Copenger is pleased to present a two-person exhibition featuring Maria Cazzato and Adrian Wong, with accompanying text by Julian Lentchner.
“Each of her buttocks was a peeled hard-boiled egg.” Georges Bataille, The Story of the Eye.
In Bataille's The Story of the Eye, Simone puts an egg between her legs—consciously placing the eye within the site of the desired spectacle. Through Simone’s confrontation with this surrogate eye, the egg, against her body, she synthesizes spectacle and spectator. Bataille writes on these sexually deviant, libidinal actions of eggs and legs between Simone, the narrator, and Marcel, structurally displacing the sight and stare through object doubling and fixation, which Barthes famously argues in his essay, “Metaphor of the Eye.” Nevertheless, Bataille never seems to respond to the most critical question of which came first: the chicken or the egg.
Chicken leg or chicken egg? My chickens (I have 32 chickens) eat their eggs, typically devouring them. When an egg is consensually deemed bad by the flock, the entire brood of hens scramble, viciously attacking the egg—beaks, feet, feasting on pure albumen, yolk, and shell. A good source of protein, you could say. This act is a complete debasement of the egg’s origin, chicken-eating-chicken, continuing a displacement between the beholder and object, as the chicken's consumption of their egg annihilates any signification of spectacle and spectator.
Maria Cazzato’s and Adrian Wong’s work in dialogue, circulating objectivity vs. subjectivity within ‘spectacle’ and ‘spectator.’ Maria Cazzato’s paintings of legs create a spectacle of the libidinal urge, alluring yet forming this resistance, as the viewer never sees the whole body, just intertwining legs, over intertwining legs. Adrian Wong’s photographs of eggs present the surrogate eye, combating the viewer with a reflection of their voyeurism, as the egg stares back at them, solidifying the pleasure an egg holds.
— Julian Lentchner
