Relevant Press: Samara Kaplan on congrats and condolences by Barnett Cohen

congrats & condolences, a new and original performance piece by the Los Angeles-based visual artist Barnett Cohen, is an experiential inquiry into consciousness and its relationship to the physical sense of sight. Dominated, as we are, by ideologies of power embedded in cultural narratives—what we tell ourselves about ourselves—as well as current technologies—congrats & condolences articulates the possibility that blindness is intrinsic to our collective vision. Those for whom sight is a given might not see what is actually in front of them. Cognitive dissonance—the gap between belief and behavior—therefore looms large as what we think we see and what we think we know are muddied by exasperation, by the perspective of action as futile. As the planet overheats and intelligent robots replace conscious workers, inaction appears seductive in the face of the unfathomable. congrats and condolences suggests, however, that the first step on the path towards personal and political liberation, towards the attainment of consciousness, is that right view eventually leads to right action. In this ferocious moment in history in which language is caught in the death throes of late-stage capitalism where everything means nothing and nothing means everything, where autocrats and oligarchs the world over have corrupted the relationship between the signifier and the signified, congrats & condolences attempts to disentangle meaning from the clutches of the generally accepted. Channeling the legacy of non-narrative or postdramatic theater, Theravada Buddhism, and the general yip yap that is contemporary communication, congrats and condolences posits that awakening and action are within reach through the shrugging off of empty stories, the dispensing with words, and an embrace of sound as silence.