The aesthetics of de-struction
Approaching the work of Robert Kinder is analogous to taking a "tracking shot" through the constantly changing transparent backdrops of a subterranean mind with its visions of tormented bodies, repressed societies, an environment under threat - a despotic, mechanical, industrial nightmare.
Kinder's obsessive concern is with power, domination and suppression, systematic strategies of media misuse, torture, the use of surveillance and fear to control society; a vision somewhat reminiscent of Foucault's description of a society of "discipline" which "inscribes" the body with its sense of order:
The body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs ... the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body. [1]
The surface of Kinder's work can be read in Foucauldian terms as the body - which also includes nature - that has become fractured, burnt, twisted or disintegrated. Superimposed over these devastated surfaces, precise technical drawings depict the organised maps of urban life, the hard, cold efficiency of technological capitalism that cuts into the soft tissue of the body. Burnt timber, fractured, split and tom edges reflect the damaged body.
While not illustrating theory, Kinder's works are a panorama of themes which center around the inner and outer limits of our world: capitalism which encroaches upon and destroys the balance of nature; the limitations of ideology; the limitations of a text; humankind's own limits to its interior psychological space; and the physical limits of pain, punishment, purges, prison.
The most overt references to such themes... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline