No one seems to have any personal relationships in any of Mika Rottenberg’s recent videos. They depict women working alone, even when surrounded by others. The women are usually abjectly bored, often jaded, and sometimes asleep. They’re lodged within a magnetizingly colorful yet exploitative system that has long since become banal to them but remains interesting to the audience. Cosmic Generator, for instance, includes footage of a variety of women minding market stalls in Yiwu, China. Their shops are like nests of mass-produced wares, and the women, who are either napping or absorbed in sending and receiving text messages from their mobile devices, are snuggled into their products, nestled amid a legion of inflatable latex animals or tucked into a floor-to-ceiling forest of topiaries. One stall sells only glow stars.
Rottenberg is an Argentine-Israeli video artist who likes to aggressively juxtapose settings where women labor. The three primary video installations in Easypieces, a mid-career survey of her work, traverse a pearl manufacturing operation headquartered in Hong Kong; a Maine potato farm; CERN’s Geneva-based Antimatter Factory; merchandise stalls at the famously vast Yiwu market; Chinese restaurants in Mexicali; the Siberian steppe, where members of an all-female Tuvan throat-singing group perform before a pastoral landscape; and decontextualized cubicles (ostensibly the fictionalized contents of the Antimatter Factory) where disembodied hands practice using tools on hunks of gelatin.
Easypieces comprises five video installations and assorted sculptures, all made between 2015 and 2019. The show debuted at the New Museum in June 2019 before traveling to the MCA in October. Three primary video installations (about twenty minutes each) occupy black boxes; two of these, NoNoseKnows (Artist Variant) (2015) and Cosmic Generator (Tunnel Variant) (2017), have been shown before (at the Venice Biennale and Skulptur Projekte Münster, respectively). The third, Spaghetti Blockchain (2019), was made for Easypieces.
In NoNoseKnows, a woman squats in the corner of a cold dark interior, every surface of which is slick with brown slime (it’s unclear if these are her actual working conditions, or if Rottenberg has staged this). She’s plucking pearls out of massive oyster shells, siphoning off the slimy pink flesh, and tossing the husks behind her. NoNoseKnows also seems to comment on the absurdity of the middle-management lifestyle: a white woman dressed for a corporate setting apathetically moves through a nondescript office building full of broken air-conditioning units and dead plants, and devoid of coworkers. At one point she seems to leave work and travel through a massive, seemingly vacant residential tower park in a motorized wheelchair, only to reappear at work. She’s played by Bunny Glamazon, a wrestler, dominatrix, and exotic dancer with whom Rottenberg has a long-term working relationship. Glamazon does not have a single interpersonal encounter over the course of the piece. Her job seems primarily to consist of producing plates of sludgy food by sneezing them out through her nose, and secondarily involves storming down hallways, opening and closing the doors to empty offices, as if being a businesswoman really just entails purposefully walking in and out of rooms while wearing loud shoes.
When men are present, they tend to look distinctly confused and slightly nervous. A short, fourth video, Sneeze (2012), shows barefoot men in suits, each of whom sneezes out rabbits, lightbulbs, and slabs of meat in turn. Their toenails are painted pink and purple and red, and their brows are furrowed as if they’ve been asked to do something and don’t know how. (Nail polish is an omnipresent motif—in Spaghetti Blockchain, different nail colors can be read as designating the disembodied laboring hands belonging to distinct workers. I read this as a subtle attempt to produce individuals with personal styles and gender presentations.) In Cosmic Generator, dish covers are lifted off of entrees at a Mexicali-located Chinese restaurant to reveal three tiny squirming men in vaguely yonic taco suits. At one point, one of these men crawls down a tiny mine tunnel and arrives in a tiny anonymous waiting room containing a bubbling fountain made of bright ceramic fruit, where he sits and stares anxiously at a pink glazed pomegranate resembling a vulva.
Labor, for Rottenberg, seems to be defined by either walking around a building, waiting for something to happen, or doing things to matter with your body. Women at the pearl harvesting facility shepherd pearls into different piles with their hands, demonstrating the special mode of attention demanded when evaluating many small objects at once. In Spaghetti Blockchain, actors’ disembodied hands repeatedly smack wriggling hunks of technicolor jello as if to punish them into becoming antimatter. The work, which takes place in brightly colored insular rooms, seems thoroughly unproductive: the hands are simply demonstrating their ability to interfere with matter by repeatedly slicing, smacking, burning, or melting unidentifiable gelatinous substances that seem vaguely edible. The highly chromatic gelatin reacts by making exaggerated noises. (The actual shots of CERN, a jungle thicket of wires and mammoth machines, provide a strong textural contrast with the viscerally chromatic gelatin.) In NoNoseKnows, glossy, wriggling bubbles hover in nearly identical desolate office rooms like zoo animals. Each has a unique wobbly morphology and emits distinct sounds, some resonating with static electricity, others emitting little avian shrieks. Every object in Rottenberg’s universe has a set of overly emphatic noises proper to it. The only human-generated noises are sneezes and throat-singing; in Spaghetti Blockchain, the voices of the Tuvan throat singers (the group is called Tyva Kyzy), layered over activities at the Antimatter Factory, seem to emanate from the matter undergoing transformation.
Rottenberg seems to harness her repulsion with the vapidity of these objects; she reacts to it by turning up the volume on color, texture, and sound and milking them for all possible sensory resonance they have to offer. I imagine she is skeptical of the sensory charisma of things and trying to trouble this by exaggerating it towards a breaking point where the viewer emerges into heightened criticality. (I am not sure she finds this threshold; for me they just become more hypnotic the grosser they get.) Rottenberg’s cinematography foregrounds the raw tactile magnetism of even the least charming commodities, obsessing over how it looks when matter gets touched. At the same time, she wants to make visible the incorporeal, barely conceivable network of capital flow. This is the friction in Spaghetti Blockchain’s title, which stretches the distance between the gustatory resonance of slimy pasta and the techy beeps and boops of the ruthlessly abstract blockchain.
Rottenberg combines this haptic allure with techniques of film grammar to knit disparate settings together. Video is the perfect instrument for rendering the surreal fragmentation of supply chains because it’s easy to manipulate attention to erase vast distances. The videos trace dense, fibrous networks of commercial activity. Spatial relationships between the individual settings are incoherent: you want to draw a map, but you can’t. She occasionally lets the viewer indulge their cartographic impulses, giving glimpses of how things relate. Often she’s deliberately misleading, stitching shots together to create relations of cause and effect between totally unrelated events. Rottenberg often presents her investigations in the register of magical realism: spaghetti-producing sneezes share space with documentary footage of women who actually sort pearls for a living sorting pearls.
She likes to produce little anomalies in the circuitry of the capitalist logics she exposes. Interiors and exteriors mismatch relentlessly: a shot of an ornate yurt, scored with tech-y noises, cuts to an interior of a buzzing cryptocurrency mining facility. In the pearl harvesting facility, a woman operates a contraption that looks like a middle school science fair project to manipulate an elaborate set of dowels that pass through the ceiling; the rest of the contraption seems to rise from the floor of the Bunny Glamazon’s office, wiggling a feather that tickles her nose, as if Glamazon’s corporate office in an unknown location is literally above the pearl harvesting facility. This contraption is the sole flimsy link holding the two employees’ lives together and is consistent with the how Rottenberg physicalizes connections generally: useless devices manufacture divisions to ensure that interclass contact stay improbable and labor remain unemotional. A woman in the sweatshop sleeps with her bare feet in a bucket of pearls; in the corner of Glamazon’s office sits a bucket of pearls in which two upended feet grow like plants. Orientation in relation to the totality of a globalized commercial system is at once promised and proved unavailable. This point defines most of her work; the new videos at moments feel like the same old clothing item in a fun new color.
Rottenberg seems to gesture towards visitors’ complicity through putting props from the videos into the gallery space. The pieces work better when they don’t try to rope the white cube into the plot lines of their supply chains. The gallery is full of twitching paraphernalia from the films: convulsing disembodied ponytails, fans at hip-height whirring away in little alcoves of their own, copious pearls, an air-conditioning unit, a plant. Though Rottenberg has frequently let motifs from the work overflow into the gallery space with more success, in this particular room the souvenirs seem to stem from an anxiety about failing to provide visitors with adequate stimuli.
Broadly, the decision to aestheticize the niches she documents seems self-conscious. She seems to want to document the fruits of consumerism alongside their making in order to demonstrate how potently those fruits distract from the violent systems that produce them. Exposing banal or exploitative labor conditions would ordinarily seem to demand peeling back superficial appeal; Rottenberg knows holding viewers’ attention is contingent on harnessing that appeal. The seductiveness also risks releasing museum visitors from registering their own complicity. In the best case, it sensitizes an especially critical viewer to their own experience of commodity fetishism. I am not sure if the exhibition actually offers the tools to coax out this reading from someone who isn’t looking for it.