The exhibition, organized by The Costume Institute, celebrates the late Alexander McQueen’s extraordinary contributions to fashion. From his Central Saint Martins postgraduate collection of 1992 to his final runway presentation, which took place after his death in February 2010, Mr. McQueen challenged and expanded the understanding of fashion beyond utility to a conceptual expression of culture, politics, and identity. His iconic designs constitute the work of an artist whose medium of expression was fashion.

The Romantic Mind

Coat
Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims (MA Graduation Collection), 1992
Pink silk satin printed in thorn pattern lined in white silk with encapsulated human hair

“You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.”
—Alexander McQueen

McQueen doggedly promoted freedom of thought and expression and championed the authority of the imagination. In so doing, he was an exemplar of the Romantic individual, the hero-artist who staunchly follows the dictates of his inspiration. “What I am trying to bring to fashion is a sort of originality,” he said. McQueen expressed this originality most fundamentally through his methods of cutting and construction, which were both innovative and revolutionary.

Romantic Gothic and Cabinet of Curiosities

“Coiled” Corset
The Overlook, autumn/winter 1999–2000
Aluminum

One of the defining features of McQueen’s collections is their historicism. While McQueen’s historical references are far-reaching, he was particularly inspired by the nineteenth century, especially the Victorian Gothic.Like the Victorian Gothic, which combines elements of horror and romance, McQueen’s collections often reflect opposites such as life and death, lightness and darkness. Indeed, the emotional intensity of his runway presentations was frequently the consequence of the interplay between dialectical oppositions. The relationship between victim and aggressor was especially apparent, particularly in his accessories. He once remarked, “I . . . like the accessory for its sadomasochistic aspect.”

Romantic Nationalism

Dress
The Horn of Plenty, autumn/winter 2009–10
Black duck feathers

McQueen’s collections were fashioned around elaborate narratives that are profoundly autobiographical, often reflecting his Scottish heritage. Indeed, when he was asked what his Scottish roots meant to him, he replied, “Everything.” McQueen’s national pride is most evident in the collections Highland Rape (autumn/winter 1995–96) and Widows of Culloden (autumn/winter 2006–7). Both explore Scotland’s turbulent political history.

Romantic Exoticism

Ensemble
No. 13, spring/summer 1999
Corset of brown leather; skirt of cream silk lace; prosthetic legs of carved elm wood

“I want to be honest about the world that we live in, and sometimes my political persuasions come through in my work. Fashion can be really racist, looking at the clothes of other cultures as costumes. . . . That’s mundane and it’s old hat. Let’s break down some barriers.”
—Alexander McQueen

McQueen’s romantic sensibilities expanded his imaginary horizons not only temporally but also geographically. As it had been for Romantic artists and writers, the lure of the exotic was central to his work. Like his historicism, McQueen’s was wide ranging—India, China, Africa, and Turkey all sparked his imagination. Japan was particularly significant to him, both thematically and stylistically. The kimono, especially, was a garment that he reconfigured endlessly. Remarking on the direction of his fashions, McQueen said, “My work will be about taking elements of traditional embroidery, filigree, and craftsmanship from countries all over the world. I will explore their crafts, patterns, and materials and interpret them in my own way.” As with many of his themes, however, McQueen’s exoticism was often expressed in contrasting opposites. That was the case with It’s Only a Game (spring/summer 2005), a show staged as a chess game inspired by a scene in the film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), which pitched the East (Japan) against the West (America). Films often inspired McQueen, as did contemporary art.

Romantic Primitivism

Dress
It’s Only a Game, spring/summer 2005
Lilac leather and horsehair

“I try to push the silhouette. To change the silhouette is to change the thinking of how we look. What I do is look at ancient African tribes, and the way they dress. The rituals of how they dress. . . . There’s a lot of tribalism in the collections.”
—Alexander McQueen

Throughout his career, McQueen returned to the theme of primitivism, which drew upon the ideal of the noble savage living in harmony with the natural world. It was the focus of his first runway collection after graduating, Nihilism (spring/summer 1994). He said of the collection, “It was a reaction to designers romanticizing ethnic dressing, like a Masai-inspired dress made of materials the Masai could never afford.” It famously included a latex dress with locusts, McQueen’s statement on famine. Many of the pieces were coated with mud, a conceit the designer repeated in Eshu (autumn/winter 2000–2001), a collection inspired by the well-known deity in the Yoruba religion. The clothes, including a coat of black synthetic hair and a dress of black horsehair embroidered with yellow glass beads, came close to fetishizing materials. This fetishization also occurred in It’s a Jungle Out There (autumn/winter 1997–98), which was inspired by the Thomson’s gazelle. The collection was a meditation on the dynamics of power—in particular, the relationship between predator and prey. Indeed, McQueen’s reflections on primitivism were frequently represented in paradoxical combinations, contrasting “modern” and “primitive,” “civilized” and “uncivilized.” The storyline of Irere (spring/summer 2003) involved a shipwreck at sea and was peopled with pirates, conquistadors, and Amazonian Indians. Typically, McQueen’s narrative glorified the state of nature and tipped the moral balance in favor of the “natural man” or “nature’s gentleman” unfettered by the artificial constructs of civilization.

Romantic Naturalism

“Spine” Corset
Untitled, spring/summer 1998
Aluminum and black leather

Nature was the greatest, or at least the most enduring, influence upon McQueen. It was also a central theme, if not the central theme, of Romanticism. Many artists of the Romantic movement presented nature itself as a work of art. McQueen both shared and promoted this view in his collections, which often included fashions that took their forms and raw materials from the natural world. For McQueen, as it was for the Romantics, nature was also a locus for ideas and concepts. Inspired by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), it presented a narrative that centered not on the evolution of humankind but on its devolution. For the Romantics, nature was the primary vehicle for the Sublime—starry skies, stormy seas, turbulent waterfalls, vertiginous mountains. In Plato’s Atlantis, the Sublime of nature was paralleled and supplanted by that of technology—the extreme space-time compressions produced by the Internet. It was a powerful evocation of the Sublime and its coincident expression of the Romantic and the postmodern. At the same time, it was a potent vision of the future of fashion that reflected McQueen’s sweeping imagination.

Ensemble
Eclect Dissect, autumn/winter 1997–98
Dress of black leather; collar of red pheasant feathers and resin vulture skulls; gloves of black leather

In recent years, television’s reality shows and talent competitions have offered people a conflicted chance at fame, while various kinds of Web-based social media have pioneered new forms of communication that people increasingly use to perform their private lives as public theater. During the same period, governments worldwide have asserted vast new powers of surveillance, placing unwitting “participants” on an entirely different kind of stage.

Against this backdrop, The Talent Show examines a range of relationships between artists, audiences, and participants that model the competing desires for notoriety and privacy marking our present moment. Ranging from seemingly benevolent partnerships to those that appear to exploit their subjects, many of the works in the exhibition animate the tensions between exhibitionism and voyeurism, and raise challenging ethical questions around issues of authorship, power, and control.

Selected Artists:

1. Andy Warhol

“Robin”
1965. 16mm film, black and white

“Screen Tests,” this four-minute 16-millimeter film portraits of famous, semi-famous and unknown subjects. Projected wall-size here is the nearly static image of a young woman named Robin, who sat for her film portrait in 1965. She was not a celebrity, but there seems no reason to think she could not have been another superstar had she been more self-assertive.

2. Piero Manzoni

Base magica – Scultura vivente
1961. wood 60 x 79.5 x 79.5 cm

A pedestal called “Magic Base — Living Sculpture” (1961) by Piero Manzoni invites people to step up on it and exhibit themselves as works of live art.

3. Chris Burden

Wiretap
1972. Mixed media installation

Chris Burden’s performances from the early ’70s did much to shift attention from things artists make to the artist as a quasi celebrity. Here three of Mr. Burden’s actions are memorialized in reliquarylike plexiglass boxes, with mementos resting on purple velvet cushions. One offers only a printed card stating: “I disappeared for three days without prior notice to anyone. On these three days my whereabouts were unknown.” I want to say as I write this, “Well, no one knows where I am right now,” but then I am not the object of a personality cult.

4. Adrian Piper

Context #7
1970. Mixed media installation

Adrian Piper’s contribution to “Information,” the influential exhibition of Conceptual art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971, was a binder full of blank pages on which visitors were asked to write or draw whatever they liked. A selection of those sheets is displayed around the walls of one gallery. They included political commentaries, feeble japes like “You are all under arrest” and crude cartoons. The most incisive is a drawing of two people, one saying to the other, “You know Clyde, this exhibit’s better when you’re stoned.”

5. Amie Siegel

My Way 2
2009. Video (color, sound); 12 minutes

Compilation of  YouTube clips of girls and young women singing “Gotta Go My Own Way” from the movie “High School Musical 2,” on the one hand, and men singing the Frank Sinatra chestnut “My Way” on the other.

6. Sophie Calle

The Address Book
2009. A portfolio of prints: 28 pages, each with text and photographs

In 1983, Calle produced her most controversial work of art, Address Book. She had found an address book in the street, photocopied it and sent the original back to its owner. She then visited and interviewed the people listed, in order to build up a profile of its owner from their descriptions and anecdotes. The results were published in Liberation. At around the same time Calle herself became the willing subject of such investigations. In 1981 at Calle’s request, her mother hired a private detective to follow her daughter, photograph her in secret and record her every movement. It was, in Calle’s words, an attempt ‘to provide photographic evidence of my own existence’.

India is one of the four ancient civilizations, and is known for its long history and affluent cultural heritage. Contemporary Indian art demonstrates an alternative direction in raising criticism of one’s own country’s social reality and controversial issues including class system, the wealth gap and political agendas.

This exhibition has selected 63 artworks by 29 artists, and intends to present the facets of art and aestheticism the general outline of contemporary Indian culture and social life.

Artists:

1. Thukral & Tagra

The artistic style of the duo is as unpredictable as fast changing, being product of the intersection between the Western popular culture and the deep-rooted traditional culture of India. Their works often explore the gradual loss of self-identity of the Indian society, and the influences brought by the globalization.

At the same time, the duo illustrated through human sculptures and portraits the different groups of people brought by the new era. Among these groups are: the farm boys who dream of fame, and the young delinquents who roam the streets, all of which reflects the influences of foreign cultures and the shift of aesthetic values in Indian society.

2. G.R. Iranna

Dead Smile

G.R. Iranna’s works are known to combine allegories with theatrical elements, exploring physical sufferings with spiritual struggles. The sculpture installation Dead Smile is mysterious even in its name, portraying twenty life-size sculptures of strong men in the same crouching position, but facing different directions. Their heads are covered with black cloths, erasing their individuality while bestowing them a common facial expression.

Under these circumstances, the work portrays from the unity of individuals a “community of fate.” Even though each individual sculpture is essentially the same as the rest, they are mutually isolated from each other.

3. Manjunath Kamath

Second Hand Car Goes to Heaven

In this installation the artist humorously places a car with tiny golden wings climbing on the wall, and a herd of fiberglass rabbits gathered around its exhaustion pipe, inhaling all the smoke the car produces. Such imagery hints at the great disparities in the era of globalization, such as: the roles of developed countries and the ones that follow them, the value between “new” and “second-hand,” and the dominance of the industrial civilization over natural environment.

4. Shine Shivan

Sperm Weaver

Shine Shivan believes that an individual’s gender and sexual orientation is not certain or defined at birth, but molded through intimate interactions with the social environment. His works explore the male identity under the post-feminism context, bestowing to the male gender an anti-traditional feminine image, and emotional projection towards the same sex.

In the photography and video works Sperm Weaver, Shivan displays male nude bodies carrying white tulle, which are commonly used in wedding dresses. In this work series, the long white tulle adopts different roles: a representation of inner femininity; a bridge that connects the land with riverbed, subtly suggesting the existence of a third gender; a depiction of the symbolic relationship and spiritual distance between body and earth; and an element that stirs the origin of life.

5. Rohini Devasher

Archetype I, Chimera and Chimera II

Rohini Devasher’s works explore the possibilities of natural creation, including living organisms and their origin, development, and multiplication. She imitates nature’s mechanism of procreation through an artistic, scientific, and fantastical perspective, creating surreal works that resonate with all primitive lives, while hinting of a possible futuristic scenario.

Archetype I is inspired from Goethe’s search for “that which was common to all plants without distinction,” and explores the morphology of plants. The work refers to a purely ideological “archetype plant,” which is the basic structure that is common to all plants, and conveys its infinite possibilities of appearances in nature.

6. Anita Dube

The Theater of Sade

Anita Dube’s works utilizes different readymade objects to explore the loss and rebirth of the individual and society as a whole, and the common experiences in human life, including: morality, desire, pain, and joy. The Theatre of Sade displays a set of daily objects, such as dentures or books, covered by black velvet.

The work transforms the exhibition space into a theater’s backstage, creating an atmosphere of tranquility and anticipation. Dube is known for using velvet to cover readymade objects, as if giving them a “secondary skin.” Through this action, the artist erases the objects’ intellectuality and brings out their sensibility, thus encouraging the audience to approach these strange yet familiar objects with an uncommon perspective.

7. Nandini Valli Muthiah

Definitive Reincarnate Series

Nandini Valli Muthiah’s works explore issues of self-identity and social acceptance, while attempting to redefine the preconceived notions of faith and oneself, and to answer the ultimate question: “Who am I?” In the video series Definitive Reincarnate, the artist gives Vishnu a contemporary image. Vishnu is one of the three major gods of Hinduism, and titled as the Preserver of Life.

Definitive Reincarnate Series

The work series reinterprets the concept of divine incarnation, borrowing elements of consumerism present in South Indian movies and mythological calendars. As result, the images of the deity, portrayed by celebrities, are blessed with gorgeous appearances, body postures, facial expressions, and garments.

8. N.S. Harsha

Look Into My Eyes

The artist tends to utilizes Indian traditions and a secular vocabulary to integrate elements of everyday life with accessible artistic language, in order to depict political issues and phenomena present in contemporary society.

Just as the Matryoshka dolls of Russia or the Barbie dolls of United States, the Mysore dolls are not just items of collection, but often the children’s confidants during their growth. Look into My Eyes is a large painting that depicts a newlywed couple, where the bride and the groom are dressed accordingly to South Indian traditions. Wreaths are put around their necks, decorated with landmarks from the world across, as if they are saying “even though we are common people, but it is our dream to travel the world.”

Mika Rottenberg’s immersive video installations address issues of gender and labor through outrageous narratives centered around real women (not actors or models) and their bodies. With her new video entitled Squeeze, Rottenberg collapses the humorous and the unsettling to examine global production in a 20-minute narrative that screens on a continuous loop at SFMOMA. Splicing together documentary footage from a rubber plant in India and a lettuce farm in Arizona with her own narrative of women in an absurdist makeup factory, Rottenberg’s surreal video homes in on the social realities of women’s labor.

In the makeup factory the blush source (the blond woman, dressed in an alluring outfit) is literally squeezed by walls for profit. Meanwhile, a nozzle from the wall of bare asses sprays water, and an obese woman spins on a circular floor — all to ensure that the priceless block of lettuce-rubber-blush is made to perfection.

“This piece, which is trying to collapse these geographically distant places into one space, is a natural step for me,” Rottenberg says. “It’s about using your body and being alienated from your body, objectifying your body and using it almost like a factory that can produce stuff. I feel like that’s very feminine. I’m interested in how selling one’s body can be empowering.”

Mika Rottenberg
Still: Squeeze, 2010

Jennifer Allora (American) and Guillermo Calzadilla (Cuban) have been collaborating since 1995. On October 13th they will debut new large-scale works incorporating performance at the Lisson Gallery in London.

“Hope Hippo”
2005. Mud, whistle, daily newspaper, and live person.
nstallation view: 51st Venice Biennale.

Allora & Calzadilla approach visual art as a set of experiments that test whether ideas such as authorship, nationality, borders, and democracy adequately describe today’s increasingly global and consumerist society.

“Returning a Sound”
2004. Single channel video with sound, 5 minutes 42 seconds.

Their hybridized works—often a unique mix of sculpture, photography, performance, sound and video—explore the physical and conceptual act of mark making and its survival through traces. By drawing historical, cultural, and political metaphors out of basic materials, Allora & Calzadilla’s works explore the complex associations between an object and its meaning.

Clamor
2006. Mixed-media sculpture
Installation view: The Moore Space, Miami

More info: http://www.pbs.org

Artists have long been fascinated by the methods used in seducing customers, and by the locales of shopping – from corner shops and department stores to contemporary suburban mega-malls. Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture examines the relationship between the display, distribution and consumption of commodities and modern and contemporary art, and includes works that blur the distinction between the shop environment and the gallery environment.

Andreas Gursky
99 Cent II, 2001 (diptych)

Andreas Gursky’s new work 99 Cent II 2001 celebrates and critiques the seductive powers of supermarket packaging and presentation.

A collaboration between the great names of Pop art, including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, The American Supermarket is an evocation of an ordinary supermarket but one where real foods such as Warhol’s signed stacks of Campbell’s soup cans are mixed together with works such as Robert Watts’ chrome fruits and multicoloured wax eggs.

Robert M.Watts, Eggs
The American Supermarket, 1964
Shopping also presents a classic example of Christo’s covered store fronts from the 1960s, an ensemble of Jeff Koons’ monumental vacuum-cleaner vitrines from the 1980s, and Barbara Kruger’s iconic work Untitled (I shop therefore I am) 1987.

Barbara Kruger
Untitled (I shop therefore I am), 1987

Damien Hirst
Pharmacy 1992

This piece explores the link between the presentation techniques used by pharmaceutical companies and the methods of display found in shops and museums.

On 27 March 2010 the Mary Boone Gallery will open at its Chelsea location “The Globe
Shrinks”, a new video installation by Barbara Kruger.

“The Globe Shrinks” (2010) is a multiple channel video installation that continues
Kruger’s engagement with the kindness and brutality of the everyday, the collision of
declaration and doubt, the duet of pictures and words, the resonance of direct address,
and the unspoken in every conversation.

Barbara Kruger
still from The Globe Shrinks
dimensions variable
four-screen digital video installation
2010

Barbara Kruger is not just an artist who understands the manipulative power of seductive images when combined with a few pointed words. She uses them to hold a mirror to our entire culture — a hotbed of passive aggression if ever one was. At least, that’s the way it looks in “The Globe Shrinks,” an immersive new multichannel video installation that is challenging the presumptions of all who dare to enter the Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea.

Balancing self-possession with self-doubt and rage with tenderness, Kruger’s art does exactly what one of her subtitles says: it show us to ourselves. The globe may shrink for those who own it, as another phrase (borrowed from the critical theorist Homi K. Bhaba) puts it, but Kruger’s perfect calibration of life’s crueler ironies performs a kind of miracle, allowing the blind to see all.

This is the third of a series of video works with which Kruger has translated her widely copied graphic designs — superimposing red or white text over cropped images, or enlarging words into slogans the size of buildings — into propulsive action. Some of the text in “The Globe Shrinks” came out of “Between Being and Dying,” her installation last fall at Lever House, where she covered the windows, columns and floor of the lobby in phrases like “A rich man’s jokes are always funny,” speaking truth to the lords of power and ambition who build palaces like, well, Lever House.

www.maryboonegallery.com
745 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10151

Nicola Costantino was born in Rosario on November 17, 1964. While she attended the course of Fine Arts at the National University in Rosario, her interest in new artistic materials and techniques led her to research and work in craft workshops and factories. At ICI Duperial, she experimented with silicone molds and matrices on polyester resin apt for flexible polyurethane foam injection. Her skill in this technique proved decisive for the development of her work, and enabled her to achieve the real-object perception that would become characteristic of Nicola’s art. Since she was a teenager, Nicola had worked in her mother’s clothing factory. In that world of fashion, she developed her skill in clothing designs and patterns. In 1990, the rest of her family moved to Chile.

In 1995 she started to experiment with an almost exact copy of human skin made in silicone that she used for the production of her clothing. Also, she made her first coat with navels and human hair, which she herself wore during her frequent trips to New York and Los Angeles. Fashion, a topic that had been present throughout her life -along with consumption and the human body as a tool of seduction-, has finally become a recurrent theme in her work.

In 2003, she started her project Savon de Corps, with soaps made with a part of her own fat obtained from a liposuction. She held a solo exhibit of her Boutique at Senda Gallery, in Barcelona’s Paseo de Gracia, a street where the world’s most glamorous clothing brands are based, and other exhibition with her whole work at Casal Solleric, Palma de Mallorca, both in Spain.

Shoot First Make Friends Later
Shirin Aliabadi & Farhad Moshiri
2006

Iranian art couple Farhad Moshiri and Shirin Aliabadi created the project “Operation Supermarket”. It consists of a series of commodity advertisements and packages mixing “poetry with detergent” as the artists describe. The emphasis is on the commodification of mainstream media traits of the Middle East, but also on a wry parody of the mythical hopes still pinned on the commodity itself as a capitalist agent for change.

The series points out the pervasive effect of Western global capitalism on the everyday life of the general public and how the citizens start to define themselves as persons by what they take from the shelves of the marketplace. These works offer manipulated packages of common household objects available at any common supermarket in the world. The title “Supermarket” suggests an allusion to global consumerism and products as the vehicles of its manifestation as the new figure of Empire.

We Are All Americans
2006

The work titled “We are all Americans” suggests our fascination with everything American. This Americanization of a society is defined by the ratio of commodity fetishism to the range of product accessibility. Global corporations, when localizing their advertisements, adapt their jingles to the local cultural attributes. Thus poetry with detergent is also a reference to Iranian oral culture and its obsession with poetry, a tradition deeply rooted in Iranian society. The artists re-brand and transform these items into a discourse on capitalism. The new guise of the image, altered from an advertisement to an artwork, consequently modifies the way the image is encountered and discussed. The artists deploy these ready-made advertisements as a platform for smuggling a new content. The immediate quality of these images – as parts of a common global image-repertoire – are used to convey a differentiated message in a fashion that contradicts their raison d’etre.

Families Ask Why
2006

In his work, Moshiri makes direct reference to everything kitsch, as the post-colonial monuments of contemporary culture of Iran and the region. He refers to the post-revolutionary drawing books, water fountains at the intersections and main squares of the cities, the furniture of the parvenu, and the Western and Westernized brands of products. But nevertheless these works go way beyond the local boundaries. With consumerism as a global tool of expression, our lexicon of products forms the vocabulary of our times. The lines of carts behind the supermarket register suggest a modern form of communication. Shoot first, make friends later is the product of a global paranoia and people killing people is what that makes everyday headlines. In fact some of them do remind us of the postcards of demonstrations outside WTO summits. And perhaps the artists are raising the question of how can we stop the famine in Africa with the choice of our soap and how can our bathroom shelf criticize out government? How can we protest with the brand of our underwear and how can we ask for forgiveness with the choice of our moisturizers. And with our preferred set of detergents we express our love, asking: “MY SOUL, MY UNIVERSE, WHERE WERE YOU ALL THOSE DAYS”

Mika’s video installations envision the female body as a microcosm of larger societal issues such as labor and class inequities. In her short films, women cast for their notable physical features and talents perform perfunctory factory-line duties, manufacturing inane items worth less than the labor required to make them. Her homemade machinery and decor are functional but crudely constructed.

These contraptions, operating by pedal, conveyor belt, paddle, rubber band, or string, are reminiscent of Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s kinetic props, though the human interaction in her works adds a carnivalesque element to Rottenberg’s environments, the physical comedy implicit in her narratives recalling Eleanor Antin’s filmed performances. The bright colors of Rottenberg’s self-contained sets don’t disguise the close quarters in which her characters work or mitigate the sense of claustrophobia induced by a dead-end job. A blue-collar work ethic is conjured through the women’s uniforms, ranging from diner-waitress dresses to jogging suits. Her cast often use several body parts at once, reminding the viewer of the feminine capacity for multitasking while it suggests an ironic futility in her sweatshop-like situations.

Mary’s Cherries, video still, 2005

Three previous videos established Rottenberg’s unique narrative approach, in which action is compressed into layers of illogical activity. In Tropical Breeze (2004), a woman in the back of a truck chews gum, wraps it in a tissue picked from a pile with her toes, and sends it on a clothesline to the profusely sweating driver, who dabs each tissue with perspiration to ferry it back for packaging and sale as a “moist tissue wipe.” Rottenberg’s installations often physically echo her videos: Tropical Breeze was screened inside a cratelike box mimicking a big rig’s trailer. Mary’s Cherries (2005) showcases a trio of obese ladies pedaling bikes who, through a magical process of clay kneading and fingernail clipping, transform acrylic fingernails into maraschino cherries. In Dough (2006), one woman smells flowers to provoke hay-fever tears while another mashes a foot-powered bellows into foul-scented air that wafts onto dough, which rises as the moisture and air hit it. Dripping beads of sweat, women’s grunting, and booming machinery dominate the audio, while close-ups of the women’s bodies and faces highlight their resignation to an abstruse cause.

Rottenberg’s newest film, Cheese (2007), conflates farm-girl imagery with the fairy tale “Rapunzel” into a story loosely based on the Sutherland Sisters, renowned for their extremely long hair. Floating through a pastoral yet mazelike setting of raw wooden debris cobbled together into a benign shantytown, six longhaired women in flowing white nightgowns “milk” their locks and the goats they live with to generate cheese. Shots of animals crowded in pens and the sisters’ bunk bed– cluttered room visually compare the women to their ruminant allies. As nurturing caretakers, these women represent maternal aspects of Mother Nature. Here Rottenberg investigates feminine magic, the ability to “grow things out of the body” as she says, as the ultimate, wondrous physical mystery.

Dough, video still, 2005/06

With her video installation Dough (2005/06), Mika Rottenberg has produced an oppressive commentary on capitalism’s alienating work conditions: the moonlight job now takes place in a specially designed sweatshop, where the housewives’ bodies are turned into machines that actually produce sweat and tears. The artist, who was born in 1976, addresses themes such as economics in the post-industrial age or cultural identity; the female bodies she portrays exist far from social norms.

Mika Rottenberg is part of a vital New York scene that is currently attracting a good deal of international attention. Rottenburg’s drawings for Dough were already on show in the pa.per.ing exhibition, which presented paper works by this young generation
of artists in the Lobby Gallery at Deutsche Bank New York. At the Frieze Art Fair, the Cartier Award’s first winner will be showing Chasing Waterfalls: The Rise and Fall of the Amazing Seven Sutherland Sisters (Part 1) for the first time. At the center of this video work are the Sutherland Sisters who became human circus attractions due to their extremely long hair.

Cheese, video still, 2008, Whitney Biennial

Mika’s video on coolhunting.com