{"id":233,"date":"2007-07-20T22:24:37","date_gmt":"2007-07-20T22:24:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/?p=233"},"modified":"2008-10-25T22:37:57","modified_gmt":"2008-10-25T22:37:57","slug":"mika-rottenberg-long-hair-lover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/20\/mika-rottenberg-long-hair-lover\/","title":{"rendered":"Mika Rottenberg, Long Hair Lover"},"content":{"rendered":"

For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine<\/p>\n

\"Mika<\/a>
Mika Rottenberg, \u2018The cardio solaric cyclopad-work from home as you get fit and tan\u2019, 2004, Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The female body, in all its potential fantastic proportions, obsesses Mika Rottenberg.\u00a0 Her eccentric videos have featured body builders, dancers, wrestlers, and porn models laboring in confined, assembly-line settings to manufacture unusual objects related to the body:\u00a0 fast-growing fingernails morph into cherries, perspiration becomes the scent for tissues, and in the video \u2018Dough\u2019 (the highlight of her first New York solo gallery show early in 2006 at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery), the tears of an obese beauty cause dough to rise.<\/p>\n

More recently, Rottenberg has abandoned her cramped studio in favor of the wide-open spaces of the natural world.\u00a0 Inspired by the story of the Sutherland Sisters, a 19th century family of girls who displayed their extra long hair in a Barnum & Bailey performance and marketed their own hair growth formula (supposedly including mist collected at Niagara Falls), she worked with members of a present day long hair club to make the short trailer, \u2018Chasing Waterfalls: The Rise and Fall of the Amazing Seven Sutherland Sisters (part one).\u2019\u00a0 As winner of the inaugural Cartier Award, Rottenberg screened the video at the 2006 Frieze Art Fair, giving her audience a tantalizing glimpse of the related project on which she is now working.<\/p>\n

MK \u2013 Your videos have been set in an enclosed space; now you\u2019re working outdoors.\u00a0 What has that shift been like?<\/p>\n

MR \u2013 In past pieces like \u2018Dough,\u2019 I built one part of the set at a time and worked individually with each actor.\u00a0 I wanted to see what I could do with limited space.\u00a0 Now, I\u2019m interested in finding out what I can do with no spatial limits, so I\u2019m building a set completely from scratch in the middle of the woods.<\/p>\n

MK \u2013 How did you choose the location for your shoot?<\/p>\n

MR \u2013 The actors in the trailer are part of a long hair lovers Internet club, and three of them live near one town in Central Florida.\u00a0 I actually wish I could write a sitcom about the RV park\/ retirement community where I\u2019m staying.\u00a0 People there have a lot of time on their hands, which makes them creative – they do things like have their own parades.\u00a0 The Boy Scouts are even going to help me behind the scenes.\u00a0 Thanks to a piece in Vanity Fair, I got permission from a local farmer to do whatever I want with a huge piece of land that includes a petting zoo that no one visits.<\/p>\n

MK \u2013 Has your normal working process had to change?<\/p>\n

MR \u2013 My process usually follows several distinct stages:\u00a0 I start with drawings, which come purely from my imagination; then I try to find people I want to work with; I build the set or sculptural environment; then work with the actors in the space, making a lot of set changes.\u00a0 Eventually, there are always moments over which I have less control, as when I introduced the dough in \u2018Dough.\u2019 There\u2019s gravity and you know it\u2019s going to go down, but I don\u2019t know how a person is going to behave.\u00a0 I try to keep the camera on all the time so I have hours and hours of footage, but often, the material I actually use is from moments when the actors forget the camera is on.\u00a0 My first thought for my current project was to mimic a reality TV show by creating a space \u2013 in this case, a functioning 19th century farm – and asking the women to just be there for a week.\u00a0 The scenario, along with their bad acting could really make it ridiculous and funny.<\/p>\n

MK \u2013 Will there be similarities to your previous themes?<\/p>\n

MR – The project is in the beginning stages and could still go in so many directions.\u00a0 But like my other videos, I want the whole story to revolve around cause and effect \u2013 presenting a problem and then solving it.\u00a0 It may be a poor farm and the women bad farmers.\u00a0 Something will break and that will trigger the next thing, a method that will promote the story and develop the characters.\u00a0 I\u2019m thinking in an almost sculptural way and trying to have the story be more physical, because I can\u2019t write dialogue!<\/p>\n

I\u2019m inspired to think of the farm as a giant Earthwork in the sense that it\u2019s a zone for experimentation with earth.\u00a0 There are parallels between the incredible amount of labor that goes into farming and the routines the women adopt to care for their hair, such as brushing it daily for two hours.\u00a0 I spent this week trying to make a device that would convert the strokes of a hairbrush into an energy source that could power other things on the farm, though I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ll even use the device in the final version.<\/p>\n

\"Mika<\/a>
Mika Rottenberg, Chasing Waterfalls, 2006. Video Still. Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

MK \u2013 You closely associate the women with nature, whether it\u2019s being near a waterfall or on a farm.<\/p>\n

MR \u2013 My videos employ clich\u00e9s about femininity, and this one involves associations between women, fertility and the earth.\u00a0 I\u2019m attracted to how these trite ways of thinking about women offer a kind of bliss, that is, they satisfy a basic desire for resolution and simplicity.\u00a0 I\u2019m a sucker for the related visual images \u2013 girls playing with little lambs and bunnies, waterfalls, and long blond hair blowing in the wind.\u00a0 But the fun really starts when I dissect the clich\u00e9s, turning them inside out and showing them as they really are \u2013 creepy and uncanny.<\/p>\n

The Sutherland Sisters started selling their hair fertilizer as a result of the Industrial Revolution.\u00a0 They marketed their product right after chemical fertilizers for the soil came on the market, implying that if you could grow grass that much faster, then you could also grow hair.\u00a0 I like the contrast between male baldness and a super abundance of female hair.<\/p>\n

MK \u2013 Certain aspects of the trailer remind me of a romance novel or soap opera.<\/p>\n

MR \u2013 Absolutely, because its about entrepreneurs and new horizons.\u00a0 It blurs the line between cheesy, funny and genuine.<\/p>\n

MK \u2013 Have you intentionally used humor in your past work?<\/p>\n

MR \u2013 Whenever I try for it to be funny, it\u2019s probably not, so I don\u2019t.\u00a0 In \u2018Dough\u2019 there\u2019s more of an awkward weirdness and element of grotesque that might come across as funny. It actually depended on the reaction of the other people watching the screening; if people were laughing you felt like it was funny whereas if people were serious you felt unease.<\/p>\n

MK \u2013 That video seems to intentionally subvert conventional notions of beauty.\u00a0 The obese woman is pretty whereas the thin woman\u2019s proportions are grotesque.<\/p>\n

MR \u2013I don\u2019t know if I consciously think in terms of beauty or subverting beauty.\u00a0 My interest is more in things that the body produces and the way you use the body and it becomes more like an object.\u00a0 Some long-haired women relate to their hair like it\u2019s a pet.\u00a0 The Sutherland sisters were smart not to cut and sell their hair, but to keep it and use it as an object in their Barnum and Bailey act.<\/p>\n

MK \u2013 Is your art about society\u2019s response to their extremes?<\/p>\n

MR \u2013 I don\u2019t think it\u2019s about society\u2019s reaction to long hair or fat people.\u00a0 It\u2019s about society\u2019s interaction with the body in all its possibilities.\u00a0 Of course, there\u2019s a layer that relates to American obesity, but that\u2019s not my focus.\u00a0 Instead, it\u2019s more about taking something to an extreme to examine it.\u00a0 If the dough is a stand-in for the body, there\u2019s a fantasy about the body\u2019s ability to stretch as if there\u2019s nothing inside.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s also more about my personal attraction to long hair or to big bodies, for example.\u00a0 For my video \u2018Time and Half\u2019 I\u2019d been looking on the Internet for someone with really long hair and then saw a woman on the subway.\u00a0 In that piece, I manipulated the background (a Chinese takeout restaurant) by adding more palm trees to emphasize how the girl and her hair are so exotic.<\/p>\n

MK \u2013 Could you be accused of exploiting your characters?
\n?MR \u2013 I\u2019m always waiting for that question.\u00a0 In a way, I am using the actors almost as objects, which is supposed to be a bad thing to do.\u00a0 I\u2019m not trying to be a saint, and I don\u2019t think the artist\u2019s part is to be \u201cthe good guy.\u201d\u00a0 I often feel uncomfortable in the position in which I put myself, but my connection with the actors runs like an experiment, a behavioral observation or a motion study.\u00a0 I can see how that can be exploitative, but it\u2019s hard to make work about that without actually doing it.\u00a0 You could argue that we have an equal and satisfying relationship serving each other\u2019s needs as exhibitionist and voyeur.<\/p>\n

MK \u2013 Does your work come from a feminist perspective?<\/p>\n

MR \u2013I\u2019ve always defined myself as a feminist.\u00a0 There is an aspect of misogyny in my work that is a response to the way society in general is.\u00a0 So I have to ask myself what it means to be a \u201cgood\u201d feminist.\u00a0 If I use peoples\u2019 bodies and objectify them, then I\u2019m a bad feminist, or I\u2019m promoting the usual stereotypes.\u00a0 But since these are so common in daily life, it\u2019s a way to negotiate or understand them and make them empowering.\u00a0 I keep questioning my own morality.<\/p>\n

MK \u2013 There\u2019s another \u2013ism that relates to your work.\u00a0 Can you tell me about your references to Marxism?<\/p>\n

MR \u2013 The very definition of labor is the process between a person and nature, but actually, I\u2019m interested in Marx\u2019s writing in an abstract way, as more poetic than political.\u00a0 The way he describes production and a person in motion is both beautiful and very visual.\u00a0 What\u2019s inspiring to me is his way of measuring units of energy, materials and time involved in labor.\u00a0 Everyone assumes that in \u2018Dough\u2019 there is an end product, but in my mind, the rising dough is constantly growing in volume so the excess that is pushed out is really more of a unit that measures work.\u00a0 The process of handling the dough also uses the forces of nature like gravity, allergies and other reactions.\u00a0 In the new video, I\u2019m growing crops and thinking of how to control the animals\u2019 movement by harnessing their desire for food.\u00a0 It\u2019s almost as if they\u2019re the dough.<\/p>\n

MK \u2013 What do the women in the long hair club think of reconnecting with nature?<\/p>\n

MR \u2013 They\u2019re each different but are all high maintenance.\u00a0 You have to be when you have hair that long.\u00a0 It gets delicate and they count every hair and split end.\u00a0 Most of the time it\u2019s up, but when they take it down, it\u2019s like a ceremony and their mobility can be almost paralyzed.\u00a0 But each has a unique relationship to her hair, and unlike my past videos only one of them makes a living (running a soft-porn website) from her unique feature.\u00a0 Very long hair is attractive to a lot of guys, but the women distinguish between the fetishists and the long-hair lovers.\u00a0 If they meet a man, he has to pass tests to make sure the attraction isn\u2019t sexual, although, of course, it\u2019s sexy.<\/p>\n

MK \u2013 This sounds like a whole new way in which truth is stranger than fiction.<\/p>\n

MR \u2013 Like my other videos, I\u2019m setting up a situation and trusting reality to do the job.\u00a0 People might say that my work is absurd, but reality is even more so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine The female body, in all its potential fantastic proportions, obsesses Mika Rottenberg.\u00a0 Her eccentric videos have featured body builders, dancers, wrestlers, and porn models laboring in confined, assembly-line settings to manufacture unusual objects related to the body:\u00a0 fast-growing fingernails morph into cherries, perspiration becomes the scent for tissues, and in the … <\/p>\n

Read more “Mika Rottenberg, Long Hair Lover”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[24],"tags":[8,18,9,15,14,13,12,17,10,16,11],"class_list":["post-233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-art","tag-artist","tag-contemporary","tag-critic","tag-exhibition","tag-gallery","tag-new-york","tag-photography","tag-sculpture","tag-tour","tag-visual-art"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2BDOD-3L","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":246,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions\/246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}