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The cockroach of antiquity and the Middle Ages lived in a cultural darkness—cockroaches were no better off than peasants, their teeming masses obscure, despised, and considered unworthy as a subject of art. Emerging from this age of katsaridaphobia, the 20th-century cockroach made a halting entry into popular culture. Its first notable foray into modern consciousness came with Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” though it must be remembered that not until the 21st century was the original German word ungeziefer consistently translated as “cockroach,” a term which may well be an anachronistic liberty. Gregor Samsa is not explicitly referred to as a cockroach in the original text, and Vladimir Nabokov, a lepidopterist as well as an author and literary critic, believed that Gregor was, technically, “a big beetle.” Nabokov’s argument focused on the wings that Gregor never realized he had, which brings us back to the roach, who is even less disposed to use his wings than the beetle; if Gregor is indeed a cockroach, it is not so much that he doesn’t know he can fly, it’s that he doesn’t want to.
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In the Age of Enlightenment—which roughly corresponds with the Age of Aquarius in the human world—the cockroach becomes more than an analog of the artist experience. Jim Carroll, who performed with cockroaches in the late 60s and exhaustively recounted their presence in his memoirs, tortured captive roaches to appeal to the sadism of his audiences while simultaneously seeking to reject arty pretension. Throughout the 60s, the roach was normatively seen as something to fear—as in the cat-tormenting roach armies of Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers—but the roach is also a curiously hapless underdog. One can’t help but root for those comix legions of roaches; they’re disgusting and militaristic, but, after all, no more offensive than the Freak Brothers themselves. Anne Sexton’s “Cockroach,” first published in the literary journal Antaeus and later collected in 45 Mercer Street, views the hated creature in reverence: “These days even the devil is getting overturned / and held up to the light like a glass of water.” This attitude of meditation and primordial wisdom is perfectly illustrated in Ed Ruscha’s 1972 series of silkscreens on wood, Cockroaches, which featured the ancient species in a light both meditative and noble. A more visceral incarnation of Enlightenment-era reverence can be found in Vito Acconci’s 1970 performance-video Rubbings, in which the artist smashes cockroaches into his naked, hairy belly, and rubs them into his gut until they disappear, until the artist and his divine subject are one.
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The cockroach came of age, appropriately, with punk and no wave. We might pin the first glint of gold to 1981, when Joey Skaggs, an East Village prankster and performance artist, offered the world the cure-all “Cockroach Vitamin Pill.” Skaggs, taking on the persona of entomologist Dr. Gregor, conned the United Press International and WNBC-TV into covering the news item. (Skaggs was interviewed on air by Jack Cafferty and Sue Simmons.) The miracle cockroach pill was subsequently covered in hundreds of venues—until Skaggs outed himself in People magazine.

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In the 90s, the cockroach, now an art star, slipped into the comfortable role of celebrity. Bad Mojo, an adult-oriented computer game from 1996, took Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” as a jumping-off point and put players in the skin of the cockroach. In 1997 Guillermo del Torro’s Mimic fashioned a cockroach Freddie; Marie Osmond, the year before, created the fine-porcelain doll, Count Cocky Cockroach (now highly collectible). Refined, the cockroach graced the pages of Esquire when Robert Crumb—suddenly respectable himself—rendered a 1994 version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. In MTV’s 1996 film Joe’s Apartment and Daniel Evan Weiss’s 1994 novel, The Roaches Have No King, the cockroach was cast as essential to the boy-girl love story. Even pop-culture barometers like the X Files (“War of the Coprophages,” episode 12, season 3 in 1996) and Paul Verhoeven (Starship Troopers in 1997) skittered into the craze.
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In Chalmers’s Infestation, the cockroaches happily inhabited doll-sized dioramas, appearing almost domestic. But in her follow-up series, Execution, first shown in 2000, Chalmers struck the first blow for the Bronze Age of cockroach art. The Bronze Age marks a sudden change in direction—after 350 million years, the cockroach, the archetypical survivor—is no longer surviving.

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Perhaps rightly, the Age of Decline is no more than a tuft of footnotes. The roach itself has been removed from the equation of cockroach art, and the period presents the cockroach only in absentia, or in parts. Fabian Peña, for example, uses roach limbs and wings as a palette for his paintings and renderings. Fernando de La Rocque’s ongoing series Barata de Ouro ("golden cockroach") entombs cockroaches in gold paint—except they’re fake. While at one time de La Rocque used only the genuine article, the sculptures in their Saatchi incarnation are representational, constructed of aluminum, enamel, and paper.Certainly, it's an act of hubris to chronicle the cockroach from the myopic vantage of humanity or to announce it an artistic movement and declare it dead in the same breath. But the cockroach doesn’t speak for itself, and where the cockroach was a cultural muse of the 20th century, the cockroach is curiously absent in the 21st—and where one might expect the soft tentative touches of antennae, there is instead a void. Damien Hirst kills 9,000 butterflies; Samuel Mark decorates trashed furniture with street-style, spray-painted bed bugs; Shiva Burgos leaves the painting to giant beetles. We’re looking at a generation of artists that didn’t grow up with roaches, that don’t live with them, that don’t relate to them, that don’t even know where to find them.

A seventh age of cockroach art—a renaissance—isn’t going to happen. Even in the East Village, the American cockroach has been totally overthrown by the German cockroach, which is wet-shit-colored and measly, an aesthetic disappointment. The roach as we know it—plagued by bait traps and reproductive poisons—is in a state of hysteria, racing helter-skelter through a period that may well culminate in the end of their 5,000-species, 350-million-year reign of the blue planet.The scuttlebutt going around the internet is this: The scales have tipped, and the total mass of the human population now outweighs the total mass of the cockroach population. Which perhaps provides food for thought. With Western nations increasingly concerned with fine dining (Top Chef, etc), climate change’s potential to cause food shortages, and artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija making a compelling argument for communal dining as a form of high art, might we look to non-Western traditions and menus to inspire a new and sumptuous vision of the roach?Perhaps just such a new order is already underway, and the six ages of cockroach art will repeat on a larger scale, a global scale, and will herald the arrival of a yet stronger, more definitive kinship between cockroach and man. In October 2012, 32-year-old Floridian Edward Archbold suffocated after binging on dozens of live roaches during a roach-eating contest. Might our Edward be the first martyr of the cockroach? Angelina Jolie, who of course eats cockroaches, warns only: “There’s this very pointy bit on their stomach you just can’t eat. You have to kind of pop that off.” If Archbold and Jolie constitute evidence of the New Order Reformation, there will shortly follow a New Order Enlightenment, during which the cockroach will become a pretentious foodstuff (enter Tiravanija); next, a New Order Golden Age, during which the cockroach will be elevated to delicacy; the New Order Silver Age will popularize the cockroach, perhaps in the form of snacks or fast food; finally, during the Bronze and Decline periods, the cockroach will loose its headliner appeal, and settle into use as a base ingredient, such as soy or cornstarch.It is somewhat melancholy to imagine the day when the cockroach, once free-spirited and ambling, is born as livestock, no more noble than the chicken too fat to walk, the cow lowing dolefully on the slaughter hook. But through our symbiosis with the cockroach, perhaps we will survive our own scurrying avarice, and find our place in a starry future. We may—even if we don’t want to—spread our wings and fly.