Addiction tends to be ascribed to the individual rather than the system in which they are entangled. As long as the uninhibited content producer is put back online, the wider environment can remain fuzzy – unless it heaves into sight in the form of treatment facilities. The gulf in the conditions available for treating addiction is made resoundingly clear in Rob Kulisek’s new exhibition Meg at Paracelsus at VI, VII in Oslo, where the influencer Meg Superstar Princess (Yates) is sent – with the help of montage – to haunt a luxury rehab clinic in Switzerland.
Kulisek is an American photographer based in the electrically charged “between” New York and Paris. He creates photo series for everything from fashion magazines to Texte zur Kunst, has worked with Dora Budor for the 9th Berlin Biennale curated by DIS, and has an ongoing collaboration with the German artist David Lieske. His first solo show was pride rave (part I) in the autumn of 2021 at VI, VII. There he unfolded, in large formats, a lockdown rave in Berlin. Kulisek documented the nomadic party and the participants’ interaction with the city’s insides and outsides: buildings, parks, studios. The images were blurry and intimate – reminiscent of a groomed version of Norwegian artist Maria Pasenau from the time she explored youth culture as seen in her own circle of friends – anticipating a desire for fleeting closeness that marked the aftershock of the global infection control measures.
The photographs in Pride Rave (Part 1) came from a reportage commissioned by the German branch of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. Displaying the images in an art gallery highlights the intersection between visual art and the fashion industry. Bearing in mind the first twenty years of the 2000s, where the intensity of the flow of information brought different modes of expression closer to each other, art’s proximity to fashion feels, at worst, a tad zeitgeisty. Often this symbiosis seems motivated by a search for pulse. So can bringing in the aesthetics from social media and profiles of various kinds.
Yates is a twenty-something New Yorker who has established herself on Instagram as a kind of party and fashion icon, with parts of her lived (or LARPed) blog delving into a history of addiction. The exhibition Meg at the Paracelsus comprises a series of photo collages in which images of Yates, wearing dark eye make-up, striking different poses, and appearing in a variety of attire and states of (un)dress are superimposed on portraits of employees at the aforementioned Swiss institution. Kulisek’s pictures are framed and arrayed as neatly as the staff portraits on the website of Paracelsus, a resort-like rehab clinic whose no less than fifteen employees only treat one client at a time using a holistic approach that promises to see whoever can pay their way “as a human being.”
Kulisek arranges a fictional meeting between the rehab facility’s clinical order and a chaos operator. The result is hazy, haunted, and visually arresting, displaying multiplications of eyes and strange physical mutations. Meg’s teeth crunch hungrily in the eye socket of the institution’s bespectacled medical director. A bare breast overlaps the cheek and nasal bone of the venue’s clinical coordinator while Meg’s head becomes an outgrowth. Across the thirteen photographs – whose titles are Meg at Paracelsus modified by a parenthesis stating the professional title of each employee shown – Meg adopts an array of poses, but remains consistent with her exhibitionist persona. Read as a story about a course of treatment, no deeper change seems to have occurred. Either the treatment bounces off her, or changing the individual is not the point.
I find myself thinking of Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974–75), in which photographs of buildings in New York’s Bowery district mingle with notes describing the experiences of alcoholics and drug addicts. The inadequacy of the descriptive systems she applies to the urban area – known for being equal parts bohemian and impoverished – with the slippage in photography and typewritten text combined, together point towards the systems of which the individuals are part, rather than to the singular, as the source of the addiction. But we live in a different time, where the topic of addiction is invariably tied to the smartphone screen, a means of communication that is equal parts mirror and interface.
Online confessions are filtered and sorted by mechanisms that are difficult to access. At a recent gathering, some friends and I were talking about ghost stories, and an expert in the field mentioned a new element that has been added to the genre: the algorithm as an unknown force that directs and misdirects the user. Here, fear is attached to being caught in a bad algorithm, one which keeps pulling up content that is socially unacceptable, whether we want to see it or not. The fate is similar to that of people who, by sharing their misery online, are brought together in “filter bubbles,” communities of like-minded people who mutually inspire each other to self-destructive actions. Kulisek merges the trust-inspiring employee portrait with the confessional self-portrait. The two forms of presentation are contradictory, yet haunted by the same belief in the individual’s importance – and point grimly to cycles of reinforcement rather than of healing.
