Problem Pop
Could there be a more vague, more abused, more assumed concept than “pop”? Sure, any single term or label behaves similarly, like a squirming worm impaled on a taxonomic hook, fishing for meaning in the Arts. Yet my reading of pop defaults to its negative origins, wherein lie both its cultural separation from the Arts, and its contextual importation by the Arts. I would argue that little has changed in the Arts in the past half century in terms of pop developing or transforming beyond those post-war battles staged between high and low cultures.
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Archie Moore’s minimalism plays a formalist trick on a settler audience that sees only an Aboriginal flag, never the painting itself.
The Tennant Creek Brio’s art isn’t a legible script, a tidy lineage, or an easy metaphor—it’s a rupture, a refusal, a site of resurgence. This story sends us somewhere else, reaching for something that came before or after, looking for what’s out back, round the back of the house, the shed, the art centre, the “outback.”
“It is no longer my face (identification), but the face that has somehow been given to me (circumstantial possession) as stage property.” — Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Delirium
