The World of Yum Yum – Brooklyn Rail

on view

swiss institute
world of yum yum
January 25th – April 14th, 2024
new york

In her first solo exhibition in the United States, Lorenza Longhi illuminates the interior of a fantasy department store with intense fluorescent lighting. The title of the exhibition is world of yum yumFrom the essay “Glamour Wounds” by Rhonda Lieberman. This phrase is given as a nickname for the Chanel boutique, where the writer suffers from vivid anxiety attacks. “The symbolic effect of the staff and products mocking the accusers is that if Coco or Karl Lagerfeld himself were there and looking at me, I wouldn’t have felt as bad,” Lieberman said. Speaking in the middle of a spiral. “I was shocked to be so viscerally besieged by mere products and officials who were actually ignoring me.” At the Swiss Institute, USM furniture, building lobby, warmth and coolness Longhi, a Zurich-based artist with a penchant for the nuances of lighting, takes up this figure with an indifferent and dominant gaze of the product, but rather than giving up on the viewer, the cheap illusions that fuel paranoid consumption and economic Resisting the spectacle of consumerism in an age of inequality and climate crisis, she subjects the objects of our collective aspirations to rigorous and unbiased interrogation.

Spy cameras and flowers are the dual subjects of eight ink and wood-mounted digital prints suspended from the ceiling about five feet from the wall. Some high definition prints include: race riot (all works 2024), featuring flowers woven with tricolored threads with beaded cameras in place of pistils. obsessiona large felt-like perennial with aggressive magenta petals divided into two panels, providing a surplus of almost tactile visual stimulation. StarA long-handled, dark-lensed portrait stuck in a Hello Kitty-branded lemonade can evokes a sense of three-dimensional space, broken only by a layer of ink. Eyeballtwo panels featuring a grid of floral cameras outlined in silver recall Andy Warhol’s high-contrast floral paintings from the 1960s.

Mr. Longhi off season The series is a collection of four boxy walls containing speakers covered in crumpled florist paper, providing a soundscape for the gallery and adjacent hallway and staircase. According to a press release, Longhi took spy camera microphones to department stores in Zurich and New York to record audio. Taura Lamb’s “New Normal,” Desire’s “Tears from Heaven,” both Prince and Sinead O’Connor’s versions of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Taco’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and more. is included in the sampled track. It is reduced to just the surface and sounds, and the persuasive power of the store is nullified. What Longhi’s work focuses instead on are the codes of surveillance and control that we have internalized, recreating the emotional intensity of the store without its distracting specificity.

For the 2020 exhibition in Rome, Longhi used plastic film and cables to create an overhead installation: a suspended ceiling that conceals part of the exhibition space’s original structure. At the Swiss Institute, she once again incorporates an architectural addition, this time a makeshift frieze. The “frieze”, which is lined with white on one side and patterned kraft paper on the other, is secured with silver tape to a device that supports the wooden panels and hides some of the metal equipment. This subtle intervention connects the central ring of the exhibition, where the viewer is “surrounded” by stimuli from all directions, and the peripheral refuge, a backstage area where only the bare wood of the symbolically opted-out panel is visible. It formally inscribes the division between stage of capitalist consumption. Looking at it another way, viewers who were first shown the back of the panel had the option not to opt-in in the first place.

Longhi not only deconstructs the potentially alienating cultural experience of shopping, but also offers a form of resistance through his methodology. Using spy cameras, Longhi is participating in what Canadian engineer Steve Mann calls “surveillance,” a term used to describe the act of “surveilling from below.” Traditional top-down surveillance provides sometimes bird’s-eye access to what Lieberman calls “officials,” such as security guards and salespeople monitoring shoppers and shoplifting suspects. According to Mann, sousveillance, which reverses hierarchy, is more like “a shopper taking a photo of a store owner.” The risks of recording a pop song played in a department store are certainly lower than the risks of eavesdropping or leaking state secrets, but the fact that Longhi is so willing to combine retail and espionage in this exhibition suggests that something is happening at a boutique or shopping mall. A square where our intimate desires mingle with those of others. The “world of Yum Yum” in Lieberman’s essay may function overtly as a space of exclusion, but it also reflects the fantasies and desires of capitalism, where shoppers are humble customers and eternally transitory beings. The entire theater similarly easily enforces norms of pervasive acceptability. Just existing can be a violation. In his essay, Lieberman quips that we should heal our wounds by possessing and merging hostile goods. “If you can, buy it,” she writes, but Longhi’s show is “even if you don’t, you should definitely see it.”