On Marc Kokopeli at Édouard Montassut, Paris
Image produced by DALL-E
Marc Kokopeli, “Meeting people is easy”
Édouard Montassut, Paris
October 20–December 17, 2022
At the Bonner Kunstverein in summer 2021, and the following spring at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York, Marc Kokopeli exhibited a series of more than sixty sculptures made in the style of the pampertaart—a gift that one gives to new parents in the UK and Europe, consisting of arrangements of diapers in recognizable shapes, from multi-tiered cakes to edifices or vehicles. The concept was popularized for American audiences in a Sex and the City episode from the early 2000s, when Miranda is pregnant and Carrie and Samantha order a wrapped pampertaart online. Kokopeli’s versions took the genre to a new level of absurdity. They ranged in specific personalities and references, from a papal entourage to militarized dirt bikes, agricultural tractors, and minimal Calvin Klein-branded looks. Filling the gallery space on low, felt-covered pedestals, the diaper sculptures were as baffling in scope as they were pleasing on the level of craft and attention to stylistic detail.
Kokopeli’s show at Édouard Montassut in Paris, which opened in October 2022, followed from this body of work, but its presentation was more restrained. Seven photo albums lay on milk-white plinths made of thermoplastic at the far end of the gallery. Cotton gloves were there for handling the albums, and viewers could put on white Bluetooth headphones and two canvas girdles designed after the ones Andy Warhol had to wear after he was shot in the stomach.
For the show, Kokopeli explored the neural pathways of text-to-image generative AI models, which were a new and alien territory then, having been released to the public in mid-August. He asked the model DALL-E to produce “a photo of a baby on an atv made of diapers, in soho,” “a photo of a baby riding a motorcycle diaper cake in new york city,” and other similar descriptions, creating hundreds of images that were pasted into the large photo albums as C-prints.1 The results of his inputs depict believable shots of the sidewalks of SoHo, cobblestone streets of TriBeCa, Chinatown facades, NYC scaffolding, and Times Square traffic lanes in bright, sunny-day light or cinematic nights. But the human figures and pampertaart vehicles look pliable, made of bizarre gauzy textures, a computer’s conception of the diaper. Features slide off the forms, and parts adhere to gravity only partially or unpredictably within a realm constructed by an unseeing, probabilistic system of vectorized data.
In the images, the babies manning the starchy vehicles are depicted with a strange, unspeaking but purposeful agency. They roam solo or in packs,some taking calls, commuting, others appearing to do repairs. The fact that the prints are shown in photo albums raises the topic of family, and that these diaper-babies appear to be operating without one. But the absence of the family structure, or any sign of childcare, from DALL-E’s renderings doesn’t seem to come with a liberatory politics, as in a revolutionary abolishment of private property, or a technofeminist world in which automation delivers women from reproductive labor. Here, the nuclear family is deleted, but so too is any palpable form of human kinship. And in the background, the neoliberal city we know appears relatively intact.
Maybe the parentlessness of these DALL-E babies does more as a metaphor—personifying the authorless, copyrightless nature of any raw content generated by AI. The babies’ roving autonomy evokes something of the chaos of free-market competition. It captures the eerie, startling speed with which generative AI models, now in their infancy, have appeared in public—their rapid acceleration in scope and ability, and their power to displace labor pools. Kokopeli’s albums also pose ethical concerns surrounding this new type of authorless picture, its lack of moral onus. There is a cruelty to the anonymous, unfeeling images, which is part of their curiosity. A few were prompted to be scenes of wrecks (“a photo of a baby crashing a mini motorcycle made out of diapers in soho”) and demonstrate accidents with bloodless fragmentation. Others are hard to look at because of the deformations or bandage-like surfaces depicted; there’s a brutality to the synthetic morphing that results from the technology’s strain to picture bodies.
Radiohead’s 1997 tour-diary album OK Computer, a classic Gen X response to robotic corporate and globalized life, played on the headphones as a soundtrack.2 Its title refers to someone verbally addressing a computer with a command (something like today’s “Hey Siri,” or just “Alexa”). Alternately comforting and cloying, OK Computer’s electronic sounds contextualized DALL-E’s images in a lineage of 1990s crash-test-dummy aesthetics or the android-like CPR mannequin on the cover of The Bends. While paging through the photo albums, Thom Yorke’s voice acted like a retrograde pull from early-internet days, giving the feeling of standing in a wake as this new generation of artificial intelligence is dispatched, along with the further social alienation and capital accumulation it portends.
The facsimiles of Warhol’s abdominal girdles were a curious companion to feeling emo with headphones on. After Valerie Solanas’s assassination attempt, Warhol wore these corsets to hem in his damaged internal organs.They pinch on some of the motivating contradictions found in Warhol—being all surface versus alleging referential or biographical depth; he “want[ed] to be a machine,” but was of course only human. Pop art seems an especially analog transition technology in the face of AI and its capacity to mutate new imagery out of massive preexisting training sets. One wonders what Warhol would have made of its appropriative engines, and how it metabolizes us and our contentin real time as we use it, a fact Kokopeli’s show was no doubt playing with.But though the absorption of decades of cultural production—Warhol’s and Thom Yorke’s and Kokopeli’s included—by algorithmic omniscience was summoned, the show’s effect was to retain that bit of critical distance that constitutes art-making. DALL-E was, on the whole, positioned as an object of study, one that artists can probe for its funny vulnerabilities, rather than an object of wonder to which artists are subject. Which aspects of this we will one day feel most nostalgic for is difficult to predict.
The medical girdle and the diaper are both containers for seepage and our bodily lack of control, and thus are both poignant props in the context ofnew debates and boundaries being drawn regarding man versus machine. And then there’s the pampertaart, a sublimatory gift to expecting parents made of wasteful cushioned underpants tied up with bows, a phenomenon so pitifully human that, if a machine could ever understand it, it might truly know something of what it is to be alive.