I published writing on the “main character energy” meme in Real Life magazine last week, also I am now on tiktok because of writing this piece, lol.
One way I wanted to end the piece (which ultimately didn’t find room or logic to fit) was to do a profile on one of my favorite artworks: a 2001 piece by the late Jason Rhoades titled The Costner Complex (Perfect Process). The piece consisted of the transformation of the gallery that hosted, Portikus, into a sprawling prep station tasked with cultivating a rare essence: The Gardenia alla Potpourri. The essence was basically a pickle, but outside of the usual mixed variety of ingredients such as oil, vinegar, onions, garlic, carrots, salt, and water, it was also slowly exposed (using a sort of lazy-suzan-turned-centrifuge) to the entire oeuvre of the actor Kevin Costner over several hours of “watch time.”
Side note, I was surprised to realize my former undergrad teacher Hugh Pocock was involved in drilling the water from the ground for the project! I’ve been thinking about this piece for four years now — Hugh did this kind of well-drilling back in Baltimore and I know and love some of his other 90s and 00s work, but I literally had no idea he was a part of this piece until I was sent the video by the Portikus people. Love that.
Anyway — I love the install because I think it plays up its own dumbness really well. It’s both very obvious and also totally evasive. It also, now, functions like such an artifact of post-90s-UCLA-MFA energy, lol, which just is what it is. That said, I think it goes beyond a simple “absurdist factory” gimmick or like a “dumb artisanal” joke. I also think it goes beyond some of the simple iconoclasms that some process-based work around this time leaned too deeply into.
The most direct implication is that these pickles absorb a little Kevin Costner in them, offering a material claim to the cinema that sort of “brainwashes” them. You ask if Kevin Costner-ness is there? Simply check the ingredients :) Probably the pickles don’t “watch” but rather absorb the essence of Costner through such an ambient media stream.
lol. I think this is a good joke already. I also like to imagine eating a whole feast of foods that have absorbed some totally other energy from what is ostensibly being presented; that’s maybe a game for after pandemic?
But one observation is that I think this joke premise rests on a flickering unknown: It relies on the idea that the pickles are not active participants in the process, that they are simply objects that absorb rather than ferment, which starts to get a little more complicated if they are not simply objects. Some lore about the piece (maybe this is made very clear in the catalog I can’t justify buying) is that he designed it during some span of time where an ungodly number of trips between Germany and California were travelled—pretty sure he was a visiting professor at Stadelschule while living in USA—and that he felt like he was packed in a tin can airplane catapulting back and forth across the ocean while being fed a steady stream of cinema. With that in mind, it seems very clear that, even if he is only thinking of himself, we become the pickles in this premise.
I mention the Jonathan Beller “Cinematic Mode of Production” in the Real Life essay, but I think it becomes really embodied here — especially the aspect that [watching is work] and [that work produces something that probably ends up being our entire sense of self]. There’s more writing on that in the article above to stake that claim (also apologies to Beller who is incredibly careful in his writing on this subject while I take liberties so freely!), but if you take me up on the premise then the “goofy factory” take ends up being slightly different than the position I land on: that these pickles become subject-objects — and that they are involved in the process of their own manufacture. Do they understand Kevin Costner-ness? This might be the question that describes whether they watch or if they simply absorb. We understand Kevin Costner-ness and his metonymic quality for a persistent “regular white guy” Hollywood typecast, which might make all the difference. In that scenario — they do watch. And if they watch, they work — completing the process of their own production as we often do when watching movies. The Kevin Costner-ness ends up subsuming every aspect of the pickles that might remain autonomous otherwise before becoming a part of the “thousand gallon wall” aspect and becomes their defining context.
Share this post
Main character energy + the Costner complex (perfect process)
Share this post
I published writing on the “main character energy” meme in Real Life magazine last week, also I am now on tiktok because of writing this piece, lol.
One way I wanted to end the piece (which ultimately didn’t find room or logic to fit) was to do a profile on one of my favorite artworks: a 2001 piece by the late Jason Rhoades titled The Costner Complex (Perfect Process). The piece consisted of the transformation of the gallery that hosted, Portikus, into a sprawling prep station tasked with cultivating a rare essence: The Gardenia alla Potpourri. The essence was basically a pickle, but outside of the usual mixed variety of ingredients such as oil, vinegar, onions, garlic, carrots, salt, and water, it was also slowly exposed (using a sort of lazy-suzan-turned-centrifuge) to the entire oeuvre of the actor Kevin Costner over several hours of “watch time.”
Here is a six minute video of its installation in Frankfurt by the filmmaker Helke Bayrle amongst her series of profiles of portikus installs over the years.
Side note, I was surprised to realize my former undergrad teacher Hugh Pocock was involved in drilling the water from the ground for the project! I’ve been thinking about this piece for four years now — Hugh did this kind of well-drilling back in Baltimore and I know and love some of his other 90s and 00s work, but I literally had no idea he was a part of this piece until I was sent the video by the Portikus people. Love that.
Anyway — I love the install because I think it plays up its own dumbness really well. It’s both very obvious and also totally evasive. It also, now, functions like such an artifact of post-90s-UCLA-MFA energy, lol, which just is what it is. That said, I think it goes beyond a simple “absurdist factory” gimmick or like a “dumb artisanal” joke. I also think it goes beyond some of the simple iconoclasms that some process-based work around this time leaned too deeply into.
The most direct implication is that these pickles absorb a little Kevin Costner in them, offering a material claim to the cinema that sort of “brainwashes” them. You ask if Kevin Costner-ness is there? Simply check the ingredients :) Probably the pickles don’t “watch” but rather absorb the essence of Costner through such an ambient media stream.
lol. I think this is a good joke already. I also like to imagine eating a whole feast of foods that have absorbed some totally other energy from what is ostensibly being presented; that’s maybe a game for after pandemic?
But one observation is that I think this joke premise rests on a flickering unknown: It relies on the idea that the pickles are not active participants in the process, that they are simply objects that absorb rather than ferment, which starts to get a little more complicated if they are not simply objects. Some lore about the piece (maybe this is made very clear in the catalog I can’t justify buying) is that he designed it during some span of time where an ungodly number of trips between Germany and California were travelled—pretty sure he was a visiting professor at Stadelschule while living in USA—and that he felt like he was packed in a tin can airplane catapulting back and forth across the ocean while being fed a steady stream of cinema. With that in mind, it seems very clear that, even if he is only thinking of himself, we become the pickles in this premise.
I mention the Jonathan Beller “Cinematic Mode of Production” in the Real Life essay, but I think it becomes really embodied here — especially the aspect that [watching is work] and [that work produces something that probably ends up being our entire sense of self]. There’s more writing on that in the article above to stake that claim (also apologies to Beller who is incredibly careful in his writing on this subject while I take liberties so freely!), but if you take me up on the premise then the “goofy factory” take ends up being slightly different than the position I land on: that these pickles become subject-objects — and that they are involved in the process of their own manufacture. Do they understand Kevin Costner-ness? This might be the question that describes whether they watch or if they simply absorb. We understand Kevin Costner-ness and his metonymic quality for a persistent “regular white guy” Hollywood typecast, which might make all the difference. In that scenario — they do watch. And if they watch, they work — completing the process of their own production as we often do when watching movies. The Kevin Costner-ness ends up subsuming every aspect of the pickles that might remain autonomous otherwise before becoming a part of the “thousand gallon wall” aspect and becomes their defining context.