Capsule Shanghai is delighted to present Contempt, the first solo exhibition in China by the New York-based artist Elizabeth Jaeger (b. 1988 San Francisco; lives and works in New York). Loosely inspired by Alberto Moravia’s novel of the same name, Contempt brings together Jaeger’s most recent body of works, notably ceramic and metal pieces specifically made for this show. The exhibition unfolds across four halls of the gallery – all of which are interconnected yet independent – and explores the idea that contempt permeates various aspects of human life, whether manifested individually or societally.
René Descartes’ Passions de l’âme marks an important milestone in the history of thinking about contempt as a distinct idea. Prior to Descartes, philosophers rarely included contempt in their taxonomies of the passions, treating it as a subspecies of indifference. To have contempt for something meant to be free of passion in relation to it. Descartes expressed the dual nature of contempt: its potential utility as a discouragement to vice, while at the same time presenting it as just as unruly, capable of abuse, requiring regulation. Following Descartes’s intervention, philosophers increasingly came to include contempt among the passions. This led to changes in lived understandings of the concept as well as philosophical implications.
For this occasion, Elizabeth Jaeger transforms the gallery into a living theatre set. The viewer immediately becomes aware upon entering of the unusual presence of a prolonged metallic sound, (whose origins are revealed in the farthest room of the gallery). The sense of alienation is deepened with dystopic scenes depicting a world almost devoid of humans; the viewer walks among artworks that serve as both actors and props, and is suspended in a constant state of semantic ambivalence and liminality. Jaeger’s Contempt conveys a strong sense of the passing of time, leading the viewer into an oneiric state where it is unclear whether one is navigating the past, present or future; it enwraps the visitor into a total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk), in which each element speaks to our times at both the micro and macro scales.
The show opens with a post-human scene: a room filled with ceramic flowers, neatly arranged on structures resembling tombs (Colma, Isola San Michele, Woodside, Borella, Fushimi, 2024). The delicacy and precariousness of the flowers is experienced through their swaying at the passage of visitors. Beauty and decay share the same space. Juxtaposed with the flowers are insects and animals represented at different scales, a leitmotif of this show: worms, rats, birds, but, most of all, beetles. More than 600 beetles invade the gallery, constituting not just an all-pervading visual element; the energy they emanate, their industriousness and their frantic movements turn them into a sonic element as well, a permeating noise, a crawling synesthesia linking the gallery halls to each other.
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Like Jaeger’s protagonists, humanity finds itself at a crossroads. The instinct to act does not equate to the capacity to act. Awareness of this state is itself a vector of tragedy; as in Jaeger’s Blaming God, it seems as if humanity is left grimacing, its shaking body fit only for procrastinating rather than truly engaging.
Elizabeth Jaeger: Contempt
Aug 17 – Oct 26, 2024
Capsule Shanghai
Shanghai, China
