Perverse Pop exhibtion at the Catto Contemporary Gallery,
London 21 Feb 20 March 2002
Catalouge statement by Ben Austin and Godfrey Barker

The term 'Pop Art' was created by Lawrence Alloway in 1958 to label those bright Omo and Daz and Hoover paintings, piled high with consumer goods, that cheered the post-war gloom. At last! TVs, fridges, telephones and swimming pools - they were the new Golden Calf. Overnight, we were Mammon's slaves.

Fifty years on, artists see the consumer culture very differently. They smell malaise. They see global multi-nationals eating us up - Coke, Nike, Texaco, those all-pervasive brand names from which nobody can escape. They see life packaged from your shoes to your DVDs to your pop idols to your holiday in Ibiza. After death and taxes, they see brand names as the biggest facts of life.

Is this a bad thing? If so, why? Shoppers are numb to it. Even grateful, on the High Street.

But there's a quiet revolution. Not just artists, brick-throwers and Guardian readers feel that the world dominated by Uncle Sam, MTV, the Internet, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Hollywood has become a giant global sameness.

Everyone does. We are all alienated consumers. We despise the thing we love. We accept the consumer gods as integral to our lives, but we resent them. At the same time we can't imagine what we'd do without them. They validate us, they give us status, define us, make us feel we belong.

The art of this anger is 'Perverse Pop'. What is it? What does it mean, why is it important?

Perverse Pop is saying: Coke, Big Macs, Marlboros, Levis, Reeboks, they have become the new global Big Brother. They follow you wherever you go. They fuck you up; they tell you what to do. They stifle individuality with pre-packaged lifestyles.

Advertisers have become brilliant at tapping into the aspiration of under-25s – i.e. to live the lifestyle of pop stars, footballers, Hollywood hunks and babes. But for all that choice, somehow there's no choice. The gritty reality is your desk on Monday morning, while Beckingham Palace remains forever out of reach.

This is the realm of 'Perverse Pop', the world of ideal conformity and feed the dream, the world of unattainable lifestyle; the world, which like the Barbados ads, is 'just beyond your imagination', the world where the carrot is just beyond your nose.

Perverse Pop is where we acknowledge the inherent sickness in our consumerism. Perverse Pop exposes the sordidness, waste and calculation in the whole sorry business - and it is a business. Not the most glamorous models, not the slickest ads can conceal it - the dollar drilling of the masses into loyal, unquestioning buying armies.

America is the Home of the Free. But artists are getting angry with the global American value system, its global colonialisation. Communism has been defeated. But what's around to defeat capitalism, the system with no alternative? Last week's petrol-bomber at McDonalds is munching a Quarter-Pounder with Fries today.

Nobody knows. But artists are now fighting for identity, space and air. Art is emerging as the strongest protest against the uniform cultural scene.

It now looks as important for Europe to reject US consumer domination, as it mattered to the US in the 1950s to kick out European cultural dominance - 500 years of Old Masters and all that grammatical Standard English.

Perverse Pop is worried: where is it all going? Is the future to be more and more mass consumer seduction? Will Albanians be smuggling themselves into Italy in 2010 in desperation for Nikes and Camels as now? Coca-Cola is now bigger than the GNP of 125 third world countries. It, like other giant consumer brand names, invades our souls. More than any government, Coke, McDonalds, the American reality is universal modern reality - brought to you at the push of a button on CNN, interpreted for you five-minutes later by Hollywood.

It's a lonely and packaged world. Fact and fiction are blurred. News is entertainment. Time Magazine found in 1962 that the average American was exposed to 1600 ads and brand names a day. What escape now? There are 77 channels on the telly, the universe is at the end of a mouse-click, Big Macs are on sale in 200 countries - and just who are you?