I encountered Untitled (Project for the Whitney) when I was just beginning a decade-long professional sojourn into the art world, and dealing with the realities of having a terminally-ill, art-obsessed parent who would never witness any of it. Bag, meanwhile, made the video as an askew homage to her own mother, who hosted a happy-go-lucky children’s show in the 1970s, some clips of which are embedded here. In the video, Bag positions herself as the world’s worst role model, in charge of overseeing a gaggle of grinning child actors who suffer through her madness. The artist is the product of her childhood, and now, technically an adult, she struggles to pull her shit together for long enough to be of help to the next doomed generation.
Untitled (Project for the Whitney) is funny, to a point. Who can resist a browbeating dragon who unleashes sarcastic zingers like “set the GPS to despair” and condemns what Bag is doing as “self-indulgent, masturbatory drivel”?