Recent Works
Robert Kinder's most impressive exhibition of mixed media works at Milburn + Arté intimates that this is the year of 1984 + 4. His is a subterranean sensibility wrapped in conscience and its dilemmas. His work fascinates and frightens, portraying the psychological drama of a paranoid Police State under permanent surveillance. Kinder's work questions the state of sanity in a world of sanctioned violence and fear. Yet there is a dilemma in his work, or a number of dilemmas. His desire to heal social ills is accompanied by the knowledge that this is virtually impossible via artistic production, and his aesthetic preoccupations might even contradict his strongly felt social concern – Aestheticism versus Social Realism. In terms of aesthetics, his work has its roots in European art, in its elegant and subtle surfaces far removed from the vulgarity and superficiality of Kapitalist Amerika's Postmodernism.1
Kinder's obsessive concern is with the abuse of power, its organized exterminations, systematic strategies of media misuse, torture, and the use of fear to control society. Kinder's references are centered in French Theory,· particularly Foucault with themes which center around capitalism, which encroaches on and destroys the balance of nature; the limits of ideology; the limits of a text; man's own limits to his interior psychological space; the physical limits of pain, punishment, purges, and prison; power; the degeneration of society; and the political choice between accepting the controls of the socius or becoming a radical nomad. However we must always bear in mind Kinder’s "dilemmas".
The strength of Kinder's work is situated in irresolvable tensions for, on the one hand, he desires a "healing" or weaving together of the fabric of society –
Robert Kinder, Detail: a in Kara, 1987. Paint, charcoal, lead, wood, conté, collite. Courtesy of Milburn and Arté, Brisbane.
