Mika Rottenberg
La Maison Rouge, Paris, France
Mika Rottenberg, Cheese (2008)
‘Those who do not produce things cannot produce words,’ declared Antonio Gramsci in 1912. The whirring and tearing of mechanisms and gestures compose a running commentary on the manufacturing of consciousness in artist Mika Rottenberg’s videos, but the featured characters – all women – are silent. In the four works shown at Maison Rouge – Julie (2004), Tropical Breeze (2004), Dough, (2005-6) and Cheese (2008) – a simple transmission of fact (the exclamation ‘I see it!’, in Dough) is the sole utterance. In this exhibition, the body and architecture perform language as processes to signification.
For Dough, Rottenberg situates the video projection in a den-like niche amidst a cluster of rooms built specifically for the exhibition space. An enormous female wrestler, a mass of flesh likened to the mound of dough beneath her, sits directly before a vase of flowers in a cramped alcove. Between taking puffs from an inhaler, tears run down her face, along her leg, to her big toe, finally dripping through a hole in the pavement to burn the surface where they land in the room below. Though vaccum-packed for preservation and distribution, the doughy clumps that are lovingly rolled and kneaded by workers on the assembly line, are more like parodies of products: not immanent ‘things’ to be invested with meaning by a consumer, but relics of experience. This is also the case in Tropical Breeze <, which comprises an advertisement projected inside a shipping container: a black truck driver saturates paper squares with her sweat, then attaches them to a spinning line of cord. Whizzed to the back of the vehicle, they are removed by a white contortionist with her foot and fresh pieces are attached with a piece of chewing gum. Rather than being shown in cubby-holes, the long-haired protagonists of Cheese are channeled in open-air corridors fashioned from wooden fences. Though the women interact directly, they are engrossed in their own bodies, as well as those of the goats they milk and the rudimentary structures surrounding them. Tossing about their long manes, they mimick the waterfalls that provide the water they use to make a certain kind of hair tonic, rinsing their hair with it in order to wring out its essence into funnels. What will come of the hair tonic, offered to the world through a cloister-like rotating screen, is unclear but also unimportant: it is but a remnant of engagement in active self-consciousness production. ‘Not an action arena, but an existence in stoic modesty’, John Bock pronounced in his lecture for Koppel op Kop (2000), ‘Axioms of the Self-Me-Abstraction exude’. In Rottenberg’s work, the logorrhea of Bock’s lectures is silenced and his maniacal contraptions are simplified. For Rottenberg the body is protagonist rather than discourse. Rottenberg’s videos enact Judith Butler’s theory of the marginalized body as a site for subverting power dialectics, enriching its analysis of hegemony, language and the body with a Gramscian attention to the complex interplay between consent and coercion.
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