Galerie Dennis Cooper presents … Mika Rottenberg

 

‘Readings of Mika Rottenberg’s work nearly always herald it as Marxist (or at least anti-capitalist) critique. It’s undeniable that her works address issue of labor, and that such a topic is imperative. But such readings of Rottenberg’s work are too simplistic: taking on factory work does not a Marxist critique make, but moreover, such readings overlook her works’ strongest points.

‘Take for instance the wall of air conditioning units dripping water into hot frying pans that serves as the entry to Rottenberg’s solo exhibition at the Bass Museum. Titled AC Trio (2016), the installation is spectacular and disgusting, mesmerizing and repulsive. And surely the AC units might speak to class and consumption—they call to mind a New York City housing project with seemingly infinite stacks of units, rather than the constantly blasting central air units more common to Miami, where they are currently installed. Such units rack up excessive bills and carbon footprints. But the sizzling sound of the AC juice hitting the hot frying pan is more absurdist than critical, as is the similarly mesmerizing composition of gigantic ceiling fans that comprise Ceiling Fan Composition #4 (2016), on view in the adjacent room.

‘The exhibition is sandwiched by two installations affixed to recent videos—NoNoseKnows (2015) and Cosmic Generator (loaded #2) (2017). The videos themselves are actually shown in traditional black boxes, rather than on monitors amongst elaborate installations that the artist used to exhibit earlier work. NoNoseKnows includes documentary footage from a pearl factory in China and shows women endlessly counting pearls and sorting them by color, quality, and size. The footage is interwoven with an absurdist narrative, wherein a white woman in middle management peddles a bike at a desk and sneezes out plates of Chinese food, while a large and seemingly heavy bubble floats but never pops in an adjacent room. The commentary is obvious—both in the sense that it is common knowledge and that it is legible in the work: factory labor has been outsourced to women of color.

‘This point is an important one, but this form of critique is, disappointingly, more literal and didactic—too on the nose, if you will—than the artist’s earlier videos, which elegantly blended fiction and fact in more nuanced ways. This is perhaps the result of the artist responding to and internalizing what I characterized as simplistic readings of her work. In past works, Rottenberg regularly hired women who rent their extraordinary bodies to perform. Cheese (2008), for instance, features a group of real women with hair well past their toes modeled after a historical family—the Seven Sutherland Sisters—who marketed a hair growth product to men and who themselves had long hair. (Although Cheese has only six sisters). Rottenberg’s camera played voyeur to these exhibitionists. These earlier works bring up interesting and complicated ethical issues surrounding the commodification of bodies and the objectification of women. Among the actresses in Cheese, for instance, there are feuds amongst long-haired women who enjoy indulging hair fetishists and see their ability to capitalize on male desire as empowering, while others find the fetishists degrading. Furthermore, I don’t know that NoNoseKnows necessarily shakes up any conversation. Unlike Cheese, it gives form to facts art-viewing audiences are already likely to know.

‘The forms it takes, however, are incredible. Colorful, intricate, absurdist, and textured, everything the artist produces is recognizable as Rottenberg. But these forms do little for advancing a Marxist critique. Instead, they delicately and complexly negotiate the lines between attraction, fetish, objectification, and perversion—and, specifically, how these lines might be negotiated to feminist ends, or how women might image their own bodies while responding to the long and abusive history of representations of women by men. So more precisely, her work can be considered Marxist in as much as it looks at how critiques of the commodification of everything—including bodies—intersects with the objectification of women’s bodies, by the apparatus of the camera and the ways in which women choose to commercialize their bodies.

‘Moreover, I question what Marxist critique can even do within a world where even criticism itself is a commodity. Admittedly, this is not a problem unique to Rottenberg, but the women Rottenberg hired for Cheese went on strike during production because they felt the artist had not given them enough time to tend to their hair. While she makes work that speaks to pressures to conform excess and extraordinary bodies to capitalist demands for productivity, she herself apparently struggled to accommodate such bodies. This is analogous to the problem of women working to reclaim images of their own bodies in that both are complex conundrums that to this day remain unresolved. This is Rottenberg’s strength: throughout, she reveals the absurdist impossibility of capitalist critique (though the later video works take this critique more seriously and literally) and does not resolve the complex ethical lines it walks. Rather, it highlights them, leaving viewers simultaneously uncomfortable and mesmerized.’ — Emily Watlington

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Mika Rottenberg @ Hauser & Wirth
MIKA ROTTENBERG: EASYPIECES
ARTIST MIKA ROTTENBERG TURNS HER ATTENTION TO HOLLYWOOD
Book: ‘Mika Rottenberg’
ArtSeen: MIKA ROTTENBERG
mikarottenberg @ instagram
Mika Rottenberg: body and production
Mika Rottenberg by Judith Hudson
Mika Rottenberg’s films can be both beautiful and repulsive
Fetishizing the Visual: An interview with Mika Rottenberg
MR @ Ubuweb
Ronald Jones on Mika Rottenberg
Plongée dans l’espace-temps malléable de Mika Rottenberg
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MIKA ROTTENBERG
Mika Rottenberg exposes the absurdities of globalism
Mika Rottenberg. Futile machines
Strangeness For Its Own Sake
Sneezing rabbits, dismal bingo and labour pains
Slime, Bald Dudes, and Siberian Throat Singing?
On The Ethics Of Renting ‘Extraordinary Bodies’ In Mika Rottenberg’s Videos
Work About Work
An Interview with Mika Rottenberg

 

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Extras

Teaser Mika Rottenberg

Mika Rottenberg Interview: Social Surrealism

Mika Rottenberg and the Amazing Invention Factory

 

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Interview

 

Where do the ideas for the videos come from? What gets you going?

That’s a good question and it’s one I ask myself between pieces. For me the ideas make sense: of course we’ll make tissues out of bodybuilder’s sweat, and of course the bodybuilder needs stay-awake pills in order to produce more sweat, and of course she needs to drink lemon juice, and there has to be a naked guy running by.

So these are logical connections for you. They’re not unusual or extraordinary?

No. They don’t seem extraordinary at all. I don’t want them to be completely surreal. A lot of ideas don’t work precisely because they don’t make sense. It can’t just be any rendering. It takes a long time before I find an idea that I want to put everything into. I take a long time to develop each piece, and it’s not one piece for me. The last one especially seemed like a lot of different sculptures, different paintings and different things that I was thinking about brought into one piece. Once I fence it in, once I find the general idea and structure, then there is a whole other process that involves all the details.

Do you storyboard the way a filmmaker does?

Until now, it has really started from the building of the sets. That might change, but I have a general idea, which is usually a lot more complicated and impossible than the thing I end up doing. The way to bind it to reality is to start building something. When I’m done building, then I might do some kind of a storyboard. I do a lot of drawings and I have storyboards, but you probably wouldn’t call them that. There are a lot of idea diagrams and they show development and sequences, but it probably only makes sense to me.

You say it starts out being more complicated: is your process one of reducing the possibilities until you focus on what becomes the narrative? And the narrative is somehow determined by the set you’ve already built?

That’s pretty much how it goes. I’m looking for an essence, so it’s like I have this texture or a sound, almost like a physical feeling, like being squeezed, or sweating. I try different kinds of scenarios to see if I can get the sensations through them. It’s not as confident a procedure as the way I’m talking about it.

So you’re finding out where you’re going as you’re doing it rather than determining where you’re going from the outset?

Absolutely. But as the projects get bigger, it’s hard to insist on this way of working. People want to know what they’re doing, and your producers want to know so that they can budget. I’ve been working with the same cinematographer for the last three projects, and he is an amazing person. He’s very patient, which I think comes from the process of trusting each other more and more, and his understanding the way I work.

Do you build the sets inside your own studio?

No, I don’t really have a studio. It changed with the last video because I needed a really big studio. But it’s not something I need on a daily basis. I also like moving spaces and exploring a new space for each piece. Each piece needs its own space.

In that way you are operating like a filmmaker on location?

Yes, but the difference is that I am very hands-on in building the set, and a lot of the time the set dictates the narrative. That’s why it’s more sculptural because it is the result of a real construction.

At the same time that the set is important, you are also fascinated by the close-up. What is it about the flesh cartography that interests you so much?

I guess there is a voyeuristic element. I usually work with people who are exhibitionists; they have websites where they advertise their desire to be photographed and to be looked at. They’re not actors, but they have different talents. Part of it is that dynamic between voyeur and exhibitionist. I like those nuances, and I’m fascinated by the characters and by their bodies. There is this scrutinizing look that is so intense that it sometimes seems like a medical examination.

It’s interesting that you say that because one of the most compelling images in Cheese is the beautiful blue eye looking out between the slats of the goat pen. It isn’t just a question of the viewer looking in at the video, but the video is looking out at the viewer as well.

Yes. I also have it with the tongue in Squeeze. It’s the tongue, and then it’s the eye. I like the idea that it’s almost licking someone’s eye, which reminds me of Janine Antoni’s piece. I really think about touch, smell and sound, but it’s very visual for me. So if I take care of the other senses, then the visual will resolve itself and the piece will be visually interesting.

At some point Matthew Barney must have influenced you, and some residue of that encounter hangs about your work.

It’s unavoidable. I was blown away by his work when I discovered it in Israel. I still think he is an amazing artist. But there are a lot of other artists that interest me.

I think of Fischli and Weiss, and even Wim Delvoye and Cloaca. There is a sense of the excremental in your work, even though you don’t deal directly with shit.

I deal with the orifices of the body, so it’s everything that gets pushed out.

You walk a line between the grotesque and abject on one side and the lyric and sensual, to the point of the fetish, on the other.

I don’t see it as grotesque. I see it as more poetic. Things that are beautiful turn me on visually, so I never want to make them too grotesque or distasteful. It’s a thin line, and I’ve crossed it when someone stops being an individual character. I always want to feel that my characters are doing something with me, rather than me simply observing them. I think that becomes grotesque.

Is this part of what you talk about when you refer to the magic in the mundane?

Yes, I think that’s why a lot of the time I use people with extreme physiques. They have a lot of body, and the relationship between them and their bodies gets amplified.

 

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Show

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Mary’s Cherries (2004)
‘Mary’s Cherries, which shows a woman’s red fingernails being grown, clipped, and transformed into maraschino cherries, was influenced by a story about a woman with a rare blood type who quit her job to sell her blood. The women featured in Mary’s Cherries are all wrestlers for hire.’

Excerpts/Interview

 

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Tropical Breeze (2004)
‘In Tropical Breeze, champion bodybuilder Heather Foster drives a converted truck that functions as a shop, packaging her sweat. In the back of the truck, dancer Felicia Ballos pedals a makeshift device, picking up tissues and using gum to stick them to a clothesline, transferring them to Heather, who uses them to collect her sweat for packaging and later for sale.’

Excerpt

 

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Dough (2005 – 2006)
‘Dough watches Raqui, a size-acceptance activist and frequent collaborator of Rottenberg’s as she cries tears that evaporate into steam, causing dough to rise. The dough is then pulled and pushed through holes into multiple rooms by Tall Kat, a skinny, 6’9″ woman who can reach from room to room. Through their actions, a unit that measures labor is created.’

Excerpt

 

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Cheese (2007)
‘Cheese is a multi-channel video installation that depicts women with very long hair milking cows and making cheese using a machine powered by the movement of the women’s hair.’

Watch it here

Excerpts/Interview

 

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Squeeze (20100
‘Squeeze is a video shot on location at a lettuce farm in Arizona and a rubber plant farm in Kirala, India. Actors engage in a variety of gestures including thrusting a tongue through a stucco wall, a line of women massaging hands that protrude through a wall, and Bunny Glamazon being smashed between two mattresses.’

Excerpt

 

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w/ Jon Kessler SEVEN (2011)
‘Over the course of three weeks, several times a day, seven performers clock in, ride a stationary bike, and work up a sweat before a live audience in an immersive sculptural installation. Each of the seven performers represents a particular chakra—cosmic energy centers located within the body—and are ascribed corresponding prismatic colors of the rainbow, resulting in chromatic sweat. The sweat is collected in a sauna-like “Chakra Juicer,” distilled by a self-described mad scientist in a laboratory, and metaphorically transported to the African savannah. Rottenberg explains how she wants her performers to not act or emote, being more interested in how their bodies behave and the physical materials she can extract from their exertions. Performing in sync with a video featuring a rural community in Botswana, Rottenberg and Kessler’s project unites laborers in New York with “the cradle of humankind” through timed exchanges of materials and a common purpose. Playfully absurd, Rottenberg and Kessler blend reality and fiction—extreme conditions and comedic sleights-of-hand—to create a zany, wordless narrative.’

Excerpts

Excerpt

 

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Sneeze (20120
‘Men with exaggeratingly large red noses sneeze, one after another, ejecting an odd assortment of objects on a tabletop—rabbits, raw meat, lightbulbs, among others. This absurdist, whimsical video work constructs surreal scenarios by means of minimal content and formal repetition.’

Watch it here

 

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Ponytails (2014)
‘In Ponytails, a pair of kinetic sculptures, one blonde and one dark-haired, extend and flip frantically through two glory-hole-like openings in separate gallery walls.’

Excerpt

 

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Bowls, Balls, Souls, Holes (2014)
‘Bowls, Balls, Souls, Holes is a video where bingo, stretching skin, clothespins, a dripping air conditioner, and melting polar ice caps collide in time and space. “You feel that you’re on the verge of comprehending a cosmic mystery.”‘

Watch an excerpt here

 

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NoNoseKnows (2015)
‘A video installation first shown in the 2015 Venice Biennale, NoNoseKnows is both an absurdist fantasy and a feminist polemic. Its subject is the global economy, an exploitative system that extracts wealth from natural resources and laboring bodies, in this case, the bodies of Chinese women especially. The video unfolds across two sites: a custom-designed set in New York and an enormous pearl-making facility in Zhuji, China, which the artist first visited in 2014, recalling, “It was sick but also beautiful and amazing . . . It kind of draws you in, even though it’s really pretty perverted what has to be done to a living thing to force it to create a pearl.” Through assiduous editing, which cuts together footage from both sites, interspersing it with scenes from around Zhuji’s worker housing, Rottenberg knits together these far-flung locations, which form the backdrop to a story at once factual and fanciful. Inside the factory, women are involved in the difficult, delicate, repetitive task of producing pearls, first by cultivating them, a process that involves seeding oysters with pieces of mussels and, second, by extracting the pearls and sorting them by type and size. Inside the set, which appears in the video to be an extension of the factory, Bunny Glamazon performs another kind of routinized labor, this one reminiscent of the sort of white collar, administrative work that often falls to women. The tasks themselves are bizarre and without clear use value. Within the context of the video, all of these actors serve as both protagonists and, just as importantly, as catalysts. Each does strange things that make other strange things happen, often to one another, resulting in an assembly line of cause and effect. At one point, for instance, a Chinese woman responds to a prompt from Bunny by turning a handle that powers a fan, which in turn blows pollen from a flower into Bunny’s nose, prompting her to sneeze. Perhaps the most important catalyst in NoNoseKnows isn’t a human being at all, in fact, but a sensation: irritation. Indeed, the sequencing of the video mirrors the creation of pearls, which result from the almost alchemical transformation of an irritant into jewels. (Other types of sensations—physical, auditory, and visual—play a prominent role in the artist’s video, too.) Counter-intuitively, perhaps, the ecosystem (or economy) that Rottenberg creates here is not only absurd and ridiculous but also functional and, to a certain extent, believable. Indeed, what distinguishes NoKnowsNose from Rottenberg’s earlier work is its depiction of an actual relationship of causality: the industrial production of cultured pearls and the cycle of employment and exploitation that this system both requires and precipitates. Rottenberg’s video is meant to be either projected on a wall or displayed on a monitor inside an enclosed space, either a dedicated gallery or a room constructed to the artist’s specifications. It is accompanied by a 50-kilo bag of cultured pearls, which are displayed outside the entrance, purely as a prop.’

Excerpt

 

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Cosmic Generator (2017)
‘Cosmic Generator is a video installation shot partly in Mexicali, along the U.S. Mexico border. It follows workers in cramped spaces performing absurd tasks such as crushing lightbulbs, accompanied by a soundtrack of electronic buzzes and blips.The viewer is shown a series of tunnels, ostensibly linking a variety of workshops and restaurants shown later in the twenty-six-minute piece.’

Excerpts w/ interview

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Untitled Ceiling Projection (2018)
Single-channel video installation, sound, color

Watch it here

 

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Spaghetti Blockchain (2019)
‘Spaghetti Blockchain was premiered at the New Museum in New York, in a show called Mika Rottenberg: Easypieces. This piece “explores ancient and new ideas about materialism and considers how humans both comprise and manipulate matter.” The video consists of female throat singers from Tuva, Tyva Kyzy, ASMR-esque videos of colors and sizzling goo, a potato-farm, and interior shots of a Genevan Hall. Rottenberg places these scenes in “a kind of superfluous factory of her devising, whose primary product seems to be imagery that’s simultaneously pleasurable and queasily troubling.”‘

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Lips (Study #3) (2016 – 2019)
‘Through a small hole in the wall of a gallery, a pair of fleshy lips protrude. Moving closer and leaning in, one sees light flickering between them. A puff of what looks like smoke emerges from the lips – as if some bodily or industrial activity is taking place behind the wall. Peering into the cavity, the source of this steaminess reveals itself – a mirror box that holds a hilarious view of bodies working, labouring, performing.’

Watch it here

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, Thanks. Oh, right, mid-Atlantic, kind of the crossfading area. Well, having a mask permanently sewn to your face would help you achieve eye-catching status on the beach, at least until your target audience was reduced to skeleton fetishists. My fucking gums infection/pain made an unwelcome return yesterday so I’m off to the dentist this morning, so rocking my week is probably a toss up. But don’t let that stop you. ** Sypha, Hi. Yes, knowing your tastes, that is not so odd. See, you and a Middle Ages novel is like soup and sandwich. Sympathies on the root canal maladies, especially since, as I just told George, I’m off to the dentist this very morning to try to get the pain out of my own mouth. Race you to oral bliss? ** _Black_Acrylic, There’s quite a readable and good book about the history of Spacemen 3, but I can’t remember its title this morning. They’re pretty great. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I’m sure whoever did that post looked in and smiled warmly at your appreciative comment. Getdown 4ever!!!! Ha ha, your fortune teller is most welcome and probably much needed. Love fast-forwarding evolution to the point where nostril hairs are a thing of the past then hitting Play, G. ** T, Yes, very nice of Mr. ‘Kaukonen’. The last concert I was going to see before the pandemic first hit was a subsequently cancelled one by Acid Mothers Temple, alas. They’re still out there roaming the world of venues, so you may still get your chance. Me too. Okay, thank you, let me see what I can do about ‘Helicopter Story’. I have to go to the dentist very shortly, so my Tuesday is off to an unnerving start but it could feel comforting later depending on what he/she/they diagnose and treat. All is not yet lost. I hope your Tuesday drives you toward midnight at 300 miles per hour with no speed bumps. ** Steve Erickson, Check T’s comment yesterday if you didn’t already. Glad you got swept into ‘Jorma’s’ gig. Kind of a wealth, yeah. Caught me by surprise not a few times. Everyone, It’s Mr. Erickson, listen up: ‘Over the weekend, I made a Spotify playlist of my favorite new music from the past 6 weeks.’ Oh, that’s what those posters are. They’re plastered all over my Facebook feed at the moment. ** Brian, Hey, Brian. Time will tell, of course, but I suspect I’m right? Decorating is going toe the best part. Well, the best part of the physical moving in portion. The interesting project I’m working on is a virtual walk-through home haunt that Zac, the writer Sabrina Tarasoff, and I are creating with the help of these game designer guys in the UK. We’ll present it here in Paris as a Halloween themed event at the Pinault Foundation, and, if it works out well, we hope to take it on the road. I hope the pre-move stuff for your brother goes as unstressfully as possible. Oh, cool, thanks for foisting ‘The Sluts’ on him, and sweet that he dug it. I hope your Tuesday has ticker tape parade-worthy happy surprises galore for you. ** Right. Today I ask you to stroll/scroll through my galerie and peruse the works of Mike Rottenberg. Sound like a plan? See you tomorrow.