The Artist Vuk Ćuk with Everything at EIKON Schaufenster at Q21, Museumsquartier Vienna | Munchies Art Club Magazine recommends to visit this great Site specific Exhibition during Easter In Vienna!
In 2013 Nicolas Cage was asked if he knew his image was the subject of an ever expanding number of memes proliferating across social media.
“Oh my god. I just can't keep up with that stuff," the American actor replied. "The internet has developed this thing about me – I’m not even a computer guy.” Yet Cage should also be aware his unusual cult celebrity (putting aside his actual movie career) has also mutated beyond the screen, with sellers on AliExpress, a Chinese online platform for small retailers, hawking an ever more bewildering number of merchandise featuring his likeness – or rather reproductions of the memes that feature his likeness. Images of these products are included in a maximalist window collage of semi-transparent vinyl by Serbian artist Vuk Cuk at q21 EIKON Schauraum. Here is Cage’s face horrifically close-up, like a gurning death mask; there is Cage’s face superimposed on a pair of boxers shorts.
Not that Cuk’s new show, Everything, is a shrine to Cage. In fact, the viewer might barely notice the actor among all the other images culled from Aliexpress that Cuk has spread across the glass, and in an equally chaotic wallpaper collage inside the space, including imagery from popular culture, as well as other products that seem divorced from any context. Cute cats and pugs loiter alongside bewildering sweatshirts bearing prints of corn on the cob or a woman modelling a turkey fancy dress costume. Inside the gallery are dozens of products Cuk has bought from the website, occasionally kineticised with the use of hijacked electronics, or in the case of two aluminium cacti sculptures, cast from plastic props bought on the site.
Hanging like a Josef Beuys suit for the modern age is a shorts and t-shirt combo baring the repeated print of Chinese instant noodles. Cuk’s interest in AliExpress, a cipher for wider algorithmic global capitalism, in which one part of the world feeds the never-ending tapeworm consumption of another, might be verbalised in a similar fashion to the Cage quote: “I just can't keep up” with all this “stuff”. Cuk points out that for the sellers to make any kind of profit from the sale of a replica rubber prawn – or a plastic palm, earrings replicating shampoo bottles in miniature and the wide-eyed cuddly toys – then each manufacturer must make tens of thousands of them at a time. The sellers themselves seem largely oblivious to what purpose their wares might eventually serve, titling them merely with a litany of search-optimisation keywords. The meaning of each product is therefore ultimately decided by the buyer – what is the market of a stuffed textile fish? – each transaction a strange bastardisation of Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author, in which the viewer reigns supreme over the meaning and purpose of art.
Cuk takes art historical investigations into consumerist culture, from the Pictures Generation interest in decontexualisation to American Neo-Geo artists such as Haim Steinbach or Jeff Koons early invocations of rampant capitalism, but, generations apart, updates it not just to the hyperconnected Internet age, but also a moment in which simulacra has moved from Ballardian speculative fiction to everyday life. The artist says he was first intrigued by this maelstrom of stuff after noting a certain type of expensive but ultimately soulless restaurants in Serbia were decorated with plastic flowers, plants and trees. While he was impressed by how realistic they were, he also noticed that each plant or flower was inevitably an exact copy of the previous, cloned from the same industrial machine, at odds with the thing they sought to replicate. In another work featured here, the artist has installed a fake fireplace, the flames mere animated imitation with no heat generated.
For an idea of how estranged from reality we seem to have come, one only needs to think what previous generations, for whom the fire was an essential invention of survival and warmth, might make of this counterfeit. But Cuk’s investigations don’t end at manufactured reproductions of the natural world but have recently extended to a series of masks made up of a bank of LED lights from which animations can be played, including animations of the face of the wearer. This tech, falling somewhere between kitsch and Blade Runner dystopia, points to a situation in which mutations are allowed to happen online – algorithms are let lose to feed you products predicated on your previous purchases – while the material world becomes ever more globally uniform and alienating. For all the fun memes and cute kittens, Cuk’s exhibition is a glimpse into the frightening libidinal deathdrive of twenty-first century capitalism.
