Performing the system

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Tom Holert

Zapping its way through disparate TV shows and commercials, Daniel Pflumm's video installation Paris, 2003, pulses with a hypnotic collage of living, breathing corporate logos. In a darkened gallery, the viewer experiences a delirous, often painfully slow ride through countless images of cars, cosmetics, and candy. These advertising clips merge with documentary footage of endless throngs moving through an anonymous urban space--as well as images of political demonstrators, bombed buildings, and exploding cars. This cascade of images from the media-saturated present surges to a techno beat, befitting an artist who emerged from Berlin's '90s electronica scene as a musician, logo-sampling artist, and promoter of the club/bar Panasonic. With its unsteady image quality and shifting montage speeds, Paris suggests a comprehensive Pop catalogue of global corporate symbols while also appearing to capture the way market forces make people move through urban spaces and their lives. Yet, of course, this compendium is haunted by the futility of such an undertaking, and a feeling of melancholy and helplessness pervades the installation.

Like the work of many media-savvy young artists, the video registers the global commercial spectacle as a means to "perform the system," that is, to engage with a mediascape entirely controlled by economic agencies and interests in order to gain insight into its logic. Pflumm's rhythmic mise-en-scene of everyday media signs and allusions to their effects is but one of many post-Pop appropriations and infiltrations of today's multifarious mass culture. Currently, artists from different generations and backgrounds work with and within the realm of mass-cultural imagery. From veterans of '80s rephotography like Richard Prince to the "superflat" populism of Takashi Murakami, the spectrum of possible links to the Pop tradition is broad. It might include Sarah Morris's investigations of the glossy continuum of politics, corporate architecture, and fashion, or the surgical video editing of movie stars by Candice Breitz. It ranges from Daniele Buetti's manual (and then rephotographed) frottage of fashion photography to the remaking of movies by Brice Dellsperger or Rene Huyghe.

In the case of Pflumm, an additional working model is derived from outside art in current assaults on corporate branding--whether they be called "culture jamming," "image defiling," or "adbusting." This often Web-based, loosely interconnected community of cultural producers pursues anticorporate, antiglobalist, antiwar agendas by drawing on the traditions of agitprop graphics and Situationist detournement. Such media tacticians and image saboteurs playfully yet aggressively make visible the strategies of seduction and manipulation by which corporations attack the very basis of individual subjectivity. In so doing, they supposedly subvert the media-saturated environment via its own means. Yet in trying to name and contest the strategies of big ad agencies, these "No-Logo" activists necessarily risk becoming closer and closer to their supposed targets. A magazine like Adbusters, for example, ironically seems to have strategically marketed itself as a trendy lifestyle accessory.

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A similar problem attends the work of artists like Pflumm, who may ultimately have to consider how legitimate it is to appropriate forms of resistance from other contexts. An artistic practice that mimics the methods of oppositional "tactical media"--copyright crackers, logo sampling, audio mash-ups, etc.--endangers its own integrity, and perhaps intentionally so. As artistic practice, it becomes cultural production, a turn already inherent in the idea of Pop. From the start, Pop seems to have been predestined to become an aesthetic strategy for bringing together a variety of symbols and even audiences; for engendering crossover maneuvers into and out of art; for organizing these practices; and, finally, for inscribing them into tradition. This fate is certainly clear in the work of many young artists today who inhabit--sometimes simultaneously--various modes of cultural production. But this strategy necessarily raises nagging doubts about the goals and purposes of the Pop approach. And although Pop in a world become Pop seems to be the only imaginable form of realism, its characteristic tendencies to exacerbate and accelerate are difficult to manage--or to welcome wholeheartedly.

To better understand the critical potential of contemporary Pop's "performance of the system," it is worth turning to the debates surrounding the movement's inception in the 1960s. In 1966, shortly before his death, the seventy-six-year-old Siegfried Kracauer participated in a discussion on Pop art "or reality as artwork." "I believe that one must take societal processes into consideration if one is to explain the phenomenon of Pop art," Kracauer opined, for "we live today in a society that has become indefinable." The Frankfurt School veteran believed that the "new stratifications" of late capitalism had as yet made no connection with tradition, and he feared that in the imminent "computer age" the "human being would become a statistician's vision, that is, he would disappear into a point." For Kracauer, this concern over humanity's reduction to statistical data is directly linked to Pop art; it is caused by the "pressure, first of all, to place objects in front of you and to point to them: There you have your ad, there you have your drive to culture, your automatization!" He thus sees Pop art as late-capitalist society's attempt to educate itself about its own dynamics of abstraction, and he harbors a certain hope for its potential as an instrument to demonstrate the realities of the economic system. This view is fitting for a functionalist perspective, which required Pop to fulfill a cultural task, even if in an entirely different way than traditional art.