There’s a pervading sense lately that everything is the same, even though each thing presents itself as unique. This is very easily exemplified if you frequent (no one actually ‘frequents’) artist run spaces (ARIs) in Naarm/Melbourne, for they are indistinguishable from each other, despite being socially and geographically dispersed. I’m referring to archetypal ARIs that are fifteen to twenty years old—such as Westspace, Kings ARI, Blindside, Seventh, TCB Inc and Trocadero—that were inaugurated as an alternative to centralised institutions and commercial galleries.
All of them can now be described without differentiation, as a safe white cube in a gentrified suburb that supports experimental practices, often from emerging voices with politicised concerns grounded in feelings. There are also similar programs (e.g. Emerging Writers Program) in other creative fields (Board of volunteers) run by the same type of people (Instactivists). When these spaces feel angsty and try to problematise their existence, they make generic decisions like engaging ‘community’, seemingly believing they are the first ones to do so. The rhetoric of ARIs is interchangeable and sounds like HR speak for Montessori kids, who are learning social change through play, on their way to becoming diligent members of the professional managerial class.
Looking for accounts of this descent into (unchained) chain store psychologies, I eagerly welcomed Discipline’s launch of Philip Brophy’s Screenic (2024). This anthology brings together Brophy’s reviews, catalogue essays and polemics on audiovisual media from the 2000s onwards. The cyberpunk design of the book draws from reSTUFF (1988-1991), his three part series of reprinted articles and essays, stapled on Xerox paper like para-academic zines (available through the State Library of Victoria.) It also invokes the apocalyptic aesthetic of early Y2K, which Brophy embraced with ironic detachment in videos like The Sound of Milk (Prologue) (2004).
The contents of the book showcase an intense media literacy that is often delivered with vigorous enthusiasm and inventive hostility, turning Brophy’s voice into a strange broadcast reminiscent of Adult Swim meets Gary Indiana , with his ongoing references to films, ads and cartoons in early Pitchfork-esque takedowns. But actually good. He delivers entertainingly long sentences, akin to an enduring bite that grows tighter with every clause, punctuated by a rhythmic intonation that echoes his background in sound.
Since the 80s, Brophy has been charting screens in a Barthesian plane, performing close readings of indiscriminate media, in line with Mythologies (1957). For instance, he situates the ‘particle effect’ in Refik Anadol’s Quantum Memories (2020) shown at the National Gallery of Victoria, in relationship to advertising language and blockbuster cinema, such as The Day After Tomorrow (2004), as well as the vernacular iconography found in the wedding industry. This particle effect seems to reflect the dispersion of culture in a phenomenon he calls ‘atomisation’, which is tied to the homogenisation of the media landscape. These are the kind of feral linguistics that make Brophy an influential writer, prompting an editor once to tell me ‘Philip Brophy has found an audience in every decade.’
Brophy describes atomisation in ‘The ‘Atomisation’ of Cultural Signage: or More Dumb Semiotics in Contemporary Art’ (2010) as a state of familiarity, where individual and corporate interests have turned legitimate and coherent expressions of culture into dispersed atoms that go unscrutinised. Brophy’s hilariously intricate piece appeared in the NAVA (National Association of Visual Arts) bulletin, which now seems more concerned with turning artists into cuddly patients for the Care Industry of Contemporary Art than inciting critical thinking of any kind.
An internet search on the term ‘atomisation’ AND ‘cultural studies’ brings up a self-published ‘hypertext book’ called Meaningness by David Chapman, who uses atomisation to conceptualise how social media turns wildly scattered units into sameness by assembling a network, using ‘Gangnam Style’ as a case study. It is mostly a conspiratorial ramble that shows Philip Brophy is embedded in the last interesting algorithm, since I haven’t stumbled into anything worth my distraction on Google for ages. Chapman is also the author of ‘Buddhism for Vampires’, which I’m threatening to write a review about. Right here. Right now.
Outside the anthology, Brophy defines ‘atomisation’ as a shift from ‘the congealment of large forms to the unleashing of fine particles’ in ‘War Against Pop: Singing & Suing’ (2010.) He evokes specks of media floating and bouncing without integrity, under a presumption of historical purity. Unaware of each other, they believe themselves to be unique, oblivious to their past and context. Brophy calls them stupid with his typical bluntness, for they are naive to the chain of signification that grants them meaning. As if trying to disorient sign-traders that profit from these foolish cyphers in the social market of the arts industry, he explains ‘atomisation’ in notoriously obfuscated terms, implying a hyper-dispersion of larger masses that create a cultural ‘miasma’. This entails a paranoid fog of infection, where moralism is used to contain the threat of an invisible disease.
Brophy cites biennales and their conventions of humanitarianism as an example, noting how they are operating under a Judeo-Christian logic of benevolence, where the word alone is taken as effecting the world. The curatorial essay in Biennales, which often resembles a statement of commitment from Nike—promising to look at ‘the sate of things’ (to quote Okwui Enwezor’s Venice Biennale)—is a stupid sign. For it fails to acknowledge the conditions, precedents and performativity that comprise its grammar. We can see the start of this criticism in ‘Deliverer of Rants’ (2008), where he cites Juliana Engberg’s Melbourne Biennale (1999) as the beginning of a humanitarian posturing in local art. Brophy laments the arrival of this moral economy from overseas, which quickly became the standard in local contemporary art.
Reading this in 2024, we see glimpses of how culture has become increasingly homogenised, for we are still enduring a myriad of shows, journals and books that repeat this exact formula: let’s contemplate a world in crisis…through symbols. This stance of moral superiority allows interchangeable ladder climbers to sustain a prolific career in the arts industry—without ever changing anything—while scolding anyone who lacks the elite language to participate in a performance of virtue.
In Gentrification Of the Mind (2012), Sarah Schulman speaks of the mental homogeneity she observed in younger queers that she met as a teacher, speaker, and presenter. Schulman, who was struggling to publish books that sit outside institutional frameworks, laments a culture of professionalisation in the creative industries. While this critique is directed at queer culture and is grounded on the loss of radical minds to the AIDS crisis, it has broader applications. Her point is that cultural life is either manufactured by an elite willing to participate in dominant culture without individual thought, or creative workers who are pressured into sameness by economical necessity. After all, cultural dissenters also need a place to live and make, in a real estate market where everything is fucking expensive.
Brophy’s stance against the morality of the word is often the context for his infamously offensive remarks, which scream ‘cancel me’ to self-undermine entire pieces at times. This led a board member from the Centre for Contemporary Photography—according to Brophy—to wonder why he insists on ‘gutter talk’. Today readers may label his language as anti-woke, troll or edgelord, aligning Screenic with the sensibilities of Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies (2017), Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders (2021) and Brad Troemel’s reports. Some may immediately dismiss Brophy as an angry white man upholding the cis patriarchal regime with probo commentaries and it’s like, he reeeally gets off on this idea. Whether you want to indulge these auto-cancelling perversions or not is up to you.
Bringing homogenisation back to artist-run spaces, a select few artists in their programs go on to show in larger contemporary art organisations, where they join a limited rotation of artists in museums, biennales, art fairs and surveys. These rotations become a familiar backdrop for programming, where they are ‘institutionalised’ with their frequency of appearance. Thus, artist-run spaces are simply a tiny lobby to contemporary art organisations, festivals and museums, since the art in their calendar of exhibitions is at times identical (production values aside). This condition of sameness is a nexus of university education, algorithms, government funding, gentrification, cultural policy, professionalisation, financial distress and a culture of personal ambition. If one deviates from the moral conventions of this structure and goes beyond its ideological limits, we have a social problem. Sometimes, a really big problem. Thus, we end up with ten types of artists making five types of art, articulating three kinds of thoughts.
After reading Screenic, it is easier to see how the most generic, undifferentiated and caricaturised people believe themselves to be the most innovative, inimitable and unique. We can easily find them in the gentrified junkyard of social media, where mass produced subjectivities re-share their finger wagging claims, as if radical cutie content was the pathway to God. I’m quick to admit that I directed an ARI for six years and willingly contributed to the making of this sickly uniformity, making it worse as every month went by with my daily compliance—like a dog rolling on my tummy. If I died, you could replace me with someone else, who can vaguely provide the same service. I swear no one would notice, besides mummy.