Sampling the globe.

In a studio below my office at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt, a young German painter is scrupulously copying Japanese manga characters, while a cadre of film students in the next room watch a bootleg of a Matthew Barney movie. Pratchaya Phinthong, a Thai student who is importing nearly worthless coins from his country that work perfectly in the vending machines here (and, I presume, everywhere two-Euro pieces are accepted), recently disclosed his ingenious discovery at our open studio event. Now these two-Euro bahts are spreading across the continent like a virus. Phinthong's next move, to upload onto our server illegal copies of popular software bought in Bangkok and offer them gratis, was, understandably, halted by our administrative director. But isn't free circulation the future? "What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self," the artist formerly known as Elaine Sturtevant opines. "Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine--that's the way to go."

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In the past four decades we have witnessed a veritable orgy of repetition, appropriation, and revival, and the rhythm of these artistic returns has become increasingly rapid. At the same time, the geography of the art world has been expanding apace. Can today's samplings and repetitions, which often involve geographic and cultural displacements, be interpreted as critical reassessments of previous aesthetic models in the name of a genuine avant-garde tradition, or has contemporary art finally succumbed to the omnivorous machinery driving the inexorable recycling of fashion and style? Or have we reached a point where the question as formulated is no longer the question to ask?

The oft-remarked process of globalization--in art no less than commerce--isn't a phenomenon taking hold someplace far away but just around the corner from where you live. And that's why I started off here at home. Another local example: Four years ago, on Oskar-von-Miller Strasse 16, Frankfurt am Main (all but around the corner from where I live), artists Michael S. Riedel and Dennis Loesch and a group of their friends took over an abandoned building ready for the wrecking ball and turned it into an enormous copying machine, spitting out not only mystifying and precise imitations of invitations to art openings and posters and ads announcing shows, concerts, and theater performances but also counterfeits of other artists' work, even of entire shows. In fact, no artist showing or performing in the city of Frankfurt was immune from the risk of being duplicated, faintly altered, and perhaps even gently ridiculed a few blocks away, in the presence of hundreds of partying youth. Such was the fate of artists as diverse as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jason Rhoades, and Gilbert & George. One artist not only was aware of the duplication but actively participated in the mimicry. Others went blithely ignorant of this parallel universe. Gilbert & George, for instance, most likely failed to notice "Gert & Georg," the two fashionable young men who discreetly followed their every step and aped their every movement.

"The whole thing has nothing to do with appropriation. It's not about property, not about Sony, Saab, and Simulation, not about the 1980s"--or so reads a statement presented in connection with the release of Oskar: a novel, a fat book documenting three years of activity and itself a rip-off of Warhol's a: a novel, complete with Andy's portrait and the cover blurb praising his literary foray as "Hellish hymns from Amphetamine Heaven." But here the Oskar-von-Miller Strasse group writes its own history of replication as an artistic strategy and carefully distances itself not only from '80s-style appropriation but also from strategies typical of the following decade. This isn't about revivals. "No remake, no remix, no 1990s." So how, then, if we're to take them at their word, are we to understand this novel kind of repetition? It is an activity without nostalgia, they declare. It is, their book claims, about a total lack of emotion, about distance and arrogance. And about style, I would add. No doubt it's got a great deal to do with style and looking smart. If this is not a revival, it's because Pop never vanished in the first place. In this world of reflections, Pop is still present as a mirror effect--as is Situationism and the dress code of the mods. That's what Oskar-von-Miller Strasse 16 is: a mirror producing its own highly stylish cosmos outside the normal world of fashion cycles. In this universe of "filmed films" and "clubbed clubs" (titles of two Riedel and Loesch projects) nothing is simple and straightforward, everything implicated in the logic of reflections. Originally--which means 1957--Richard Hamilton declared, "Pop Art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience); Transient (short-term solution); Expendable (easily forgotten); Low-cost; Mass-produced; Young (aimed at youth); Witty; Sexy; Gimmicky; Glamorous; Big Business." None of that has lost its relevance. Pop is alive, as is proved by Loesch's elaborate haircuts and Riedel's smart ties and jackets, worn even while drawing a huge copy of a Warhol self-portrait (the one that graces the cover of a: a novel) on a wall at Oskar-von-Miller Strasse 16, a place brimming with young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, and glamorous people and probably best described as a late emanation of the Factory. But Big Business? Not really. Rest assured others take care of that legacy of Pop quite efficiently.

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"Business art is the step that comes after Art," according to Warhol, who also claimed that "making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art." Said Jeff Koons some fifteen years ago, "A lot of my work is about sales." He adds, "I want to have an impact on people's lives. I want to communicate to as wide a mass as possible." The answer for him was TV and advertising because "the art world is not effective right now." For a more recent case in point, look no further than Takashi Murakami's international empire of merchandise based in New York, Paris, and Tokyo and visible far beyond the boundaries of the art world. Large kitschy works like Reversed Double Helix, installed at Rockefeller Center in 2003, of course offer visibility, but other projects have reached an even larger audience--for instance, the recent collaboration with Marc Jacobs/Louis Vuitton, a project all the more visible because cheap knockoffs of the handbag are sold by street vendors the world over and thus pushed to new levels of supervisibility along the networks of global capitalism. Nobody was particularly impressed with Murakami's official entry at the last Venice Biennale, but the overwhelming presence of his bags on the city's streets, alleys, and bridges was analyzed in these pages as a novel form of market penetration. That, of course, is also Koons's favored vocabulary. He manipulates and he penetrates, and he is eager to place his operation in a tradition of Pop: "To me, Andy presented Duchampian ideas in a manner the public was able to embrace. Where I differ is that Warhol believed you could penetrate the mass through distribution and I continue to believe you penetrate the mass with ideas." And Murakami's penetration? Just global distribution or even a few ideas?

"We want to see the newest things. That is because we want to see the future," writes Murakami in "A Theory of Super Flat Japanese Art," his 2000 essay describing a specific painterly sensibility and attraction to two-dimensionality that has given rise not only to a tradition of very flat art from Tokyo but also to an entirely new form of Japanese existence, which probably has its equivalent in other parts of the world--perhaps in every part of the world. In Murakami's view, the integration of the entertainment industry and the art world is yielding not only flat artworks but, more important, a new superflat image: "Us." Who are the "us" of superflatness, one might ask? I used to think that the flattest things around were the flowery wall paintings of Lily van der Stokker and the Nintendo paintings of Michel Majerus, but perhaps the two-dimensionality of Japanese superflatness is even more extreme than these European latecomers to Pop. Murakami's lineage involves not only classical Japanese artists from previous centuries, such as Kano Sansetsu and Katsushika Hokusai, but also contemporary artists working with animation, manga culture, and music videos. In "The Super Flat Manifesto" (2000), he claims that "the world of the future might be like Japan is today--super flat."

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Michel Majerus, who died in a plane crash in his native Luxembourg in 2002, may well have agreed. Certainly his huge canvases, which have always impressed me, convey a similar sense of razing the differences between high and low, original and reproduction, historical and brand new. His massive works--some almost thirty feet wide--display fragments from the history of painting and imagemaking in its entirety, from Rubens and Watteau to Warhol and Disney. It's all there at once--glaring, overwhelming, and hideous. But what dominates his paintings are not traces from old or new masters but slivers from newspaper ads, comic strips, video games, and manga characters, all reproduced in lurid acrylic. Is this an updated form of Pop or a new take on appropriation? Probably both--and something more as well. His work conveys a radical sense of presence and a complete lack of sentimentality. It's ugly, it's spectacular, it's superficial, but there's no reason to moralize or indulge in melancholic reflection on the loss of authenticity. Majerus never mourned the death of painting but instead celebrated the abundance of imagery both accumulated over centuries of artmaking and generated today by the media. The temporality of his work is that of a floating, all-encompassing Now, analogous perhaps to that of the World Wide Web. Devoid of all intimacy and ultimately of subjectivity as such, his images bear no essential link to a psychological interiority but, rather, but seem to float freely along the conduits of visual information, where the hierarchies that keep entertainment and high culture apart have long been abandoned and where manga characters inhabit pieces of abstract art. It's all there at once, in a presence rich and hospitable--yet totally flat.

A very flat Asian entity who enjoyed a quite special, if short-lived, visibility in the art world of late was Annlee, an anonymous manga character bought a few years ago by Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe for the sum of forty-six thousand yen from a Japanese agency. "We looked for a character and we found this one," says Parreno. "A character without a name, a two-dimensional image ... A character without a biography and without qualities." The wish of European intellectuals to free themselves from the old weight of history, subjectivity, and unbearable meaning has its tradition of projections toward the East, Roland Barthes's fictitious "Japan," an empire of signs devoid of Western innerness, being only one prominent instance. Is the story of Annlee a further chapter in this history? In a sense, it's all an act of liberation. Says Huyghe, "We wanted to free a character from the fiction market." The series of artworks and exhibition that followed provided the liberated sign with a rich personal history--perhaps several. The whole project, "No Ghost Just a Shell," 1999-2002, was finally summarized in a book project. Also, through a rather complicated contractual operation, the legal rights to use Annlee were handed over to the character herself (is it a she?), which provides the sign with an unusual autonomy. Thus, Annlee has received not only personal history but also, I fancy, a kind of depth. Has she become a subject? Certainly the commodity is talking back to us. In Huyghe's video Two Minutes Out of Time, 2000, Annlee claims, "See, I'm not here for your amusement. You are here for mine!" She can even become a bit threatening, as in Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's video from the same year, Annlee in Anzen Zone: "There will be no safety zone / You will disappear into your screen." What kind of an apocalyptic discourse is this? The moment the flat sign gains some kind of reflexivity and, yes, depth, she seems to prophesy the final disappearance of any sphere of autonomy and freedom, emotional or otherwise: "I might only be a digital creature / But believe me / I know what I'm talking about / I'm not crazy / And don't say I didn't warn you. I warned every one of you / There will be no safety zone ..."

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Obviously, strange things can happen to a manga character in Europe. But, conversely, designed objects of European origin go through the most radical alterations and multiplications when they enter the machinery of the Asian copy industry, which, as Tobias Rehberger knows, is more conspicuous in Bangkok than perhaps anywhere else. That's why, after enlisting craftsmen in Cameroon to make replicas of European designer classics (by Rietveld and Aalto, among others), he has now entered into an intense exchange with Thai fabricators. Some rather monstrous objects have emerged out of this cross-cultural production process--for instance, handcrafted replicas of a Porsche 911 and a McLaren, both built according to drawings made from memory and faxed or sent to Thailand. Even stranger, perhaps, is Pad See Euw, 2001, a brown vintage Volkswagen Beetle built according to the earliest available drawing by Ferdinand Porsche, not to mention Lap Ped, 2001, a white Beetle produced in accordance with the sketches made by Adolf Hitler during conversation with Porsche. Some of the Thai replicas are quite odd in that they destabilize the relationship between copy and original. Thus Yam Kai Yeao Maa, 2001, a Mercedes, was manufactured following various prototype photographs, before the actual car was launched in Germany. And Som-Tam-Poo, 2003, is a physically quite obtrusive simulacrum: a Thai version of a Mercedes prototype from the 1970s, a car that never existed in the real world but was fetishized by a generation of German boys because its picture was included in a popular game of cards some thirty years ago.

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On the second floor of About Cafe, Bangkok's leading venue for contemporary art, there is a relatively cool reading room where I have spent several afternoons working on this article. Downstairs a piece by Daniel Buren is being installed, so the European neo-avant-garde is present in its original form, and the bookshelves are filled with the standard Western literature on contemporary art and critical theory. But I am also sitting in immediate proximity to the city's innumerable bazaars, which offer copies and copies of copies, and to the immense Pantip Plaza software department store--perhaps the world's most radical challenge to copyright regulations--and issues of repetition, originality, and simulation gain a new urgency. Two decades back, Jean Baudrillard's ideas about hyperreality and the simulacrum were a provocation: "The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.... The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is, the hyperreal ... which is entirely in simulation" (emphasis added). This statement, printed on the back cover of Semiotext(e)'s 1983 edition of Simulations, now strikes me as merely a realistic description of what's going on in the myriad shops, street markets, and bazaars that surround me. The very idea of an original seems so distant in this world of mass--produced things trying to look exactly like other mass-produced things that one may wonder what is left of the concept of subjectivity. "Cloning. Sampling. Substitutes. Surrogates. Stand-ins. It's either here or right around the corner," Richard Prince observed recently. Warhol was one of very few public figures in American culture--Thomas Pynchon being another example--who toyed consistently with the idea of cloning. He had at least one "official" double and, if the rumor is true, asked two or three look-alikes to show up at openings and parties in his stead. In the Bangkok bazaars his traces are everywhere: Marilyn, Coca-Cola, Elvis, and Mao, on T-shirts and posters, postcards and books. The artist himself--or at least some late avatar--can't be far away.

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Interest in these mass-produced items recurs in any number of recent Thai art projects. Navin Rawanchaikul, for instance, has appropriated the visual language of Piak Poster, a Thai film director who later became an influential billboard painter. Rawanchaikul's huge billboards have been seen on the walls of art institutions around the world, presenting artists and curators as if film stars in a Thai blockbuster (whose narrative is synopsized in comic books by the artist in the same style). Surasi Kusolwong, perhaps Bangkok's most prominent young artist, is interested in the very structure of the bazaar itself. He recently arranged a kind of street market at the Frankfurt airport (where everything cost only one Euro!). The Danish artist collective Superflex have also been very active in Thailand. In Africa they had developed a simple, portable biogas unit that can produce sufficient gas for the cooking and lighting needs of a single family. As a comment on the Thai culture of cheap copies, they designed a biogas version of Danish designer Poul Henningsen's famous PH5 lamp, to be used by people living in areas without access to electricity. The project continued with Lacoste Supercopy, presented at the Copenhagen Fashion Fair 2002, which involved Thai copies of couture polo shirts. Superflex perspicaciously observed that "copy products could be seen as a first-class branding strategy for the original production companies, whose products will still be desired as an original. However, imagine if you could create a copy that became more attractive than the original--a SUPERCOPY."

If there is such a thing as neo-Pop, or Pop after Pop, then the nature of the neo or the after should be of interest to us here, as should the nature of the very return in question. In what sense is "original" Pop art (which, given its inherently secondhand nature, sounds like a contradiction in terms) present in the Pop sensibility so obvious in much recent art, not just from the US and Europe but globally? Are the emanations of Global Pop--Japanese superflat, say, or the Thai super-copy--just belated versions of something that was already fully significant and effective in the early '60s? In other words, are they merely Brillo Boxes adapted to a different place and time (and the clock says several decades too late)? In recent years American art historians have kept busy theorizing momentous returns in recent cultural history, primarily that of the neo-avant-garde of the '60s and '70s, which--so one prominent argument goes--cannot be seen as a mere copy of the "original" European avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century. Instead the neo-avant-garde's return to the monochrome, the ready-made, and the photocollage some half century after they first appeared must be seen as productive repetitions that contribute to the significance of the "original" retroactively. Do these productive rereadings still go on? Is the same true of Andy Warhol and today's returns to, or late emanations of, Pop?

In an old issue of October that I happen to find on the shelves of About Cafe, Hal Foster argues that we can properly understand the "Duchamp effect" only in terms of the temporality of trauma. Avant-garde art, and not only that of Duchamp, was never historically effective or fully significant in its initial incarnation, says Foster, because it constituted a traumatic break with the past and, as trauma, can be comprehended only through repetition and delay. Freud described this temporal phenomenon as Nachtraglichkeit, or deferred action. The traumatic event is never perceived as present, as something happening right now, but registered only after the fact, according to a rule of necessary delay. But event if we accept this analysis of certain psychopathological structures, what gives us the right to apply it to collective developments such as art movements--specifically, to the recent vicissitudes of the avant-garde? Foster poses this very question but then throws his hands up: Since "this analogy to the individual subject is all but structural to historical studies," he concedes, shouldn't we at least make sure we use the most sophisticated theory of the mind available? That to him means a Freudian--or, perhaps, Lacanian--theory of the subject as characterized by the essential nonidentity of traumatic temporality, where "before and after, cause and effect, origin and repetition" are overturned. And while we may want to reject the notion of a collective historical subject, we all know that the temporality of art isn't linear but characterized by precisely these sorts of repetitions and syncopations, detours, and delays. Sometimes the real revolutions in art remain invisible until they are long over, and the subterranean shock waves can travel for generations.

"If I'd gone ahead and died ten years ago, I'd probably be a cult figure today," reads the first sentence of Warhol's POPism. In a world where surface is the only thing that matters, even death is reduced to the level of a glamour effect or a celebrity stunt. Warhol's wish to be reincarnated as a jewel on Liz Taylor's finger is pretty far from the idea of the return of the Real (where the real is understood as traumatic). So is Warhol all about surface? Should his "There's nothing behind it" be taken seriously, or, on the contrary, are his works dark political allegories of American culture, and, as such, do they really enact a kind of engaged realism? In one of the most sophisticated essays on Warhol I know of, Foster answers: both. In "The Return of the Real" (1996) he argues that Warhol's "Death in America" series of the mid-'60s should be read as both simulacral and referential, both complacent and critical. Again, the key concept is that of the trauma. Warhol's art is a kind of traumatic realism, and his cult of the machine, his compulsion for repetition, and his cultivation of meaningless monotony are sure signs that the subject here in question is in a state of shock. In Lacanian theory there are two kinds of repetition: the return on the level of the symptom and the return of the traumatic Real itself. In Warhol's own view, the very idea of a symptom is suspect since it depends on a deeper realm hidden beneath the surface of the visible. Everything's visible, Warhol would have insisted; behind this shining surface of glamorous effects lies ... nothing.

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.

"The pictures I went after, 'stole,' were too good to be true," says Prince. Is his art a critique of the commodification of our desires or a cynical affirmation of that process which also forces the viewer into voyeurism and complicity? Whereas Murakami, say, seems to have misunderstood Warhol's remarks on monotony and now floods the market with meaningless and boring art, Prince consistently produces work that, at its best, emulates Warhol in ambivalence and dangerous attraction. His series of Marlboro men, "Untitled (Cowboy)," ongoing since 1980, not only displays the typical ambiguity--fascination or critique?--but would seem to have slowly accrued significance over the years. Unlike fellow artists who have widened the range of material appropriated to become more "global," Prince has basically kept doing the same thing--yet the perception of his work has slowly changed, and the pictures now seem more political. An icon of early-'80s art and that era's interest in the simulacrum, the Marlboro series has by now become in effect a portrait of the last superpower ("spiritual America" indeed); Presented at the 2003 Venice Biennale, the cowboys fully conveyed the powerful attraction and repulsion of US supremacy. This, I thought, is an artistic statement wholly comparable to Warhol's "Death in America" series, and it is unrivaled today in sheer force and unbearable geopolitical self-confidence. Neo-Pop? A repetition on the level of the symptom or a return of the traumatic Real? Posterity will tell.

Director of the Stadelschule art academy in Frankfurt, contributing editor Daniel Birnbaum also heads the institute's Portikus gallery.