The Cumbersome: Marc Kokopeli’s Now We Are on Easy Street

Marc Kokopeli’s exhibition Now We Are on Easy Street, which opened during Berlin Art Week, was one of the few to elicit laughter, featuring animated sculptures housed in glass vitrines and pipeline-like tubes. The figures — with their squat torsos, oversized heads, and round eyes — evoke the world-famous, anything-but-child-friendly characters from South Park. Kokopeli, however, pushed this precocious charm into unsettling territory, with hands resembling foetuses. The association with in vitro fertilised beings is intentional, as the accompanying poetic and deliberately multifaceted texts suggest an analogy between “television” and a “heavenly test tube,” where “crystals develop a life of their own.” There is talk of “unpredictably grown little spheres” that have developed a kind of “raw mindfulness.” The figures’ raw, mindless speech recalls the crude humour and misanthropic mockery of South Park’s Eric Cartman. In 1997, during the show’s first season, this humour was not yet a reaction to state-populist madness, but twenty-six seasons later, it has become just that: introducing a cartoonish President Trump who consults the generalized evil, the devil himself. During the run of Kokopeli’s exhibition, the Berlin daily tazdescribed South Park’s struggle with the “reality principle” as a reaction by its creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone to Trump’s second election victory, portraying it as a pointedly exaggerated crisis of reality-turned-travesty that spares no one from “self-inflicted immaturity.” Kokopeli’s Easy Street as world theatre calls the contemporary abyssal political state its backdrop. At the same time, it opens up to more.