Mika Rottenberg exploits the banality and allure of the show

LOS ANGELES — The current exhibition of Mika Rottenberg’s work by Hauser & Wirth is the artist’s first major presentation on the West Coast, which is somewhat surprising given that his surreal and subversive videos exploring globalization, the job and the show seem perfectly suited to Los Angeles. The exhibition presents three video works, fingerprint drawings and a series of kinetic sculptures that humorously blur the promises of late capitalism, while offering a glimpse of its sparkling allure.

“Cosmic Generator (Loaded #3)” (2017-18) offers perhaps the best introduction to Rottenberg’s work. Shot on location at a plastic goods market in Yiwu, China, and Chinatown in Mexicali, Mexico, the video mixes scenes from these real-life locations with studio-shot elements of magical realism. Slow pans of vendors sitting in their stalls filled with glittering, cheap rainbow goods are juxtaposed with Chinese restaurants in the Mexican border town, where miniature corporate clones squirm on beds of cilantro.

A tracking shot reveals a tunnel (of the kind dug under the current United States border by smugglers) that magically connects the two places on opposite sides of the world – an analog version of the digital networks that move capital across the world at the touch of a button, even as the movement of people is limited by physical borders. The distinction between fantasy architecture and real space is further blurred by a fabricated tunnel, through which viewers enter the space, and a curtain of colored garlands through which they exit.

“NoNoseKnows (50 Kilos Variant)” (2015) was filmed at a pearl farm in Zhuji, China, where workers seated on long tables gently insert foreign cells into oysters to create cultured pearls. One of the workers turns a crank which operates a fan on the upper floor, blowing pollen into the nose of a blonde woman; his sneezes result in various pasta dishes piling up on his desk as his nose grows Pinocchio-style.

It’s a mirror process to the one unfolding below, and reminiscent of his short film “Sneeze” (2012) in which men with grotesque prosthetic trunks sneeze steaks, rabbits and blisters. In a conversation with Alex Sloane, associate curator of performance and programs at MOCA, Rottenberg said she was interested in the “magical process that creates value – how an irritant, mucous, becomes a gemstone.” A 50 kilo bag of cultured pearls sits outside the screening room, a tempting and tangible reminder of this value.

Despite all the enticing visuals and the focus on goods and products in her videos, Rottenberg says she’s less interested in the things themselves and more in the connections and networks between them. In another chat with artist Paul McCarthy and ICA LA Executive Director Anne Ellegood, she said, “I’m not a big person. It’s really about everything surrounding the objects that interest me. To this end, sound plays an important role in his videos. They buzz, crackle, crackle, with the mundane sounds of industry, the hum of electricity, the simmering of boiling pots and fried eggs.

Rottenberg’s fascination with this type of ASMR auditory activation is evident in “Spaghetti Blockchain” (2019), which features sounds as appealing as a sliced ​​jelly roll, crunchy dry pasta, a rumbling reaper picking up potatoes and hands crushing green dough, as well as the haunting sounds of the Tuvan throat singers of the group Tyva Kyzy, which were filmed remotely in Siberia after the artist met them in Brooklyn. “The voice turns into material, almost becomes form,” Rottenberg said during his interview with McCarthy and Ellegood, describing the singers. The disparate sounds are represented in various chambers of a rattling hexagonal machine, which delivers each new vignette as it spins, bridging the actual distance through its clockwork mechanism.

This exhibition leads to the release of Rottenberg’s first feature film, Remote, premiering in September. Made in collaboration with filmmaker Mahyad Tousi, the film is set in the near future and features five women from different countries around the world speaking different languages, including Korean, Croatian, Farsi and Spanish. Despite their geographic and linguistic separation, they are bonded by their shared love for a Korean dog grooming show. “[T]hey find that portal through the show that frees that old internet,” Rottenberg told ArtNews in 2020.

Rottenberg further explores this inherent tension in a globalism that isolates even as he connects in the show’s physical works, such as his drawings of fingerprints, brightly colored index marks that assemble into colonies resembling microbes or serve as the basis for drawings of body parts. Rube Goldberg-esque kinetic machines spin plants and produce ponytails (real and fake) of hair or fake nails on fake fingers in absurd, pointless, but momentarily amusing displays. Visitors are invited to turn the crank on a few of them, reinforcing the illusion of agency in a system where productivity is valued above all else.

Despite general themes of alienation, fragmentation, and “world domination,” as Ellegood put it, there are indeed elements of levity, wonder, and curiosity in Rottenberg’s work. The overwhelming industrial architecture and futile labor of his videos are tempered by small moments of awe, like the bursting bubbles of smoke billowing through the hallways of “NoNoseKnows.” Ellegood has described Rottenberg’s work as highlighting the “banality of spectacle, or the spectacle of banality.” “Steam evaporates in a different way each time,” Rottenberg replied. “It’s super mundane, but also a spectacle.”

Mika Rottenberg continues at Hauser & Wirth (901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA) through October 2. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.