Bright plastic beads rattled by a manicured hand; aerosol hair, delicately sprayed onto balding men; cylinders of multicolored Jell-O, slapped, sliced and vaporized on a sizzling griddle: These are just some of the images that make it hard to tear your eyes away from Mika Rottenberg’s weirdly compelling video installation Spaghetti Blockchain (2019). Indeed, the Argentina-born Rottenberg has shaped her latest effort, in part, to evoke so-called ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos on YouTube, in which hypnotic sequences of inexplicably pedestrian actions are meant to arouse tingling sensations of soothing pleasure.
Even if you don’t experience that frisson of bliss, Spaghetti Blockchain mesmerizes you with its astounding segues. One, for example, of a clay cube scored by a tiny rake, smoothly merges into an aerial view of a furrowed field being worked by a combine; another features the camera gliding across the colossal Large Hadron Collider at CERN before alighting on a group of Siberian throat singers. A master of indelibly incongruous juxtapositions and circular narratives, Rottenberg unravels the web of connections—audio, visual, psychological, economic, metaphoric—between phenomena as disparate as science, agribusiness and pop-cultural self-gratification. Her take on the hidden workings of the world is absurdist, to be sure, but it also invites a sense of wonder.
Spaghetti Blockchain is just one of the offerings in this midcareer survey of Rottenberg’s videos and installations; and, as the show suggests, the artist has long been fascinated by globalism and its human costs. In 2015’s NoNoseKnows, she unpacks China’s cultured-pearl industry with viscerally goopy scenes of women shucking oysters to get at the baubles inside. Amid their endless labor, Rottenberg has inserted a scene of a blonde white woman sneezing up plates of noodles through her grotesquely elongated nose—the result of a deliberately stimulated allergic reaction not unlike the one induced in oysters to make nacre.
Cosmic Generator (Tunnel Variant), from 2017, depicts underground passages linking one group of women selling cheap plastic merchandise in Asia to another group working at a Chinese restaurant on the U.S.-Mexico border. Two men—one in a taco costume, the other a Trump look-alike in a business suit—can be seen crawling through the tunnels. Quietly over-the-top, Cosmic Generator contrasts the gendering of toil (and its punitive conditions) with the free flow of trade that it sustains.
Much of Rottenberg’s practice would read as Marxist-feminist critique were it not for the way that she imagines late capitalism as a dreamlike dive into a collective subconscious that is both funny and Freudian. Her videos operate like instructive if oneiric fables of the forces buffeting us today—a kind of Social Surrealism for the 21st century.