In Disposable Wipes Story, the title of the three-channel video I have just tried to briefly describe, the most unlikely thing – an animal and a human being talking to each other – also appears to be the most normal. The conversation flows as if nothing had happened, without any particular jolts: the dog and the woman seem familiar, the tone is calm, the words between the two bounce from one side to the other – from one monitor to the other – like in a tennis exchange between friends, with an empty glass in the middle – on a third screen – to watch, the only paradoxical witness to the dialogue.
What strikes me, instead, it’s the uneasiness of the sentences, especially in the first part. From this strange interspecies conversation emerges an abyss of solitude, distrust, mutual blame. An abyss into which the dog and the woman have sunk, apparently without the possibility of redemption. Like puppets in the hands of a merciless fate, the two characters consume themselves in an almost heartbreaking conversation, taking it out on a world that – far from being enchanted – keeps them chained in a kind of spell. How will it end?
Reflecting on Disposable Wipes Story is a complicated exercise, but ultimately useful. It is natural to ask what those two figures in conversation represent, what their speeches refer to, what that “fucking space” is that cages them. Looking for a univocal answer is a vain effort, and perhaps it is right that it should be so: every work of art worthy of the name lives on gray areas, ambiguities and misunderstandings, on symbols that are only hypothesized, on readings that are probably not entirely clear even to the author himself. However, I have the feeling that the damned world from which they are planning – or perhaps simply fantasizing – an escape is much less blurry and distant from us than we might think.
What surrounds our protagonists seems to the landscape in which we find ourselves immersed and which is difficult to escape: it is the landscape we access by crossing the threshold of hyperconnection every day, of compulsive scrolling of social networks and internet pages, of the slew of data (information, news, images...) that inundates us, of the excess of activism and, above all, of the fear of missing even the most insignificant crumb of this spectacle, of being cut off from all of it, of missing who knows what essential appointment.
The vertigo and melancholy that this condition produces settle inside us, ending up cloaking and depressing us or, at best, settling a persistent sense of dissatisfaction. I don’t think, however, that Catherine Biocca is interested in proffering some moral about the times we are living through. Like almost all people born in the 1980s (the non-“digital natives,” so to speak), Biocca is well aware of the splendor and misery of digital culture and its tools. The way in which art historian Valentina Tanni describes this type of relationship comes to mind. It’s a bit of a long passage, but it’s worth quoting in full:
“The amount of time I have spent online is incalculable: on the internet I have studied, written, played and spoken; I have built friendships, I have seen communities form and disintegrate, phenomena and languages arise and change, but above all I have learned to appreciate the dizzying diversity of human expressions. I have discovered, day after day, that the rabbit hole is not only deep: it is inexhaustible”.
Tanni continues:
“What keeps me connected, even today – the true core of my Internet addiction – is the pleasure of feeling this swarming of the world, of perceiving the presence of others, of letting myself be surprised by the complexity of behaviors, words, sounds and images that pour into the web every minute.”[1]
I have the feeling that Biocca also experiences the same kind of attraction, an attraction that makes us curse the internet and then, a moment later, recognize its virtues, forcing us to return to its soft and addictive embrace. However, in the case of Disposable Wipes Story – or so I like to believe – the dog and the woman decide to free themselves from a grip that in the meantime has become a clamp, undertaking a timid attempt at sedition.
They promise to listen to each other: this is the real subversive act that the two perform; I think I can say, it is to try to recognize and understand each other, finding together a shared path through – I quote the dog’s words – “this shit show”. The alienation has produced an unexpected solidarity (“It seems like we are stuck together in this surreal landscape, whether we like it or not. Maybe we can try to really listen to each other”); and it matters little what kind of relationship the dog and the woman have with each other (are they long-time friends? Did they meet recently? Are they in a romantic relationship? This is part of the seductive ambiguity we were talking about earlier).
What seems to me to distinguish this new work from others in Biocca’s production is an unexpected sense of trust, at least apparently. Over the years, the artist has repeatedly staged what Lorenzo Benedetti has defined as “the excess of communication”[2] of contemporaneity, with its tragicomic implications (in truth, more tragic than comic). Behind a patina made of cartoon figures, chromatic highlights, desktop backgrounds and references to the Internet universe, a form of disturbance and deformation, even horror, has always been hidden. In Biocca’s work, the internet may seem like the apparently harmless and jovial Internet of memes and “LOL”; the artist uses its symbols and communication strategies, but the aim of the appropriation is to show its morbidity, which is impossible to escape.
In the video presented for the first time at the Galleria Eugenia Delfini, in Rome, I find there is a character that is certainly more explicitly tragic and painful, at least at first reading, but then the negativity seems to thin out, allowing a glimpse of a kind of hope. Biocca offers a plastic representation of the state of mind dominated by a poignant melancholy that the abuse of stimuli produces, but she also shows us the possibility – the necessity? – of reaction and, perhaps, of escape from the incessantly connected world.
Faithful to a poetics that leads her to enter and exit the pixelated frame of digital towards the more defined one of life “in flesh and blood”, the artist also exhibits small canvases made with colored air foam and drawings on paper of anthropomorphic vases (the faces are griffins, similar to grotesques), together with two larger sculptures. It is, easy to guess, the incarnation of the dog and the woman protagonists of Disposable Wipes Story.
And yet, there is a gap between the image of the video and that of the sculpture, as if in the passage from one state to the other the two had acquired a body, but lost resolution. The two “three-dimensional” works, which rest on a carpet-base made of artificial skin, appear as stand-ins for the characters seen on the screens, masks, puppets at rest (aspects that amplify their fetishism and, with it, their underlying eroticism). An overlap that further complicates the reading of the exhibition, like the windows of a browser that multiply, like files converted from one extension to another. Avatars of avatars, one might say.
Back, then, to the tragic and disturbing aspect of Catherine Biocca's poetics. The exit from the monitor and the entrance of the dog and the woman into the world of the living have not led to any kind of redemption; assuming that they are still distinguishable, real and digital are equally tragic. Perhaps the time has come to deal with this and to consider both contexts, simultaneously, the cause and the effect of the condition in which we live. Sides of a coin (or windows of a browser, if you prefer) and irremediably affected by a virus that is difficult even to give a name, or even find a cure.
Quite a headache, no doubt about it. And so, the title of the exhibition, ugly woman scratching her head, appears to be the most effective image to summarize the disturbed and low-resolution world that Biocca has explored, leaving the door ajar to allow us to spy inside.
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Saverio Verini is a curator of exhibition projects, festivals, and series of meetings related to contemporary art and culture. He is currently the director of the Civic Museums of Spoleto. He has collaborated with institutions such as the Galleria Nazionale, the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris, the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art, MACRO, the Rome Quadrennial, the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici, the American Academy in Rome, the Memmo Foundation, the Ermanno Casoli Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the ArtVerona fair. He collaborates with the magazine Artribune and writes critical texts for solo and group exhibitions in museums, private galleries, and other exhibition spaces. In 2018, he published the monograph Roberto Fassone. Quasi tutti i racconti for PostmediaBooks; he is also the author of La stagione fatata, published by Castelvecchi in 2022, an essay on the relationship between childhood and Italian contemporary art.
[1] V. Tanni, Exit reality. Vaporwave, backrooms, weirdcore e altri paesaggi oltre la soglia, Nero, Rome 2023, p. 10.
[2] L. Benedetti, essay in the catalog You’re hired, published on the occasion of the anonymous show by Catherine Biocca at Villa delle Rose, Bologna, 2019.
