Sampling the globe

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Daniel Birnbaum

How is Pop's legacy to be understood, this recent tradition of the self-confidently flat? Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami, Michel Majerus, the Thai super-copy--are these instances of critical repetition or of traumatic return? Or are they instead the products of a Nietzschean intensification, a pure Steigerung without critical will or dialectical hope: even more affirmative of the market, even more cynical in their exploration of commodification? In a 1988 essay about Warhol's "one-dimensional" art, Benjamin Buchloh condemns the constructions of Warhol as a particularly effective amalgamation of the entrepreneurial worldview of the late twentieth century and the phlegmatic vision of consumers, who can celebrate in his work their status of having been wiped out as subjects: "Regulated as they are by the eternally repetitive gestures of alienated production and consumption, they are barred--as are Warhol's paintings--from access to a dimension of critical resistance." Since those words were written, the globalization of capital and, concomitantly, of visual culture and of the art market, has taken a quantum leap.

It's interesting to note that a number of the artists particularly interested in the aesthetics of the commodity in the 1980s have in more recent years developed their respective practices in relation to "exotic" cultural traditions. In the case of Meyer Vaisman, it's the artist's native Venezuela that offers ample visual material for explorations of cultural hybridity, what he has labeled "transculturalization in reverse." Ashley Bickerton, on the other hand, who has lived and worked in Bali since 1993 (the year of his show "Just Another Shitty Day in Paradise! [A Travelogue]"), has developed lurid figurative paintings displaying a cast of grotesque characters, the monstrous denizens of his decadent island in the sun. Also Peter Nagy's art, which used to be an exploration of corporate culture, has changed radically since he moved to India in the early 1990s and began including Hindu and Buddhist iconography in his installations. In New Delhi in 1997 he reopened Nature Morte, the gallery he cofounded in 1982 with Alan Belcher that was one of the key venues (along with Vaisman's International With Monument) for a generation of conceptually oriented artists then emerging in the East Village. (The new gallery shows mostly New Delhi-based artists.) Perhaps this entrepreneurial tendency is a sign not of commercialism per se but of an artistic practice concerned with the production of objects and with the social context, the very theater in which art meets audience. Sometimes artists' interest in the market and in the desires manifested in the world of commodities and advertisement cannot so easily be defined in black-and-white terms of criticality or complicity. Richard Prince, another case in point, has also been involved in all kinds of manipulative art-world hoaxes, such as creating pseudonymous imaginary artists, ascribing unlikely dates to artworks and interviews, and, in 1983, opening what looked like a commercial gallery, Spiritual America, in order to display a single rephotographed image of a ten-year-old Brooke Shields posing naked in a bathtub. Such activities have a (no doubt calculated) frisson of amorality, even of criminality. He likes to talk about the rephotographed imagery as "stolen" pictures.