Down in Miami, Pae White is as charming as ever

You may recall Pae White's show Material Mutters (often misremembered as "Material Matters") at the Power Plant in 2010.  Well, here is her latest work, currently featured at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair:

FIGURE 1:  Pae White, Pop Storm, 2011
Japanese paper, clay, black thread, dimensions [presumably] variable.
Image courtesy of Kaufmann Repetto.

I'm really enjoying the lighthearted humour of Pop Storm!  Let me be frank, Pop Art wasted no time transforming from a campy, accessible rebuttal against Minimalism into a bloated self-congratulatory monster (for whose persistence we have Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami to thank) [Figures 2 & 3]. This tongue-in-cheek installation is fun and friendly.  The puffed clay popcorn kernels are even hanging at mouth height!  Talk about accessible.  Sad to say, this type of contemporary art still incites baffled skepticism in the general public.  To the average person, work such as Pop Storm seems to beg the question, "How is this art?!"

Well, let's ignore the shiny candy-coloured  Koons for a moment, and take a closer look at Pae White's Pop Storm.  There is a quintessential difference between White's installation and the sculptures by Koons or prints by Murakami.  Pae White doesn't present us with an object, instead, she facilitates an experience.

FIGURE 2: Jeff Koons, installation view of
scultpures from his Celebration Series at the
Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2007.
Photo coutesy of Markus Tretter

I can't emphasize this enough…  Pae White looks at pop art reflexively.  Playing with multiples, White engages her audience in an immersive experience.  Instead of one super-saturated image burned into your retina, White's installation is recalled sensorially——you remember walking through it, dodging to avoid smacking into pieces of popcorn.  It's haptic, it moves, you can touch it and smell it (though you probably shouldn't*).

FIGURE 3: Takashi Murakami,
Flower Ball, 2002

Pop Storm, though made of clay and paper, feels perishable.  It is an installation, so it will not remain static and unchanging.  This is not the case for Murakami's Flower Ball or one of the many Koons balloon dogs. 

The appeal of the flowers and balloon dog is the product of decades of advertising.  They are bright, they are shiny, they remind us of the wrapping of a product whose consumption exists in supposed direct correlation to our happiness.  Of course, the sugar rush is brief, and the ultra-glossy wrapper is immediately thrown away.  It kills me that centuries from now, people may know Koons' balloon dog as the poster child for art at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Yes, we live in a consumer society driven by aggressive, deceptive media and advertising.  Yes, planned obsolescence is ruining our quality of life and decimating our environment as well as the landscapes and resources of entire countries.  The model of Western life is deeply flawed…  I'll admit it's possible that Koons is the most accurate reflection of our day and age (should he manage to elbow aside Damien Hirst).  But Jeff Koons' work is soulless.  Instead of celebrating Koons' monuments to Capitalist consumerism, let's remember how intelligent, creative artists such a Pae White** were able to look at our "disposable culture" with a critical eye and a sense of humour, instead of taking the easy route and idolizing our most amoral flaws.

* Think Brian O'Doherty's Inside the White Cube, a 1976 essay dismantling how galleries limit our experience of fine art by encouraging a "polite manners" and "best behaviour" mentality.

** More posts on this to come!