WHO IS KENDALLE GETTY?

Kendalle Getty is a multimedia artist based in New York and Los Angeles, with an interest in sculpture, poetry, music, and the creative arts. Her upcoming show, The Hostile Home, uses sculptural installations to depict a pervasive sense of feeling unwelcome in her mother’s home. As the daughter of Gordon Getty, and a member of the Getty family, Kendalle sits on the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation board of directors. Kendalle is a survivor of sexual violence, and she is devoted to improving the quality of life for women, nonbinary people, children, and other minorities and survivors of abuse and violence. Through her independent philanthropy, she supports important causes such as environmental conservation, animal welfare, human rights, and reforming the way the justice system handles gendered violence, racial inequities and bias, and transphobia.

My art ethic is driven by an impulse towards disruption.

I wish to strip visual and behavioral codes from their contexts, exposing them for the absurd and oppressive rituals they are. I seek the balance of education and anti-education, diplomacy and instinct. My prime focus is the fragile axis of muted, cultured brain-matter. I want to destroy basic and unnoticed assumptions, from the mundane to the abstract, to provide new space for unwritten and unrehearsed practices. I believe in hypocritical art—the art of multidimensionality, of the dogma of anti-dogma and the reverse, of concepts not yet verbalized, of life. I believe in an anti-alphabet, of Craig Owens’s allegory, which discusses the dichotomies of humanity and biotic matter, of instinct and inescapable egoism. I believe in an art which strips the signified from the sign and liberates the signifier. I believe in choice art—the closest I can fathom to free art—and free art—art I cannot fathom. I believe in art as objects, not art objects, and not subjects. I believe in shallow art, free from semiotic. Disrupt the acoustic image! Open yourself to an illogical synesthesia! Disarm and disword! No rules!

Experience the art of psychological realism! Experience experience twice removed! Experience it anew. Non-stagnant art must, in the words of Susan Sontag, subject the viewer to its experience, rather than the other way around. I believe in counter-Pop Art, reversing the damage done by post-modern consumerist aesthetics. I believe in the arguably surreal. Let’s re-consider figurative formalism: a phantasmagoria of the concrete and the abstract both in content and in structure, a state of abjection, an unintelligible moment and activity, recognizable to resist dogmatic interpretation, physically implausible and yet honest in its depiction, spontaneous and cryptic, universal and personal. Specificity yields alienation—I am for an art which alienates everyone equally. I believe in an art for which language was not made to describe. 

I believe in an art which, fully aware of its objectiveness, takes place in the neurons of the viewer. I wish to destroy visual literacy, to strip you of your logical and local defenses.

Art as experience: involving, empathetic, honest, wordless, in which the wish for a conclusion may never be consummated. I believe in abusing camp for cultural and/or anti-cultural art. I believe in an experience more tangential than Pop-Art, less pretentious than Abstract Expressionism, less literal than Surrealism, as cryptic as Dada. I believe in self-referential anti-purist art, art with its own environment, objective multi-media installations of an un-objective truth. I believe in art as manipulative as literature, as obvious as dance, as formal as cinema. I believe in art of primal consequence—art that makes one blush, vomit, yawn, scream, laugh, stare, react wordlessly. I believe in the art of metalanguage and physicality. I believe in grotesque art, sex art, honest art, paranoid art, sensitive art, sterile art, smelly art, messy art, pristine art, uneducated art, spontaneous and abstracted art, microcosmic art, macrocosmic art, subatomic art. I believe in nonsense art and narrative art, temporal art pieces and theatrical art, almost invisible art. I believe in a vulnerable and invasive art. I believe in an art to catholicize subjective “reality”. I believe in art that does not claim to be any more real than any other experience.

If art is experience, its setting must be one of two places: the mind, or the body. 

I wish to externalize internal conflict, intrinsic self-consciousness, secret day-nightmares. I believe in the art of the human experience, whether depicted in the piece or experienced in its inevitable translation, of incoherent or dissected thought.

Getty has exhibited at Swivel Gallery and most recently at SPRING/BREAK Art Fair in Los Angeles.