Sampling the globe

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Daniel Birnbaum

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Interest in these mass-produced items recurs in any number of recent Thai art projects. Navin Rawanchaikul, for instance, has appropriated the visual language of Piak Poster, a Thai film director who later became an influential billboard painter. Rawanchaikul's huge billboards have been seen on the walls of art institutions around the world, presenting artists and curators as if film stars in a Thai blockbuster (whose narrative is synopsized in comic books by the artist in the same style). Surasi Kusolwong, perhaps Bangkok's most prominent young artist, is interested in the very structure of the bazaar itself. He recently arranged a kind of street market at the Frankfurt airport (where everything cost only one Euro!). The Danish artist collective Superflex have also been very active in Thailand. In Africa they had developed a simple, portable biogas unit that can produce sufficient gas for the cooking and lighting needs of a single family. As a comment on the Thai culture of cheap copies, they designed a biogas version of Danish designer Poul Henningsen's famous PH5 lamp, to be used by people living in areas without access to electricity. The project continued with Lacoste Supercopy, presented at the Copenhagen Fashion Fair 2002, which involved Thai copies of couture polo shirts. Superflex perspicaciously observed that "copy products could be seen as a first-class branding strategy for the original production companies, whose products will still be desired as an original. However, imagine if you could create a copy that became more attractive than the original--a SUPERCOPY."

If there is such a thing as neo-Pop, or Pop after Pop, then the nature of the neo or the after should be of interest to us here, as should the nature of the very return in question. In what sense is "original" Pop art (which, given its inherently secondhand nature, sounds like a contradiction in terms) present in the Pop sensibility so obvious in much recent art, not just from the US and Europe but globally? Are the emanations of Global Pop--Japanese superflat, say, or the Thai super-copy--just belated versions of something that was already fully significant and effective in the early '60s? In other words, are they merely Brillo Boxes adapted to a different place and time (and the clock says several decades too late)? In recent years American art historians have kept busy theorizing momentous returns in recent cultural history, primarily that of the neo-avant-garde of the '60s and '70s, which--so one prominent argument goes--cannot be seen as a mere copy of the "original" European avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century. Instead the neo-avant-garde's return to the monochrome, the ready-made, and the photocollage some half century after they first appeared must be seen as productive repetitions that contribute to the significance of the "original" retroactively. Do these productive rereadings still go on? Is the same true of Andy Warhol and today's returns to, or late emanations of, Pop?