Performing the system.

Zapping its way through disparate TV shows and commercials, Daniel Pflumm's video installation Paris, 2003, pulses with a hypnotic collage of living, breathing corporate logos. In a darkened gallery, the viewer experiences a delirous, often painfully slow ride through countless images of cars, cosmetics, and candy. These advertising clips merge with documentary footage of endless throngs 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 present surges to a techno beat, befitting an artist who emerged from Berlin's '90s electronica scene as a musician, logo-sampling artist, and promoter of the club/bar Panasonic. With its unsteady image quality and shifting montage speeds, Paris suggests a comprehensive Pop catalogue of global corporate symbols while also appearing to capture the way market forces make people move through urban spaces and their lives. Yet, of course, this compendium is haunted by 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 controlled by 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 effects is but one of many post-Pop appropriations and infiltrations of today's multifarious mass culture. Currently, artists from different generations and backgrounds work with and within the realm of mass-cultural imagery. From veterans of '80s rephotography like Richard Prince to the "superflat" populism of Takashi Murakami, the spectrum of possible links to the Pop tradition is broad. It might include Sarah Morris's investigations of the glossy continuum of politics, corporate architecture, and fashion, or the surgical video editing of movie stars by Candice Breitz. It ranges from Daniele Buetti's manual (and then rephotographed) frottage of fashion photography to the remaking of movies by Brice Dellsperger or Rene Huyghe.

In the case of Pflumm, an additional working model is derived from outside art in current assaults on corporate branding--whether they be called "culture jamming," "image defiling," or "adbusting." This often Web-based, loosely interconnected community of cultural producers pursues anticorporate, antiglobalist, antiwar agendas by drawing on the traditions of agitprop graphics and Situationist detournement. Such media tacticians and image saboteurs playfully yet aggressively make visible the strategies of seduction and manipulation by which corporations attack the very basis of individual subjectivity. In so doing, they supposedly subvert the media-saturated environment via its own means. Yet in trying to name and contest the strategies of big ad agencies, these "No-Logo" activists necessarily risk becoming closer and closer to their supposed targets. A magazine like Adbusters, for example, ironically seems to have strategically marketed itself as a trendy lifestyle accessory.

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A similar problem attends the work of artists like Pflumm, who may ultimately have to consider how legitimate it is to appropriate forms of resistance from other contexts. An artistic practice that mimics the methods of oppositional "tactical media"--copyright crackers, logo sampling, audio mash-ups, etc.--endangers its own integrity, and perhaps intentionally so. As artistic practice, it becomes cultural production, a turn already inherent in the idea of Pop. From the start, Pop seems to have been predestined to become an aesthetic strategy for bringing together a variety of symbols and even audiences; for engendering crossover maneuvers into and out 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 modes of cultural production. But this strategy necessarily raises nagging doubts about the goals and purposes of the Pop approach. And although Pop in a world become Pop seems to be the only 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 1960s. In 1966, shortly before his death, the seventy-six-year-old Siegfried Kracauer participated in a discussion on Pop art "or reality as artwork." "I believe that one must take societal processes into consideration if one is to explain the phenomenon of Pop art," Kracauer opined, for "we live today in a society that has become indefinable." The Frankfurt School veteran believed that the "new stratifications" of late capitalism had as yet 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 concern over humanity's reduction to statistical data is directly linked to Pop art; it is caused by the "pressure, first of all, to place objects in front of you and to point to them: There you have your ad, there you have your drive to culture, your automatization!" He thus sees Pop art as late-capitalist society's attempt to educate itself about its own dynamics of abstraction, and he harbors a certain hope for its potential as an instrument to demonstrate the realities of the economic system. This view is fitting for a functionalist perspective, which required Pop to fulfill a cultural task, even if in an entirely different way than traditional art.

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Although Kracauer may have been asking too much of Pop in reading it as a strategy for coming to terms with the power structure and representational techniques of consumer society, his thinking was actually in line with other critical takes of the day. In fact, Pop has always inspired cultural and theoretical reflections--not least because it was assumed to operate in an extremely close relationship with what Kracauer called "societal processes." For example, in 1970 Jean Baudrillard likened the gestures of Pop art to the attitudes and imperatives of consumerism itself, declaring its "'cool' smile" a unifying (and leveling) operation. Even earlier, Lawrence Alloway wrote in his 1958 essay "The Arts and the Mass Media," a founding document of Pop art, that "the new role for the fine arts is to be one of the possible forms of communication in an expanding framework that also includes the mass arts." This "expanding framework" can be seen as the true field of operation in which Pop made particular use of an "iconography of mass culture." In other words, Pop art presupposes a certain knowledge of "societal processes," which thus enables an aesthetic (and possibly extra-aesthetic) intervention directly within them. By 1969, Alloway went so far as to describe "the area of Pop Art" in terms of a quasi-utopian Gesamtkunstwerk, a vision of "cross-media exchanges and the convergence of multiple channels."

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This characterization seems almost prophetic in relation to the work of an artist-cum-techno producer like Pflumm or, even more so, to the "cross-media" practices of Chicks on Speed, a girl-band trio that one member described as a "living project." "We all live in the same building," explained Alex Murray-Leslie in an interview several years ago, "and meet regularly, hang out, make collages, eat together, whatever." "Whatever" may indeed be the best term to encapsulate the diverse activities of CoS, which also includes Melissa Logan and Kiki Moorse. Trained in art, fashion, and jewelry making, the women of CoS soon went beyond traditional artistic categories to forge a multidisciplinary pop undertaking and social experiment. Although they no longer live together, from their headquarters in Berlin, they operate in the midst of an international network of artists, musicians, fashion and jewelry designers, record labels, and galleries. In addition to a fashion collection, they have recently released the book Chicks on Speed: It's a Project and records by musicians including Angie Reed, DAT Politics, and Kevin Blechdom, as well as albums of their own. Falling somewhere between fashion shows and performance art, the club concerts at which CoS produce and perform their increasingly professional version of electroclash--a veritable yard sale of retro Euro disco, punk, and New Wave--are embedded in a theatrical spectacle of self-made costumes and makeup, video feeds, animated graphics, and photographic documentations of other CoS productions. For those orbiting their universe, these concerts/parties have become known for their special brand of rowdy glamour. Songs like "Fashion Rules," "99 Cents," "Class War," or "We Don't Play Guitar" mimic and sometimes satirize the conventions of political sloganeering. However, there's also a certain seriousness to the way the songs are performed onstage with quotations from agitprop graphics, references to the "industrial painting" of the Italian Situationist Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, or the texts of anarchist pamphleteer and cultural theoretician Stewart Home.

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On one hand, CoS worked early on to develop a distinct public image, which has now evolved into a coherent indie corporate identity. On the other, their production is growing so prodigiously that it is impossible to summarize. Decidedly multidisciplinary, they engage and vampirize the system of fashion and consumer society in a way that takes up and expands on the historical Pop activities of "art directors" and artist-entrepreneurs from Claes Oldenburg, operator of the Ray Gun Mfg. Co. Store, to Warhol, with his Factory and Interview businesses. To these precedents CoS adds an understanding of culture as economics that refers as much to Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's Sex boutique as it does to the DIY ethos of the postpunk era of indie record labels and the start-up optimism of the '90s. The "political" status of this merging of art, commerce, and subculture is anything but clear, characterized as it is by a tremendous skepticism toward traditional modes of artistic politicization and yet suggestive of anticapitalist and postfeminist agendas. CoS do not operate critically, analyzing a situation and then reacting to it. Instead, they interpret the logic behind the cultural fields in which they move--on the spot and at their own speed. Some observers mistrust this approach, finding the political intent of such nebulous celebrations of creativity and entrepreneurialism vague and merely illustrative of entrepreneurialism itself. What do we know, or rather, what do Chicks on Speed know, of the popular culture with which they "play"? What can be determined about the "system" if one is both wandering through it and infiltrating it in a Pop-performative mode? And what, for that matter, is specifically "Pop" about it?

In a literal sense, many artists in New York and Europe in the early '60s already understood Pop as a call to performance. The collage environments and happenings that Oldenburg and Jim Dine developed from Allan Kaprow's activities of the late '50s brought together the realms of business, commercial production, audience participation, and performance in the immediate vicinity of Pop. From the context of Fluxus came the "decollage" Actionism of Wolf Vostell, who intervened in more or less public spaces in West German cities via media images, antiwar demonstrations, and even jukeboxes. In so doing, he understood "Pop" both as the target of his criticism and as his performative method. In 1963, Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg, the self-appointed artists of "Capitalist Realism," installed themselves in the salesrooms of a Dusseldorf furniture store for their performance-installation Leben mit Pop (Living with Pop).

These and other performative "cross-media exchanges," to borrow Alloway's phrase, such as the long-term performance in the Factory or the Living and Singing sculptures of Gilbert & George suggest a model of Pop as "under construction" or "at work." Such an approach grasps the system of mass media and consumer society very materially, even bodily, despite its dematerializing effects. To physically interact with or intervene within this power structure demanded a bodily commitment, which contrasted with catchphrases about the "disappearance of the body" or the "disembodied visuality" of a technologized world. Yet this performative bodily drive has been tendentiously omitted from the story of Pop as narrowly told by art history. It remained an episode--an episode that nonetheless has suddenly gained new meaning in today's reactivations of a Pop ethos. Kracauer's and Alloway's characterizations of Pop in terms of "societal processes" and "cross-media exchanges" are being reinvestigated via methods that privilege the body as the site where mass-cultural effects are inscribed.

The example of Chicks on Speed has already introduced several aspects of "performing the system" along these lines. While in the '60s there was talk of a "new sensibility," the very concept of "sensibility" (as a culturally coded attitude toward the world) has now been superseded by the concept of "subjectivity." Societal processes are now--thanks to Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri--more adequately described as processes of subject formation. One important reason for this change is that subjectivity has become capitalism's most important market. The production of identities and emotional states has superseded the production of products. Pop can still function in direct relation to consumer society, but only if it takes into consideration both the ubiquity of Pop's principles and the special nature of social power today. Anxieties about social status, terrorism, or the effects of globalization are being linked to high-key images of success, health, and beauty--all in order to produce subjects that integrate the virtues of "flexibility," "mobility," "responsibility," "fitness," "attractiveness," or "emotional intelligence" within a constant performance of the self. Anything that could today count as an interesting aesthetic reaction to social relationships within a global media and consumer landscape must examine this performative condition. Pop is thus more unavoidable and omnipresent than ever, yet its strategies bear little resemblance to the Pop of the Fordist postwar decades.

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In 1994, Jonathan Crary described the situation succinctly, writing in these pages, "One of the most difficult tasks facing us today is to imagine strategies of living and acting that may well be within the terrain of the image and information marketplace but that are discerning and mobile enough to identify and elude its ever changing consumerist and productivist imperatives." The same issue of Artforum also included Glenn O'Brien's discussion of Art Club 2000's now legendary Gap project, which was exhibited in the summer of 1993 at American Fine Arts in New York. In the post-Conceptual spirit of the early '90s, the seven-member group thoroughly investigated the corporate philosophy and economic reality of the Gap, going so far as to rifle through its trash. In turn, they posed for a series of photographs as duty-minded, competent consumers, absorbed in activities such as reading Newsweek or hanging out on brand-new furniture. They even announced their project with a pastiche of a Gap ad, which drew the company's ire in the form of a cease-and-desist letter. All of this, O'Brien remarked, combined "the elegant muckraking of Hans Haacke with a groovy Pop art sensibility." With its supposedly acquiescent photographs in the style of fashion and lifestyle ads, the Gap project was an early and often underestimated contribution to a post-Pop performance of the system that analyzes the economically and societally determined performance of the self. From today's perspective, the photographs seem to be more about a concrete situation than enjoyable consumerism, more a record of subjugation to the market than an eager mimicry of the world of images and goods.

This subjugation goes hand in hand with the demands of corporate identity programming, leading one to wonder: How can one hope to achieve self-empowerment? The artist group the Yes Men offer one possible strategy for resistance by infiltrating a powerful milieu and exposing its ideological mechanisms through theatrical exaggeration. Known for pranksterish performances in which the three members made appearances as representatives of the WTO at neoliberal think tanks or at events held by US conservatives, they propose a method of "identity correction," which works by "exposing, perhaps deviously, the nastiness of powerful evildoers." At the Heritage Foundation's annual Resource Bank meeting in Chicago this year, the group masqueraded as the fake rightwing Society for Socioeconomic Stability. Acting as ardent supporters of free-market forces, they took the stage, criticized Bush's lack of trust in this ideal, and "nominated" for president former Reagan attorney general Edwin Meese, who was present at the occasion. As to be expected, the documentary movie The Yes Men was released this summer.

This form of acting undercover and mimicking the very postures and practices that are responsible for an individual's sense of disempowerment can be claimed as a central artistic thrust within the post-Pop performance of the system. "Theatricalization" extends even to art spaces, as, for example, in the work of Vanessa Beecroft. She has deployed an unconventional collection of models under the banner of beauty and desirability, yet they often appear uncannily constrained and disciplined in a way that contradicts the promise of the good life through bodily perfection. The white cube thus becomes a stage for the mise-en-scene of physical normativity. Colonized by the supposedly "foreign" disciplines of fashion and modeling, it is revealed to be a kind of image space that, not surprisingly, can no longer be categorically separated from other spaces that produce cultural and social value.

The recent video installations of Aernout Mik, like Reversal Room, 2001, and Dispersion Room, 2004, take the theatricalization of the art space in another direction by trying to make the viewer interact with quasi-narrative images of mysterious occurrences in large office spaces and industrial kitchens. Often projected on the walls of specifically constructed rooms, these images do not suggest a latter-day form of institutional critique but, rather, display the radical breakdown and neuroticism of institutional systems and bureaucracies. The installations effectively engulf the viewer in their playful dysfunctionality, yet ultimately audience "participation" is limited to one's movement within the image-drenched space. Indeed, a troubling but pertinent question around much post-Pop concerns its degree of involvement with societal processes, the gap between representing and emulating them, between mimicry and pseudomanipulation.

Another approach to performing the system is pursued by the British journalist Adrian Dannatt with the Three, a semifictitious group of former models turned Conceptual artists whose sole aim is to generate media attention about themselves. Concocted by Dannatt, this mysterious trio (composed of rotating members) have allegedly withdrawn from the fashion industry and now, possessing only their beauty and questionable notoriety, create one modeling "test picture" after another. As it turns out, this artistic hoax has effectively garnered Dannatt mentions in media sources like the New York Daily News. Dannatt has remarked, "What The Three have made clear is that to be an artist is to invent an artist and that the only way to subvert the mass media is via the mass media." The Three were also involved in the short-lived fad of "flash mobs," which were a means of gaining attention through cryptic actions in public. These ironic forays into societal processes are intended to be rendered as pure information by the media: Reportage replaces the artwork, and rumor becomes the certified art object exhibited in the gallery. And the interventions in a shopping mall become a commentary on the "illegitimate" manipulability of this space. Such purposeful transformations of institutional and social spaces turn them into stages for making visible the mechanisms of identity control.

Ultimately, even the theater itself, which is, after all, the ancestral home of any "theatricalization," has become the site of a Pop interrogation of the social processes of identity formation. Choreographers such as the Berlin-based Argentinian Constanza Macras and her troupe Dorky Park work to a great extent with pop music, mass-media images, and television formats. In Macras's pieces like Back to the Present, 2003, the trashiness and misery of the image industries are embodied in dance. Taking their cue from the sadomasochistic drive of MTV's Jackass, the young dancers often act like stunt people, literally throwing away their bodies. To emulate and express the state of constant surveillance or the "reality" of reality TV, the cast is put on display to such an extent that they eventually end up naked, if not necessarily liberated.

Macras has a lot of company in the theater world when it comes to rendering the pressures of an economy that promotes ruthless striving for the optimization of personal attributes, from looks to intelligence. In the 2003-2004 trilogy Das System, staged at Berlin's Schaubuhne theater, German author and director Falk Richter, collaborating with authors such as Martin Crimp and the British art collective Blast Theory, deploys the full technical apparatus of contemporary theater to dramatize our entrapment within the ideologies of efficiency and the any-spaces of airports, offices, and hotel rooms. His protagonists are downsizing consultants, journalists, and people generally running amok amid video projections of corporate facades and night-vision military imagery. As in the logo parade of Pflumm's Paris, the power of contemporary visual culture is putatively captured through a cataloguing of images, attitudes, and phraseologies. Yet in the process, common cultural cliches about the nature of the system and the professional deformation of the individual are often simply reproduced. Even when they fail, however, such undertakings are part of a concerted, albeit heterogeneous, effort to come to terms with a "system" that can no longer be adequately identified with terms like "the state," "capital," or "conservatives."

The disorientation caused by the manifest lack of methodological or formal guidance is also apparent in every move of author and director Christoph Schlingensief, who works mainly with theaters like the Volksbuhne in Berlin, where he has also founded political parties ("Chance 2000") and produced TV talk shows. Schlingensief began working in film, but his labyrinthine career path has also led him into the art world (his Church of Fear appeared at the 2003 Venice Biennale) and to Bayreuth, where he directed Parsifal in this year's Wagner festival. Schlingensief has become a minor celebrity in Germany, a bona fide pop figure who continually puts himself at the disposal of the mass media. Nevertheless, his "pop" is one not of distance and indifference but of intrigue and provocation. Schlingensief's personality and his work embody and thrive on a certain kind of confusion: a hilariously messy self-made mythology of love, failure, fear, German history, and alienation from that tradition. His discourse often appears (and is) entirely pointless, tending toward a rather self-satisfying excitement, or a symptomatic embodiment of our present entropic condition. But it is nevertheless difficult to dismiss his actions, which have included provocations of bourgeois theater audiences by putting real neo-Nazis on the stage (as at the Schauspielhaus Zurich), public performances with homeless people in Hamburg, and an ongoing collaboration with a group of mentally handicapped actors.

These disparate aesthetic forays into today's political systems and the image world of the mass media take place within different institutional, cultural, and geographic settings--and explore very different social and economic considerations. But given Pop's ubiquity within contemporary art, one must consciously reckon with this kind of disparity if one is to talk meaningfully about its afterlife today. By now, Pop is a resource for a wide repertoire of aesthetic and critical strategies that can subtly probe the conditions of social control but which can also end up simply celebrating and legitimating those very conditions. It is therefore not surprising that the ambivalent struggles within nearly all of the artistic and cultural undertakings mentioned here are closely related to the critical questions raised by Kracauer in his discussion of "societal processes" and by Alloway in reference to the "communication system." Pop art's real transgression and dispersal into all areas of life and society have reduced the original Pop conceit, if ever there was one, to a set of working models for coping with a life-world built from popular and commercial images. As Pop becomes so much more than benday dots and billboard paintings, it becomes increasingly difficult to address and delimit it as the object of a "disciplined" art-critical or -historical study. Given the various levels at which artists currently interact with the media apparatus and address its impact on individual subjectivity, or "perform the system," it is no longer easy to discern traces of Pop proper. But this dissolution into a wide range of aesthetic practices may nevertheless be the true legacy of Pop art today.

Tom Holert is a Berlin-based writer.

Translated from German by Sara Ogger.