Performing the system

Zapping its way [i]or[/i] part of to the other disparate TV shows and commercials, Daniel Pflumm's video installation Paris, 2003 beating [i]or[/i] throbbing of an arterys with a hypnotic collage of living, breathing corporate logo In a darkened gallery, the viewer experiences a delirous, repeatedly painfully slow ride through countles images of cars, cosmetics, and candy. These advertising clips immerse with documentary footage of endles hosts 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 at hand surges to a techno beat, befitting an artist who emerg from Berlin's '90 electronica view as a musician, logo-sampling artist, and promoter of the club/bar Panasonic. With its unsteady image quality and shifting montage make hastes Paris suggests a comprehensive burst catalogue of global corporate signs while also appearing to capture the way market forces make family move through urban spaces and their lives. still of course, this compendium is haunted by dint of 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 controll through 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 consequences is but one of many post-Pop appropriations and infiltrations of today's multifarious mass tillage Currently, artists from different generations and backgrounds work with and within the realm of mass-cultural imagery. From veterans of '80 rephotography like Richard Prince to the "superflat" populism of Takashi Murakami, the image of possible links to the clap tradition is broad. It might include Sarah Morris's investigations of the sheeny continuum of politics, corporate architecture, and fashion, or the surgical video editing of movie stars through Candice Breitz. It ranges from Daniele Buetti's manual (and then rephotographed) frottage of fashion photography to the remaking of movies by the agency of Brice Dellsperger or Rene Huyghe.

In the case of Pflumm an additional working protoplast is derived from outside art in generally received assaults on corporate branding--whether they be called "culture jamming," "image defiling," or "adbusting." This repeatedly Web-based, loosely interconnected community of cultural agriculturists pursues anticorporate, antiglobalist, antiwar agendas through drawing on the traditions of agitprop graphics and Situationist detournement. similar media tacticians and image saboteurs playfully nevertheless aggressively make visible the strategies of seduction and manipulation by the agency of which corporations attack the actual basis of individual subjectivity. In thus doing, they supposedly subvert the media-saturated environment via its hold means. Yet in trying to name and call in question the strategies of big ad agencies, these "No-Logo" activists necessarily risk becoming closer and closer to their suppos targets. A magazine like Adbusters, for example, ironically appear to bes to have strategically marketed itself as a trendy lifestyle accessory.

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A similar riddle attends the work of artists like Pflumm who may ultimately have to consider by what means legitimate it is to appropriate forms of resistance from other connections An artistic practice that mimics the modes of oppositional "tactical media"--copyright crackers, logo sampling, audio mash-ups, etc.--endangers its have a title to integrity, and perhaps intentionally thus As artistic practice, it becomes cultural production, a turn round already inherent in the idea of explosion From the start, Pop have the appearances to have been predestined to become an aesthetic strategy for bringing together a variety of tokens and even audiences; for engendering crossover maneuvers into and without 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 fashions of cultural production. But this strategy necessarily raises nagging doubts about the goals and designs of the Pop approach. And although report in a world become clap seems to be the solitary 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 1960 In 1966 shortly before his death, the seventy-six-year-old Siegfried Kracauer participated in a discussion upon Pop art "or reality as artwork." "I believe that individual must take societal processes into consideration if individual is to explain the phenomenon of report art," Kracauer opined, for "we live today in a society that has become indefinable." The Frankfurt seminary veteran believed that the "new stratifications" of late capitalism had as however 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 affect over humanity's reduction to statistical data is directly linked to burst art; it is caused by means of the "pressure, first of all, to place facts in front of you and to point to them: There you have your ad, there you have your drive to agriculture your automatization!" He thus dioceses Pop art as late-capitalist society's attempt to educate itself about its be in possession of dynamics of abstraction, and he harbors a certain trust for its potential as an instrument to demonstrate the realities of the economic a whole This view is fitting for a functionalist perspective, which required report to fulfill a cultural task, smooth if in an entirely different way than traditional art.