'Fluff War' and 'Wildlife' are on view through June 15, 2019 at Anton Kern Gallery. All images courtesy the gallery. Lead image: 'Untitled (Exhibition of Dust)' David Shrigley.
Walk up that spiral staircase today, though, and you might find that there’s a crucial thing missing: the artist himself. It’s because Kulig is in Paris, where he’s been holed up for a year. He’d made the move in order to escape the hustle and bustle of New York City, and it’s a decision that has, at the very least visually, served him well — not to mention he’s settled down in a uniquely inspiring house, that has a living tree growing through its living room floor — save for the fact that he may have to settle for a second-best pepperoni slice. But a move across the Atlantic doesn’t necessarily equal a move beyond challenges; when you’ve made it as far as Kulig has, the challenges tend to be self-imposed.
“These sorts of pieces are much more intense to see and hear than most paintings I’ve ever seen,” he says, musing about works that attack multiple senses. “Which makes me think… is painting my medium? I’ve never actually questioned that.”
Few others have questioned it either. When Kulig first moved to New York City in the aughts, his infinitely-interpretable plea, “Love Me” — which, on the average downtown walk, you may find anywhere from the walls of large buildings to the pendants of pedestrians’ chains — went from being a neighborhood fixture to a global brand.
Though his beginnings were defined more by sprawling screenprinting and oil paint practices, the years following his move to New York saw him come increasingly into his own right as a multidisciplinary artist. Much like the jazz and Jack’s meows, another guarantee of his Lower East Side studio is eclecticism: one stroll down the expanse gives way to a ceramic sculpture of stacked boxing gloves about the height of a fifth grader, a Moschino piece he plans to wear in a performance piece in the near future, and a set of hefty pink-hued canvases from a recent series he did. All of which are very fun obstacles, should a certain cat be inclined to turn the studio into a funhouse. On a recent Zoom call with Kulig, with his two new Parisian kittens popping in and out of frame, we talked about art and the American Dream, geography, and the concept of rigor mortis.
CURTIS KULIG— It was only when I took the time to understand the layout of this studio that I thought to myself, “Oh. A cat would love this.” Trees and stairs and platforms everywhere… It's basically a giant cat house.
SAMUEL HYLAND— Your studio in New York is, too.
CK— Yeah. And the rooftop with the trees and birds and shit… perfect for Jack. But yeah. There’s two of them [new kittens]. One is Rigor Mortis — do you know what rigor mortis is?
SH— It’s like a stiffening of the body after death, right?
CK— Yeah. It’s a crazy concept. It really is. I think there’s a timeframe for it after you pass. Probably like six hours after.
SH— Why would you name your cat that?
CK— One of my friends was talking about it, and I thought it was such a great name. I like the combination of Rigor and Mortis, but Rigor alone could be cool, too. And he also kind of looks like a Rigor Mortis. The other one is named Napkin. So just like that Rigor Mortis and Napkin came together in a weird way. Rigor Mortis fell in the bathtub the other day, with the water in it. The thing is, with Jack, I never had any drama. He was from the street. These cats, I’ve had for maybe three months, and I’ve brought them to the vet like six times. They’re bourgeois cats. Anyway, Rigor Mortis fell in the bathtub, and he was barely breathing when I took him out. It was so dramatic. I thought, “Maybe I shouldn’t name my cat Rigor Mortis.” Have you been to Paris before?
SH— Nope. Tell me about it.
CK— They say the layout of Paris is like a snail. The middle is the first district, and then it sort of spirals outward to create the shell. I think of it as a large-scale West Village. West Village is probably one of the only areas in New York where I can get lost. But the whole city of Paris is like that. You make one wrong turn, and you’re somewhere completely different than where you intended. I used Google maps for the first bit that I was here. And I always wear headphones on my walks, because interestingly, I feel very anonymous here. In New York I can’t make it a block without a run in. Here I can walk around here, and sure, I’ll run into somebody I know sometimes, but much less in New York. In New York, I never go outside with headphones in. Here, I never take them out.
SH—Music is always playing at your studio –at least in New York. Why?
CK— There’s so many songs that I listen to repetitively. I’m such a repetitive listener. If I get, like, four songs that I feel a certain type of way about, I can’t stop. Especially for painting. For painting, I either do complete silence, for the serene experience of hearing the brush and paint move — did I just say that [laughs] — or jazz. I’ve been into Ethiopian music as well. But I’ll listen to the same song 25 times in an hours. It informs these movements that I want to keep accessing, so I use the music to reverberate what I’m doing.
SH— I feel like you’ve probably answered the New York/Paris question a ton of times, but a specific thing I wonder about is the foot traffic. Do you find it significantly different in either place?
CK— It took me leaving the New York bubble to realize how much of a circus downtown really is. I miss that energy. It’s a free-for-all. Say what you want to say, walk where you want to walk, cross the street when you want to cross the street, wear fucking angel wings, who cares. But also, it’s a complete circus in the most organized way. It’s such a beautiful thing. It’s where you go to do whatever you want. And I feel like I’ve always known it subconsciously — all the cliche stuff like, anything’s possible in NYC… the melting pot. But it’s so cliche because it’s so real.
SH— You briefly came back from Paris late last year. I imagine that must have been some crazy whiplash.
CK— I came back for a month. Life shouldn’t be about how much you can get done and/or how quickly you can get it done, but me working in New york for a month I didn’t even accomplish in ten months of being in Paris. There’s this weird sort of blasé tone. In New York — or maybe in America — there’s this odd take on the American Dream, where “you live to work.”
SH— Where would you say you naturally fall? Working to live, or living to work?
CK— I live to work. But with that said I’m an artist. It’s not really work for me most of the time, it’s just kind of my existence. All I do is make art, and if I’m not making art, I’m still making art. That’s what I think I’m here for. That’s what comforts me.
SH— Ending on a vague note — but what’s the plan?
CK— The plan is to keep making work that I feel needs to be made. Work that feels thoughtful right now, feels right with what's been done in the past and work that will feel relevant in the future . I think the more honest I can be with myself about that, the better I’ll feel.
Also, just making the world a better place. Which might sound as generic as it gets… but also maybe not so generic. The world would be much better if as many people actually did it as the amount of people that say they want to.
Among this corner of the internet, one where reposted images are manipulated until overprocessed and abrasively sardonic until no longer decipherable, a new type of artist has risen. These hyper-online artists create work that explores living during dreadful times in a saturated digital world. On Sunday evening, thanks to the help of Metalabel, their work went from smartphones to the big screen in new film The Idiot. Co-founder of Metalabel, Yancey Strickler, explains, “The film shows the power that comes when a group of artists with a similar worldview release work together. A wider perspective, bigger than any individual piece, emerges when a shared context brings work into dialogue.”
Curator and media artist Jay Islate created The Idiot, inspired by Byung-Chul Han’s Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power — specifically the quote, “One of the roles of philosophy is to play the fool or idiot.” The hour-long film exhibition features work by Charlie Curran, Emilia Howe, Wonderful_cringe, Domonique, Network Glass, Sam Stewart, and Leïth Benkhedda. Alongside the videos, a Twitch chat was displayed for people who couldn’t make it, and many people from the intimate audience joined as well. It became a virtual fever dream for people who were in on the joke. They laughed at the same parts and trolled one another in the chat.
The Idiot works best at exploring our physical self’s relationship to the internet. Leïth Benkhedda’s “The Internet of Friends” contribution tells narratives through pictures made on Whisper via viral Tumblr posts and kitschy stock images. One shares a transwoman's experience about finding tranquility in her identity after posing as different characters in chatrooms; another recounts finding love and community in World of Warcraft. Emilia Howe created screenrecordings of herself dancing to popular Tik Tok songs amidst existential thoughts and cutesy filters.
However, when mentions of 4chan, autism, r/, god are used and someone has the user “uralldasha,” the exhibition can feel a bit edge lord-ish. I understand this objective may stem from the nihilistic undertone tone that characterizes our current cultural epoch, but provoking for the sake of provoking is a poor foundation to base politics on. It’s the exact ideology that big data and capitalist society urge us to fall into, a culture of submission. A clip of someone setting their phone on fire over a compilation of low quality memes with an “Everytime We Touch” nightcore remix playing ends the exhibition, allowing us to imagine one day we will have that strength. But that day is not today. So read on for a dummy guide to this glitched-out subculture of art, memes, and the deep, dark web from Jay.
To start, can you tell me a bit about psychopolitics and why it interests you?
One of the main ideas within the book is how neoliberalism has discovered the productive force of the psyche. Much of this force comes through the utilization of algorithms and big data and its attempt to homogenize both emotion and expression. For me, this instantly draws on the idea that due to this homogenization and conformity, many of the conversations and ideas challenging/questioning these ideological and aesthetic powers are occurring within online spaces.
Another reason this book resonates so much is due to its prescient nature of insight and theory. Written in 2017, a year into Trump’s presidency and years before COVID, the ideas have maintained a timely relevance and have even predicted much of what we have come to experience — both online and in person. In today’s information overload, I find this resonance incredibly compelling and inspiring.
What do you think led to a deep-fried internet?
The sheer amount of information posted and seen. It’s truly incomprehensible. Then all that information gets exponentially compounded within memes, Tik-Toks, or any other form of content. It’s a sure-fire recipe for internet rat brain, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
One of my favorite things is seeing a story or post that has literally been screenshotted, remixed, or added to until the post is an illegible artifact of social spread/connection/interaction. It’s like playing the game telephone but with a picture. Still the exact same image but different by the “end.”
Why do you think this aesthetic works as a medium for political art?
Mainly just due to the fact that it operates on such a different spectrum aesthetically. Some of these videos contain so many images and videos that they are almost incomprehensible. They are also in direct defiance of fitting within the algorithm. It sort of feels like a direct confrontation with creating art for capital/economic success. That’s where I believe the magic comes from being able to create and express yourself with utter freedom. This freedom is sort of a pipe dream but also one being made possible within contemporary digital mediums. Almost everyone has a smartphone, what else do you need for a studio?
How do they navigate our current world — both online and off?
With love.
Is there a certain literacy someone must have to understand this form? If so, how can one develop it?
With much of online culture and the internet in general, there is a necessary visual literacy needed to navigate and understand the firehose of images we all see. Taking any form of content at face value is essentially an admittance of illiteracy in our modern age.
The world is nuanced; ideas take time to process. It’s okay to feel stupid. For me, half of exploring all this is this constant feeling of being dumber than the rest, but that’s sort of how learning goes. With this being said, it takes time and also effort. Brad Troemel is sort of a master at satire that highlights how little time or effort we put into processing ideas/images. Then I guess it sort of goes without saying but, spend time online. Find your dark forest or interest then follow it until you find something else worth exploring. It’s all a cycle, and everything is way more connected than you expect.
How did you initially come across this community of artists?
I’ve met and found all of the artists through various online communities I’ve stumbled upon and have followed. Up until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t even met anyone in person. I only know some of the artists by their social media handles, which is pretty cool to me. As I mentioned earlier, many of these online communities and people (at least within this sort of NYC/art/literary/meme admin scene) are only separated by what feels like less than 1 degree of separation. It’s truly incredible. Through these online platforms, we can sort of foster a “small town” vibe within a huge urban area.
In what ways does this current iteration of post-internet art differ from the one that emerged in the early 2010s?
I wasn’t really around or involved in the art being made on the internet then, and anything I know now has been found through research or discovery. It’s all viewed with this sort of nostalgia for the “old internet.” One thing now that seems different is just the sheer amount of people online and posting. The lines between everyday life and life online are blurrier and blurrier. Much of the work from the 2010s was constrained by desktops and ethernet cables. Now all of that is in our pocket, so naturally that’s going to have quite an effect on the work being made now compared to then.
This is just pure conjecture, but I feel like how we post is different. With early Myspace and geo-cities, these pages were sort of a new extension of expression. With social media being less of a tool for expression and more of a proof of existence, we are confronted with the reality that our digital existence signals proof of our physical existence.
If all of our memory is built on a digital record and you don’t post, do you exist?
How does this form of art relate to shitposting?
Personally, I don’t feel comfortable really tying any of these works to the idea of “shitposting” as a concept or action. All of this work was chosen because of its artistic merit and the ideas behind the pieces. Basically, I just don’t lump these works in with memes. It feels important to make that distinction.
That being said, visually, there are definitely connections. Specifically within the use of memes and memetic imagery. Unlike shitposting though, many of these images are used as a personal expression or intrinsic look into personal identity. Images and ideas can hold so many different meanings upon appropriation and remixing across the internet. Many of the online webs and nodes are connected by meme pages with admins who most definitely are shitposters. But meme pages and admins are just different types of online residents. This showing is about the artist making work responding to all of these online residents, contents, and life online (not that it’s much different than life “offline”).
Why did you partner with Metalabel for this exhibition?
I’ve gotten to know several members of the Metalabel squad over the past year or so. Much of this connection was driven by a shared deep curiosity about subcultures and their modern interpretation within online spheres.
What does the context of the Metrograph — a theater in Dimes Square, a microneighborhood basically created online — add to the exhibition?
The whole Dimes Square thing has been such a fascinating example of a subculture starting online and then searching for a place to latch on to in order to devirtualize. Did that need to happen to validate the community’s existence? Not really, but it certainly helped it export its ideas, aesthetics, and lore into the world.
That’s sort of the idea behind the theater and displaying this work. I want to get as close to being inside the timeline as we can. It’s attempting to work in reverse and ask people to virtualize their existence. Become a part of the Discord server. This work doesn't need to devirtualize. There’s not much of a difference between those two states anymore anyway.
It’s also worth noting how incredibly lucky we are to be in a city that is so large that it can support these online subcultures and also offer neighborhoods, bars, and venues for these scenes to linger in. A place or space for connection is key within any subculture.
Sitting in the main room of the gallery, Cooke talked to me about his decision to move fully into abstraction, the implications of such, and the conceptual and theoretical reasonings for his new show. Read below for the full interview.
I was doing a bit of research and found an interview you did in 2016 in which the first question was "What is a painting?" You answered that it was a wall of questions, has your answer changed since then?
I suppose it has changed a bit but not a lot. I think the paintings change in order to maintain the questions, so the minute you start answering things, you kind of kill it. I think the idea is to always have new questions. The first principle really is that it has to be impossible, it has to be a range of questions as to what a painting can be, and whether I can do it I suppose — whether it will allow me to have a relationship with it and develop something and move forward. All of that is about questions, because obviously there have been a lot of paintings for thousands of years, and in some way you are trying to find a sort of gap between everything that has already happened, and you aren’t trying to find something that hasn’t been done, but something that is different enough where parts can become infinite — to become a window into something you haven’t really seen before. So there is a newness thing to that.
Maybe it becomes more of a wall of questions when there is less of an image. I think that’s changed. I think in a way I’ve exaggerated that question side, I’ve put more into that, because it’s about mystery. I like when I see things that I don’t know what I’m looking at, because I think so many things are geared up towards being understood. Sometimes I feel when the image is too concrete, it can beg an answer that is finite in some way.
That definitely resonates. Your present occupation in abstraction seems to posit questions without giving any explicit answers. It’s nice to hear that this sentiment is a conscious one, in that the form is directly appreciated in tandem with the conceptual side of the work.
I think in a way the word question is about something unresolved, and again something with mystery. Oddly, when I went art school, abstraction and figuration had this sort of interchangeable fashion, I don’t know why it’s still like that, but people seem to say that now everyone is making figural works, or now everyone is making abstract works.
It’s so cyclical.
Yes. But for me the abstract painting that I’ve ended up doing is brewed out of figure. It’s not bought into from day one, it was sort of arrived by mistake, almost as a process of adventure. But I think it’s odd if you don’t go through the figures before the abstract. I don’t know why, perhaps it’s a bit too traditional, but I believe you have to nourish abstraction with that kind of knowledge. There’s a lot of abstract painting I see that is too notional — if I put this with this it will equal that. It doesn’t seem very interior, it doesn’t seem arrived at in the process. That’s something I’ve always been looking for, I’m always fascinated by the idea of where it’s gonna all end up, what comes next, and you’re sort of chasing the future in a way, you’re pursuing a painting that’s down the track somewhere.
A horizon amidst the chaos.
Yes. Is it progress or is it just curiosity? I don’t know. Theres always a question of: I wonder if that is possible? From this I might say could there be a monochrome? Is there a way in which the uniform color is an opening shot towards creating a monochrome? And that comes from thinking what is the worst thing you could probably do, what is the most dumb and dead thing you could do. Often times I think those are what gives the most fruitful exchanges, because one, monochromes aren’t British really, so that’s already gonna be odd if I do it. And I suppose this is like that too. In this country, many students have painted like that, much more than in Britain I’d say. But having crept toward it through something else, it’s like putting a different flavor in a meal, it has this sort of conundrum to the combination of things it’s trying to do. In some ways it’s like European figuration, Classical figuration, but then it’s sort of also woven into Joan Mitchell via Manet. In a way the game of painting, with the volume of history, is that there’s always a possibility of bringing your enthusiasms together into a surprising combination that allows you to see something new, which is similar to what I said at the start about seeing the gaps. And its abstraction as a language, reducing and subtracting, rather than the art historical idea of progressing from images. But I think progress doesn’t really exist, certainly in terms of painting. I think it’s for all times.
It’s interesting to hear you talk about your works in terms of a genealogy of painting up until this point. To me, trying to digest the breadth of that awe-inspiring history reminds me of the Loren Eiseley essay which inspired your show, in which he chronicles the evolution from mythic notions to the scientific method as two respective means which help us digest and comprehend the awe and phenomena in our world. How did Eiseley’s emphasis on the evolution from mythic to scientific schools of thought — and the essay more generally — inform your work for the show?
I started by liking the title, because it begins with the word “How.” Again it’s about the questions, I could’ve called this show “How," or “How do you make a painting?” Once I dove into the essay, when he was talking about the trend from myth to science, I felt like it mirrored what I was doing. Science is our way of making things more certain around us, and concrete and trade-able as an idea. It’ll say this is why this happens and we all socially understand how science has contributed to our understanding of where we are. But I think that with painting you sort of begin with that, you don’t work towards it, but you begin with that, and it evolves into something that is not made sensible through science — it becomes a private form of mythic thought, in which your reasons why things happen are fictional, and your combination of things can be mythic in terms of hybridized forms, things through time, things influenced by different times and different eras of your own life but also in art history and earth history. So I just liked the idea of working back towards something that was more mythic in the sense that it has in the essay. So one of the things I liked about making these is that they combine things from my own experience that don’t really combine in any other way, a bit like you’re in a life or a thought, a place of flux and incongruent things which only exist for you, until you speak and put them into some sort of order, and the works are the speech. But because it isn’t speech it allows you to join them up how you want, and I think that joining them up into something convincing is like a myth because you want there to be an awe to that. The way I would understand that is thinking about the sublime or nature, where you’re kind of inundated with the volume of it, whether you’re talking about Burke’s sublime or Kant, it’s a complicated and large issue, but what I do know about it is that in a way it’s about the parameters of how you understand something being too big, so you can actually digest and make sensible the thing around you, so there’s a sort of terror involved as well as fascination. And I would say that that’s familiar in this. I’ve sort of set myself into that position because I don’t really rehearse them in any other way. I don’t go into photoshop and cut bits up and put them together, I don’t do collages or drawings. I do little fiddling about things, but when it comes to doing that I’ll look at a bit and take another bit, like listening to music, once it’s come and gone I don’t look at it again, it goes in or it doesn’t, it’s like a moving thing that keeps on going.
I suppose that it’s all about definition, like how am I using the word myth, well I think it would be mystery. And I think that it works when there is some emphatic and convincing way of it being delivered. And I think what I try to do is paint it as though it is an image, with the conviction of having looked at something, but it’s actually based upon having thought something.
There is tremendous intentionality in all of these works, an aspect which I was initially enamored by. I find that your decisiveness helps substantiates the mythical thought map that’s present in the works themselves. How did working in abstraction allow you to explore this sort of myth-making even further, instead of perhaps another genre?
In a way the myth thing is a way of freeing up something prehistoric, or certainly premodern. If you think about the Odyssey, and the idea of the hero before Christianity, you had these figures who were flawed. You could be a hero and be problematic, and that was more realistic, that was more about people relating to something, it wasn’t about divinity, it was about having shortcomings. But also things being transformed to — to make the story work things change form, Athena becomes an owl and then appears in a different form and speaks to him through different parts of the planet at once. There are ways in which you are freed of rules with myth. It’s about telling a story, particularly because most of it is handed down through oral tradition, it’s about keeping something sort of magical I suppose. And I think that when you don’t understand something, you think in a magical way about it. We see this in a negative way with conspiracy theories. People would rather imagine than not know. People don’t say, “I don’t know but that’s interesting that I don’t know,” they just say "I’ll find out and I’ll know.” They’d rather have an opinion than not have a clue, and I think that’s a really dangerous thing. I think in some ways that’s why abstraction became meaningful for me — it’s everything about this knowing thing, this clarity. I just feel in our culture now it’s the most mistrustful and dangerous thing in a sense. It doesn’t allow for changes of mind, or education, or flexibility, or empathy. It’s all about colonizing something, and appropriating it for your own needs. I’m not saying that’s what figuration is, but I think having unequivocal imagery is playing into the least interesting thing about visual culture today, and I think that even if people have got no idea what they’re looking at, and this is common, I still think there needs to be things like that, particularly in art. And I think that in abstraction I suppose I was trying to find a way for it to be magical, you know?
Completely. That dilemma definitely justifies this process you’re speaking of which aims to incentivize an acceptance of uncertainty. However, the marriage of the two — conceptual uncertainty and formal uncertainty — allows for the works to not just exist in that realm of questioning, but also as something that’s visually intriguing and exciting.
That’s really important too, and maybe it has to do with the art you encounter when you are young. But it’s about life, and I mean life in terms of anything that raises your pulse and makes you feel like it’s worth being here. I think it has to feel like a living thing, not a fake picture of a living thing, and I think it’s a bit like Cézanne in a way. He went from pictures which were sort of intellectual as in they spoke to the conscious mind, and into process which actually was about so much more than what he could see. It was about “how do I make marks that are about my relationship to that?” Which became almost about his whole life, about his entire relationship to the world. And I think that in a way through the language, the touch, and the handling of the thing, he kind of allowed modernism to happen because the medium becomes the message. But now I’m thinking in a way that it has sort of entered a psychological era where mental health, inner lives, inner identity has contributed to a different idea about that now. If you think about the Abstract Expressionists in this city, psychoanalysis was really just appearing then, but we know more about the mind now. Since Abstract Expressionism, the science of the mind is unrecognizably advanced, and maybe, in a way, my approach to abstraction is about reflecting that, because it is all interior, it’s all about the mind I suppose, and about how the mind and the outer world are this sort of connection mesh-work, and that you as the person are a conduit between the two. I don’t think I’d be thinking that if the science of the mind generally hadn’t come to where it has. And also how that has affected everyone socially. Now you can talk about mass psychological progress with Covid and whatever else.Various things we’ve gone through, even in the last ten years, have made us feel more alert to what it might be like to be someone else, which is a kind of empathy about the fact that you’re in a life. I think that really fuels the abstraction part.
