'In Black Pleasure (2017), Jack Marder uses moving image, sculpture, print and text to examine the ways that online cultures and physical bodies become intimately intertwined. Working within a postinternet mode, the artist reveals strong links between sexuality and consumption within fringe internet communities. While postinternet artists like Jon Rafman have also used memes and extreme videos in their work, Marder seems interested in them not simply for their abject and horrifying nature, but also in finding ways to uncover the mystifying properties that situate these virtual images between fantasy and reality.
 

He said eat fat boy through gritted teeth is a video that conveys a variety of fetishes including obsessive food consumption and fat kink. A dizzying array of frames, videos, images and text combine within the virtual environment, showing real or simulated images of bodies becoming bloated while food, objects and even tiny people are placed inside closely framed mouths. Another video, Black Pleasure, shows a 3D digital model of an old ceramic pot that the artist found in a craft museum whilst completing a residency in Japan. While we see views circling around the digital model of the pot, obsessive and disturbing chat messages pop up onscreen. These messages are from user ‘hiki_pot’, drawing a connection between a reclusive object stashed away in a museum vault and hikikomori, modern-day hermits predominantly found in Japanese society. “Black Pleasure” also refers not only to the slick, globular sculptures that are found throughout Marder’s installation, but as well to the subject of the text ‘Black Pleasure: are you still watching?’, in which the narrator recounts a scene in which a formless, sentient black mass erotically fuses with and takes over their body.

While probing the crossover between the virtual and the real in online fetish communities, Marder paints a vivid picture of the pleasure and pain that obsessive consumption can create. Just as one can consume, one can be consumed by desire, lust or greed. This examination feels particularly apt when one considers that a capitalist society is one based on consumption, with this fetish imagery being distributed on corporate platforms (like YouTube and Twitter) and accessed via laptops and mobile devices, each of which sits shattered within the installation.'

 

- Herb Shellenberger, Curator and Writer, 2017.