Kathe Burkhart

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

As an alter ego, Liz Taylor has provided me with a body to inhabit that I can use, eternally, as a funnel to filter my own personal history through. The badass, black haired actress who always played herself gives me a phallic woman to embody who I can unpack as myself. “Woman must put herself into the text”, wrote French feminist Helene Cixous. “The woman who writes cuts herself out a paper penis”. Writing in his bestseller You are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier has observed that there are specific kinds of neural pathways for profanity.I've added slang and curses to subvert the individual given meanings of the publicity and production stills that make up the source materials, To make use of a metaphor, it functions as a sort of illustration the Medusa in action played by Elizabeth Taylor, if she might have had Tourette’s Syndrome. Living in Los Angeles as a young artist, I was impressed by billboards and Hollywood, and these contributed to both the scale and content of the work. Hollywood: that pervasive fantasia of movies and stars - has created a rigid range of female role models. No personality exemplifies the dual role of bad girl/mother better than Liz Taylor, the last star. The golden age of Hollywood may be over, and in Liz's final role, she may have entered the pantheon of dead celebrities, but she is still a cultural icon(for her time arguably the only one, who pointed up male-defined parameters of female autonomy.) The myth of Superwoman that she embodied:...

Artwork