Marc Kokopeli’s Devices Embrace Half-Baked Nostalgia

Electronic media is, still, a stubbornly sculptural condition: this is the salient point of Marc Kokopeli’s exhibition at Reena Spaulings, ‘MY TV SHOW I ❤ TV’. Contrary to philosophers’ claims of imminent dematerialization, the artist paints a portrait of a society that may be ‘hyper-digital’ but is nonetheless obsessed with objecthood. Our age has spawned gadgets as absurd as merchandise display cases that double as giant touchpads and finger rings that play on-demand reality television – two devices that Kokopeli sourced from Chinese e-retailer Alibaba to form the basis of artworks on view. At first blush, ‘With Friends Like You’ (2023) appears to be a series of small television monitors showing images of cobblestones. Upon closer inspection, they reveal themselves to be vitrines containing physical cobblestones, but whose glass façades are equipped with semi-transparent digital screens that intermittently play video, half-obscuring their contents. These mutant devices collapse numerous economies of virtuality in the staging of merchandise. What is an object, an image, a screen in today’s consumer rituals? With the humble cobblestone, Kokopeli offers a clue: once a potent symbol of urban protest, such pavements are now protected markers for the most gentrified shopping areas of cities – that is to say, physical objects treated as mere signs.

The dialectic between image and objecthood is a longstanding phenomenon in the art history of the vitrine, a container perpetually haunted by the rituals of consumption. Indeed, the exhibition presents itself as a technology trade fair of sorts, offering a range of televisual objects on padded plinths. Many of the objects play loops of 1990s edu-television produced by the artist’s mother. However, in Kokopeli’s hands, noble messaging on topics such as bullying and drug consumption is sidetracked by the gizmo’s lure. Design rationales are meme-ified in works like Facing Up (2024), where a video screen is effectively framed by miniature school lockers, supposedly a consumer homage to the Disney Channel film High School Musical (2006). In one particularly bizarre contraption, a gun-like device has been pimped with a video ‘doorbell’ camera that quietly surveys the sculpture’s passersby, as well as with a switch that turns on white noise (Bazooka, 2024). This ‘firearm’ seems ridiculous, though I was informed by the gallery attendant that its parts are largely the same as the ones Tetsuya Yamagami used to contract the weapon with which he assassinated Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in July 2022.

In Revolution 9 (2024), an oversized media device plays The Beatles’ eponymous 1968 track as a shitty digital rendering of a vinyl record spins in the wrong direction; nearby, a television encased in green plastic – evoking a kitschy, oversized apple – plays clips from another edu-film, this one intended to encourage children to report sexual harassment from adults (Yes You Can Say No, 2024). The eerie fruit leaves a pit in your stomach while also recalling Yoko Ono’s readymade Apple (1966) – a real apple displayed on a gallery pedestal. Ono’s gag-like exercise in ephemerality was famously self-cannibalized in 1988 when she decided to reproduce it in solid bronze – rejecting the nostalgia for the utopian televisual frenzy of 1960s and, as she told The New York Times in 1989, reflecting on a subsequent age of ‘commodity and solidity’.

In this push and pull between Marshall McLuhan-era ideas and the technological present, Kokopeli makes a compelling point: the endgame of media flux is reification – though not necessarily a particularly dazzling or even futuristic kind. The electric age would be one of ‘interfaced situations’, the media philosopher promised in 1967. Instead, we got crude objects that trade in half-baked nostalgia and low-res trompe l’oeil effects. What’s playing really doesn’t matter: we want our screens outsized, curved, touchable, portable. That is to say: we find ourselves, still – stubbornly – in the realm of sculpture.

Marc Kokopeli, ‘MY TV SHOW I ❤ TV’, is on view at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York until 8 March 2025

^{Main image: Marc Kokopeli, ‘MY TV SHOW I ❤ TV’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art; photograph: Joerg Lohse}