Dang: a Caroline Polachek Dipping Sauce
A REVIEW ON PSEUDO-INTELLECT, PRESENTATIONS + FINANCE ART
I’ve listened to Caroline Polachek’s new song, Dang, more than I feel comfortable disclosing over email. Like a lot of pop music, I thought it was a bit shit when I first listened to it. I solved that problem by playing it over and over and over again.
One of the New York fags follow, @aramnotagoat, tweeted, ‘she just does shit 😭’ to his seventy-thousand followers, of which I am inexplicably one. Aram(?) was referring to Caroline Polachek’s recent performance of Dang on CBS’s The Late Show.
Polachek’s performance has altered my brain. The artist waits in a slate-walled room covered in chalked phrases, schematics, and to her right stands a white, freestanding presentation screen. She’s wearing earpieces, a Britney headset, a pen stuck through her tied-up hair, black strapped heels, and a two-piece blood-red leatherette maxi skirt, shirt and tie. Above all else, Polachek’s wearing glasses.
She’s about to deliver a presentation—because she’s a genius.
Pseudo-intellectualism actually makes me hard. I don’t care. There’s just something about the pretence, the sexy nurse, of it all. Nurses are the backbone of the health industry—a super serious job—and being smart, feeling smart is also really, very, important. Otherwise, everything wouldn’t be as perfect on Earth as it is today.
Caroline Polachek gets up on a late-night talk show to perform her new song, as a presentation, for which she directs her viewer’s attention to a ‘FIREWORK SALES VS. GLOBAL TEMPERATURE’ chart; it’s stupid good. The two lines spike in unison towards the present day of the two-thousand-year scale. Do you get it?
Polachek takes a sumo stance, runs her hands down to her hips, convulsing her spine up to the turn of her head, and sings the word, ‘Dang.’ The next slide indicates where in the length of the track we are with an arrow pointing to the sound waves.
Though all I want to do is discuss, further, the impact and work of Caroline Polachek; I’ll talk about art, ‘real art;’ not Frieze Fair—that’s unimportant, I think—I was on holiday over the weekend and didn’t go. I want to talk about the kind of art you side-eye. Little smile on your face, eyes narrowed. Unserious art? Comedy art? Comedienne art?
Hannah Sawtell gave a lecture when I was in art school. I’ve forgotten just about everything she said, (oops.) All that’s left is that she did a residency in the offices of Bloomberg, the financial analytics and media conglomerate, and made an artwork about crypto. Don’t roll your eyes! I have something to say!
Sawtell made her own currency, ‘sold’ it to viewers of her artwork, and with each transaction a 3D render of a blooded, boxing old lady would be algorithmically motioned. On the left of the projected display, a cascading fall of Sawtell’s tokens fills half the screen. In the words of Aram, the New York fag, ‘she just does shit 😭’.
I’m sure the show was deadly serious but I can barely remember a thing about it and the press release gives nothing away, it basically just says, ‘It’s about money.’ I’ve decided to re-write this artwork, I think it was silly, but in a smart way. Very, ‘Ha-Ha-Ha, I’ve read an e-flux article.’ ‘Capitalism’s bad, here’s some art, Ha-Ha-Ha.’
I thought the whole thing was K-Hole-coded, that virginal trend forecasting, LA-via-NY, art project founded by Greg Fong, Sean Monahan, Chris Sherron, Emily Segal, and Dena Yago. Since disbanded, foreclosed, ruined; until 2016 the project was best known for coining the term ‘Normcore’, then co-opted by the fashion industry in 2013.
Caroline Polachek’s presentation music video reads like YOUTH MODE: A REPORT ON FREEDOM. K-Hole’s report was about youth culture; responses to being alternative, responses to being basic. Oppositional expressions. The report was definitively about something. Though, I don’t know if there was necessarily a point.
Who’s to say what Polachek’s Dang presentation is actually about? Not me. What I can speak on is my love of pseudo-smart charts. Okay, so there’s one in YOUTH MODE (see below), and it’s borrowed from Rosalind Krauss (see below also). As the original, weird, art It Girl, she wrote Sculpture in the Expanded Field, which is a total slog to read—many masochists have tried. List includes me and one of ‘em at K-Hole.
I’m also partial to the use of a chart, see reportage from Paris; a sexual existentialist reading of a Tom of Finland Foundation show and an MEP erotica exhibition. I don’t think any of this is watertight; maybe it’s just fun, maybe ‘she just does shit 😭’.
No one needs to do a close reading of a music video, or crypto, or the boring clothes people are wearing, or sexy pictures, or whatever Krauss was talking about. Maybe we can only do what we’re compelled to because reasoning one’s actions is so bland.
Maybe we get up in front of a bunch of people and give them a little show.
—Andy x