Jenna Bliss Mythologizes the Market

In Jenna Bliss’s videos and photographs, art is capital and finance is a regime – the mouthpiece of which is television. The works comprising ‘Basic Cable’, the artist’s current show at Amant, infuse observations about art and commerce with absurdity and biting humour. Lower Manhattan, a global financial capital, is often the focus of this native New Yorker’s work, yet Bliss’s oeuvre has been more widely circulated and discussed in Europe; ‘Basic Cable’ is her first institutional exhibition in the US.

Referencing Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, Bliss’s montages and readymades invoke popular 21st-century struggles against economic and racial inequality. Comprising a Super 8mm pigment print in a light-box, Western Union #3 (2023) is among the exhibited works that grapple with the continued reign of New York’s Wall Street. Bliss inverted the logo of Western Union, a formerly monopolistic financial services corporation, and superimposed it onto a film still of a person wearing a surgical mask and sitting in a deserted Zuccotti Park during the COVID-19 pandemic. The park is the storied site of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests, a moment in which a challenge to financial authority – effectively a call to value people above logos – ultimately failed.

In other light-boxes, such as Chanel, Orange or the winkingly titled Apple, Omelet (both 2023), Bliss juxtaposes film stills showing Manhattan’s abandoned retail giants during the pandemic lockdown with those depicting dated advertisements of the ‘mom-and-pop’ variety from around the city. The retro light-boxes that house the images represent a near-obsolescent storefront technology, gesturing to consumerism’s material transformations. Drawn from her growing archive – Bliss has been filming the city since 2016 – the juxtapositions demonstrate some of the ways in which financial power plays out across time and through real estate.

Dominated by an ordinary sectional, the cavernous adjacent screening room transforms into a banal, domestic backdrop for Bliss’s 30-minute faux reality-television show, True Entertainment (2023). Resuscitating the skinny jeans-wearing corpse of 2007, the video opens at an art fair in Switzerland to shrill mid-2000s space rock. Each character is a caricature, defined by their profession. Bliss uses her experience of editing reality-television shows (work she began doing in 2007) to provide an aesthetic register in which she can place her artworld composites: the louche handlers, the hollow gallery director, the over-speculated artist. While Bliss clearly appropriates pop-cultural tropes, inspired by scripted reality shows like The Hills (2006–10) and Bravo’s short-lived Gallery Girls (2012), True Entertainment’s amalgamated character studies also feel tied to self-reflexive artworks, like Andrea Fraser’s film May I Help You? (1991), in which a commercial gallery director delivers a tour that frequently devolves into confessions of class anxiety.

Even more than other works in the show, True Entertainment underscores Bliss’s interest in the mythology of our recent economic past. As the plot unfolds, exhibiting artist Lola van Hess becomes her own kind of collateralized debt. Van Hess, ‘most importantly, was a model … an it girl’, gallerist Florian emphasizes, loading significance onto her biography rather than the art itself because ‘literally dirty tablecloths are selling these days’. As all the works are bought and a sharply inclining stock price flashes across the screen, Van Hess breaks down. In light of the American housing market’s fate in 2008, the scene elicits a cringe.

‘Basic Cable’ strives to capture the fallacy of markets, though at times this intention yields to an undercurrent of cynicism. Its title refers to the flattening effects of reality television and the hidden and not-so-hidden circuitries that drive capital. Throughout, Bliss renders the art world and financial systems as twin spectacles: each an elaborate performance of value without substance.

Jenna Bliss, ‘Basic Cable’ is on view at Amant, Brooklyn until 16 February 

^{Main image: Jenna Bliss, True Entertainment, 2023, video still (detail). Courtesy: the artist and Amant}