There’s something about Mark

Marcus David
September 2019

Claire Jervert,  Mark Zuckerberg Eyes

Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most recognizable CEOs in the world and over a billion people use his free social networking website Facebook. He’s also a fitness buff, multilingual, and known for being frugal. Because of his weird quirks there is even speculation that he may not be a human being.

A question worth considering is what compels artists to create artwork that focuses on this man. After all, there seems to be quite a bit of it out there. For clarity on this, curator George Metesky provides us with a sampling of five artists from around the world, each working independently and each offering their own unique angle on Zuckerberg in the exhibition, Portrait of Zuck at Galerie Manqué.

The exhibition features work by Sandra Araujo, Marion Balac & Carlos Cabonell, Bob Bicknell-Knight, Ryan Garvey, Ben Grosser, Claire Jervert and Lane Twitchell.

Sandra Araujo, u$aar v3.0

Facebook is an essential 21st century tool that allows friends and families to stay connected, and its power is undeniable. In 2011, ordinary Tunisians used Facebook to communicate and organize during a critical period that lead to the Jasmine Revolution that in turn launched the Arab Spring. On a darker note, in 2016 the Russian government used Facebook to conduct an influence operation that helped propel Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. What is obvious is that Facebook has changed the way we humans comport ourselves on Planet Earth and that, to most people, is a very scary thing. Whether we are talking about straight up mind control or God-like power over the whole of humanity, there seems to be no limit to the paranoia that Facebook can inspire, and the public face of that fear and awe is Mark Zuckerberg.

Ryan Garvey, Wicked World in 32 DPI

From the overtly political to the profoundly humorous, the range of work in Portrait of Zuck is broad. In the realm of video installation, Sandra Araujo injects a dose of political intrigue with u$aar v3.0, which aims to connect Trump, Putin, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, while Marion Bala & Carlos Cabonell’s musical odyssey Mark follows a CGI Zuckerberg (a Zuck head on Smurf- like body) from birth to CEO of Facebook to US president and beyond. Ben Grosser gives us a taste of what matters most to Zuckerberg in his video work titled ORDER OF MAGNITUTE, a super cut drawn from Zuckerberg’s most favored words, namely “more” and “grow.” In the 2-d realm we have Bob Bicknell-Knight’s Mark’s Fifth, which depicts Zuckerberg as a trophy hunter with a freshly killed hippo, inspired by an interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, where he stated that there was a year when Zuckerberg was only eating what he was killing. In contrast to all the hi-tech forms previously mentioned, we have Claire Jervert’s delicately rendered drawing of Zuckerberg’s eyes with their oft-remarked-upon unusual quality. One gets the impression that there may be something mechanical or even digital behind those eyeballs. Finally, in the more abstract direction, we have Ryan Garvey’s Wicked World in 32 DPI which complies images of cable news chyrons related to Facebook and Lane Twitchell’s Winter’s Discontent #3 (So-So), which cleverly incorporates the familiar thumbs-up “like “ icon into a circular, mandala form. suggesting there actually may be a religious devotion to the pursuit of likes.

Taken together the works in Portraits of Zuck give us a vision of a world controlled and curated for us by technology, and the personification of that technological tyranny at this moment is Mark.

Marion Bala & Carlos Cabonell, Mark

Portrait of Zuck
Galerie Manqué
September 6 -29
56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn

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