Keren Cytter, Bad Words, at Jenny’s
The world is maybe ending but at least we still have art, right? Those were the thoughts that were buzzing through my head the other night as I trekked downtown from an arduous trip returning from a visit to my family in New Jersey. I had just survived having white knuckled gripped myself through conversations about vax statuses, masking mandates, and the Ukraine “thing” with my very kind but very Trump juiced family.
Walking through Chinatown to go to the opening of Keren Cytter’s new show, Bad Words, at Jenny’s (9 Pell Street), gave me the sense of returning to the NYC cultural safety zone that realigned my overly performed sense of being “a part” of one type of reality and not another, and I was dying for a dose of art plus a few very stiff drinks.
Jenny’s is located on Pell Street in Chinatown which is still a gentrifying location of choice for newer spaces, and strategically just on the edge of the old/new again Tribeca art gallery mass relocation zone. (The old downtown is the new downtown once again). This newer outpost is of the same eponymously named space that was once in LA and it is a bit rough and ready but it is known to be “cool” in what it shows.
Cytter is very much a “cool” artist but they are also smart, whip smart. Israeli born, NYC based, Cytter is known for her films, photography, installations, and more (much more). They are the type of contemporary artist whose medium flexibility reminds you of what every grad student has tried to accomplish someway along the way but only the very few could master so that it isn’t cringe. Cytter’s works are ultra now, NOW in their content but also posses that big brain energy that makes you totally buy into whatever spastic lines, utterances, and zooms of focus they are investigating.
Bad Words has a similar vibe. It is a short video that is installed in Jenny’s demur 2nd floor space. The room is small but that’s okay as the video content fits with the wall projection installation that reminds you of a movie, or Bachelorette watching night with friends. The video has a few characters that present mostly as women (I don’t have confirmation of their pronouns…) And it is a melange of these youthfuls faux acting over meme audio clips. TikTok’s viral music hits and voice recordings are set within the familiar cramped downtown living stylings of Ikea sofas, racked clothes and impractical but fabulous shoes and accessories. There is a narrative of sorts, something about god, cheating, friends maybe not being good friends to each other?… But the core story is not really the point.
The construction of this unimportant story is masterfully done by the underwhelming, deadpan mimed acting, and the way Cytter has sliced and stitched them together to create absurdity, humor, and blasé all at once. There is something a bit woozy about being so emotionally queued and recognizing all the hit tunes and trends within Bad Words. Point in case, TikTok’s viral Capone’s Oh No song is used to emphasize an emotional realization point. The main protagonist’s face is staring directly at the audience as it plays and in return you are sharing and also slightly a part of, the tragic-comedy, punctuation itself.
Why is “woozy” the response to this technique? Because it works so well. It’s like an algorithmic cowbell is being set off on our collective brains (at least those of us who are saturated by social media). And it creates this double entendre of knowingness. This conjures the concept of the uncanny. Freud was the guru of this idea and also Heidegger reflects about the concept of the uncanny in the presentation of art and you can learn more about these interpretation in such book’s like Katherine Withy’s Heidegger on Being Uncanny, but for the sake of not losing the plot, the uncanniness that was being conjured (for me) while watching Bad Words was how what was on view was also already in my mind. It was a mirror simulation of the doom scrolling, ear-worming, sub reality/actual reality that many of us experience each day. Those songs, those viral voice overs, are being enacted in our minds independently and here we are watching them being represented and thus they are being even more deeply re-embedded. The sense that we are living in a bottomless pit of self referentials and lolz felt very bleak yet one must admit, slightly satisfying.
Is this just Millennial, Zillennial, Gen Z malaise, the new irony 4.0? Yes, no, maybe… but it is stringent and feels like a zip of fresh air. Like Debord but actually chill/funny. For instance there is a text section that reads:
when you wake up and realize
that you are late to your job interview with your best friend’s ex
and you are not a lesbian but the product of the a patriarchal society
that’s conditioned you to see women as sex objects
This statement feels like a distilled nugget that reflects the conundrum of being currently alive in a certain age/time/place. Everyone is so damn smart but does any of that matter or mean anything?
Attention and focus. This is the marketplace for social mediation today. It is literally what all of capitalism wants to have, gain, and control. It is the area that the marketers, ads, AIs, Amazon’s, smartphone, app designers, startup office shares want to harvest and claim. Cytter has used the mechanizations of attention and control as a part of their tool box to replicate/duplicate/collage/chop and screw it into new ways that are really sharp and smartly done. The ways in which Cytter creates gaps, the edits — the Russian doll effect of virality within virality — is probably one the most effective ways to critique this cultural glut of our times while also making it something someone actually wants to watch and will remember.
Bad Words is a capsule of how well this can be done and it captures you because it is way too close to home (home being your own brain) but it also feels like a valve of conceptual release. All this clutter, all the internet noise, is also relevant fodder and can be used to create “art.”
Would I want to see an episodic version of Bad Words? No, that would be one ironic step too many but it did make me grateful for the micro-dose of laughter. And then as I made my way through the lanterned lights of Chinatown to the afterparty at Forlini’s (which had a one night installation by Cytter and John Roebas: a backwards clock, a chandelier, and four screens with abstracted videos) and drank many stiff drinks within a swarm or very unsocially distanced, hot young things, I had the realization that yes, we are living in a doom world. Russia invading Ukraine, a pandemic that keeps going and going… but this is okay. To be using art to be a reason to get together to cope. Party, drink, hug, catch up with minor acquaintances and close friends. To see good art and then if needed, have a good cry alone or with someone you care about on the way home.
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Additional Reading
Withy, K. Heidegger on Being Uncanny, Harvard University Press, 2015.
Freud, S., Strachey J., Cixous, H., Dennomé, R., Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The “Uncanny”), New Literary History. Vol. 7, №3, Thinking in the Arts, Sciences, and Literature (Spring, 1976), pp. 525–548+619–645, The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Larkin, M., New York’s Hottest New Gallery District Looks Familiar, The New York Times, June 15, 2021.
Pandey, A., Sahu, R., Kumar, D., Social Media Marketing Impact on the Purchase Intention of Millennials, Business Information Systems, Vol 28, Issue 2, 2018, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
Dwivedia, Y., Ismagilovab E., Hughes, D., Setting the Future of Digital and Social Media Marketing Research: Perspectives and Research Propositions, International Journal of Information Management, Vol 59, August 2021.
Vadukul, A., How Forlini’s Survives the Instagram Horde, The New York Times, September 14, 2018
