If
You Read This You're A Dickhead - or - You've Got To Be
Fuckin' Kidding
Infectious Humour, Affected Art & Referential
Effect
catalogue essay for WIT'S END, Museum
of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1993
In a scene from the film Heathers (1989), one of the young
rich bitches - all of whom call each other Heather - rips
open her locker door. The scene in question is brief, a
few lines of dialogue with the other Heather are exchanged
in a crowded, middle class high school corridor. The mise
en scene is set up to frame a passing parade of schoolkids,
each belonging to one subculture or another, and to focus
Heather against the inside of the locker door, festooned
with scraps that make up her 'identity'. A flash of red
surreptitiously catches the eye: a small red postcard with
white letters in italicised Helvetica Extra Bold proclaiming
I Shop Therefore I Am. Heather slams Shut the locker as
an edit takes LIS to the next scene: BANG/CUT! Approximately
15 seconds of screen time in a film lasting around 100 minutes.
Let's Start with that 0.25% of Heathers.
An
audience hip-o-meter, would indicate that most people would
find humour in the postcard for two distinct reasons: (1)
they recognise the droll reference to Descartes' famous
quote "I think therefore I am"; or (11) they've encountered
variations on that gag throughout a fair portion of their
lives, in either magazines, sitcom asides or witty editorial
headlines (all of which have made numerous puns on the Descartes'
quote). A smaller percentage would recognise the postcard
as object, and identify the author of the gag as Barbara
Kruger, the postcard being derived from one of her works
from 1987 [Fig.1]. This is where things get complicated.
Is the character of this particular Heather hip because
(i) she is hip to (i.e. intellectually versed in), digs
at Descartes ; or (ii) she is hip to (i.e. socially informed
of), the anonymous spread of popular humour; or (iii) she
is hip to the specific humour of Barbara Kruger (i.e. knowledgeable
of what that humour implies in the context of contemporary,
theory laden postmodern art)? If this question is absurdly
rhetorical, does it consequently mean that the character
of this Heather is vague, undefined and meaningless? Or
is this particular scene totally insignificant?
The
old production of meaning template can actually be of some
help here. Look at the credits at the end of the movie.
In amongst the over 300 names listed, there will be some
attached to categories such as production design, art direction
and/or set decoration. One of them was employed to figure
out what to stick on the inside door of Heather's locker,
and given money to purchase those items. That someone also
had to posit a script relevant reason for selecting those
items, and their choice would have been approved by someone
else, anyone from the head of art direction to the director,
Michael Lehmann. Acknowledging this, we can replay our series
of questions concerning the audience's level of cultural
recognition to the person(s) responsible for selecting the
Barbara Kruger postcard. Did they simply walk into a store
like Heaven and spy the card amongst other 'cute' postcards,
like those depicting John Waters' gargantuan screen queen
Jean Hill, Japanese dressed up cats, or Paper Moon airbrush
illustration of muscle men's sweaty buttocks, and think:
"Hey, that'll do great for Heather's bitchy shopping mall
character"? Or did they flash: "Hey, I'll stick in one of
Kruger's postcards as a little in joke"? We'll probably
never know unless someone from the production mentions it
in passing in a published interview.
The
Descartes/Kruger reference doesn't so much refer us to a
textual location (this person who said that at one point
in the history of discourse), but rather refers to a labyrinth
of hollowed out cultural references, each and every one
being a seismic site of previous usage. What we are confronted
with in this excavation of language is a score of echoed
voices, each repeating a phrase along the lines of "I think
therefore I am", but not one declaring itself as the originating
voice, or laying claim to authorial grain. If we were ever
to navigate these labyrinths to discover Descartes down
there somewhere, we wouldn't be able to hear his voice -
his right to authorial power - due to the deafening din
of those other voices and their vocal impersonations, impressions
and characterisations. There is a simple metaphor for this:
noise. An overload of communication due to multiple, simultaneous
transmissions, which are beyond the directional capability
of a receiver to distinguish or locate sources of utterance
and emission. An equally succinct denotation is 'Popular
Culture': the disembodied chorus of the amorphous masses.
Far from being subjected to a communication breakdown or
signal cancellation, those masses are the subject of references
like the scene from Heathers. True to their name, the masses
are as amorphous, yet material, as the gag in question is
anonymous, yet multiple.
Such
a minor incident in a film has allowed us to pinpoint certain
crucial mechanisms of cultural referencing (which for the
moment we can qualify as 'cinematic effect'), and to fix
on the peculiar dynamic of quotation, which throughout the
eighties has effected everything from magazine layouts,
to stand up comics, to childrens' toys, to pop songs, to
(at the end of the line), contemporary art. It appears that
all have undergone condensation and displacement in the
name of social commentary, rendering many poetic, structural
and political interpretations of then meaning obsolete.
Negative views of this demise of cultural and artistic discourse
abound as cannibalistic, parasitic, or simply banal. Born
from the frenetic pace of referencing, their allegedly amoral
and ambiguous effects arc also experienced as being out
of synchronisation with the measured construction Of literary
signification, ie. the steady deployment of the message,
the moral, the viewpoint, the concern, and the subtext.
Such negative views are supported by architecturally derived
notions of structure, meaning and signification, where things
are built and handled like material according to a master
formalist plan. Hence the collapse of meaning, the implosion
of culture. the deconstruction of the text and so on.
But
quite aside from the boundaries drawn between modernists
and postmodernists is a different field of inquiry, where
one can readily acknowledge that those cavernous paths made
by incessant referencing and quotation eventually construct
an anti matter version of the classical strictures of structure.
Here the passages of negative space have become the very
material from which a new construction can be engineered,
and structure becomes something composed of, and defined
by, an immaterial network. As hollow as the practice of
quotation can be, it does not precipitate that erosion of
its sources, but rather allows references to flow through
semantic, symbolic, and semiotic tunnels, without halting
or blocking them in the name of meaning.
As
an audio-vistiual textual apparatus, cinema foregrounds
a dynamic which allows references to flow on-the-run, and
to alter them so as to facilitate its narrative tunnelling.
Throughout the eighties (and especially in its address of
the oppressive social realism of seventies cinema), movies
developed mechanisms which foregrounded play, often throwing
audiences into a labyrinth only to instantly recoup them.
This is cinema which openly terrorises more than it placates,
desensitises or inoculates. Certain directors made their
reputation here, by relegating what were once structural
conventions (plot, character, motivation, climax, resolution.
etc.) to background staging and detailing. openly exhibiting
narrative conventions and codes of realism as theatrical
facades. Their movies invert the classical form/content
and foreground/background relationships between mise en
scene and narrative, subsuming everything into all expanded
and destructured audio visual field of signification and
effect; communicating through overload.
A
good example is Joe Dante. He started editing trailers for
Roger Corman's New World company, and eventually went on
to make movies for their ribs and digs at anything you could
think of. The Howling (1981), Gremlins (1984), Explorers
(1986), and Inner Space (1987), lampoon culture and its
artefacts with alarming precision, complexity. and speed.
So much so, that their strata of referencing operates at
a textual hyperspeed removed from both the rhythm of plot,
and the flow of narrative (hence the afore mentioned effect
of a reference being out of synchronisation with the literary
text). Virtually every frame in Dante's scenes are brimful
of colloquial and immediate references: TVs playing in the
background, cars passing drive in screens, radios playing
songs, posters on bedroom walls, badges and TV shirts on
characters, snatched lines of dialogue delivered by characters
whose names are puns on famous figures and so on, all creating
a sensurround generated by mass culture's communication
to its media self. The social fabric in Dante's films is
threaded by intersecting airwaves: a material version of
the immateriality of the negative space created by contemporary
cultural referencing. On par with Dante's hyperventilating
hilarity are John Hughes's teen comedies, particularly 16
Candles (1984), Weird Science (1985). and Ferris Bueller's
Day Off (1986), which operate along similar lines of transmission.
Perhaps even more radical is the networking between Sam
Raimi and Joel and Ethan Coen whose films Evil Dead (1982),
Blood Simple (1985), Crimewave (1985), Raising Arizona (1987),
and Evil Dead II (1987), collectively attain the mode of
address, tone of delivery, and pace of presentation endemic
to this type of contemporary cinema.
Heathers
- salaciously marketed as "The Breakfast Club in Hell" -
is not a particularly good example of this facet of eighties
cinema (it is more an example of how carefully one can aim
for a Cult audience), but it shares the reckless approach
of Dante, Hughes, Raimi and the Coens, and does have its
moments. The locker door scene with the Kruger gag is one
of them because it initiates a crucial play with the audience.
The hip player in this game is one who can spot the most
immediate reference before it becomes lost in the secondary
network of signs which immediately opens up. Recognising
Kruger is then hipper than recognising Descartes. Perhaps
this is one aspect of what is meant by the death of history
- knowing the present or presence of an utterance in place
of its past or passage. However, history is far from dead
because its corridors and chambers are always full of tourists,
scouts and anthropologists. The hippest way to play the
game is to trace - intellectually or instinctively - a backwards
path through the labyrinth, not to uncover the origin of
the quotes (pedants and purists already do that), but to
demonstrate either a knowledge of, or a feel for, where
the echoes are heading.
Trained
as Picture editor for Con& Nast, and presumably adept
in this process of part-intellectual part instinctive linage
selection, Kruger plays the game well. Her work between
1981 and 1984 perfectly collaged retro mass imagery onto
text banners of suitably ambiguous political rhetoric. The
retro aesthetic was already strategically employed in post
Punk fashion, music, and graphic design in the late seventies,
and was an extension of Eduardo Paolozzi's collages from
the late forties and early fifties. While much French theory
was heaped onto her work, not much note was made of her
real triumph: fine tuning the retro aesthetic by successfully
mutating the formalist techniques of John Heartfield's anti
fascist photo montages from the thirties, with a Rod Sterling
voice over narration straight out of The Twilight Zone from
the fifties. The greater appeal of Kruger's work - the potential
resonance of its humorous commentary in the public arena
comes from this mix of referencing political art and sci
fi TV, rather than her skill in selecting images, her ideologically
sound content, or her wit in combining the two.
Kruger's
style and method established during this period developed
two particular instances of image-text ground work. The
first is Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Flore's The Medium
Is The Massage (1967), which was designed as "an inventory
of effects" to graphically depict the functional operation
of the book's title - the title page in fact uses an image
used by Paolozzi for his Wind Tunnel collage of 1950. A
sarcastic dandy whose views on the media eventually brought
advertising agencies courting his views on consumer psychology,
McCluhan stands as a precursor to Jean Baudrillard's concepts
of simulation and effect in contemporary culture. The second
instance relevant to Kruger, is the lesser known postcard
work of John Stalin and his company The People's Police.
[Fig.2]. Easily identified by their checkered borders, Stalin's
work was a very influential approach to collage which typified
much Punk and post Punk graphic design, particularly for
record covers. More importantly, Stalin's postcards (published
as three major series in 1980, 1981 and 1983), were often
based on a single unaltered image. onto which was laid a
text banner which instantly transformed one's interpretation
of the image.
Only
occasionally exhibiting in galleries, Stalin preferred to
work as a producer of postcards and will unfortunately obtain
at best a small footnote in art history. Kruger's career
change from commercial media to fine art, has more far reaching
consequences. Like Stalin, Kruger's real skill was to select
images basically free of reference interference: passages
devoid of immediate references which the viewer must recognise
and pass through to arrive at a meaning This deliberate
lack of specificity (in work which dates from the early
eighties) was a manoeuvre which induced a multiplicity interpretative
possibilities and ambiguity of effect. Yet once it was translated
into the discourse of fine art the same lack of specificity
serviced a vacuum (popular culture as anonymous and indiscriminate),
and was filled in with the identity of Kruger as author.
Fine art discourse has traditionally exploited such a gap
to extol creative virtue, and in this instance to credit
Kruger with the total effect of her appropriated imagery.
Much postmodern art which deals with popular ulture in fact
operates in this way - de-contextualising, and then re claiming
it on a higher level.
Kruger's
later work plugged into contemporary popular culture more
directly, but so much of the critical appraisal of works
like We Don't Need Another Hero, and What, Me Worry? (all
1987), appeared ignorant both of the immediate references
and colloquial mode of address being used, as well as the
satiric bite of the original. For example, We Don't Need
Another Hero (the title of the theme song to Mad Max III:
Beyond Thunderdome) was held to champion feminism, as if
Tina Turner either didn't exist or was somehow not doing
the same; and What, Me Worry? (the phrase captioned for
promotional images of Mad's Alfred E. Neuman) was supposed
to critique social irresponsibility, as if Mad magazine
either didn't exist or was somehow not doing the same. [Figs.3,4,5).
My
point is that while Kruger is effectively critiquing culture,
the very culture she critiques is already critiquing itself,
from Mad to Mad Max. Inasmuch as her previous work was deliberately
unspecific (in the tradition of Heartfield, Paolozzi and
Stalin), this later work is very specific so much so that
many art patrons either did not note the immediate references
or thought them irrelevant. There is also something awkward
about the way in which Kruger's work foundered, and was
confounded by, certain aspects of communication overload
in popular culture. It alerts us to some of the ways in
which that strategy can be confused, co opted or corrupted
by fine art's distanced perspective on popular culture,
and also how postmodern artists are forced to juggle with
these politics of representation.
As
problematic as it is, the value and power in Kruger's later
work is in its implicit critique of the 19th century notion
of the artist estranged from society, heroically expressing
his innate individualism. This critique begins with Duchamp
and dada, developing through Hamilton and the British Independent
Group, and peaking with Warhol and American Pop - a lineage
to which Kruger and most post-Pop Art is aligned. While
this lineage has been circumscribed as a trajectory of dandyism
(the wilful celebration of self consciousness, perversity.
irony, etc.), it has its roots in a politics of refined
taste, and the inflated value system of the Romantic aesthete.
It is no wonder then that Postmodern art is so critically
hinged on the promotion of bad taste, gross humour and blunt
sentiments. Kruger's later works - and Heathers, for that
matter - deliberately ape those traits and appeal to their
primary audiences (respectively, the postmodern arena and
the cult market), through a contemporary reworking of strategies
like parody, pastiche, burlesque and satire. Consequently
the gag, the joke and the point, have replaced the message,
the moral and the viewpoint - not simply through the degeneration
of discourse and the collapse of meaning, but as a reassessment
of the fundamental purposes of satire in social commentary,
art practice and cultural referencing.
The
dadaists were the first of the Modernists to mine satire's
potential for triggering antagonistic humour through social
critique. Duchamp was dada's most eloquent speaker and best
comedian, and far from simply being witty and cryptic, he
was actively engaged in sourcing colloquial modes of humour.
For example, the unknown object entrapped in the ball of
twine in With Hidden Noise (1916), recalls the bemused giggle
of children being taunted with mystery; the toilet urinal
of Fountain (1917), invokes toilet humour: the hat rack
fastened to the floor for Trap (1917), alludes to the practical
joke; and the vandalised Moira Lisa of L.H.O.O.Q.(1919),
promotes ridicule through defacement. Many of Duchamp's
assisted readymades manipulate these resources to make the
viewer the butt of the joke. Much dada art is now perceived
as overtly politicised absurdism, but Fountain will always
be as base as it first appeared to the critics of the Society
of Independent Artists. As a prime example of toilet art
it stimulates the self reflexive appeal of primal toilet
wall scrawl: "If you read this you're a dickhead!"
Certain
strands of conceptual art throughout the sixties and into
the seventies returned to this intersection of linguistic
reflexivity, anti aestheticism and dumb arse humour. Artists
such as Joseph Beuys, Joseph Kosuth, Les Levine, Christo
and Chris Burden, were often motivated to express black
humour at the expense of the viewer. Prior to Kruger's rise
of the billboard, Levine had explored its potential as a
site for amplifying his work and parodying himself as a
used car salesman in the art world. Here he could present
himself as a character in much the same way that Beuys played
the role of Beuys the artist in his lectures. Kosuth used
linguistic constructions to humorously mirror a viewer's
search for explicative meaning in the anti object world
of contemporary art, laterally connecting with funhouses
and their use of distorting mirrors. Christo's greatest
joke plays on himself and the viewer, as his wrappings mimic
the industrial coverings which usually connote that "work
is in progress" - an eternal, frozen progress never to be
unveiled. Chris Burden - well, if you don't think there's
anything firmly about Burden having his body wrapped in
heavy blankets and left on a busy L.A. freeway to see if
anyone would run him over, then perhaps you've missed the
kind of joke so typical of the nut who on a dare, tries
anything for a laugh at the end of the week.
In
a way, Yves Klein - a leader in neo dada and a prophet of
Pop - went further than any of the above. Famous for his
Anthropometry paintings which used nudes as flesh paintbrushes
(satirising the macho chauvinism and ballsy bar room camaraderie
of the American Abstract Expressionists), he apparently
contacted film producers Gualitero Jacopetti and Franco
Prosperi in order to be included in Mondo Cane (1962). The
first mondo movie or shockumentary, Mondo Cane features
natives eating insects, fishermen slaughtering sharks, kids
polishing skulls in catacombs, women wearing live bugs as
jewellery, religious fanatics cleaning stairways with their
tongues, men being chased by a bull down a street and some
crazy artist who paints with his models. Dressed in formal
suit and tie and accompanied by a string quartet (for inspiration
says the voice over narration), Klein played the crackpot
artist to the full. Unlike Gilbert and George, whose droll
performances either operated within the gallery environment
(where anything goes for art), or in the guise of public
mime buskers (where anything goes for money), Klein's cameo
in Mondo Cane sees him stripped of his vestiges as a serious
conceptual artist. For example, the string quartet in reality
played one of Klein's own proto minimalist Monotone Symphonies,
but the scene is overdubbed with the Top 10 hit theme, More.
Klein appears as an anonymous representative of the wild
and weird world of modern art marking his role in Mondo
Cane as his most serious comment on how meaning is generated
in art through artistic identity.
The
dada legacy is continually manifested in conceptual art
through displays of how far an artist will go to make art,
hence the ambiguous mix of the heroic romantic and the impulsive
looney, living on the edge and working as an outsider -
or as McLuhan put it: "Art is anything you can get away
with". Though associated with Pop Art, Warhol can be seen
similarly insofar as his work was primarily designed to
create an environment within which he could play artist.
His ultimate scheme became to re invent popular culture
as theatrical backdrop to this display, and he knew that
once art becomes popular it was destined to be consumed
by popular culture. Warhol played the role of artist as
a fundamental contradiction of the status the name implied.
A lateral connection might illuminate this further. Compare
Klein's famous photo of his Leap Into The Void (1962), [Fig.6]
with Warhol's White Car Crash (1963) , [Fig.7]: Klein used
his photograph of himself in a mock up of a newspaper front
page; Warhol used a similarly shocking image of a body thrown
through space not staged as an artistic spectacle, but featured
in a morbid newspaper photograph of a commonplace apocalyptic
accident.
While
both Klein and Levine ironically advertised themselves as
artists - communicating predominantly to an art audience
the nature of the artist as product - Warhol's Pop strategy
was to communicate himself as all artist to everyone but
an art audience. He did this by presenting himself as a
charlatan, and thereby provided popular culture with its
cynically desired image of the artist. Artists often lose
sight of the fact that whenever art enters or crosses popular
culture it is allowed to do so only for ridicule - something
of which Klein may or may not have been aware. Very few
modern or postmodern artists have ever been able to really
communicate to the masses that art is futile, redundant,
arbitrary and meaningless: they know that already. One must
not forget what a field day the American press had with
the Armory Show in 1913 in New York, [Fig.8] not unlike
the manner in which their French counterparts reacted to
the first Salon exhibition of the Fauves in 1905. Both were
conservative reactions against formal methods of artistic
depiction, Duchamp's pre dada Nude Descending A Staircase
(1912), being a "serious work of art" and a formal exploration
of the time-space relationships between Cubism and the then
forming Futurism. His readymades come after this potent
taste of popular culture's taste in art, indicating that
Duchamp learnt the first lesson in controversy: you don't
court it - it catches you. Warhol courted controversy by
letting it think it caught him. His cameos and name lending
in advertisements are then logical instances of his surrender
to popular culture in the name of popular culture, allowing
himself to be exploited not as an artist but as someone
who is famous for being all artist. [Fig.9]
A
good example of a textbook Warhol, Mark Kostabi, is famous
for trying to be famous as an artist - but that's where
the Warhol connection ends. Calling him the next Warhol,
is as dumb as saying that Taylor Dayne and Debbie Gibson
would each be the next Madonna. To posit Kostabi World (his
factory run more along the lines of third world cheap labour,
than Warhol's recreation of Hollywood's dream factory),
as a sign of postmodernity's industrialisation of simulation
is pure folly. Kostabi has desperately played the American
media since the mid eighties, receiving unending coverage
by an endless supply of journalists who failed to distinguish
between Warhol, and Kostabi playing Warhol. Yet Kostabi
proves himself useful as a ghost come to haunt postmodern
art with the materialisation of its referencing, not of
popular culture, but of the much vaunted collapse of art
and culture. Kostabi is a walking, talking, mass of that
rubble, feigning the mad artist for those who see no practical
difference between Warhol and Van Gogh. In the end, he affirms
what popular culture already knew that all modern art is
made either by crazies or bad comedians, a charade Kostabi
embarrassingly enacted for 60 Minutes, by wearing his harlequin
suit, playing the Court jester sitting atop a traffic light
on Broadway.
Kostabi
has never demonstrated any knowledge of the crucial difference
between courting controversy and letting it catch you. His
inability to differentiate these two modes of hype throws
him into orbit precariously close to Kruger. His Kostabi-isms
(his pre packaged you may quote me quotes which paraphrase
Warhol and McLuhan). sound very much like her post 1985
- or is it the other way around? Compare: "I Shop Therefore
I Am" (Kruger). with "I Am Bought Therefore I Am" (Kostabi).
Or try guessing who said what: "When I hear the word Culture
I take out my chequebook" and "Paintings are doorways into
collectors' homes". Despite his dumbness in aping Warhol
is Kostabi hipper that Kruger? In a roundabout way, we have
now introduced a fourth figure into the Heathers/Kruger/Descartes
instance of referencing. Perhaps some viewers of Heathers
figured Kostabi as the author of the postcard. Perhaps they
are not all that wrong. And perhaps Kostabi works as a blockage
in Kruger's strategy of blending her voice with the colloquial,
because that terrain is so saturated by others making similar
claims. Clearly, this is why Jenny Holzer's text-o-grams
have remained so defiantly anonymous, able to dematerialise
in any media space, leaving no trace of who said what, and
whom is being referenced, of creating an overload of reference
interference, in place of the gap caused by her absence.
While
we're on the subject of distinguishing the identities and
strategies of artists and charlatans, it would be criminal
not to look at Ken Done. Essentially an interior designer
who took to the shopping malls, intent on wallpapering popular
culture with the prefabricated fabric of his identity, Done
poses further problems as to why and how we can celebrate
art, popular culture and/or the possible collapse between
the two. Done is, literally, a material effect - a movable
stain of artistic identity that can be overlaid on anything:
T shirts, cups, tea towels, bed sheets, as well as name
products like Australis perfume, Swan beer and Dulux paints.
Conscious of his market boundaries, he applies his staining
to those items which inhabit the vacuous domestic stratosphere
plotted by interior design, and readily accept any identity
given them. The claustrophobic proximity of art and popular
culture is visible in how Done's vacuous stratosphere is
conceptually akin to Klein's void - used as the stage for
his artistic projection, and practically akin to Warhol's
environment - designed as a theatrical backdrop for his
cultural performance.
On
this saturated plane of the art cross over, Done's marketing
of his artistic fabric is as crucial a manoeuvre as Warhol's
franchising of his Pop identity. In one of a series of advertisements
for Swan lager, Done is depicted as one of Australia's contemporary
folk heroes. As the insipid Mo Jo style of heart felt jingle
intones "They said you'd never make it," a group of (presumably
Australian) art critics nod their heads dismissively at
Done's paintings. Cut to Done in Paris (!) at a sell out
exhibition of his work. The little Aussie battler shows
them, and us, how the severed head of the tall poppy can
make it in a scenario that could have been directed by Frank
Capra. The Swan advertisement pays dribbling lip service
to Anglo American mythologies of modern art: France as the
centre of the art world; the artist as a struggling hero
paving his dues and sticking to his guns while the masses
ridicule him, etc. Of Course the only place Done has made
it is in a realm recognised by the likes of Swan Lager -
that is, a media space which feeds off the media potential
of the Done marketing machine.
The
Dulux paint advertisement featuring Done exhibits a more
tongue in cheek approach, by cleverly confusing issues of
professional art careerism and the industry of interior
design. This confusion - itself a sign of postmodernism
exploited by the advertising industry - is embedded in an
ambiguity generated by parodying Dulux's old image, associated
with the parental folk figure of Rolf Harris, and Dulux's
new image projected through the golly gosh hokum of urbane
Ken Done. On reflection, the intersection of Rolf Harris
and Dulux paints is a pre postmodern conflation, especially
if one interprets Harris' iconography - the macho heard,
the dripping brush, the ocker tone, the buckets of paint,
the gawdy mural as all allusion to Pop's own jokes at the
expense of the Abstract Expressionists [Fig.10]. Similarly,
Done's Dulux ad infers traits of Pop and post Pop, marking
his endless production of interior design in the name of
art ("Love your new painting, Ken") conceptually close to
Pop - Warhol's Cow Wallpaper (1966); Lichtenstein's Modern
Painting and Modular Painting serial panels (between 1967
and 1969); - and post Pop - Richard Prince's reproductions
of high gloss advertising photography; Allan McCollum's
production line pre framed paintings of black; and Jeff
Koons' editions of cast figurines for the domestic mantelpiece.
[Figs.10,11,12]
Still,
there is something limp and prissy about Done's elbow ribbing
Dulux advertisent, a quality made apparent when one sees
the more gutsy Dupont Stainmaster carpet advertisement featuring
Pro Hart. Consider: if Warhol feeds off the masses' cynical
view of art; Kostabi their detached view of art; and Done
their pragmatic view of art, then Hart feeds off the masses'
altruistic view of art that it is the activity of supplying
beauty on demand. Pro Hart is a real artist all Australian
landscape painter. Rather than commodifying his work like
Kostabi, or marketing it like Done, Pro Hart industrialises
the process of painting, mass producing original signed
landscapes like a small businessman hocking the wares of
his cottage craft to the masses. For Hart's audience he
delivers the real thing.
His
Kleiman performance in the Dupont Stainmaster carpet advertisement
is not a parody of his own industrial practice, but a straight
forward piss take on the theatrical excesses of modern art
- which to Hart and his audience means Jackson Pollock (whose
$3 million sale of Blue Poles to the Australian National
Gallery still stings their tax returns). Hart's cantankerous
goo mulched by his flabby girth, is a total inversion of
Klein's fraudulent liquids gleefully splashed about by his
naked models. Here is a severely unironic statement embedded
in an advertisement working under the guise of extreme irony.
Note also that the bland, beige Dupont Stainmaster carpets
are being pushed mainly for their ability to resist staining,
and are therefore diametrically opposed to the comparatively
avant garde aesthetic promoted by Ken Done for Dulux and
stained by his sense of design. If Duchamp was at his self
mocking heart seriously stating "If you read this you're
a dickhead," Hart replies to the progressive impulses of
modernism in an equally terse, colloquial voice - "You've
got to be fuckin' kidding". Radically opposed, they each
nonetheless hit the dead centre of the art/culture mutation
with dead pan humour and deadly accuracy.
Even
though I am only touching on some of the base mechanisms
of modern art (referencing, critiquing, quotation), which
by the laye fifties were irretrievably enmeshed in the gears
of commodification, exploitation, industrialisation and
mass production, the few artists discussed above collectively
project an interactive energy field so intense it is little
wonder that the customised combine of neo dada, Pop, and
post Pop, has had such little impact on the socio cultural
terrain across which this dynamo of art and popular culture
mutations has already been spinning. Its energy is the stuff
of dialectic gags, and deconstructed punchlines all fuelled
by that cinematic effect peculiar to contemporary cultural
referencing, re evaluating the purpose and function of satire.
Mobilised by this dynamo, art and culture have not collapsed
into each other - they've gone walkabout: across new socio
cultural plains; along frequency bandwiths of media airways;
into expanded and destructured audio visual sensurround
fields; and through immaterial networks of negative space.
Surveying this media saturated panorama, one can't help
thinking: "Culture changes; artists don't".
The
aim of this essay has been to lose track of the trajectories
of art's trailing of popular culture, and popular culture's
trailing of art, by combining the likes of (in order of
appearance) Michael Lehman, Barbara Kruger, Alfred Neuman,
Joe Dante, John Hughes, Marcel Duchamp, Marshall McCluhan,
Eduardo Paolozzi, John Stalin, John Heartfield, Rod Sterling,
Les Levine, Christo, Yves Klein, Gualitero Jacopetti, Andy
Warhol, Mark Kostabi, Jenny Holzer, Ken Done, Rolf Harris,
Richard Prince, Allan McCollum, Jeff Koons and Pro Hart.
All their voices authorial, political, satirical communicate
through coughing and spluttering in all atmosphere composed
by analytic smokescreens, laughing gas pellets and political
stinkbombs. Everyone is a critic; anyone can be an artist;
and they all want to be comedians.
