Shortly earlier than the pandemic, I had a prophetic studio go to with a sculptor who was holding a sale out of his workspace. I left with a fog machine, a strobe gentle, rainbow coloured gentle bulbs, and a few books of artist writings, one titled “Failure,” the opposite, “Appropriation.” I requested what the event was for the sale and he shrugged and replied, “I’m dematerializing my follow,” which I took as shorthand for pivoting to video — one thing many on-line magazines tried in 2015 and what most of us have been compelled to do in 2020.

New York-born, Los Angeles-based artist Tita Cicognani had labored primarily in sculpture and assemblage, an insistently materials follow with humorous invites to the physique, like a chair with a spiked seat titled “Unhealthy Scholar” (2019) or a pink-lit set up of BDSM furnishings, all coated in mushy white shearling (“Fuzz Dungeon,” 2019). She didn’t need to dematerialize. Her 2020 video “I Am So Stuffed with Longing and Want It Gushes Out of My Knees as They Scrape the Floor Upon Which I Crawl Towards You” is nearly a protest in opposition to the circumstances of its personal making. The title would possibly provide you with a really feel for the tone — CGI animations of a writhing determine with grey pores and skin and a black bikini are lower with chaotically brief clips from “The Pocket book,” “Titanic,” Taylor Swift and Christina Aguilera movies, and varied web memes — a biggest hits montage of popular culture romance and High 40 seduction. She additionally began making giant installations combining her movies with sculptural components and soundscapes round a central component: inflatable sizzling tubs. “There are three iterations of the tubs,” she says, “all very completely different.”

We’re sitting in her present set up, sturdy, non–inflatable, at the moment put in on the Hammer Museum, the place she has agreed to an interview with me outdoors of regular museum hours, when guests can join a 45-minute slot to soak in “Coronary heart Tub” (2022), which is precisely that: the schmaltzy stalwart of low-budget love nests that started to appear in locations just like the Poconos within the early Seventies, barreling America’s obsession with hysterical love into the Decade That Style Forgot.

Humorous factor in regards to the heart-shaped tub: what started as an overdetermined catalyst for love has since devolved into a logo of tackiness (see: “Failure”). However loving is nothing if not embarrassing, its expressions at all times somewhat infra dig. Cicognani’s “Coronary heart Tub” set up doubles down on tackiness to the purpose of non secular frenzy, a trance on the secular altar of need. The bathtub isn’t simply purple, it’s purple crocodile-skin vinyl (purple crocodiles don’t even exist! Who comes up with these things!) pocked on all sides with embedded video screens and sitting beneath floating holograms of alien craft and bubbly hearts plucked straight off a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper.

“The primary tub I made throughout the first stage of COVID lockdown and it was in our short-term grad college studios in Chinatown,” she says. “It was definitely associated to what I used to be feeling on the time — very remoted and really alienated. I used to be craving one of these bodily interplay and sharing, this sort of” — she splashes a little bit of water at me — “actual bodily house.” My pocket book is moist.

Artist Tita Cicognani, proper, constructed a sizzling tub for a present on view on the Hammer Museum. Christina Catherine Martinez takes notes.

(Wesley Lapointe / Los Angeles Instances)

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Throughout the fall of 2020, whereas I used to be wrangling these rainbow lights and fog machines to attempt to jazz up the numerous livestream performances I used to be doing out of my condominium, Cicognani was utilizing party-store particular results together with video projections and aforementioned tub to create what grew to become “Mothership” (2021), a small, inflatable pool rimmed with mirrors and LED lights, and topped with a disco ball, like a tiny moist enjoyable home. It’s vaguely redolent of the Gravitron — a county honest staple the place I spent many a summer season scooting myself the other way up, pinned to its vinyl sides by centrifugal drive. Physics is likely one of the few energetic thrills obtainable to bored suburban youngsters who love Jesus an excessive amount of to the touch medicine or alcohol (however not, because it seems, each other).

Cicognani’s work operates on an identical horseshoe of have an effect on the place spiritual and corporeal ecstasy get weirdly shut. Her earlier initiatives embody “Prayer Playing cards” (2019), taking up the feel and appear of the small devotional footage often reserved for photographs of saints, and changing them with a picture of the artist herself in a state of stigmata, or attractive submission, or each. The playing cards are performed up in a Smarties palette of pink and purple and teal, printed with the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. The prayer sounds not solely not like the type of softcore self-help infographics that flow into on Instagram. “Oh, I’m not on social media,” Cicognani says. I’m not stunned. Her aesthetic typically pulls from a generationally shared pool of pop references and the newly modern Catholicism and UFO tradition, however her work by no means flattens into mere aesthetic. Cicognani is at all times making an attempt to drag the physique out of the display screen. Like a benevolent Cronenberg.

Artist Tita Cicognani sits within the sizzling tub she created.

(Wesley Lapointe/Los Angeles Instances)

Her second tub, “Grotto Tub” (2022), was much more carnal. Put in on the artist-run house Leroy’s, a gallery within the former Thanh Vi Restaurant in Chinatown that very a lot bears the architectural options of its earlier life. “That was actually great as a result of the house can also be a bar. Lots of people have been coming late at night time with their mates and consuming within the tub. Opening night time the house was flooded as a result of there’d be like six, seven, eight folks in there at a time. It was actually wild and type of gross, in a very nice approach.” “Grotto Tub” regarded extra like a Madonna Inn rock bathe and delighted in its earthiness. PVC pipes protruding of its partitions pumped a gentle stream of unidentified brown goo. Accompanying movies contained footage of Cicognani and her mates mud wrestling. “There have been much less protocols in place there,” Cicognani admits. Throughout her preliminary talks about bringing the undertaking to the Hammer, Aram Moshayedi, the Robert Soros senior curator on the museum, affectionately referred to “Grotto Tub” as “artwork pupil soup.”

The present set up on the Hammer is an train in scaling up sure types of intimacy connected to the tubs of their extra clandestine kinds. Realizing it right here concerned navigating new logistics like scheduled time slots, launch kinds and constructing codes. “Even this,” Cicognani says, motioning towards the chrome heart-shaped handrail that makes the set up ADA compliant. “That’s not one thing I considered earlier than, however it’s lovely, it really works.”

We sit again and watch the 40-minute video “I Nonetheless Imagine” (2022) looping on a big display screen in opposition to one wall. It’s like being at a drive-in, or somewhat, soak-in. The video follows a green-skinned CGI avatar of the artist with enlarged palms, patting round an inexpensive motel full with its personal heart-shaped tub. The low-res background picture is taken straight from Reserving.com (see: “Appropriation”). The determine falls via the water into an infinite underwater void, freaking out, rising, encountering UFOs and immaculately conceiving an alien progeny. The determine toggles between astral heights and glowering depths, by no means fairly capable of sit nonetheless right here, on the floor of the Earth, the place Cicognani and I sit collectively, watching all of it unfold. “My notions of need and sweetness and love have been all type of constructed on pop music and glossy issues,” she says. “It’s one thing that I undoubtedly rejected for a very very long time and in some way previously couple of years I’ve revisited and embraced it.”

Author Christina Catherine Martinez, left, and artist Tita Cicognani watch Cicognani’s multimedia video from a sizzling tub.

(Wesley Lapointe / Los Angeles Instances)

The modern artwork college is a curious establishment — it’s type of like a faith, although its orthodoxy is extra cerebral than corporeal. “I had the sensation that every one of that may be very corny and I’m not like that. I’m very severe! That was my first yr and a half of grad college: telling myself I wanted to make work that I may relate at all times to concept, specializing in issues that have been attention-grabbing to me, however solely on an mental degree.”

There are mental ranges right here too. “Coronary heart Tub” is aware of its place amongst different our bodies of water in museums, most notably a piece from the Museum of Up to date Artwork’s 2010 exhibition “Suprasensorial: Experiments in Mild, Colour, and Area,” which included a 1973 pool set up by Brazilian artists Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida titled “CC4 Nocagions.” I used to be lucky sufficient to take a dip in that work as effectively. My reminiscence of it felt extra slick and summary, not like the cascade of photographs that float in and round “Coronary heart Tub.”

There’s a potent class-dimension to exploring bibleots of need marketed to an underclass in fixed search of a disappearing center. We speak in regards to the financial subtext of a phrase like “cheesy” and whether or not the 2010 movie “Sizzling Tub Time Machine” is as legitimate a reference because the late theorist Lauren Berlant’s writings on need. “Once I began constructing the primary one the voice of Craig Robinson saying, ‘it have to be some type of … sizzling tub time machine’ stored coming into my head,” she says. “It simply made me chortle and was a reminder of the absurdity of the whole undertaking.” We chortle.

As we dried off with the customized made towels Cicognani designed for the present, I regarded my very own physique. The pea-green towels are embroidered with a picture of the newborn alien from her video beneath the phrases “I nonetheless imagine.” “Please, maintain it!” Cicognani insisted. A consultant of the museum supplied to ship me a recent one. I declined, completely. I really feel prefer it’s a part of the work, I mentioned, realizing that a lot of folks used this one. They assured me the towels are washed after every use.

Christina Catherine Martinez is a author, actress, comic and daughter of Los Angeles. She is a recipient of the Inventive Capital/Andy Warhol Basis Arts Writers Grant and has been named a Comic You Ought to Know by each Time Out L.A. and New York journal. Her e-book of essays, “Aesthetical Relations,” is offered from Hesse Press. She was born and raised in Southern California.

Guests could make an appointment to sit down within the sizzling tub Tita Cicognani created.

(Wesley Lapointe / Los Angeles Instances)

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