Kate Cooper Disappear Completely
When you enter „Kate Cooper” in a web browser the first image that appears is a photograph of a female bodybuilder, trainer and owner of the Kate’s House of Fitness in Arizona. “I would like to represent this sport as a female, who is strong, independent, intelligent, accomplishes, feminine & sexy without having to present myself as a sex object”, states her personal website*. It seems particularly striking in connection to the recent Kate Cooper’s (the British artist and co-founder of the artist-run initiative in London – Auto Italia) show at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. RIGGED, curated by Ellen Blumenstein, is her first institutional solo exhibition, awarded as a part of the Schering Stiftung Art Award and made especially for Kunst Werke.
The female figure plays a major role in photographic and film images. The character of a young girl has been developed while Cooper’s collaboration with feminist film archive Cinenova at Tate Modern in London. “While the girl is indeed subject to society’s dominating forces, yet her ostensibly marginalized position simultaneous empowers her with her own agency”, says curatorial statement. Like bodybuilder trains her body to achieve ideal muscles shape, the pretty girl with alabaster complexion, is a result of a digital simulation – using new possibilities of CGI technology. The virtual avatar looks like a merge of a British fashion model – Lily Cole, with protagonist of a video game – Lara Croft. Her face and body are present all over the two-storey show.
Advertising aesthetic of billboard-size projections and sterile light boxes activate thinking of different agendas of capitalistic hybrid of gender and labor. The discussion takes place between the digital environment and the space of the gallery. In a dim light human body loses its corporeal properties and becomes equal effigy with the digital. The eternal virtual model is programmed for maximum efficiency – she never gets old or tired. She can infinitely jog and improve her already perfect teeth. Thus, a mortal always appears forceless, but his or her weakness is manifested in an attempt to striving for perfection that they will never achieve. Photoshopped pictures in the magazines are on the agenda since quite a while and High-Tech beauty care does not astonish anymore. What is striking in Kate Cooper’s images is the fact that they are more authentic than any advertising. They show visible pores, freckles, dimples, facial lines. It paradoxically realizes how beautiful human being is.
The soft voice from the screen repeats like a mantra: “Disappear Completely”, which after a while becomes more a curse than a magic spell. Reality, in a sense how we used to understand it, exists now in a state of contradictions. The image is no longer the simulation of reality – it’s the reality itself. It belongs to the parallel world, where the hyper reality and cybernetic coexist. The tactile has been replaced by the digital doubles. What does it mean in terms of representation then? The virtual figures become autonomous entities themselves. It brings about the notion of future and the use of human being in the days to come. Whether it will be reduced only to being an image? Cooper’s avatars belong already to the post-representational world, where ‘post’ does not refer to ‘after’ but rather to the representational state of mind.
Kate Cooper, RIGGED, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, September 14th, 2014 – February 15th, 2015
All images courtesy KW Berlin
LEES OOK METROPOLIS M Nummer 6-2014/2015 ONZICHTBAAR & THE CURATED SELF
Weronika Trojanska
is an artist and art writer
