Dark Pop. Brandhorst Museum, Munich

So its Art-Art today. Pop art as Neo- Dada priviledges the everyday and examines the drives and forces that shape the production of meaning in the world of consumption. This shouldn't necessarily be a million miles away from Art Jewelry. Any of the ideas being explored here could be extended to placement on the body. If anything its the perfect medium. Consumption after all is so often simply the wearing of  one kind of badge or another.

Mike Kelly

Within an exhibition titled Dark Pop, this work involves a sound piece and two stuffed animals, one seemingly older bear and one younger, placed so their noses touch. The soundtrack articulates the voices of two voices, smooching kisses. The narrators ‘older’ voice seems to initiate or teach the younger one and at the same timearticulates a discourse on text, that there is no virgin text.  That texts attempt to explain the text that precedes it suggests the notion of culture ‘reproducing’. The cutesy aesthetic of the figures is subverted by the implied subjugation to a grotesque process, a kind of threat. The effect is uncanny, and hints at the repressed within the vernacular of the everyday, but perhaps on a deeper note, the trauma experienced by the artist. Kelly emerged out of the 70s conceptual west coast art scene. Disillusioned with the failure of 60s idealism, his work could be framed as a kind of sick anarcho-punk critique. Within the context of a cultural elite that he tried to resist and critique its interesting that he became so successful. Subversive voices are just so god-damn marketable!

Louise Lawyer

Louise Lawler. No Drones 2010

Lawlors work sits in the context of a generation of artist who looked deeply and critically at the way art images are distributed and consumed. She is making art about not just art but the forces that exist around art. These are economic, social and political. In this installation (not picture) a large skewed image of a Gerhard Richter painting of World War II bombers is reproduced as wallpaper covering the museum wall entirely, and also as a photograph of a painting. There is a third small picture of a momento mori; a skull on another adjacent wall. Within this space a mirrorball hangs close to the ground. Every 20 minutes lasers come on  and patterns of starbursts and transverse movements of grids of dots appear, targeting specifically the large print. Its important here to look back to Richters work in the early 60s, in which three traditions; The readymade, photography and the tradition of painting. In the context of 60 pop art, the reproduction of existing media content such as this suggests an ambiguity towards the presumed integrity of both traditions. Is painting being bombed or reflecting on what has already happened? Lawlors installation extends this original context to examine the consumtion of images like this in collections, as commodities and again asks us to reflect….in an age of zero casualty, drone warfare how much purchase can art really have? War changes like everything else. What was once man on man in a big field has been changed by technology. Does the mirror ball implicate us as members of the first world ‘leisure class’?

Bruce Nauman

World Peace 1996

A chorus of video portraits speak from a script that develops the notion of speech and listening in seemingly arbitrary patterns. I’ll speak , you’ll listen…they’ll speak, you will listen etc etc. A lot of Bruce Naumans work involves the body, his own or others. I thought about the fact that we speak….we use our lungs to create and shape sound, in such a way that it forms speech, basic units of language. In this installation speech is brought back to the body in a very visceral way. The notion of World Peace seems very removed form the individual subject, somewhere in a shared social space, mediated by text in its many forms. What each subject does do with their voice, is articulate the necessity for communication for exchange and a dialectic. Power relationship are implied by the presued role of the subject as having to occupy a position at one end of this dichotomy, either as a single subject or as a group. This works opens up something that we all take for granted, that we unconsciously mediate on behalf of things we don’t really know the origin of and under a pressure that we put on ourselves, on others and expect in return. This ‘taking seriously’ of the issue in the face of what is essentially absurd poses questions for people who might presume to know the answer to World Piece. In the context of MIKRO MACRO is certainly has opened me up to a whole new line of questioning about what the consistency of each could be.