review
Austin

K8 Hardy: Position Series

Dean Daderko
September 23, 2011

With her earlier efforts, like the self-published ‘zine fashionfashion, or a Lady Gaga performance-parody as the character Lazy BlahBlah, K8 Hardy demonstrates how conspicuous consumption wears thin when compared against personal, inventive and individual refinement. Fashion can be bought, as they say, but style one must possess; toppling established cultural hierarchies, Hardy creates inclusive spaces for individual expression.

With her recent Position Series, Hardy blows open conservative notions of personhood. A selection of photographs from this series, ongoing since 2009, is currently on view in Queer State(s), curated by Noah Simblist with David Willburn, at the University of Texas at Austin’s Visual Arts Center. With few exceptions, each image in the series consists of a female figure whose full-body portrait appears in a variety of banal settings. Hotel rooms, backyards and back alleys, fast food restaurants, public wastelands and tourist destinations all melt into one another.  Eschewing details that would locate the figure within specific places, Hardy uses these settings to focus attention on their human subject. This woman could be anywhere. She’s also everywhere.

K8 Hardy, selection from ​Position Series​ on view at the Visual Arts Center, all 2010; C-prints and wooden frames; courtesy the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York.

Careful observers will notice a consistent thread: the woman in these photographs is the same person, just decked out in various guises. With few exceptions, Hardy portrays each photographic subject as one among a seemingly endless supply of fleshed-out characters. It may be more precise to say that Hardy ‘performs’ these characters, since the images feel like they were snapped as the figures passed in front of a camera. Hardy shoots from the hip, and for the most part consciously avoids high production values—like studio lighting, say—in favor or a more common snapshot aesthetic. Her eccentric subjects aren’t designed to be photo ops as much as opportunities for the artist to inhabit a spectral variety of roles. Building from a repertoire of wigs, clothing, settings and attitude, Hardy may suggest extended narratives, but it’s the viewer’s imagination that completes any story. If one imagines (as I did) that one character looking down from a ladder, bitchy and superior, could kick the crap out of someone in a bar fight—or that another is a prim and repressed fashionista with a low nasal voice, ready to dissolve into the ether like a ghost—that story is on us; Hardy provides no script to follow. Instead, she plays with the innate desire to establish narrative, throwing light on the suppositions and imaginaries viewers bring to the table in making such judgments.

Position Series blends aspects of photography and performance in ways that loosen the constraints on both genres. Hardy’s project isn’t about perfect photographs; a camera flash reflects in a piece of Plexiglass one figure holds up, occasional images are grainy or blurry, and torn prints collaged together appear punky and experimental. Hardy’s action extends into the darkroom, where she made photograms by throwing a lace bra onto paper to be exposed. She’s also laid under the photographic enlarger while flipping the bird, burning an evocative silhouette on top of other printed imagery. Messing with the master narrative of photography as a skill-based practice, Hardy injects the field with performative energy. She provides evidence of how still images signal action, showing us what performance looks like when it’s taken to the street.

K8 Hardy, Position Series, Form #19, 2010; C-print with photogram; 20 x 30 inches; courtesy Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York and the Visual Arts Center.

When Hardy toys with static notions of authenticity by single-handedly becoming a myriad of individuals, she shows us how accustomed we are to judging experiences based on common patterns; of dropping things into pigeonholes. With Position Series, the proliferation of characterizations that Hardy enacts—coupled with the fluid way these individuals butt up against and slide around one another—shows us just how much fun it can be to resist singular and static identities. The broader implications of this strategy offer a primer on resistance tactics, making either/or paradigms obsolete. Be any of them. Be all of them.

Poet Eileen Myles, who I asked to comment on Hardy’s work, says it best:

I think K8's like Cindy Sherman with affect. Her work is pathetic in the best sense of the word. There's something about her work that is greedy for all the positions in the world—romantic, abject, horny, playful. Also it’s the art of citizenry more than the marketplace. It's not just moving because it's performative. It's moving because it's moving. It shifts like a people's idea of the beautiful and is never a static or practical thing. I like all that desire…1

  • 1. Special thanks to Eileen Myles for her insight into Hardy’s work!
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