The Cheryl Donegan exhibit at the New Museum titled Scenes + Commercials, possibly marked my first brush with museum art that was predominantly performance based. The work put was extremely vocal, and evoked extremely strong sentiments in the mind.
The first work I will talk about was this video being played on one of the side television screens, which was so tacky in transitions from one frame to another that it was almost a power point video. The subject of the video were products made of plastic an cheap stone- bracelets, pins, balls objects of propaganda, all products you don’t really need accompanied by an almost obnoxiously assertive commentary . The commentary sounded like the narrator was convincing himself more than anyone else that he was living his life right, living it the way he was supposed to or the way society told him to. The desperation and frenzy in his voice and the emphasis on certain words in his statements, accompanied by the flat visuals of unappealing and passive products of mindless consumption, filled me with a sense of extreme chaos. I couldn’t physically bring myself to listen to the audio for more than a few seconds, because it made me feel so disturbed that I wanted to burst out of my clothes and out of a window.
I am still getting used to the level of consumerism present in the American society, before I came here I lived for a year in a small village in Karnataka, a state in south India, and the difference in the attitude and tendency towards consumer products has been monumental.
I could understand the allusions to pop cultures and commercials that she draws over and over again through out the exhibit, highlighted in this piece that has been crafted to look like an overplayed never ending reel of television commercials making the strangest and wildest declarations but making them so forcefully, and almost belligerently that you feel bullied and confronted. I feel like the work is an almost transgressive satire on advertisement culture, and the manipulation of human psychology,used to exploit people to constantly consume.
This work seemed nightmarish to me, and definitely evoked a very intense reaction from me. I felt like the audio track was out to brainwash me, and I walked away from feeling terrified and slightly violated.
The second work of art, that interested me was the giant video montage projected on the wall. The museum had no labels to name or even explain any of the individual works. Several elements of this piece, seemed geared to expose the hypocrisy and ugliness of pop culture and advertisement media. The woman wears a bottle over head, a choice that makes her less than human. The bottle is either a detergent or juice bottle and upon fusing it to her own body, it outs her identity as product. The bottle has only one hole to look from, which seems to be making the point of tunnel vision that society has become conditioned to look through in a our mad race to consume more and more everyday. all the colours used in her costume or lack thereof and involved i the background are extremely loud and clashing with each other to create a world of hyper reality, and the simulation of sensations heightened to the point of a manic panic. the part where she stands on a pedestal that rotates back and forth shows blatant objectification of the human form, and the paint thrown at her shows the lack of respect she owns. Perhaps the garbage bags and packing materials she wears define her s trash, or a product wrapped in packaging, or perhaps a product that is as useless and pointless as trash. There is a seen where she as a woman in a bottle mask throws paint at the painting of a woman in bottle mask, while a third woman in the same mask throws cheers her on with a foam finger. This series of visuals that loop over themselves for a while present a delirious and disillusioned cycle of hypocrisy, judgement and objectification, that needs to be broken.
This effect is only enhanced and supported by a visual that follows soon after. The scantily dressed artist with her “bottle face”, stands leaning over an old television set,in a very seductive pose, with a container of cleaning spray fluid in her hand, swinging casually in her fingers, as the cap of the bottle she wears on her head dangles before the television set, a pose that perfectly mimics so many famous advertisements in popular culture.
Bodies sell products in our society, especially female bodies.Towards the end of the video we see pastel coloured liquid pouring out through cracks in the tape that covers her face, and from he mouth of the bottle attached to her face, in a pretty phallic visual. A little liquid spills to her face and she is handed a tiny tissue to wipe it off before she goes back to modelling. This visual seems to indicate a breaking point that the model reaches after everything she is put through mentally and physically, but is given no time to recover from this break down or recuperate and instead forced to easy fix herself and carry on, lest she lose her place in the fast world in her quest for mend her body, mind and soul.
The picture makes me feel like the artist feels suffocated by the amount and content of media being forced down her throat.
