Analysing Warhol’s art and his point of view towards consumism and modernity, one can say that his art is partly made of the incessantly repeated accumulation of ordinary consumer goods: cans of Chambell’s Soup and boxes of Brillo, bottles of Coca-Cola, images of stars, etc. Objects, in short, with little desirability unless viewed through his eye. The ‘democraticalism’ and freedom of consumption was the very stuff of consumer culture, and the American Dream.
"What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."
--Andy Warhol (The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again)
If culture, at its root, is the production and the experience of meaning through symbolization, the thesis of global culture convergence must contain the idea that people’s interaction with these goods penetrates deeply into the way in which we construct our ‘cultural world’ and make sense of our lives. “Consumption, then, must not be understood as the consumption of use-values, a material utility, but primarily as the consumption of signs” (Featherstone, 1991: 85). Richard Prince’s work Cowboys is a good example of this appropriation of symbolic forms circulating in our popular culture. The strength of his art is that the images he captures, once removed from their function as advertisements, comment on our culture, and show us archetypical images of our society. What makes Prince's appropriation interesting, is that the iconic nature of the Marlboro’s pictures, signifies the cultural pathology of a society obsessed with self-indulgences and individualism that respond to ideas about American identity and consumerism.
Modernity, super-modernity and its photographic representation
In an era of increasingly global capitalist production, photographers have become more and more preoccupied with documenting social spaces, and how ‘modern’ and ‘super-modern’ societies interact in these spaces. The work of photographers as Andreas Gursky and Allan Sekula has emerged from both the documentary tradition and the legacy of conceptual art, to document the relationships between the society and individual in the modern and super-modern spaces. With the selection of such a different photographers, and their body of works, I will argue that the kind of places exhibited in their photographs, represents a substantial challenge to one of the central myths of globalisation theory, that the world is increasingly becoming the same.
As Augé himself states, “Identity and relation (human relations) lie at the heart of all spatial arrangements classically studied by anthropology”. (Augé, 1995: 58). However Augé’s thesis is more focused on the relationship and dynamic between people and a notion of ‘place’, and in particular a ‘super modern non-place’, which he defines in opposition to a ‘modern’ space. Places are contrasted to spaces; spaces in turn are contrasted to non-places: “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place” (Auge, 1995: 77-78).
When modernity is contrasted to super-modernity we realize that super-modernity creates the non-places, “spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places...” (Auge, 1995: 78). For example, `in the modernity of the Baudelairean landscape ... everything is combined', the old and new are interwoven; on the other hand, super modernity `makes the old (history) into a specific spectacle, as it does with all exoticism and all local particularity ... in the non-places of super modernity, there is always a specific position ... for ‘curiosities’ presented as such” (Auge M. 1995, 110).
We have seen that Marc Auge defines non-places as those who do not have identity, history and urban relationships. Non-places are temporary spaces for passage, communication and consumption. Perhaps the artist, who is most faithfully recording this changing, or the globalization represented by the ‘non-places’ in the world, is Andreas Gursky. In his huge monolithic photographs, we see a world dominated by vast super structures, airports, stock exchange floors, whole enclosed artificial beach environments, cattle processing yards and sea-like masses of people attending rave parties. Gursky’s images seem unreal and yet true at the same time, and this paradox between the familiar and hyper real of the subject matter, create a distance/objectivity relationship, that make Gursky’s work one of the most prominent artists within the globalisation and historical perspective. “Gursky's work brings to life a globalized world, which is in the process of becoming—an eerie well lit world of travel, markets, hotel lobbies, airports, ports and crowds. But where there is light there is also darkness. Outside the spotlight of the globalised world is a darkened reality of relocation, labor, layoffs, dirt, sweat and pollution. It is this world which is the primary interest of Allan Sekula”. (Begg. 2005: 66).
Allan Sekula has been described as a pioneer in what is usually called ‘social realism’. His photographs most often focus on people engaged in political or economic struggles or iconic structures as part of his exploration of global economic systems. Sekula’s 81-color slides work, Waiting for Tear Gas (1999-2000) chronicles one of these chaotic days. He performs a classic role as photo-document, relying on the veracity of the camera to record the action. It is both a powerful statement in support of the anti-globalization movement and an extremely political artwork. “Sekula focuses on a more political conception of the multitude by portraying those who have been cast into this role through their opposition to trade, speculation and unproductive wealth” (Z. Begg. 627.). These images, at the same time, operate in critical relation to the documentary mode, occupying a strategic place vis-à-vis both the mass media (of all political persuasions) and a fine art tradition with which photography has a particular and complex relationship, discovering how new forms of social realism are present in the current art field.
Conclusion:
We have examine how globalization relates to the artistic practices of Andreas Gursky and Allan Sekula, looking at the manner in which Marc Auge theory of non-places as having no identity, no history and no urban relationships in a super-modernity society, has changed in what way we conceive photography.
On the other hand, we have seen how globalization has changed countries at the point that differences between cultures are being negated by a “global culture”. Already, in anyone of a hundred western counties, on the same day, millions of individuals can watch the same film, dressed in their identical ‘Levi’ jeans and ‘Nike’ shoes whilst ‘enjoying’ the same ‘Starbucks’ coffee. After the film the same individuals can visit their local franchised Museum of Contemporary Art and then go home to watch the same CNN news service.
It is a clear example of how the traditional cultural values of Western society are degenerating under the influences of corporate politics, the commercialization of culture and the impact of mass media. ‘The globalization process is seen as producing a unified and integrated common culture. Hence we find that theories of culture imperialism and media imperialism assume that local cultures are necessarily battered out of existence by the proliferation of consumer goods, advertising and media programmes stemming from the west (largely the United States)’. (Featherstone, 1995: 115)
We have seen as Andy Warhol and Richard Prince have been using iconographic symbols and sings that are part of our consumer culture. "In Warhol's art consumer culture doesn't come up short only when it is seen failing in its suicides and accidents and assassinations. It also fails when it succeeds. As plenty of studies have suggested, the fundamental premise of consumerism that happiness grows in tandem with wealth and ownership is a failure from the start. The eerily empty commodities depicted in Warhol's art, and produced by it, can feel like illustrations of that failure.
Although I made attended to clarify issues related with globalization and how it has been represented in the contemporaneous art and photography practices. Globalization is a reflection of a world in permanent mutation under human control and consequently unpredictable to be understood in a simple essay. This work is a personal attempt to comprehend the relationship between art and globalisation, and a will to clarify the different perspectives of practitioners and theorists within a complex globalize world, in its historical, geographical and cultural positions. Those positions are western and culturally imposed, that is to say that globalisation and art, are part of the same process of massification of the world under economic and political interests that are making culture worldwide live under signs of capitalism.
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References:
Augé, M. (1995): Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. London: Verso.
Begg, Z. (2005) Recasting Subjectivity: Globalisation and the Photography of Andreas Gursky and Allan Sekula. Great Britain: KALA PRESS, ISSN 0952-8822, NUMB 77, pages 625-636.
Featherstone, M. (1991): Consumer Culture & Postmodernism. London: Sage
Featherstone, M. (1995): Undoing Culture: Globalization, Posmodernism and identity. London: Sage
Warhol, A. (2007): The philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to B and back again. London: Penguin.
