Seduce and Destroy: Avant Pop 3

"...the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment...If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." - William Blake, from the Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The subject matter of Avant Pop is the artist's prerogative, however typically speaking it indulges into the Blakean ideal of purification through sensory stimulation and enjoyment. This is a part of the seduction process that is one of the ultimate goals of Avant Pop. It is dark, free form, sexy, like a tab of acid it slowly sucks you in and makes you hypersensitive while it rearranges your conceptions and thought process. Ultimately the goal of all this is to subvert the status quo bonds that have been placed on the arts and on society by media, through the use of media itself.

It is, generally speaking, the tradition of the dominant culture to either assimilate or make a novelty of that which is considered counter culture or dangerous to it's ideologies. By doing this it either brings the counter culture into it's service, or makes it seem a gag, a passing carnival act. It would seem then that the only effective method of debunking the dominant culture's mythologies is to infiltrate it and use it against itself, like a tick or a virus would do.

By latching itself onto, and using pop culture as one of it's main influences, while still maintaining an Avant sensibility, the Avant Pop artist uses pop icons and concepts (from rock stars, cyber sex, MP3's, to Internet Ready News) from a point at which it can exploit them and destroy their pretensions. They seduce with that which is familiar to our passions and minds, everything that we experience in our daily life, and make it a potential catalyst to help explain the level of technological and information overload we suffer from. It does not hate technology. Quite the contrary, it loves it for it's potential, tries to love it for what it is, but is vehement about it's failures and our inability to cope with it. Avant Pop is an attempt to move us in a direction of living compatibly in a digital universe.

What may prove the most revolutionary about all this is that it has taken our conceptions of text one step further. It moves towards a more interactive and seductive form of art, making the reader and the author both artists. It is summed up by Mark Amerika as follows, "I, whoever that is, am always interacting with the data created by the collective you, whoever that is, and by interacting and supplementing the collective you, will find meaning." (Mark Amerika, from the Avant Pop Manifesto)

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic