“Yesterday’s Newspaper”: Recontextualizing “Just Kick It Till It Breaks”
By Lilly Cao, Summer 2020 Curatorial Intern
“From the Archives” is a series that spotlights The Kitchen’s history. As a complement to our Archive Website, these posts offer focused reflections on the artists, exhibitions, events, and institutional practices that have defined and shaped The Kitchen since its founding in 1971.
IN 2007, The Kitchen’s Executive Director and Chief Curator at the time, Debra Singer, and Curator Matthew Lyons organized a group exhibition called Just Kick It Till It Breaks, which featured artworks by eleven contemporary artists interrogating the relationship between political activism, consumerism, and corporate media. Combining signs, newspapers, posters, photographs, and film footage in their pieces, these artists investigated how media presentations of different figures and events shaped their political impact: their works responded in particular to the commercial anesthetization of protests and activism by re-appropriating the symbols of consumer media itself. Using aesthetic mimicry as a subversive strategy, the exhibition thus critiqued media and commercialism from the inside, shedding light on important issues and perspectives typically obscured by the very media parodied. The artworks therefore embodied the all-encompassing nature of corporate media, all while demonstrating that protest could still exist in the interstices.
Thirteen years later, this reflexive interrogation of the media and political activism appears more relevant than ever. With COVID-19 highlighting glaring racial and economic inequalities and protests over racism and police violence erupting nationwide, the complexities of activist expression and corporate responsibility remain pressing issues. How have anxieties over mass media’s culture of distraction, or its complicity in regressive politics, evolved or stayed the same? How has the evolution of mass media altered the relationship between political activism, consumer culture, and global attention? How can revisiting criticisms of the past inform our understanding of and approach to the present?
These questions are enormous and possibly unanswerable, but the critiques and methods of subversion suggested by the artists of Just Kick It Till It Breaks can provide useful perspectives. Integral to the artworks of the original exhibition was a reexamination of historical protest movements and radical groups; continuing this cycle of review, I look back to thirteen years ago to reconsider the original issues in a new political context. To this end, I reached out to three artists who participated in Just Kick It Till It Breaks—Josephine Meckseper, Scott Hug, and Dave McKenzie—to ask if they would revisit the artworks they showed in the exhibition and reflect on them from a contemporary perspective. Our conversations, all of which took place over email, include discussions of news and social media, contemporary and historical protests, and hope for a better future. Additionally undergirding these conversations is an appraisal of the universal importance of revisiting artworks and exhibitions from the past. Indispensable to the artworks’ original incorporation of historical memories and memorabilia was a disruption of the capitalist temporality of accelerated consumption and rapid disposal. By revisiting the exhibition, we extend the lifespan of these objects and this show even further, observing how its themes have transformed over time.
JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER IS A NEW YORK-BASED ARTIST who works in a variety of media, including film and installation. Growing up in Western Germany in the 1970s, Meckseper was involved in political protests starting at an early age, with her mother leading the Green Party in her hometown and her aunt being a close friend of Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Faction. Her early exposure and involvement in protest culture reflect heavily in her work. In Just Kick It Till It Breaks, she showed a short film titled Rest in Peace (2004) that was loosely inspired by Zabriskie Point (1970), a Michelangelo Antonioni film that centered on the 1960s U.S. counterculture movement. In her email description of her film, Meckseper lists the early 2000s protests and activist events that constitute the core footage of the work: a “Life After Bush” conference at the CUNY Graduate Center, the “End the Occupation of Iraq” demonstration in Manhattan, and even a “Youth and Activism & the Fight for Our Future” class organized by The Young Democratic Socialists Building A Student Movement. Meckseper views the protests she documents as “a collective expression” of the “need for more equality, a more just society, and to address climate change.” Her films reveal these protests’ significance and call for them to be seen. Drawing attention to the fundamentally communal nature of protest, she writes, “in an era of individualism and social media obsession, [protests] stand out as communal voices for a better future in real time.”
Rest in Peace also includes footage of the Empire State Building, stores on Avenue of the Americas, and police presence in New York. Importantly, the work’s inclusion of one of New York’s most commercialized settings—the Avenue of the Americas storefronts—accentuates the tension between these protests and the consumer context in which they took place. Besides film, another of Meckseper’s commonly employed artistic mediums is a shelf displaying disparate found objects and glass pieces. For example, her Just Kick It Till It Breaks work Untitled (Only a Monster Can Allow Himself the Luxury of Seeing Things as They Are) (2005) consists of a glass shelf showcasing, among other objects, a collage made out of New York Times pages, a quote from E.M. Cioran’s 1960s book History and Utopia, a mannequin hand, a white toilet brush, and several sculptural glass objects. Her third work shown in the exhibition, titled Der Umkehrbare Lauf der Dinge (2005), is a totemic sculpture combining a Diet Pepsi can, toilet paper, and glass elements. Meckseper explains of her oeuvre that “the films show underexposed civil disobedience and protest; the display works show overexposed modes of consumer society.” But the two are closely related, as is revealed by the commercial footage in her films and the political references in her installations. Meckseper writes:
The shelves and vitrines are non-affirmative manifestations of consumer displays that are intended as artificial ignition points and triggers for destruction. They represent the moment right before a demonstrator vandalizes a store.
The presence of threats within the architecture of commerce evokes a sense of instability and fragility that betrays the mirrored surfaces and the seemingly benign objects reflected in them—suggesting that the reason for their existence is the anticipation of their own destruction.
While these works were originally made over a decade ago, their emphasis on the importance of protest continues to hold significance today. The recent protests catalyzed by the tragic murder of George Floyd demonstrate the impact that collective expression can have, with important changes beginning to take place (even as many demands have yet to be met). In her email, Meckseper writes that these recent protests “give hope that there is a growing number of people fighting for equality and an end to racism and colonialism.” Yet she also believes that the urgency of this fight is at its peak: “The pandemic might be our last wake up call to resolve systemic inequality to unitedly address future global challenges and climate catastrophes that might be far worse than what we’re experiencing now.”
MECKSEPER DESCRIBES THE ADVERTISEMENTS IN HER WORKS, such as the New York Times collage n Untitled (Only a Monster Can Allow Himself the Luxury of Seeing Things as They Are), as indications “that the spectacle of mass media and advertising have a central role in an advanced capitalist society.” When I talked to New York-based artist Scott Hug, his thoughts likewise broached the topic of politics and mass media. Hug showed five works in Just Kick It Till It Breaks: four silkscreen prints from his series A Current Affair, Page 6 Heads (2006–ongoing) and an installation titled No Escaping Martha (2005).The Page 6 Heads works extract striking combinations of headshots and captions from the daily gossip column of The New York Post, isolating them on enlarged canvases and creating sometimes jarring secondary meanings as a result. For example, one headshot of Prince William in military gear is paired with the caption “What a racket”—generating vague associations around the Western military industrial complex and the celebrity culture of politics and nobility, which could apply still to the present. Yet another of Hug’s Page 6 Heads canvases features Mike Tyson with the caption “Rage the roof,” which Hug notes in our conversation as gaining new relevance with the Black Lives Matter protests today.
Rather than constructing an overt political message himself, Hug simply recontextualizes existing consumer images to reveal thinly veiled political meanings, meanings which were present all along and which would have remained hidden otherwise. In fact, the power of these images stems precisely from the fact that they were taken from a real news source and reveal their own absurdity—not just the absurdity of contemporary political issues but of gossip column culture itself. In Hug’s email to me, he wrote:
I chose headlines that were general enough that when decontextualized from the celebrity gossip column, they could speak to the absurdities of the George W. Bush administration. They were meant to be humorous, but also have a deeper, darker reading intended to go beyond the surface of celebrity culture and into the culture at large. It was a critique of our consumption of mass infotainment, our mass distraction.
The pieces from Page 6 Heads are thus an exercise in the guerilla tactics of infiltration that characterized Just Kick It Till It Breaks more largely: they critiqued mass media culture through the medium of mass media itself.
The physical newspaper may now be outdated, but the obsessions with celebrity stardom, the culture of mass distraction, and the penetration of politics into all parts of life remain identical issues today, simply filtered through new media. Hug describes his Page 6 Heads as kinds of pre-Facebook and pre-Twitter status updates, and when I asked him whether these new forms of mass media brought with them new concerns, he replied, “yes; does information overload make us even more numb/dumb, and fuel our political apathy?” In many respects, the jarring increase of media availability has only served to amplify the criticisms Hug observed thirteen years earlier in the works included in Just Kick It Until It Breaks.
DAVE MCKENZIE, A JAMAICAN-BORN VISUAL AND PERFORMANCE ARTIST who contributed three works to the exhibition, deals with media and politics in his art as well. When I asked McKenzie how his art might connect to the current moment, he chose to focus on his work Tomorrow Will Be Better (2007), which consists of the title phrase written in thin aluminum lettering hanging from a metal rod, like a precarious storefront sign. When I first saw a photograph of it, I immediately noticed its fragility, with its rotating letters and crumpled aluminum finish. If tomorrow will be better, could this fragility represent the current state of things, or maybe even the fragility of the promise itself? McKenzie writes, “Right now as I read it, I can hear myself emphasizing the word ‘will.’ It feels like a call and an acknowledgement that things currently are far from good enough. It is incremental but it also projects itself into the future. The next day must be better too.” “Tomorrow Will Be Better” is neither a question nor a request, but a statement: change is not possible; it is certain. It is with this optimism that McKenzie views the Black Lives Matter Movement today. In my correspondence with him, he summarized this perspective by writing:
As a Black person I have always believed that my life matters, but I have not believed that society as a whole feels this way. Black Lives Matter is an urgent movement and statement. As speech it is employed to help create something new and to move beyond a history of our lives not mattering—slavery, racial segregation, mass incarceration…
For me, the repetition of the statement reinforces something that must be true and must come to pass. It is simple, beautiful, and unbelievably powerful at the same time.
Another of McKenzie’s works in the show, Yesterday’s Newspaper (2007), is simply that–a copy of yesterday’s newspaper presented on a wooden board. The piece reflects on history and on the question of time in our media-consumed world. Even in 2007, the news media was seen as a constant barrage of information, capitalizing on the public’s brief attention span to continually supplant the events of the recent past with new happenings. A newspaper from as recently as yesterday could suddenly become, as McKenzie describes it, “mainly utilitarian—something you wrap the fish in, clean a window with, etc.” Thus, in McKenzie’s words, Yesterday’s Newspaper is “an object that makes a return to the present and a return to visibility.” Highlighting this object that should be obsolete subverts the capitalist temporality of endless production and waste. Moreover, as McKenzie writes, “If we think of news like history, then we can see that we are still reckoning with the past and that we aren’t done with it any more than it is done with us.”
The profound “time-operations” McKenzie describes as conducted by Yesterday’s Newspaper rely heavily on the display of the physical object, a format for communication that has primarily given way to digital media. These digital platforms have only amplified anxieties over information’s increasingly brief moment in the spotlight, perhaps because of the loss of a concrete reminder of yesterday’s events. In a time where building from history is more pertinent than ever, the ever-increasing rapidity of information consumption seems to make McKenzie’s call for pause and reflection from thirteen years earlier more challenging to enact. How can we prevent the public from losing interest in important movements like the Black Lives Matter protests when the media platforms they rely on for communication emphasize quick consumption and disposal rather than long-lasting content? In the same way that Hug observed the information overload as contributing to political apathy, McKenzie considers digital apps and social media as contributing to shorter time periods of relevance. He observes that “large tech companies are primarily interested in generating user data and keeping our attention/platform loyalty. The content on these platforms is in many ways relevant only insofar as it keeps us engaged with the platform [...] in the digital, what is important seems to be an emphasis on the endless.”
MY CONVERSATIONS WITH MECKSEPER, HUG, AND MCKENZIE REVEALED new anxieties over the state of media and politics, reemphasized the power and importance of protest, indicated what progress has been made and what has tragically stayed the same, and exposed a persistent sense of hope despite all that has yet to be done. When I asked McKenzie what he thought of the process of revisiting the show, he spoke of how new times required “resuscitat[ing] old strategies for new ends,” which his reflections on works like Yesterday’s Newspaper embody when applied to the present day. In particular, he wrote that the act of returning to old works could serve as a catalyst for self-reflection, for “we also see flaws in [the works’] arguments, flaws we may be guilty of as well.” For Hug and Meckseper, to return to the past was part of the push to move forward as well. Meckseper stated that “the struggle for equality in a late capitalist society and a country with an unresolved colonial past is an ongoing process.” Similarly, Hug wrote, “as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more aware of the cyclical and, yes, cynical nature of things […]”
In her curatorial essay for the exhibition, Singer references a quote from artist and curator Dan Graham: “The task of the artist is in part to resuscitate the just-past—that period in time made amnesiac by commodity culture—and to apply it as an ‘anti-aphrodisiac’ (Walter Benjamin’s phrase).” McKenzie’s piece Yesterday’s Newspaper exemplifies this theme, as does Hug’s immortalization of old gossip column images and Meckseper’s merging of old and new protest footage. These artists and others in Just Kick It Till It Breaks use their work to revisit the past, even its most prosaic relics, and consequently resist commodity culture’s endless preoccupation with the new. Returning to the exhibition extends the lifetime of the show even further and, reviving its lessons, calls for an essential moment of pause and reflection in this oversaturated digital context.
Images: Thumbnail) Postcard for Just Kick It Till It Breaks, curated by Debra Singer and Matthew Lyons, at The Kitchen, 2007, front. To see the full postcard, click here. 1) Just Kick It Till It Breaks curated by Debra Singer and Matthew Lyons, 2007. Installation view at The Kitchen. © Eileen Costa 2) Josephine Meckseper, Untitled (Only a Monster Can Allow Himself the Luxury of Seeing Things as They Are), 2005. © Josephine Meckseper. 3) Josephine Meckseper, Der Umkerhrbare Lauf der Dinge, 2005. © Josephine Meckseper. 4) Scott Hug, works from the series A Current Affair, Page 6 Heads (2006–ongoing). From left to right:: What a Racket (Prince William), Rage the Roof (Mike Tyson), Praise the Lord (Paris Hilton), History Excised (Kane) (all 2006–2007). Courtesy of the artist. 5) Dave McKenzie, Tomorrow Will Be Better, 2007. Courtesy of Small A Projects. © Dan Kvitka. 6) Dave McKenzie, Yesterday’s Newspaper, 2007. Courtesy of Small A Projects. © Dan Kvitka. 7) Postcard for Just Kick It Till It Breaks, curated by Debra Singer and Matthew Lyons, at The Kitchen, 2007, back. To see the full postcard, click here.