Neo-Pop anti-product.

PRODUCT

BY DIMITRIOS ANTONITSIS & JEFFREY APOIAN

9 MINUTES, 30 SECONDS, 2006

Emphatically titled Product, in a gesture well-suited for the "enfant terrible of Greek art," (1) Dimitrios Antonitsis and Jeffrey Apoian's recent video is both a witty and artful eulogy to the anti-product--or better yet, an elegy for the "product." (2) As a video elegy, Product is comprised of a series of nine television advertisements, which as audiovisual rather than textual couplets, rhyme with each other by means of repetitive cliches of advertising wisdom (for example, love and beauty) and the oxymoronic absence of the products they actually advertise.

Antonitsis has meaningfully selected to appropriate, as the epitome of the artistic advertising of luxury goods cum lifestyle, the masterpieces of high-end television advertising by renowned fashion photographer Jeffrey Apoian, who is a full collaborator in the work. (3) Yet he reworks the frames in which each advertised product (beauty products, jewelry, champagne, etc.) emerges with its sharp (branded) recognizability and appeal by blurring them to the point of abstract unrecognizability and digital painterly beauty. Furthermore, he denudes the advertisements of their commercial voice-over, while leaving intact only the original soundtracks to dramatize the idyllic scenarios of love and beauty that are enacted by fashion models in make-believe everyday settings, which vary from exuberant baroque exteriors to elegant modernist interiors and exotic beaches. Using his, by now, signature "digital blurring," Antonitsis and Apoian make the advertised products vanish, dissolving them into their spectral doubles: a series of beautiful polychrome abstract frames. With tongue in cheek, he collapses the climactic moment of each product's appearance into an aquatic configuration of colors--like a daydream, or even better an impressionist afterimage, due to the way that traces of the products' shapes are often maintained to allude to them. As such, the artists mischievously interrupt the coherence of these stereotypical commercial narratives of rejuvenation through beauty products and idyllic love routines in order to frustrate both the consumerist expectations and the scopophilic desire of the viewer, who keeps watching and desiring (for isn't desire defined by the loss of its object in psychoanalysis?), only to be further frustrated by another quasi-advertisement that follows. Undoing the fetishism of advertising by undoing the commodity fetish itself and suspending its vital relation with the sexual fetishism inherent in most advertising, Antonitsis and Apoian blow apart the archetypal alchemy of advertising and defers the product. Conversely, he substitutes commodity fetishism for image fetishism: his own artistic (anti-)products.

Less an episodic ironizing gesture than a genuine critique of consumer culture and its supporting industry, Product is further related to the artist's most recent endeavors. Masterpieces of digital abstraction in and of themselves, Antonitsis and Apoian's near-psychedelic passages render Product another step in his recent exploration of digital abstraction, marked by his polysemous exploration of both juxtaposition (Some Prefer Nettles, 2005) and conflation (Philosophobia, 2004) of opposing systems of representation: abstraction and sharp (cinematic or photographic) realism--a trajectory that harkens back to his 2001 exhibition "Blurred Fiction" at Steven Makris Gallery in Athens, Greece. While Product's bilingualism seems to expand his previous investigation of "high" and "low" in Asian cinema's representation of sex, as in Some Prefer Nettles, with its own dialogue of both high advertising and art, it also reinforces the more esoteric turn that Philosophobia has initiated. Antonitsis and Apoian seem "weary of high-resolution product and fashion photography etc.," as he confessed during a recent conversation in his New York studio--a studio that, as he emphasizes, has been inside a high-end fashion photography studio for over a decade.

Messying high advertising formulae and burying the product is not, however, a simple personal reaction and is certainly not where Product's meaning ends. An informed reference to classic Pop Art and its generational struggle with American formalism is hard to miss in his daring coupling of found imagery (appropriated advertisements in particular) and abstraction. Antonitsis and Apoian's abstraction is actually closer to abstract expressionism, both in principle--recent analysis of Jackson Pollock's paintings has stressed his abstraction as the end-product of layers of figurative imagery blurred by superimposition--but also in appearance, as in the case of his Roth-koesque dissolution of one of the products. The British Pop artist Richard Smith's colorful abstract canvases, derived directly from the shapes of consumer objects and product packaging, or Richard Hamilton's early painterly dissolutions of design objects and display models into fetishistic images might also be evoked by Antonitsis and Apoian's digital video work. But above all, Antonitsis implicates himself in a dialogue with a legion of Neo-Pop artists such as Barbara Kruger, exposing the mechanics and ideologies of mass media but also seemingly proposing art and abstraction, in particular, as a solution for artistic survival and individual integrity. Or doesn't he?

Is this Neo-Pop essay truly a wishful goodbye to "products"? Or are these beautiful eruptions of creativity, these coloristic poems of anti-commercialism, just as deceptive as the artificiality of the originary objects they muffle? Considering that Antonitsis and Apoian have not erased all the at-tributes of the objects from which these blurred bouquets of colors derive, I cannot help thinking of them not only as abstractions but as eruptions of what Hal Foster has theorized as "traumatic realism." (4) Jacques Lacan defines the traumatic as a missed encounter with the real that must be repeated because it cannot be represented. But he also claims that the (traumatic) real finally ruptures the screen of repetition that wards off the traumatic by means of the tuche or what Roland Barthes calls the punctum. As Barthian punctums, which rupture the screen of Antonitsis's repetitious blur, formal allusions to the initial consumer products "pierce" the viewer, reminding him or her that the artist's proposal of creative authenticity as a substitute for commercial artificiality is yet another deception. After all, an elegy for the product can only be an illusion in a supersaturated era of post-industrial consumerism and a simulacrum of artificiality--and more so when proposed by Antonitsis and Apoian, with their low-res but high-tech artistic means. (4)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

KALLIOPI MINIOUDAKI is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and a Lila Acheson Wallace and Alexander S. Onassis Foundation fellow.

NOTES

1. According to George Armaos in Dimitrios Antonitsis, Show Hungry (Athens, Greece: Koan, 2005).

2. Some of the dictionary definitions of elegy are the following: a poem in elegiac couplets; a song or poem expressing sorrow or lamentation especially for one who is dead.

3. Antonitsis has often collaborated with Jeffrey Apoian and assisted the production of some of the "appropriated" advertisements of Product.

4. Hal Foster, in The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), explains the seemingly apathetic repetitions of death scenes in Andy Warhol's "Death and Disaster" series and the blur of Gerhard Richter's paintings of fuzzy snapshots as symptoms of "traumatic realism" in light of Jacques Lacan.

see

To watch the video Product, go to the Afterimage Web site at www.vsw.org/afterimage.