Issue 15: Greetings from La La Land
flashback to Broome Street
Back in the summer of 2015 when I was still working at the Whitney Museum and teaching at NYU — a veritable lifetime ago, as my life has gone so far — I organized an exhibition at the sadly-now-closed P!/K. Gallery at 334 Broome Street, in Chinatown. The show was called Egress, and it featured two of my still-favorite artists, New York’s Colleen Asper and the Amsterdam-based Kate Cooper. As a curator, I was concerned, quite simply, with the mediation of the female body through technology — the technology of CGI renderings in Kate’s case, and in Colleen’s, painting and performance (or really, painting-as-performance). Gallery shows can be treacherous! Though they are becoming increasingly museum-like in nature, most still lack publications or longer-form essays to frame them. This is to say that I wish, in retrospect, that I had written more at the time about what, exactly, compelled me as the show’s organizer and why I (still) believe that Colleen and Kate’s work are in strong dialogue.
Years later, I can pinpoint that moment in time as one where I was personally fascinated — grotesquely so — with the then-nascent proliferation of “try before you buy” technologies aimed toward women by the beauty and fashion industry. The press release for Egress featured just two quotes (by Baudrillard, sigh, and AI scholar Kate Crawford) and an image of Sephora’s then-new “Color IQ” skin-matching system — one that promised to effortlessly ensure that women were purchasing the “correct” color of foundation by pointing a simple, hand-held artificial intelligence-powered device at a woman’s face to obtain her “color IQ.” This, my friends, is bananas.