Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Burgeoning technological innovation over generations has brought out the millennial optimist in many, but, especially outside the bubble of the tendentious capitalists eager to cash in on their investments, it may have unloosed the Luddite paranoiac in more. “Goings On,” a pastiche of Mark Fingerhut’s cheerfully invasive videos deftly curated by Lonesome Dove and recently screened at Springs Projects in Dumbo, speaks to both – the one in knowing condescension, the other in sardonic affirmation. Blasts of images that rankle sometimes owing to their content, sometimes because of their staccato presentation and creepily fluid mutability, make a case for the digital matrix’s weird agency and, beyond that, its insidious seductiveness.
Fingerhut’s snippets snarkily suggest that everyone is ultimately disposed to suicide and that the indelibility of posted content might reinforce that predilection. Breakdown is an especially clever – and grating – evocation of users’ helplessly mindless captivity. It starts with the deadpan declaration that “this video is a waste of time” and a proceeds to prove it over its course as the self-loathing narrator points a handheld camera at his feet while walking aimlessly through a messy apartment, concluding: “So, this is the whole video and it was bad. God fucking damn it.” Viewers watch this lazy dreck simply because it is on a computer screen in front of them, as they watched Seinfeld – the show about nothing – just because it was on TV.
There’s no denying that Fingerhut’s loop is an unalloyed – therefore instructively candid and cruel – simulation of many a wasted day in real life. It is also an illustration of how the internet can enable futility insofar as it traps users “in the spaces between the digital and the corporeal,” as Lonesome Dove puts it in the trenchant little book accompanying the screening. She worries that it squelches humanity. Yet the low-tech, DIY feel of Fingerhut’s work and the arch minor key of his narration reveal just that – humanity – alongside the casual humor that confirms it. The Replacements, via Paul Westerberg, wryly observed that “a person can work up a mean thirst after a hard day of nothin’ much at all.” Like them, this show, unpacked, seems not to despair of that fact of human life so much as merely to take note of it. What people do with the information is still up to them.
“Mark Fingerhut: Goings On,” curated by Lonesome Dove. Springs Projects, 20 Jay Street, Suite 311B, Brooklyn, NY. Screenings on August 28th (Mark Fingerhut, curated by Lonesome Dove), September 9th (curated by Sara Jordenö), September 11th (curated by Optical Animal), and September 14th (curated by Clea Rsky), 2024.
August 28, 2024.
About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
