Family Matters
Marc Kokopeli at RSFA. Plus Super Bowl picks and a smol Warholian rabbit hole
Marc Kokopeli, Check It Out, 2022. Installation view, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, February 2025
Marc Kokopeli’s excellent 2022 show at Reena Spaulings of diaper sculptures, Die Pampertaarten, made for a funny yet somehow disconcerting spectacle of craft vernacular and the human body, at least by metonym. If you visit his new exhibition at RSFA expecting something similar, you will be surprised. The show, titled My TV Show I [HEART] TV, comprises videos on a dozen monitors of all shapes and sizes. To reach them, one first strides literally through a video, that is, the beam of a projector playing Ken Burns’s New York. Its entire 17 hours is overlaid with an animated elephant walking up a pile of money that gradually fills the screen. Burns’s history lesson also appears in a twin work on a monitor at the opposite end of the gallery, there featuring a different elephant. The creature—named, like the virally popular mascot of the New York Liberty, Elly—gradually walls off the moving image, brick by brick.
The eclectic monitors that populate the show were clearly chosen as much as sculptures as for their function. The inventory includes a pair that look like red astronaut helmets—a little Kubrick allusion, perhaps?; a few that resemble display cases or microwave ovens, with the image playing like an apparition on the front glass and the interior containing slabs of rock; one shaped like a big apple; one built into a chunky pink ring that plays The Simple Life. You may have to ask for that one to be turned on—its tiny battery doesn’t last long.
A short prose piece penned by the artist to accompany the show might make My TV Show sound like an acid-tinged reflection on supply chains, a rumination on the infrastructural networks that intersect to create a television: “I become aware of the minerals that were mined for the body and the components. . . . I see the factory, and the production line. The software, tens of millions of lines of code. . . . I see the electricity surging within it.” After spending time with the show, however, the text—whose cosmic tones turn out to stem from Kokopeli’s reworking of a Buddhist prayer—seems like an allegory for the show’s true topic: subject formation, growing up, the child as the product at the end of the parental/societal assembly line.
Roughly half of the videos in My TV Show are educational programming of the sort that would be shown by a social studies teacher in need of a free period to catch up on grading. Standing up to bullies, resisting peer pressure, deescalating conflict, learning to spot sexual predators: all the hot topics in a televisual form ca. 1991. The stilted performances and blandly earnest tones are inevitably comic. But the shows also shine a distinct spotlight (like the superimposed one that appears on the screen in Code Red, 2024) on childhood and learning to navigate the hazards of the cruel world outside the idealized home. One monitor is even built in the shape of a miniature array of lockers, High School Musical themed.
All traffic in directions Foucauldian, Althusserian, etc. pulls up short, however, when one learns that these educational videos were written by the artist’s mother. I’m not quite sure how to interpret this move. Using intimate material as a kind of case study resonates with the displaced intimacy of Die Pampertaarten—the infant there, the child here. There’s a sub rosa address not to the child but to child-rearing, to the notion of being “raised by television.” In the artworks, at least, Kokopeli seems less interested in rare-earth mining in Malawi than in the psycho-sociological formation of the person and, one might speculate, the possible mining of his life for pedagogy. The works in the show laminate at least two interpretations, one of abstract, ironical, contemplation of childhood and the other much more personal yet treated with remove.
Not all the videos are of this sort, but they fill in other gaps of the puzzle. Those Ken Burns pieces stand in for the inculcation of history. A round touch-screen the size of an overgrown manhole cover bears a still of Ringo Starr being knighted that, when the screen is triggered, is overlaid with an animated turntable’s arm and drolly plays the Beatles track “Revolution.” A commentary on the failure and selling out of boomer dreams, perhaps? The video seems a counterpart to those educational ones, the former directed toward the parents of those who grew up watching the latter.
All this feels a bit heavy-handed on my part; I tend to avoid overly personal interpretations and dislike psychologizing, whatever that says about me. And yet the various works keep lacing themselves together. One image becomes an icon for the whole show—a still of a clench-fisted child presented on a large grayscale monitor. The original version of the photo was used to represent anger in a book on emotions penned by, you guessed it, Kokopeli’s mom. The monitor has a glitch that causes it to flip between positive and negative versions of what it’s showing, which makes a fitting metaphor for this exhibition that flips among various meanings, refusing to allow just one view. When I visited the gallery, I witnessed only the negative of the angry boy, which was downright sinister. The mad kid looms at the end of the long gallery space to become the show’s most legible image, a little thunderhead hanging over all the rest.
Warholiana
In the last issue of Spigot, I wrote on Daniel Boorstin’s The Image. The synapses where I store his “Celebrities are famous for being celebs” chestnut are next door to those that code for the Warholian axiom “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” Looking up the latter to make sure I remembered it right, I realized that the provenance of the quote is slippery, and possibly it wasn’t Warhol’s at all.
Critic Blake Gopnik, who published a Warhol bio in 2020 (haven’t read it), wrote a detailed history of the quote and its evolution since its first appearance in print in 1968 in the catalogue for Warhol’s first retrospective, curated by Pontus Hultén at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Perhaps it was Hultén who put it in that book; perhaps Geldzhaler misascribed it to Warhol in a 1965 interview; perhaps Billy Al Bengston came up with it. The entry on Gopnik’s nerdy (complementary) Warhol research dump–cum–fan site traces its appearances in various media outlets and its iterations by characters as various as Joseph Kosuth and Dustin Hoffman.
Meanwhile, if you like butts, visit 56 Henry, which features an exhibition of racy Warhol drawings and Polaroids for two more weeks.
The Super Bowl
Sometimes, like the Democratic party, I fall into the notion that my simply wishing something will make it so. My latest delusion is that on Sunday the Philadelphia Eagles will defeat the Kansas City Chiefs. For those who haven’t been following, the Chiefs (whose name now that I keep typing it does seem a little . . . questionable) have won a record number of games this season by the skin of their teeth, listless and without flair. They appear mortal. And no team has won the Super Bowl three times in a row, as they would do with a victory this go-round.
And yet, as these mortals escape defeat week after week, they have come to seem blessed. The resulting triumphalism has made this previously charming bunch of lads irritating to hateworthy, as observed in myriad media accounts during the long lead-up to the game, from the Berkeley Beacon to the Daily Mail. If you want to go conspiratorial, it’s not God pulling the strings, it’s the NFL, rigging it all to cement the team’s dynastic reign, keep ratings high, and, most important, ensure that postgame Travis Kelce proposes to Taylor Swift live on the field in a shower of confetti.
Nevertheless, I’m sticking with (sigh) logic. May I cling to the Enlightenment when it comes to gambling, at least? The Eagles, while boring—they run the football as much as teams did in the 1970s—are very good in their own right, feature better players across the board, and have a running back who can hurdle adversaries backwards and often does this. I won’t guarantee he will do so in this game (and I would follow my wagering advice at your peril, which I hope constitutes a legal disclaimer), but it’s reasonable to think Kansas City’s luck will finally run out, that the thoroughly talented Philly defense will keep their offense in check, that the Eagles will run the ball over and over and make the game extremely dull en route to victory. If you want to follow my lead, boldly take Philadelphia by a full touchdown—carefully hedging it, of course. While you’ll probably lose the bet, well, like watching the Super Bowl, that just makes you more American.
Bonus bet: go up against your friends on the length of Jon Batiste’s rendition of the national anthem, taking the over at 120.5 seconds. Batiste, the kind of I-guess-he’s-famous? guy who shows up on network television, has performed it variously over the years. The crucial detail this time is that he’s a native of New Orleans, where the Super Bowl is being played. Expect him to melisma his ass off for the hometown crowd.
And for the record, I do expect Kendrick Lamar to call Drake a pedophile in front of a global broadcast audience of 200 million people. USA! USA!
Music
If you need a refresher on the Drake-Kendrick fracas, enjoy this playlist of the whole beef, including the monotonous diss by J. Cole that started it all and a cameo by a mega-blunted Rick Ross. It’s all a remarkably vicious path to the catchiest chorus of 2024. USA! USA!