Elizabeth Jaeger at Capsule Shanghai

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.

When the rooms are not completely devoid of representations of the human presence, individuals are presented as ‘drifters’ on the verge of collapsing, ‘leftovers’ whose role in the world is no different than that of the insects or other animals portrayed. The work In my dreams I am falling, in my life I am falling asleep (2024) epitomizes this aspect of her works: falling may be a reference to ‘falling to pieces’, free falling, falling from grace or many other notable falls in the story of humankind. Dreams are, for Jaeger, realms of intensity, where everything is exaggerated; real life is the less intriguing version. (Un)Crossing boundaries or living between realms and states of existence is not just characteristic of the few human figures presented, but also of the other animals on view: Rail (Flaco) (2024), inspired by an owl who escaped the Central Park Zoo in a storm, and spent a year living ‘free’, peering into people windows and thus reversing the perspective on inside and out, of city and cage, of observer and observed, offers one example of this dynamic. The dogs of Rail (Polly) and Rail (Winston) (2024) are caught in a state of in-betweenness, too. They express the tension of feeling trapped, wanting to act, but perhaps are too ready to be tamed, programmed by humans to be onlookers and companions rather than the authors of their own lives.

Anxiety reaches its climax in the dog depicted in Sudden footsteps (2024). Sharing the same room with Contempt (2024), a mysterious kinetic machine, the canine looks frightened, as if signaling a bad omen. This last space also holds a lifesize woman, Blaming God (2024) – whose mirror-like body reflects her surroundings – the body expresses ferocity with her piercing and intimidating eyes but also vulnerability.

Contempt is an expression of knowledge and will, but in this case, it is rendered mute. Jaeger’s works position the idea of contempt as an aborted driving force that, rather than being a catalyst for change or fighting the targets of one’s distress, instead testifies to a process of acceptance, of impotence rather than stoicism. The prevailing feeling is of a humanity that has become empathically impaired by a blind faith in progress, a product of the erroneous faith in the primacy of civilization. Here one is aware of one’s flaws but unable to correct them, and so becomes embedded in a system that perpetuates itself relentlessly despite its unsustainability.

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.

-Text by Manuela Lietti