Thursday, July 19, 2018

Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International


(link)

As ostensible critique of pharmaceutical, technological and advertorial strategies, Rosenkranz deploys them to great affect in art, using their strategies in consolidating attention and maintaining lure over the viewer. The attractive pink, the technologic jargon. This exhibition showcases among other things "Anemine" "a new generation of medical products" that are synthesized chlorocruorins, oxygen-binding hemeproteins found in many annelids, manufactured green worm-blood essentially.* A portion of the afternoon googling substances, phylums, blood hemotypes, the only results for Anemine are Rosenkranz and a German electronic artist. Maybe Anemie really is that medically cutting edge, but noted about earlier of Rosenkranz by Abreu itself: the substances are often fictional, and Anemine appears an artistic bruhaha of long long line of products and "doctors" with liminal connections to good medicine, from InfoWars guy to Tom Brady's longtime personal trainer hawking products with vague but powerful claims. So long the as the promotion outspeeds due diligence the product will remain valid. And they are fun to say: NeuroSafe, Anthroplex, Brain Safe, Myco-ZX, TB12, Super Male Vitality, medical leeches, all seeming to counteract the very real issues of Atrazine and xenoestrogen, though Obama did not turn the "frickin' frogs gay." Look at the Bosch-like extraction of Horseshoe Crab blood chopped in half and bleeding out in dungeon apparatuses into jars for highly valuable medical technology, for blue blood, so it's not hard to imagine research extracting green worm blood for sport, and for an artist to get the good idea to make paintings with. "gives consumers a sensation of security: the less they understand the terms used to describe the product, the more reliable it seems, because it's at the cutting edge of technology." Horror film foreboding, green blooded insectoids, the large company willing to make money of its extraction, everything there for a real good narrative.


*Synthetic blood is currently being developed and has actually been created before, though though never approved for use anywhere outside of South Africa. A side effect was noted to be flatulence. 




See too: Nancy Lupo at Antenna SpaceNancy Lupo at Swiss Institute