Modern life is cacophonous. Even in our most quiet spaces, there’s the hum of HVAC, the rumble of traffic or a distant, tinny voice coming through someone else’s headphones. We simply cannot escape the din of ceaseless motion, production and consumption.
At the Contemporary Jewish Museum, sounds both real and fantastical waft over the gallery walls of Mika Rottenberg’s wonderfully titled exhibition, Spaghetti Blockchain. The show, which includes three looping video installations and a handful of kinetic sculptures, provides less of an escape from the everyday than a magical heightening of it. In Rottenberg’s hands, once mundane activities become hilariously, often uncomfortably, weird, underlining systems of mass production in an age of hypercapitalism.
The show opens with a bang, a crunch and a sneeze. On the museum’s second floor, an untitled video projects onto an angled wall; a hammer smashes colored light bulbs into a rainbow of glass shards. A nearby screen plays Sneeze (2012), Rottenberg’s earliest work in the CJM survey (and one of the few pieces here with any male protagonists). In it, besuited men with comically red noses achoo out live rabbits with a soft thump.
From this deadpan pairing, we get an early sense of the notes Rottenberg likes to hit: ceaseless labor and absurdist outcomes. In the exhibition’s winding arrangement, we enter Cosmic Generator (2017/2018) through a rough-hewn tunnel and a sparkly curtain. The video connects two spots on the globe through one of Rottenberg’s signature Rube-Goldberg-esque contraptions, seemingly turning geography (and physics) upside down.
One of those locales is Yiwu Market, a wholesale market complex in eastern China, where women sit among mostly plastic, often flashing wares, nearly disappearing to their overstuffed product booths. The other is Calexico and Mexicali, a symbiotic pair of cities spread across the U.S.-Mexico border.
