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In My Room - Mati Diop

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“What is the Contemporary?” - Giorgio Agamben

“Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it.” - Giorgio Agamben, What is the Contemporary?

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Extra-Rational Aesthetic Action and Cultural Decolonization - David Garneau

“There is a tendency in decolonial aesthetics to essentialize nondominant cultural contributions and to find value only in what they are thought to have possessed prior to contact/colonization. And those attributes are constructed as the lacks of Western ideology and imperialism.” - David Garneau, “Extra-Rational Aesthetic Action and Cultural Decolonization”

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Us As A Landscape - Geoff McFetridge

Us As A Landscape, Recent Figures for the Film My Suit by Geoff McFetridge is a collection of paintings debuted at the Cooper Cole Gallery. They e In this series all of the works feature

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Rose Gold - Sara Cwynar

Sarah Cwynar’s “Rose Gold” is a short film, presented as part of an exhibition of the same name at Foxy Production in 2017. As a part of the larger collection, Cwynar’s video partakes in multiple conversations generated by the works included, all of which center around the titular “rose gold”. In her own words, Rose Gold is a “research-oriented meditation” that extends beyond the realms of mere colour. It is a close examination of a global phenomenon that managed to capture the attention of the collective conscious on a mass scale. This particular shade of pink has managed to worm its way into a broad spectrum of product and design, and its use can be traced back to 2012, when jewelry designers began to incorporate the colour into haute couture. From electronics, to clothes, to kitchenware, rose gold has managed to monopolize the market, taking on a life of its own.

The video itself, capping at just over eight minutes, is comprised of a collage of videos, all of which utilize the framework of “rose gold”, both compositionally (through colour and form) and as a cultural entity (an object of economic and cultural production). In the spirit of the documentary, the film acts like an encyclopedic catalogue, archiving all sorts of everyday objects that generate some form of desire (such as melamine dinnerware), interspersed with moments that focus on Cwynar’s body, gesture and movement, placing herself within the complicated web of participating in the object economy. The bright technicolour of the video paints a seductive picture, generating an enticing atmosphere that reels the onlooker in. The narration uses overlapping layers of voice-over, both masculine and feminine, often interrupting itself as well as seemingly having their own conversation. It is continuous and incessant, as the viewer is inundated with constant stimuli and information. Cwynar also employs brand recognizability to her advantage, since these objects are already imbued with cultural codes and signifiers that address deeper conversations about capitalism, consumerism, and commodification.

Such cultural ephemera, then, reveal themselves to be not only mere objects, but tools that stimulate an economy of ideas that permeate within the popular consciousness. Thus, the idea of “rose gold” becomes an effigy for the contemporary and the trendy. It is absorbed into the popular image, and becomes an apparatus for cultural hegemony, representing the zeitgeist of mutual excitement that generates its own circulation (Kane X. Faucher, "Online Social Capital as Capital." In Social Capital Online: Alienation and Accumulation, 13-38. London: University of Westminster Press, 2018). Like the poor image as outlined by Hito Steyerl, this paradoxical circuit that continually shares and iterates will eventually deteriorate into cultural dematerialization. Its sheer intensity and virality compress the idea of rose gold to an economic device. The system of fetishization due to its own popularity will eventually displace the idea of rose gold from its pedestal into the tacky and kitschy, and Cwynar deftly articulates this irony in juxtaposing plastic objects (a material that, theoretically, would withstand the test of time) with eventual obsolescence, revealing its fragile temporality.

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“In Defense of the Poor Image” - Hito Steyerl

“On the one hand, [the poor image] operates against the fetish value of high resolution. On the other hand, this is precisely why it also ends up being perfectly integrated into an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings.” ー Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image”

In her essay titled In Defense of the Poor Image, Hito Steyerl situates herself within the contemporary digital revolution of semiocapitalism, where means of image production and image value exist within a visual hierarchy based on the quality of its resolution. However, Steyerl argues that the poor image opposes the value hierarchy of high resolution images by establishing its own economy. Incidentally, both the poor and rich image exist within the same system of commodification; as Steyerl writes, “poor images are thus popular images”, in that they operate on a democratic level. They allow access and participation on a mass scale uninhibited by the confines of institutional exclusivity. It functions as a rejection of the “rich” image by purposefully denying the value of high resolution. Like its name suggests, a poor image is inherently substandard. It’s own pictorial quality is defined by its material atrophy. As the poor image constantly cycles through the process of reupload, download, edit, share, copy, paste, it frees itself from the value of high resolution by instead inheriting a form of cult value, influenced by its distribution into the cultural aether. Steyerl identifies that “poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images—their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria. Their lack of resolution attests to their appropriation and displacement”. Once it enters the network of popular image, the poor image is able to redefine value through social capital, a cultural currency defined through virality, influence and clout (John Lorinc,  "Your Kids, The Influencers." Corporate Knights 14, no. 2 (2015): 50-53.). It is iterative, responding to its environment through mimetic evolution. A poor image becomes an open invitation for cultural producers, since its inherent fragility allows for continual remix and reproduction. As such, it becomes a transgressive bastardization of the original image, displacing itself from the hierarchy of high art images. The poor image, then, is a transformative copy propelled by the circuits of demand that is stimulated by its own popularity. 

All these qualities, however, are precisely what grant the poor image its seductive condition; the poor image is still an object of cultural production, within the informational image economy. In separating itself from the value of high resolution, the poor image is commodified through its accessibility. Rather than being sequestered by the gatekeepers of the rich image, its affinity for rapid distribution and potential for volatility are fetishized by markets that operate in the exchange of culture and information. As Steyerl states, “the networks in which poor images circulate thus constitute both a platform for a fragile new common interest and a battleground for commercial and national agendas. They contain experimental and artistic material, but also incredible amounts of porn and paranoia”. I think this is most evident in the spheres of digital culture, where markets operate in a “meme economy”. The meme has become synonymous with the poor image, in that it exists within the same structure of production and commodification. Like the poor image, its visual repertoire hinges on the bastardization of the original image, which lives on and degrades through the process of iteration, transgression, and transformation. As a cultural artifact, it serves the same function of communication that reflects the ideas of popular culture. And just like the poor image, a meme’s value lies in its inherent trashiness; a meme is characterized by its irreverence to labour and quality, which grants it the capacity for virality and spread (Yvette Granata, "Meme Dankness: Floating Glittery Trash for an Economic Heresy." In Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production, edited by Bown Alfie and Bristow Dan, 251-76. Punctum Books, 2019. pp. 259-260). Its status as mutable and proneness to appropriation is what fetishizes a meme within the image economy. A meme’s relationship to democracy and popularity are what give it political clout. 

As Yvette Granate wrote in her essay "Meme Dankness: Floating Glittery Trash for an Economic Heresy",  “[a meme is] free marketing, free branding, free labor. This is the economic normality of capitalist appropriation—but now mixed with the weird image board flow of the Internet meme” (Granata, 267). As a poor image, a meme is able to be seen by many, and its fleeting temporality takes advantage of the condition of its environment, in that its velocity, intensity and impressionability seduce its audience; a meme opposes the value hierarchy of resolution, yet simultaneously plays into the system of informational capitalism.

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Hannah Black on the 9th Berlin Biennale

"Once pickled in the white cube, or through the work of an individual artist, blackness often ends up standing only for its use-value, and not for it's implacable persistence as exchange" ー Hannah Black, On the 9th Berlin Biennale

Hannah Black questions the boundaries and limitations of commodification within art: can artists really ever exist outside of their identity? And to what extent does identity function and serve? In this article, Black describes how artists become tools for larger institutions and structures of capitalism, consumerism, and colonialism. Black argues that the Biennial (and some of the works shown) exposes a dynamic of subjugation based on racial performativity, which as described by José Esteban Muñoz

“is an aspect of race that is ‘a doing’. [...] A political doing, the effects that the recognition of racial belonging, coherence, and divergence. It is therefore expedient to consider what race does [...] to look at race as a performative enterprise, one that can best be accessed by its effects [...] A critical project attuned to the performativity of race is indeed better suited to decipher what work race does in the world.” (Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position, pg. 678-79)

The tokenization of identity encroaches on what race does rather than what it is or its system of operations. Blackness, therefore, becomes a resource that is mined and absorbed by both institutional and cultural economies. Blackness, then, is fetishized for its political affect and cultural currency. Identity functions as a form of commodity, where it becomes useful only for its optic value; black, and by extension POC artists, have become apparatuses of exploitation. Once the profitability of an object (in this case, identity) is established, then it’s to that extent that society finds it desirable. To see art and artists solely through the lens of identity politics not only offers a reductive understanding of, but also reveals a cynical atomization. While it's true, one is hardly able to separate a black artist from their blackness, the persistence of the economic exchange for identity is embedded in a society of semiocapitalism; blackness is a source of cultural profit while simultaneously becoming a means of survival. 

As Black wrote, “pragmatically rather than programmatically, this total rule of commodity form means that political struggle cannot oppose the commodity but has to pass through it”. To participate in this system is to be complicit in the fetishization of identity, yet the works that use the appropriated shorthand of black culture appear vapid and shallow. If the veil of identity is lifted to reveal a translucent artwork, then the structures of commodification and use-value become clear.

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Fact or Fiction - Vanessa Maltese

Vanessa Maltese’s solo exhibition Fact or Fiction, as presented by the Cooper Cole Gallery, features various works (ranging from painting, to sculpture to video) that question the relationship between what we perceive and what is real; every single work is informed by their connection to perceptual phenomena and cognitive trickery, employing various techniques and strategies that induce psychological reactions of varying effects.

(Trompe l’oeil device, Vanessa Maltese, 2021)

Trompe l’oeil device is an assembly of larger-than-life house flies, which littered a corner wall of the white gallery. Made of oxidized silver, enamel and wax, they bear an uncannily realistic resemblance to their real life counterparts, scattered seemingly without rhyme or reason. However, their concentrated volume in a small area gives the effect of a growing swarm, ready to fly at the slightest movement. Maltese also pays homage to Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna (c. 1310), where the fly, a veritable carrier of contagion and disease, symbolizes pestilence, plague, and death. The name itself, which comes from the French meaning “deceive the eye”, teases at the works own meaning, framing the small flies as objects of verisimilitude. Maltese appears to be aggrandizing their historical symbolism; flies are representative of a fundamental fear of sickness and decay, and Maltese points to the gesture of sensationalization by making the flies bigger than they actually are.  

Desk No.1-8 is a series made on two rows of short tables, mounted on the walls which face the opposite of the Trompe l’oeil device sculpture. The paintings themselves use techniques of trompe l’oeil to represent flat objects (such as paper, sticky notes, and tape) three-dimensionally on a table, which is where you’d normally find them. The work itself plays into the context it’s understood in through the use of familiar signifiers commonly associated with stationary. Maltese harkens back to the historical practices of realism, and instead utilizes flat swatches of colour that play on subconscious pattern recognition, referencing Duck-Rabbit and the Vase Illusion by Joseph Jastrow and Edgar Rubin, respectively.

The Sky is Blue is a short video, combining both sound and sight to replicate the practice of foley artistry, manually reproducing sounds common to the everyday experience. Splitting the screen in two, the film shows two scenarios, overlaid with a single sound byte that could be mistaken for each other (in my opinion, some sounds are more easily distinguished than others, such as the crackling of the chip bag compared to fire). Maltese uses the dichotomy of visuals in tandem with auditory pattern recognition to challenge our perceptual objectivity, which she seems to suggest is based on context and the accumulation of a pattern vocabulary.

All of Maltese’s works participate within the same conversation; they are playfully referential and psychologically responsive, utilizing various forms of cognitive illusion to elicit perceptual responses. These works ask us to question our surroundings, and even our own perception of reality and what’s in front of us. In viewing these works, the audience becomes complicit in Maltese’s performance of artifice and the artificial, as the stage itself becomes a battleground for the real and unreal. Meaning-making, and by extension the art itself, is a subjective encounter, based on our own knowledge of signs, signifiers, and experience. Maltese tests our desire for objectivity, and I’m left to wonder whether or not it’s a futile task.