The problem with Pop Art is its heresy. It addresses itself to issues of taste and how its traditions are imposed arbitrarily from above. Moreso Pop Art questions the studied contemplation and interpretative expertise attached to aesthetic judgement^.1 To this end, Pop Art points to the complicity between aesthetic taste and economic and symbolic power. What really makes pop suspicious is its popularity.

Sign of the times

Melbourne Pop artist Christopher Langton exhibits none of the infamous star qualities of USA pop divas. In contrast he maintains a low profile, his art reflecting an the intellectual and emotional ambivalence about the values of art and popular culture.

Langton's work addresses the social expectations of contemporary culture and the great normalising urges of consumption. His work explores the practices and emotions preordained for a "happy" and "normal" existence in consumer capitalist society, a society where the desire for experiences has been replaced by a desire for objects. He identifies a vicarious living through consumer style and the pre-packaging of experience where "just doing it" does not need to extend beyond the initial credit card purchase.

In The biggest game in town (1996), Langton's giant inflatable syringe, dice and mobile phone offer the necessary tackle for the new generation of entrepreneurs. The title is a reference to Melbourne's casino led recovery where gambling and deal-making feature heavily in the state government's great leap forward. These over inflated objects are signs of excess and addiction; be it drugs, gambling or power and their sinister deportment is played off against their benign toy silliness.

Langton's "mega-signs" are like Jean Baudrillard's prescription that the "truth" of the contemporary object no longer lies in its value to be useful but in its value to signify. Take for example, the recent statistics of Rio police stopping drivers talking on mobile phones only to discover that two out of every three were talking on toy phones. Contemporary culture is all sign and no action.

The installation I love you (1992), presented the wheezing sentimentality of a room full of red tin foil balloon hearts palpitating to the melodramatic sighs of an air compressor. The work is both compellingly seductive and nauseating in its sentimentality. The exploration of commodification and romantic love was continued in I luv you (1994), a vending machine filled with hearts that swell to profess their love as you approach and then deflate with a heavy sigh at your departure. The work's response to your presence involves you in the strange intimate game of being the object of and an object's affection.

Kitsch as these works are, kitsch itself is hardly a transgressive act. However, these works confront the fact that sentimentality and romance have now come to denote a range of cultural responses considered embarrassing and out-moded. Their expressive affectations are rendered anachronistic by the ironic consciousness of contemporary disbelief. Despite sentimentality's intellectual unpopularity "true love" continues to remain a corner stone of culture. And while Langton investigates the kitsch object's standardisation of feeling and its transformation of emotion into a mass produced object, his work questions how kitsch both negates and asserts the romantic yearning for an authentic sphere of emotion outside and uncontaminated by the social.

Toy story

Langton carefully handcrafts his inflatables from PVC and vinyl and their shiny sculpted forms ape the cheap products of mass production. Unlike Koons' high art mediums, his inflatable sculptures are also ephemeral, fragile and perishable. This lack of preciousness is an act of generosity offering a proliferation of instantly graspable sensations and vicarious emotion giving immediate gratification.

With its impossibly cute, giant kangaroos and koalas, Souvenir embodies this vicarious experience. The souvenir itself has little or no use value but is an object which meets the insatiable demand for uncritical consumption and nostalgia. By definition it requires the attachment of a sentimental narrative, in this prescient case, vulgar nationalism. In This is not a life saving device, where Langton produced giant toys of an imaginary childhood (fluffy clouds float over contentedly smiling purple cows and cartoon cats), Pop's puns of scale was harnessed to an equally sentimental, Disney Land nostalgia for childhood.

In Sugar the Pill (1995) shifted his attention to transformations in history and place. Once an apothecary, The Basement Gallery was filled to the ceiling with a deluge of candy coloured pills the size of men. Like much of Langton's work, his phantom memory does not provoke reflection or contemplation but arouses an irresistible desire for play. And in this, Langton might seem at odds with the contemporary perception that Pop as site of cyncial irony.

Pop will eat itself

Is it the case that only in the insecure confines of the gallery system that Pop still causes a flutter of anxiety? Today, the most pertinent critique of American culture comes from a cartoon in the six o'clock time slot and Britain's surprise political force for the Tories in the recent British election was the Spice Girls. All this mucking about in the slippage between kitsch and high art, between sincerity and irony, is perhaps no longer daring in a gallery context. Perhaps Pop is just that - pop.

Thanks to Karen Burns for her suggestions.

Endnotes
1. Andrew Ross, No Respect, Intellectuals & Popular Culture, Routledge, London,1989, p.149