Jean Baudrillard’s smug grin greeted me as I walked into ‘AssumingPositions’, the ICA’s summer show that offered a speculative glance atthe ‘renewed romance between art and mainstream media’. The positionassumed by the exhibition’s curators was designed to be provocativeand consisted of selecting work for its delight ‘in the immediacy,accessibility and impact of the “pop” image’. The French sociologist’sbulky figure, sheltering in the ICA to avoid the storm outside,vibrated with stifled, uncontrollable mirth and I remembered the headyconferences and exhibitions that announced the arrival ofPost-Modernism, staged regularly at the ICA throughout the previousdecade. I watched the Blackcurrent Tango St George ad, one of theshows star exhibits with its impossible 90 second tracking shot, andcontemplated the question posed by the show’s curator Gregor Muir,’just what defines art as being “different”…’ Baudrillard’s eyestwinkled with Gaelic charm and I remembered his essay ‘Beyond thevanishing point of art’, an image that once fascinated me simplybecause it was an event I was unable to visualise. The spectre ofBaudrillard’s now forgotten thesis, that artists following Warhol’sacceptance of ‘absolute merchandise’ should work to affect art’sdisappearance, was being raised by ‘Assuming Positions’, though thewriter was never referenced by name. Baudrillard’s admiration ofWarhol is built on a crude misinterpretation but the question — isthe uneasy relationship between art and mainstream culturedisappearing — posed by the exhibition echoes Baudrillard’s lines ofthought. Through my naive, ‘received idea’ of Post-Modernism I thoughtthat any artwork moving beyond a ‘vanishing point’ would have somestrange, electronically-produ ced aura. Artworks that were ‘puresigns’, I thought, would be like the complex neon signs at theKentucky Fried Chicken shop that made my eyes smart. Now I understandthat art’s disappearance, that is the collapse of the distance betweenart and mainstream culture and consumerism, could be a far lessspectacular affair. So these were the issues I debated as I wanderedaround ‘Assuming Positions’ to kill time while I waited for the rainto stop.

‘Assuming Positions’ was a polite exhibition despite claiming itsagenda was influenced by Dada. References to Haim Steinbach could befound in Tobias Rehburger’s vases which were exhibited on plinths andcompleted with flowers. Rehburger suggests that the vases, made from ahollowed tree-trunk, ceramics and glass, embody the personalities ofcolleagues in the art world. They resemble Steinbach’s displays,though Rehberger’s sentimentalism is far removed from Steinbach’sDuchampian analysis. In Rehberger’s displays there seems to be littleirony of the kind found in the work of Steinbach, Jeff Koons and theNeo-Geo artists such as Peter Halley. Supporters of these artistsfirmly believed in the ‘Vanishing Point’. Neo-Geo, through itsrepeated mantra that nothing, not even abstraction, could escapecapitalism’s system of commodity / sign exchange, was an attempt toresist the ‘Vanishing Point’. This brave front could not be maintainedforever and, retrospectively, Neo-Geo art practices appear as a way ofkeeping the corpse of a Modernism warm, with its distinction betweenhigh and low culture intact. Was ‘Assuming Positions’ proof that thisdistinction was invalid or not worth making?

On the top floor of the ICA, Sarah Lucas’ The Great Flood, a toilet infull working order but not much used, was placed in a central space ina room of its own. The toilet challenged visitors to publicly baretheir toilet habits and made the ‘fun slot’ on several newsprogrammes. News at Ten forgot to report that the piece parodiedFrancis Bacon’s angst-ridden representations of men on lavatories andDuchamp’s celebrated, non-functioning urinal. Opposite Lucas’ toilet,in the adjacent room, a cinematic projection of Jarvis Cockerperforming a spoken version of Babies, directed by Pedro Romhany,flickered across the gallery wall. Comfy jute-covered poufs by TobiasRehberger were provided in the same room. Not only could visitors sitdown to watch Jarvis Cocker’s antics, they could ponder whether theirarses were supported by works of art or furniture at the same time.The question posed by the exhibition, however, was not, ‘can you tellthe difference between art and pop music, design and the BlackcurrentTango ad?’ Specialist disciplines are not undergoing a crisis; Lucasis unmistakably the artist and Cocker the pop star. ‘AssumingPositions’ instead asked, albeit through crude juxtapositions, whetherthe status of art as the estranged other of the twentieth centuryculture has disappeared, at least for some contemporary practitionerswho show no signs of distress at being seen as just another branch ofthe culture industry. This would be hard to argue as Sarah Lucas’position but perhaps artists don’t always have a choice in theirrelationship with the mainstream media which has learned not only tolove art, but also value its current photogenic image. Further still,perhaps the admiration is mutual: maybe there is a love affair goingon and it is not just a case of a mainstream media screwingcontemporary art for quick gratification. As one-dimensional and asbanal as ‘Assuming Positions’ often was, it is one of the few recentexhibitions to address this question. The show posed one furtherquestion too: ‘Is this “romance” between art and mainstream culture abad thing?’ In current circumstances, the positioning of art inrelation to ‘popular culture’ and a spectacular mass media remains oneof the most important questions facing any practitioner. Art has ofcourse not disappeared and many artists would not recognise the agendaof ‘Assuming Positions’ to be worthy of comment. However, a widespreadquestioning of the distance demanded by critical Modernism andPost-Modernism in relation to mass culture has occurred. In that sense’Assuming Positions’ was a missed opportunity. The dilemmas faced andnew departures undertaken by artists who have collapsed or narrowedthis ‘distance’ was not acknowledged in the show.

It was important that ‘Assuming Positions’ was international in itsselection and by drawing on artists from Western Europe and America,rather than just from London, the exhibition implied that the’romance’ between art and mainstream media was a phenomenon commonthroughout the Western art world. Whether this is the case is hard toascertain but certainly in Britain, style and fashion magazines andquality newspapers have been desperate for a bit of art to feature intheir pages. In return, the exhibition’s curator included acollaboration between fashion photographer Phil Poynter, whose workoften appears in Dazed and Confused, and Katy England. The resultingcollaboration, a series of photographs of a model taking her clothesoff and then lighting her farts with a match in a darkened room,aspires to be art and begs the question why do some fashion designers/ photographers desire to be recognised as artists? The motives behindmagazines like Dazed and Confused featuring art might be lessromantic: contemporary art can be utilised as a legitimising burst ofserious or high culture.

Rather than choose between fidelity to the traditions of a criticalAvant-Garde of the past or the embracing of mainstream and everydayculture, it might be possible to argue that some position occupyingthe tensions of this relationship is possible. This was the positionoccupied by the most engaging work in the show by Hillary Lloyd whoexhibited a tiny video monitor that played a documentary / portrait ofa woman having her hair cut entitled Nuala and Rodney. Anotherdocumentary / portrait, Dominic, displayed on two monitors, presentedthe journey of a DJ to and from the club Heaven. The artist’s concernsare similar to that of ID magazine but there is also an interest inchance. Lloyd appears to be a contemporary flâneur, finding hersubjects through chance encounters in clubs and night-time London.Like some others of her generation, Lloyd occupies a position whichdoes not place itself above everyday and popular culture (both her ownand other people’s) but, at the same time, is not entirely affirmativeof that culture either. There is no need to write a manifesto on thisposition as this is what many artists have done and are doing anyway.

If for the present moment we accept some kind of shift has occurred inthe discourse about art’s relationship to mainstream media andconsequently the critical distance demanded by Conceptual andPost-Conceptual Art in the 70s and 80s appears, due to a number ofcircumstances, less and less feasible, perhaps one aspect ofConceptualism can be drawn upon. Conceptual Art can claim asignificant intervention in the relationship between an audience andan artwork. By challenging a ‘Modernist Protocol’ conceptual artistscreated new conditions of audienceship by turning modernism’s passiveviewers into readers and interpreters of an artwork’s contingencies.What was lacking in the curation of ‘Assuming Positions’ was achallenge to Post-Modern protocol and a consideration of newconditions of audienceship for our contemporary situation.