We’re good enough artists today, that we know how it works. Knowing that intentions and value are gained in the circumscribing of a practice, the ability to theorize it, Kelm’s slow expansion (as well as undermining) of her “subject,” produces a knowing game: a continual delaying of the limnable parameters of her practice, producing photographs as hangnails eliding easy assimilation into a theory of the work, impeding understandable relations between the photographs, leaving scrutiny of the photographs themselves which give nothing but a blankness of intention, a formal dumbness.
Like Michele Abeles, or Roe Ethridge, it’s toying with, tickling, photographic ontology, Kelm’s backdrops often “touching” the picture plane, become it, blurring photography with adverts and print, full-frontal compositions suspending a viewer from entering photographic space, forced to look at the surface, the Greenbergian flatness of the photo.
This precocious meta-knowing of the game of art produces a Brechtian alienation or a Godardian-like game that, in the context of its time (Godard's), felt deeply inhuman, ironic, proto-hipster in its frivolous mockery of aesthetic ideals, as Pauline Kael mentions in her review of Godard’s “Band of Outsiders,” but as in time everything fell further towards its level grew to become, somehow presciently, deeply human. My computer’s dictionary even spell-checks Godardian at this point.
