Jenna Bliss’s “Basic Cable”

The idea of “Wall Street,” a metonym for global capitalism measured against whatever remains of “Main Street,” has far outgrown its connection to the New York thoroughfare that traces the path of the city’s seventeenth-century border wall. Today, the home of the New York Stock Exchange is heavily secured by bollards, fences, and barricades that regulate and restrict public access. Armed with her camera, native-New Yorker Jenna Bliss roams the narrow canyons of Lower Manhattan. Her unsteady lens lingers on passersby and commercial storefronts; gazes skyward to scale gleaming towers; and hovers, from afar, on the skyline’s iconic, yet ever-morphing silhouette. With the September 11 attacks, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Covid-19 pandemic as inflection points, Bliss blends fact with fiction, past and present, to probe our collective perception of Wall Street as a place and an idea—from the ground up.

To produce the Super 8 films and photographic lightboxes on view at Amant, Bliss splices and recombines her material so that her subjects are neither fully revealed nor entirely obscured, but rather held in disorienting tension. Conspiracy and Spectacle (both 2021 and under two minutes long) loop continuously on box monitors mounted atop tall pedestals arranged to mimic the Twin Towers. Though the graininess of her films evokes a bygone era, the towers are only spectrally present in them, as if we still expect to see them punctuating the skyline.

Instead, in a conflation of old and new, Bliss’s superimposed films show us the rib-like wings of the Oculus and the Stock Exchange’s neo-classical façade overlaid with the jittery tape of an airplane in midair (triggering, given the context); and twilight views of the massive, solitary Freedom Tower filtered through radiant sunsets and flashing neons. “ATM” signs hover in the sky like fireworks over the skyscrapers, turning the entire cityscape into an emblem of monetary exchange. Connecting the Dots (2021), a related film that animates a tangled constellation of the city’s illuminated windows, is only viewable on Amant’s security monitors—a reminder that our interconnectedness often comes at the cost of our privacy.

On her use of outdated media, Bliss has written: “It’s not necessarily nostalgic to use nearly abandoned technology as a weapon of resistance.”1 Her hazy, superimposed images do make the present seem dreamlike or outside of time, but the intentional obfuscation keeps her work from slipping into escapist nostalgia. But what is it that her films are resisting?

Though she records her observations with a handheld film camera, and not a smartphone, it is not simply digital technology that she refutes, but its ubiquity and corporate entanglements. With a series of convex, wall-mounted light boxes, Bliss again layers imagery by inserting enlarged film stills into discarded commercial displays. Her images of storefronts, boarded up during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, are intermixed with staged, anodyne photographs of food preparation. Though neither image can be entirely discerned, Apple, Omelet (2023) pairs a shuttered Apple Store with a hand sprinkling spinach into an omelet, contrasting the promise of consumption with its foreclosure.

Bliss previously exhibited her light boxes at Paris+ par Art Basel in 2023, which appears to inform True Entertainment, a thirty-minute made-for-TV comedy, from that same year, about “the world’s most prestigious art fair” in the boom-before-the-bust times of June 2007. Dramatizing a small gallery’s presentation of pill bottle sculptures and blood-and-glitter collages by Lola Van Haas, a fictional 90s “it girl” turned tortured artist, the episode is screened in front of an oversized sectional sofa for self-conscious viewers to sink into, should the art world stereotypes hit too close to home. The work is modeled on MTV’s The Hills (2006–10), a “scripted” reality show similar to the ones that Bliss worked on as an editor, and accurately mimics the genre’s sparkling effects, jangly guitar transitions, scene-setting montages, and constant back-stabbing.

Just beneath Bliss’s heavily ironic skewering of the art world’s inflated, but insecure, sense of importance—easy fodder, I know—lurk signs of a fiscal bubble about to burst. Though most visitors, from overeager collectors to theory-spouting grad students, recoil in front of Van Haas’s work, the presentation is a resounding success. All the while, the outside world seeps into the drama: Van Haas is described as “a phoenix rising from the ashes of 9/11”; her collages of embattled teen idols are dotted with magazine headlines, including “How to sell a war”; and everyone knows the entire operation is a glorified money-laundering exercise. As if foreshadowing the forthcoming economic collapse, the artist has an expletive-laced breakdown.

Bliss’s satire is amusing, especially for insiders, even if the critique feels too easy or glib at times. That may be the point of parody, but the stakes feel lower than in her previous long-form video, the darkly humorous 9/11 mockumentary Professional witnesses (2021). Still, the newer video comes at a time when a rebounding art market is showing signs of recession, and feels relevant as a result. As in the video, the endless progression of auctions and art fairs will nevertheless continue. And like the bitter, bossed-around art handlers who fantasize, at the close of True Entertainment, about opening their own gallery in a still-cheap Brooklyn (ha!), everyone will want in when the going gets good. Grounded in the present but informed by the not-so-distant past, Bliss’s works expose the forces that keep us operating in such cycles.