Sampling the globe

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Daniel Birnbaum

In a studio below my office at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt, a young German painter is scrupulously copying Japanese manga characters, while a cadre of film students in the next room watch a bootleg of a Matthew Barney movie. Pratchaya Phinthong, a Thai student who is importing nearly worthless coins from his country that work perfectly in the vending machines here (and, I presume, everywhere two-Euro pieces are accepted), recently disclosed his ingenious discovery at our open studio event. Now these two-Euro bahts are spreading across the continent like a virus. Phinthong's next move, to upload onto our server illegal copies of popular software bought in Bangkok and offer them gratis, was, understandably, halted by our administrative director. But isn't free circulation the future? "What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self," the artist formerly known as Elaine Sturtevant opines. "Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine--that's the way to go."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the past four decades we have witnessed a veritable orgy of repetition, appropriation, and revival, and the rhythm of these artistic returns has become increasingly rapid. At the same time, the geography of the art world has been expanding apace. Can today's samplings and repetitions, which often involve geographic and cultural displacements, be interpreted as critical reassessments of previous aesthetic models in the name of a genuine avant-garde tradition, or has contemporary art finally succumbed to the omnivorous machinery driving the inexorable recycling of fashion and style? Or have we reached a point where the question as formulated is no longer the question to ask?

The oft-remarked process of globalization--in art no less than commerce--isn't a phenomenon taking hold someplace far away but just around the corner from where you live. And that's why I started off here at home. Another local example: Four years ago, on Oskar-von-Miller Strasse 16, Frankfurt am Main (all but around the corner from where I live), artists Michael S. Riedel and Dennis Loesch and a group of their friends took over an abandoned building ready for the wrecking ball and turned it into an enormous copying machine, spitting out not only mystifying and precise imitations of invitations to art openings and posters and ads announcing shows, concerts, and theater performances but also counterfeits of other artists' work, even of entire shows. In fact, no artist showing or performing in the city of Frankfurt was immune from the risk of being duplicated, faintly altered, and perhaps even gently ridiculed a few blocks away, in the presence of hundreds of partying youth. Such was the fate of artists as diverse as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jason Rhoades, and Gilbert & George. One artist not only was aware of the duplication but actively participated in the mimicry. Others went blithely ignorant of this parallel universe. Gilbert & George, for instance, most likely failed to notice "Gert & Georg," the two fashionable young men who discreetly followed their every step and aped their every movement.

"The whole thing has nothing to do with appropriation. It's not about property, not about Sony, Saab, and Simulation, not about the 1980s"--or so reads a statement presented in connection with the release of Oskar: a novel, a fat book documenting three years of activity and itself a rip-off of Warhol's a: a novel, complete with Andy's portrait and the cover blurb praising his literary foray as "Hellish hymns from Amphetamine Heaven." But here the Oskar-von-Miller Strasse group writes its own history of replication as an artistic strategy and carefully distances itself not only from '80s-style appropriation but also from strategies typical of the following decade. This isn't about revivals. "No remake, no remix, no 1990s." So how, then, if we're to take them at their word, are we to understand this novel kind of repetition? It is an activity without nostalgia, they declare. It is, their book claims, about a total lack of emotion, about distance and arrogance. And about style, I would add. No doubt it's got a great deal to do with style and looking smart. If this is not a revival, it's because Pop never vanished in the first place. In this world of reflections, Pop is still present as a mirror effect--as is Situationism and the dress code of the mods. That's what Oskar-von-Miller Strasse 16 is: a mirror producing its own highly stylish cosmos outside the normal world of fashion cycles. In this universe of "filmed films" and "clubbed clubs" (titles of two Riedel and Loesch projects) nothing is simple and straightforward, everything implicated in the logic of reflections. Originally--which means 1957--Richard Hamilton declared, "Pop Art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience); Transient (short-term solution); Expendable (easily forgotten); Low-cost; Mass-produced; Young (aimed at youth); Witty; Sexy; Gimmicky; Glamorous; Big Business." None of that has lost its relevance. Pop is alive, as is proved by Loesch's elaborate haircuts and Riedel's smart ties and jackets, worn even while drawing a huge copy of a Warhol self-portrait (the one that graces the cover of a: a novel) on a wall at Oskar-von-Miller Strasse 16, a place brimming with young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, and glamorous people and probably best described as a late emanation of the Factory. But Big Business? Not really. Rest assured others take care of that legacy of Pop quite efficiently.