Ron English: Pop-ophilia and the Schizophrenia of Consumer Fetish

Culture has been subsumed into the media. Our visual landscape has been sold off to consumerism, and any point one can imagine in our social topography is a potential site for advertising, amusement, entertainment, coercion, co-option, or gratuitous clutter. It's a grand horror vacuii, and we just keep filling the oversaturated capital cornucopia with more: more images, more seductions and manipulations, more logos, looks and brands. Everything is a canvas on which we can project an evermore elaborate iconography where products are personified and personalities are products. Is it any wonder then that we have Ron English? For twenty-years, in nearly every creative gesture, Ron English has celebrated this all-invasive iconography to its most perverted permutations and acted as an intervention against the machinery of popular culture. If we did not have this artist, we would have had to invent him. As it is, we can only marvel at the inevitability of his particular vision and visual strategies and happily blame society for his existence.

In the hierarchy of aesthetic values, nothing is regarded in more debased terms than the mass marketing of cute in the public nostalgia's of the post-war era. Ron English allows an inversion of this status quo in which our most puerile fascinations are allowed to run amok, not so much with the youth-oriented playfulness of Japanese kawaii, as with a darker imprecation of their frenetic tyranny. English can fully endorse our collective fetishization of pop culture with a love that is far from condescending. But make no mistake about it, this is the kind of love one can develop only for one's oppressors. In psychiatric terms, we might call it a severe case of identification with the enemy, a form of the Patty Hearst Syndrome, where Ron has been held hostage for so long by the eternal ghosts of Disney and the Hollywood dream factory that they've become obsessive objects of transgressive adoration. If you ask the man, he'll probably tell you how much he loves Mickey, but when you look at how he expresses that love-in cruciforms of violation where the religio-ecstatic passions border on sadomasochistic martyrdom, cartoon fetishized desire and fantasies in which the idol becomes a stalker invading our dreams-you begin to understand just how unhealthy his, and our, attraction is. Pop culture does not so much populate his pictures, as infiltrate and infect them with a magic that is more than slightly malignant.

While French intellectuals bemoan the Americanization of Europe and the rest of the world, and New York City, the town where English has done the most substantial body of work, shudders in collective agony as its heart and soul is colonized by Disney, Ron embraces the dumbed-down demonology of our consumer-colorized cartoonification at its lowest common denominator where it can be wrestled to down and dirty slapstick. A father himself, Ron English is clearly dissatisfied with the current imperatives of family values in which everything is reduced to some boring G-rated mundaneness. These paintings address all of us, the child inside our persistent juvenilia, reminding us in our complete subservience to kiddy-fare of the fundamental rights adults have to enjoy a more adulterated vision of Toontown. English confronts pop's proliferation by rejecting fine art's more esoteric terms, preferring rather to confront the smiling animated face of fascism as a gaze that can be turned back on its master manipulators. Much as art has always taken the conceptualist and abstract high road to avoid the problematic issues of contemporary culture, English is one iconoclast who adopts the language of the mainstream as part of his own vernacular.

Practicing a social more than political form of image making, Ron English is none-the-less a revolutionary. His pictures are implicitly a kind of material liberation. He absorbs the entire visual glut of humanity's infernal media machine and sets it free from its highly organized and programmed context. Riven from the means of production and promotion, Mickey and Marilyn, Charlie Brown and Charlie Manson, Bugs and the Beatles, Joe Camel and Jesus Christ, as well as the whole itinerary of Modern art clichés are let loose from their bonds as trivialized tokens and epitomic endorsements. In English's tragicomic universe these archetypal personae of the entertainment industrial complex are transformed into uninhibited spokes-figures for an alternative reality to the consensus truth of brand licensing and anthemic sloganeering. Ron enjoys a penchant for parody in the great tradition of Mad magazine and the older lineage of social and political caricature, but his devices of cut up collage, ironic recontextualization and ahistorical pastiche are as postmodern as it gets. What English unleashes is not simply the entire catalogue of populist players, but the discreet puppeteer's strings that have kept the figures dancing the "buy-this, believe-that" shuffle on the hypnotic screens of televisual advertainment.

We have come to accept certain myths about the artist's role in society-that of visionary interpreter and soul-saving conscience-but Ron English isn't satisfied with such sanctioned practices alone. This is an artist who wields his paintbrush like a barbarian's batteringram against the hallowed walls of hypocrisy and who consumes the consumer pabulum with a voracious appetite for biting the hands that feed us and rock us to sleep. But if he were merely a cultural critic we might still find some safe place for him in the art world. He is more. Ron English is a criminal. A long-standing veteran of the street art movement, English has learned the illicit lessons of graffiti art. If your walls are being billboarded over with messages that are antithetical to your own and if your streets are being sanitized into sterile thoroughfares of commerce that are not your own, the only logical response is the totally illegal one: Take it all back. Ron English continues to make his mark, to deconstruct the language of persuasion into parables that reveal the truth in advertising. When a picture becomes all pervasive it is beyond the domain of ownership, it enters the sphere of public fantasy. Ron simply shows us how mutant this transformation is, and how incredibly weird and fantastic pop is when conjured in the smoke and mirrors of our global dream machine.