Too Late to New York: Critique Beside Itself in the Work of Marc Kokopeli

In March, I met up with Marc Kokopeli at Black Fox Coffee in midtown Manhattan. We walked, takeaway cups in hand, to the IBM Building Atrium at Madison Avenue, a covered public plaza Marc recognised from when he participated in Occupy meetings there in 2011. He said the meetings eventually fizzled out because the acoustics were so poor. My seven-dollar coffee suddenly tasted worse at the thought that an aural oversight by a civic architect might have prevented us all from attaining universal basic income. We left the plaza through the adjoining Trump Tower, crossed into the retail glare of Fifth Avenue, and walked the few blocks down to the Paley Center for Media, at Marc’s suggestion. An exhibition about the television series Survivor was on there. We spent some time in the theatre watching scenes from past episodes, including one of a former Marine eating salami after winning a food-reward challenge and another of a Texas oil company worker sporting Nike Air Monarchs and cargo shorts talking about emotional manipulation in an episode of Survivor: Samoa (2009) entitled “All Hell Breaks Loose.” We then walked over to see Isa Genzken’s Projects for Outside — ISA USA at Galerie Buchholz, which featured a video work with scenes of the razed Twin Towers site. When we said goodbye outside the New York Hilton Midtown at 1335 Sixth Avenue, metres from where Luigi Mangione is accused of shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the walk seemed to have been edited in real time by the blocks themselves: Occupy, Trump Tower, reality television, Ground Zero, corporate violence, each address interrupting the last before it could settle.