COURTESY W MAGAZINE
During Art Basel Miami Beach in 2011, Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin hosted a Kim Kardashian lookalike contest—sorry, “kontest”—at the Mondrian Hotel. Alongside Klaus Biesenbach and Dana Farouki, they endured 28 Kim impressions before bestowing the honor upon a performance artist channeling Kim, who came before them and said, “I went skiing and I didn’t wear sun block because my bitch sisters stole it, along with my Klonopin!”
I guess you could make some kind of argument about how the often meaningless patter between various minor players on the E! series Keeping Up with the Kardashians, the disjointed, often random interactions between people with indeterminate employment, purpose, or relation to matriarch Kris Jenner—the characters who inhabit this Kardashianized reality that, when binge-watched, can replace the regular one—is something akin to one of Fitch and Trecartin’s frenzied, hyper-real films.
Probably not, though! What we do know is that Fitch and Trecartin have been commissioned by W to make a project that would serve as the cover of the annual art issue, and their muses are the KUWTK associates Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid, models who are also famous for being adjacent to people famous for being famous. Fitch and Trecartin turn them into “super friendly, domesticated humanoid pets.”
Also there’s a video (decidedly not a Fitch/Trecartin video, however) with an introduction by RoseLee Goldberg, of Jenner acting out some well-known works of performance art—Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, an Yves Klein anthropometry performance, etc. What a time to be alive.