The Body Factory
Mika Rottenberg in Conversation with
Ossian Ward
Mika Rottenberg was
presented with the first Cartier Award for her absurd and subversive video
installations. Ossian Ward met with the artist in London shortly
before the premiere of her work commissioned for the Frieze Art Fair.
Second Party, 2006, © Mika Rottenberg,
Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York
Pressed into claustrophobic spaces, women in beige uniforms ceaselessly
toil at making dough. They knead it, shape it into rolls, and then lay the
sections of dough onto a conveyor belt. A magical component of the
production process are the tears that one of the workers is shedding – as
an allergic reaction to a bouquet of flowers that the corpulent woman
keeps sniffing at. The tears stream down her stout legs and evaporate on a
hot tile on the floor; they seem like a catalyst responsible for making
the dough rise. The grotesque sequence flickers on the screen - a loop
that looks like it’s never going to end.
Dough, video stills, 2005/06,
©Mika
Rottenberg,
Courtesy Nicole
Klagsbrun Gallery, New York
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.
Dough, video still, 2005/06,
©Mika
Rottenberg,
Courtesy Nicole
Klagsbrun Gallery, New York
|
Ossian Ward: How did you
come up with the claustrophobic production-line structure for your video
sculpture "Dough", in which women use their bodies to create bizarre
products?
Mika Rottenberg: It’s kind of a machine to
measure surplus, as you would measure a calorie or a unit of something. In
this case, it measures the women’s work in the form of dough. The
structure of the factory begins with Raqui at the top, who kneads the
dough, and then Kat below, who stretches it. There are two girls under
that, Audry and Adona, who divide the dough into units, which then
increase in volume with the addition of moisture from Raqui’s evaporating
tears and oxygen pumped by Kat. A machine then packages the excess created
by the rising of the dough.
I just had a show at the
Kunstwerke in Berlin and the installation of the work there was called
Big Dough , because when you walked in you saw the back of a large,
cubic wooden construction, which you had to walk around. You then went
through various rooms with low, dropped ceilings to get to the video. In
one space, one of the floor tiles was actually a metal hotplate, painted
to look like the linoleum, onto which one of the worker’s tears, actually
drops of water, would evaporate every four seconds. That drove me nuts, as
I got quite obsessed with the physics of it while trying not to burn down
the whole institution.
|
Dough, installation view, 2005/06,
©Mika Rottenberg, Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York
|
How did you dream up the scenario, and why have women
doing the work?
I suppose it really was based, somewhat
literally, on Marx’s
theory of labor and value, but as more of a joke about surplus and
product. It’s also about this general idea of how much material there is
in the world, of having an excess of something.
First of all, I found
the girls either through the internet or an ad in the
New York Post in which I asked for factory workers that were
interested in acting. These women all make a living out of their bodies –
they even have their own websites – Kat, for instance, is 6 ft. 9 inches
tall, although you can’t see that in the film. I’m interested in the way
these women use their extraordinary features, and so it made sense to put
them in that position. The girls actually never met because I had to build
all the rooms in my studio. I also made a lot of dough – buckets and
buckets of it.
Tropical Breeze, video still, 2004,
©Mika Rottenberg,
Courtesy
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York
Tell me
about the new commission for the Cartier Award at Frieze Art Fair.
It’s called Chasing Waterfalls: The Rise and Fall of the Amazing
Seven Sutherland Sisters (Part 1). It’s about these sisters who were
all born in Niagara County and grew up as poor farm girls in Lockport, New
York around the turn of the last century. They all had floor-length hair
and developed this formula called Seven Sutherland Sisters Hair
Fertilizer, which was really an anti-baldness product for men,
followed by a whole line of products. As some people in Lockport argue,
they were also the first supermodels and something of a girl band,
performing on Broadway and shaking their hair in
Barnum and Bailey’s Greatest Show On Earth. They had displays
all over the world, from Canada to Europe, and even hired substitute
sisters when they became too busy.
My work is in the form of a movie
trailer, although at some point I would like to make it into a full-length
film, because nobody knows about the sisters, even in the US, although
each of these seven women has her own story.
[1]
[2]
|
