Tropical Breeze

Finding new cinematic language to express the desire for physical contact in our increasingly isolated, mediated, and highly consumer-driven environments, Remote follows the daily routines of a quarantined woman in her sealed-off, ultra-modern apartment, where she falls down a rabbit hole playing an inexplicable interactive game with a community of women from around the world.

Rottenberg’s newest film, Cheese (2007), conflates farm-girl imagery with the fairy tale “Rapunzel” into a story loosely based on the Sutherland Sisters, renowned for their extremely long hair. Floating through a pastoral yet mazelike setting of raw wooden debris cobbled together into a benign shantytown, six longhaired women in flowing white nightgowns “milk” their locks and the goats they live with to generate cheese. Shots of animals crowded in pens and the sisters’ bunk bed– cluttered room visually compare the women to their ruminant allies. As nurturing caretakers, these women represent maternal aspects of Mother Nature. Here Rottenberg investigates feminine magic, the ability to “grow things out of the body” as she says, as the ultimate, wondrous physical mystery.

Produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; Arts at CERN, the arts program of the European Laboratory of Particle Physics, Geneva, with the support of the Permanent Mission of the United States to the United Nations, Geneva; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, with the support of Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung; and New Museum, New York

Dough (2006) depicts a team of women pulling a rope of dough through a series of claustrophobic factory compartments. At the center of the Rube Goldberg–like system, an obese woman kneads and directs the dough. When a bouquet of flowers is placed before her, a chain reaction is set off: the flowers produce allergic tears, which fall to the floor and generate steam, which in turn causes the dough to rise before it is finally packaged. Equating industrial and bodily processes, the journey of the fleshy dough alludes to digestion, excretion, and birth. Dough evinces the influence of 1970s feminist body art and also recalls Matthew Barney’s elaborate sets and surreal physical processes. Like Barney, Rottenberg gives sculptural form to her videos; here, the projection appears in a cramped wooden room, its outer supports weighed down by doughy sandbags.

The thematic starting point for Cosmic Generator is a tunnel system that establishes a trading connection between various places and actors, among them the Mexican city of Mexicali and Calexico, the Californian town on the other side of the border fence. Rumour has it that the entrance to the system can be accessed via shops and restaurants in La Chinesca, Mexicali’s Chinatown. In her montage Rottenberg links footage from the local Golden Dragon Restaurant with a 99 Cents Store in Calexico and an enormous plastic commodities market in Yiwu, China. The Yiwu Market plays a pivotal role in this imaginary network peopled by a group of rather strange characters. With its artificial blaze of colours it seems like a gigantic staged performance in itself.

In a small, carpeted space reminiscent of an oriental parlor, a dreamlike assembly of odd characters is gathered to perform various seemingly significant acts: a bodybuilder flexes his muscles to produce sweat that drips into a frying pan and quickly evaporates, a body-contortionist bends into an impossible shape only to implode in a cloud of white dust, and a kneeling man simultaneously chops two planks of wood in half with his bare hands.

Several women within surreal pastel chambers collectively fabricate maraschino cherries from red fingernails.

NoNoseKnows explores the mass production of cultured pearls for the luxury market, labor almost exclusively performed by women. Portions of the video were shot in Zhuji, China, home to gargantuan pearl-making facilities, but the rest was staged and recorded in New York on a custom-designed set. As with all of Rottenberg’s work, women serve as both protagonists and catalysts: the women seen here do strange things that make other strange things happen, to themselves and others, which in turn make even more strange things happen. The video as a whole is a kind of assembly line of cause and effect, reaction and response, all of which result in the production and harvesting of cultured pearls.