Installation view of Rochelle Feinstein’s The Today Show, at Secession, Vienna, Dec 2024-Feb 2025, photos: Oliver Ottenschläger via Galerie Francesca Pia
In her solo presentation, The Today Show, which closed a couple of weeks ago at the Secession in Vienna, Rochelle Feinstein left blue painter’s tape around some works to reveal the process of exhibition making and encased other objects in slabs of acrylic. Obviously, I was very interested.
Installation view of Rochelle Feinstein’s The Today Show, at Secession, Vienna, Dec 2024-Feb 2025, photos: Oliver Ottenschläger via Galerie Francesca Pia
I was especially interested in the beautiful and slightly inexplicable object on the floor, which looked like a painting embedded in a slab of acrylic. There was no checklist, and no caption. [shoutout @voorwerk for reblogging @peabah on tumblr.]
In the press kit it is called Embedded (2024), and is described only as a “resin floor piece.” In his catalogue essay the show’s curator, Damian Lentini calls it Embedded I, and notes how its “creased, slightly-off-rainbow-coloured dropcloth…appears as an almost fossilised remnant from a bygone era.”
Rochelle Feinstein: “The Embedded piece is deeply embedded in resin; I think it’s to really pickle them.”
Stephanie Weber: “There’s one piece on the floor that’s a dropcloth that’s dyed, in resin. Today you talked about the embedded piece on the floor. You said something that’s typical for your sense of humor about why you had to embed the dropcloth. Can you—”
RF: “Can you tell me what I said?”
SW: “It’s much better when it came from you: ‘It’s a dropcloth, it’s consumed by everyone, and I like how—“
RF: “So the material itself, not necessarily the embedding process. It’s almost a decade-long project that I’ve been working on, on Amazon—not Amazon [the river], but Amazon the monster. So I’d gotten a very cheap dropcloth for a studio in Rome, and I realized it was better to paint on it than use it on the floor. And that started my relationship with this fabric which, in the art sense, wouldn’t be considered part of a textile exhibition, or a weaving one, or something related to the artisanal craft—jacquard loom, which a lot of artists are using now for fabric hangings.
“And what appealed to me in the pieces on the sides, and the [Red] Dawns, and in other pieces which are not here, which are ongoing, is the cheapness of it. This consumer item that comes from Amazon. And I looked for the cheapest one. And it presents a challenge in holding paint. It’s that kind of weave that’s so terrible, paint goes right through it.
“And so I really began to work with it. And it comes folded. It comes in a small package, and the folds become part of the grid piece. So there’s grids all over here. And so the folds that are in the fabric pieces are deliberately left there as a kind of template.”
SW: “But then she also said, ‘Oh it’s so nice because you can fold it together. It’s so small, you can take it everywhere. But then I thought, maybe I’ll just embed it in this huge thing of resin. Then it’s not portable at all anymore.’ [laughs] And I thought, this is like a process, or a sense of humor that you often have in your method, where you make something incredibly impractical for yourself.”
RF: “Yes, but also because I wanted it to be on the ground—
“I should point out that all the work in here is based upon the seven colors of the rainbow, so that it’s staged, [gestures around the gallery] Richard Of York Gave Battle In [The I is Indigo] In Vain, and I’ve been working with that very restricted palette in various ways for the last couple of years. So the Embedded piece that’s on the ground really comes out of this rainbow mush, the mush of the rainbow.
Justin Lieberman: “I remember this morning that you said you wanted to lay it to rest. And you put it on the floor because it would somehow be like a tomb in some way,”
RF: “To encrypt it, to encrypt it.”
JL: “And I was thinking about that, and one thing that’s interesting about that is there’s only a few things that are entombed in such a visible way. Usually you don’t see the thing that is entombed. But like, Lenin and Mao were entombed in such a way—
RF: “Yeah”
JL: “—where you could still go visit them.”
RF: “And there were a few different Maos, too”
JL: “So I think there’s a kind of—there’s something interesting to me about this idea that the thing is going to be—like, what does it take to set something aside, but still be able to return to it, you know?”
RF: “I think that in traditional burials, whether it’s in a church, a cathedral, or plein air—
JL: “Saints. Saints are entombed that way.”
RF: “Yes. yes, they are. But that’s not a saint. That’s a rainbow. And it’s really kind of, um, it’s laid to rest. I’m just over the aspirational aspects and hope of a rainbow, with my cynicism. yeah, yeah.”
Lentini explained this a bit more in his catalogue essay:
Feinstein’s decision to restrict her chromatic range to the ROYGBIV spectrum also indirectly recalls the way in which gestures and materials circulate and are remediated within contemporary culture. Stripped of associations with hope, aspiration, and inclusivity, this rainbow palette is instead smudged, stained, and streaked across the canvas grounds, becoming yet another empty signifier to be smacked on to a range of surfaces and goods – such as the surface of the rainbow hoodie that Feinstein recently spotted during an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (Fig. 6).
the c. 2023 rainbow hoodie at MoMA that was apparently the last straw for Rochelle Feinstein, via her Secession catalogue
Feinstein was struck, on the one hand, by how this brilliant demonstration of these colours could stand in as the embodiment of joy and empowerment, while simultaneously also representing an empty gesture akin to rainbow emojis and other forms of hollow corporate virtue signalling. In this way, the rainbow hoodie acts as both an affirmation of hope, and as an adapted form of camouflage for the wearer: a protective shield against the accelerating normalisation of rampant disorder that constitutes the contemporary moment.
This does not feel like it’s helping. And how is this somehow a hoodie at MoMA’s fault? A hoodie that is not only not a protective shield these days, but a target, and not in a moment of rampant disorder, but of systematic, organized demonization? I’m feeling especially not interested in Feinstein’s project.
