“Self Help” Exhibition
Rawson Projects
This event has ended.
Jocelyn Miller is a Curatorial Assistant at MoMA PS1 and this is her first exhibition at the gallery. During the opening reception, there will be a special performance by musical group No Lands.
A conversation between the gallery and Miller follows.
Rawson Projects: For Rawson Projects, this is one of our first group exhibitions that I would describe as more “concept” driven, in the sense that I feel you had some idea you wanted to explore a certain type of artistic practice. What do you think makes this group of artists, objects, performances etc. relate to one another? What were you thinking about when considering them as a group?
Jocelyn Miller: Oh no! The idea of something concept-driven sounds so totalitarian….or otherwise like a futuristic vehicular prototype. But, yes, definitely, there are a set of ideas that this grouping of works touches on. The project is centered on “Self Help”, taken many different ways. Looking at strategies we use to control, change, or preserve the self, there emerges a sort of radical, technologically-assisted narcissism, a mania characterized by a desperate, ecstatic striving for a perceived enlightenment or perfect state of being — in new age-y, yogic terms: nirvana. Enmeshed with the postmodern emphasis on subjectivity, but also with the bootstrapping fundamentals of “start-up” ideology, global capitalism and the American dream, Self Help is interested in the space between the self-destructive and self-constructive, when self-improvement becomes self-invention.
Nick Andersen and Julie Ho’s CONFETTISYSTEM piece opens the show with an offering to the viewer, providing in their words “a moment to sit and escape into oneself in a new context,” and also providing instant confrontation with the show’s subject, which is, in effect, the subject. As dually design and art object, product and sculpture, their piece is influenced by temples, clubs, and other places of sanctuary or healing - the art space also implicitly being posited as one of these spaces. This idea of communal sanctuary, and also appearance and identity artifice is integral to Thomas Jeppe’s Mimetic Club series, which relates to a larger project in and about nightlife as a mimetic practice, defining the club as a site for what he calls “the performance of desire,”a place for the exploration of fantasy and libido, a site for self-prescription and projection which he nods to through his use of 19th century English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley as source image. Jeppe surgically reduces Beardsley’s already stylized images into entirely other visual experiences that seem to convey the natural, the unnatural, the subject, but also a violent dismemberment and evolution of the subject into something unrecognizable. The process, though entirely analog, feels wrapped up in technological representation, and while tapping into elemental, ineffable experiences, is all about the necessary artificiality of representation. Pinar Yolacan’s images look at deification, fertility and the naturally occurring (although somehow abject and unfamiliar in a contemporary context) Anatolian body in a densely technological, yet still devotional, photographic field, and in her image capture and manipulations of the body using color, light, and objects, seem to petrify flesh into stone. It’s also interesting to know that her subjects are culled from fetish-corners of the internet, which while not integral to an understanding of the work itself, complicates the technological process of arriving at the final image. Georgie Roxby Smith’s hacked Lara Croft Tomb Raider video game shows the familiar icon for violent femme fatale bad-assery in the throes of orgasmic housekeeping, a scene that could be read as neo-Friedan, with her “domestic goddess” subject trapped between the banal physical and the extraordinarily virtual. While the medium is insistently technological, technology extrudes into the gallery space in a much more mundane and industrial sense, with the sculptural interjection of a washing machine as plinth, which also acts as an evocation of the sidelined, disenfranchised suburban female home warrior, who’s vehicle of satisfaction (sitting astride the vibrating machinery) is ironically the same technology that might shackle her. The value judgments are unclear, the equation destabilized, as Croft joyfully irons shirts with a bow and arrow slung over her back, letting out cries that are undiscernibly battle grunts or orgiastic moans.
RP: The title of the show Self Help refers to a well-known cultural phenomenon that, at least to me, doesn’t seem to have a definitive meaning. In a general sense, it refers to “self-improvement” through a prescribed regimen of psychological and pseudo-psychological practices. One of the key facets for me is that it is about the self or, at least, perception of the self, linking it very closely with notions of identity. Do you agree? Why did this title stand out for you in terms of the work you chose?
JM: It’s true; the phrase “Self Help” instantly inspires visions of tranquil pools with floating lotuses and backlit bodhi trees, PT Anderson’s sweaty, tweaked-out Tom Cruise-as-motivational-evangelist in Magnolia, and stacks of books whose titles contain far too many subjective pronouns. Many of the narrators feel deeply unreliable. In general, it is exactly this looseness, this kind of indeterminism — and ironically a sacrifice of actual identity in favor of lifestyle adoption — that gives the entire industry, which is specifically and necessarily a capitalist consumer phenomenon, its power and its reach. The vagueness allows it to cover so much territory, and to purport to fill and satisfy very personally and culturally significant voids. It’s not just pop psychology — it’s pop philosophy, ways of thinking that then dictate and prescribe ways to live and exist. “Self Help” can span from doing your laundry, to altering your neurochemistry, to listening to Deepak Chopra meditation tapes, to attending a business conference, to masturbating, to engaging in expressive acts that provide pleasure, solace, or insight — like making art. That said, I’m less interested in parsing the psychological from the pseudo-psychological, and more interested in honing in on the motivations and mechanisms driving self-focused change and the creative act of identity production as it exists in the contemporary sphere; of course, that our tools for accomplishing this are in a constant state of advancement only makes the topic more interesting, and the resulting identities more imaginative and outlying. Products like e-cigarettes, energy drinks, anti-depressants, stimulants, jawbones, Nike+ bands, and countless others reinforce this kind of thinking and imprint — and even amplify — the obsessive, habit-forming, imaginative behaviors that support “Self Help” movements. Marketing has become a basic human skill, and the rising class of technocrats, or “digital natives” (the rather tribal assignation trend pieces like to assign to those whose formative years are post-Internet) are made up of individuals who can nestle meanings within meaning in under 140 characters; who understand the coded indices of image production, selfies, and avatars; and who elatedly use social media platforms to condense themselves into data packages that tag individuals with identity traits to disperse the physical and spiritual aspects of the self across a variety of media platforms that each have their own inherent (and branded!) taxonomic systems. The artists in this show use different strategies in different disciplines, but all collectively make work in this context of cyber-utopian thinking that promises a future where technology can be used to construct, attract, or control desire, and as a result have a vested interest in understanding the subject as it relates to self-image, power, and processes of transformation.
RP: Finally, we discussed the works David Foster Wallace, and their particular relevance to you in organizing the exhibition. Perhaps you could discuss what interested you about his work in relation to the other works in the show?
A jumping off point for this organizing principle, and general line of inquiry, came from a visit to David Foster Wallace’s archive, where I’d hoped to access some of the literary marginalia from his notoriously exhaustive self help book collection. I learned that this portion of the archive had been removed from public view upon researching, and while I was disappointed to learn this, was intrigued that of all things - not his mercilessly and affectionately annotated Don DeLillo manuscripts, not the drugstore-sourced Rugrats notebooks where Infinite Jest was plotted, not his snide jabs at the sloppy grammar of inferior copyeditors in the margins of editorial layouts - that of all things, personal notes in what might by some be termed a pulp library, were off-limits. I see some of this project’s gestures, and ways of thinking, as possible and imagined annotations and insights that might have been in these pages.
As an artist and figure engaged with a relentless and hyper-analytical investigation of the self and behavior, Wallace is deeply sensitive to many of the concerns laid out in Self Help, but also very critical of them, underscoring the simultaneity of a giddy enthusiasm for change and an anxiety about its ultimate ethical implications, or even its fundamental possibility. One of the original manuscripts that directly addresses his fascination with the subject is a short story from 1998, The Depressed Person. Wallace ruthlessly lampoons a myopically self-indulgent and solipsistic-to-the-point-of-obliviousness character who vacillates between states of wretched despair and perceived enlightenment, but ultimately bestows remarkable empathy upon the nuances of human suffering and the quest for improvement, and even admiration at the mental gymnastics required to cast the self in so many different roles. Interestingly, on the original pages of this manuscript, distinct from his others, very precise pencil scrawls ornament the reverse sides of the draft pages, indicating a kind of energy flow or direct physical sublimation of thought or emotive impulse during his own creative process. These traces and their tentative relation to the subject matter, all provide a context for not just trying to understand descriptions or illustrations of the processes of transformation and change, but record the very energetic machinations that accomplish this transubstantiation.
Media
Schedule
from June 15, 2013 to July 21, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-06-15 from 18:00 to 20:00