Some CAT Reviews
Contemporary Art Talk (CAT)
The CAT Review format: Quickly written reviews about shows I saw this weekend. Sorry in advance for any typos!
Candice Lin
Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory
September 22, 2023 – December 16, 2023
Canal Projects
351 Canal Street
If people aren’t talking about Candice Lin’s Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory, they should be: it’s a ghost story that queers digital logics in a demonic, but quite familiar “underworld.” I haven’t heard any murmurs bubbling up under louder forms of art discourse. Maybe it’s because the work isn’t totally new? It premiered in April 2023 at the Gwangju Biennale. And then, on top of that, Triple Canopy published a narrative told from the point of view of one of the Sex Demons earlier this year. It was aptly titled “My Life as a Lithium Sex Demon.”
Both the story and the exhibition reference the digital underworld. The production of digital devices, from tablets to e-bikes, relies on infrastructures of mining and refining, with devastation to the bodies and environments that participate in these chains of action. The underworld looks pretty banal at times in the exhibition: there’s standing desks that have been made to look like someone’s personal workstation, with Post-It notes, photographs, and memes on each desk. There’s some elements referencing hard labor of the factory, but it’s usually in the form of a proxy, like a rock tumbler. Some of the desks have tablets that have been covered in ceramic frames to imply that these computers are at once very, very old as part of what I want to call a “media archaeologic.” This is not a sleek type of art that cozies up well with the sexy stories about progress that come to light in major tech narratives about the Green Transition.
So, there’s mainstream sexy and then with Lin, there’s still a world of Sex Demons who will never belong (even though I oddly find them somewhat cute).
Lin’s multi-titted demon resembles any number of mythic mother wolves like the one who suckled Romulus and Remus back to life. But instead of breasts filled with life-giving energy, there is a corpse demon whose ribcage pops open to reveal dusty residue from once valuable batteries.
Lin’s demons seek to find out if love is possible within this world. Unfortunately, love becomes transmuted like all things under capital into a realm of possession. One desires to possess another and that seems to be love. But that type of possession in the world of the Lithium Sex Demons results in stealing to possess what one does not have, and stealing away to possess one another. Even after death, the end results in everyone continuing to want more—more capital and more flesh.