Things just don’t stay still any more. Blink, wherever you stand, and note for yourself a perpetual space invasion, the walls convulsing happily with culture shock. Like the walls of the lounge room, the Art Gallery, the shopping centre, the train station. Each space once had its identity, its repertoire of objects, its stasis: these days there’s nothing but flux and displacement, crazy design games of rearrangement, substitution, commutation. What was originally ‘other’, alien, foreign, has entered one’s system with a rush, and the fix of every day life, more post—modernist then ever, is for novelty and style ... a speedy determination to “keep feeling fascination”.
Take that satellite of the art gallery, for instance, that’s tomb at the city's edge: some time ago this century, its precious category of the artwork, framed and signed, began to be stretched and swallowed by a great, big, phenomenal world containing it. Just as the novel and literature lost their privilege to become merely items in a whirlpool of language, the artwork became mercifully lost in the frantic, infinitely complex culture of the visual. Art, deposed of its luxuries and indulgences—no more meaningful, beautiful, resilient, sincere or individual then anything else—quickly came to resemble, in its strategies and effects, any number of its ‘others’. Those mediums it had prided itself on its difference and distance from: advertising, graphic design, movies, comic strip’s, fashion parades, veritably a thousand and one consumer spectacles of the everyday.
This was a humiliation, a flattening, a demystification of the art-object and its sorry little ‘art world’; but a zigzag line of flight now takes us somewhere else again—to a sudden moment in time and a hastily reassembled space where all that ‘non-art’ of popular culture can speak like art, in a gallery, a little strangely no doubt, a little testily, but in a place where already definitions have changed and things can possibly happen anew. To be sure, this is cultural quicksand, texts and contexts all askew, out-of-focus, lurching off at weird tangents, and clear processes or tendencies are hard to ascertain. But while any attempt at articulating this cultural drift can at best only be a helpful stutter at the heart of the here-and-now, I feel as if I know a difference between the purists who wrap themselves in the inability of ‘resistance’ to this quicksand, and the promiscuous bunnies who wallow in it, going down fast yet stayin' alive: ladies and gentlemen, meet → ↑ →.
For → ↑ → art-making has always been a question of graphics, which just now seems like a very arty business indeed. ‘Graphics’ in its dirtiest, funkiest, most practical senses: graphics as selling, self-promotion (posters, record covers, a book of documentation); graphics as the quickest possible assemblage of a few given elements (icons, clichés, stereotypes of pop culture); graphics as a pose, an attitude, a style which is clean, structured, streamlined, clearly articulated; and ‘graphic’ in the sense of stark, theatrical, brutally obvious. From the painstaking graphed musical maps of Minimalism in 1977 to the latest 1983 projects for the cinematic-graph, it’s the same punch, the same sensibility, the same practice at work. But there’s been a move for → ↑ → within 'decoding' culture, almost fearfully the holding it off at arm’s-length, to what I consider much braver ‘post-politics’ of cultural celebration and saturation, and experiments in life-style which the tabloid like Stuff represents best. In a heady carnival of remembering, evoking, citing and responding, → ↑ → keep feeling their fascination, intelligently, funnily, and passionately.