The use of low references in a lot of today’s high literary fiction (or art) serves a less abstract agenda. It is meant (1) to help create a mood of irony and irreverence, (2) to make us uneasy and so “comment” on the vapidity of U.S. culture, and (3) most important to be just plain realistic.” –DFW
I refuse to deal with established definitions. I’m trying to destabilize them. I’m trying to contaminate them with a certain non-value aspect of reality The value system is a security system, It’s a system for subjects without courage. You need values to ensure yourself, to enclose yourself in your passivity and anxiety. You need the idea of quality to neutralize your proper freedom: the fact that it’s you who decides what’s valuable or of worth. People need quality as a kind of ghost who helps you escape the real. –Thomas Hirschorn.
Icon A Image as idea as symbol as ideal as form as icon.
Icon as device, diagram, emblem, frame, game, sign, spectacle, etc.
Device as empty. Diagram as dead. Emblem as archetype. Frame as(of mind). Sign as forecast. Spectacle as invisible. – Ad Reinhardt
If there is a sense that he works with certain materials, forms and cultural references because he finds them ridiculous, repellent or pathetic, there is also the sneaking suspicion that he is drawn to them because he acknowledges their qualities in himself. As he says, he uses cheap materials because they ‘elicit a kind of sympathy … an identification in the viewer that this is what we are’. We talk about Jeff Koons – and how his engagement with American kitsch would be less convincing if he himself did not claim to be in thrall to its sickly charms. When Bainbridge first took what he saw as his international style of sculpture to New York for an exhibition in the early 1980s, he describes feeling utterly deflated at how English it looked, in its moderate scale, self-effacing humour and domestic frames of reference.