Painting by Michael Eppler. Title: The Super Sweatshop All-Star Team. (32"x48", oil pn canvas). Click to enlarge.
As you may have noticed, PoliticalAffairs.net has a new “culture and values” page for the purpose of dealing with just what the title suggests. We’re dedicating ourselves to searching far and wide, dredging the nether-reaches of the internet and other strange realms for artistic media so you don’t have to. (Well, you can if you want to. It’s fine with us.) We are therefore proud to present you with this feature on a talented young artist we found, of all places, on MySpace. Hopefully this will the first of many to come.
Michael Eppler is a painter and musician who lives in a small, predominantly-Catholic town in south Germany near the Black Forest. For a dreamy romantic like me, the locale sounds idyllic, but Michael assures us that the right wing politics so common in the area seriously hampers any potential enjoyment. At 21 years old, Eppler works part time in a printing press and is hoping to soon study art at the university level, something that is not easy to do in Germany, he says.
He started painting at age five or six, and was encouraged by his mother, who had a keen interest in the arts. Until recently he painted with watercolor, but, dissatisfied with the results he was getting, decided to switch to oil. Since then he has come into his own more as an artist, and created his most distinctive works, some of which we are sharing with you here. His works have been showcased at a local jazz cafe and village fairs. His artistic idols include the German painters Neo Rauch and Daniel Richter, the latter of whom draws inspiration, paradoxically enough, from both socialist realism and surrealism (two influences, perhaps, that can be seen in Eppler’s own paintings).
What immediately interested me in Eppler’s work was his subversive appropriation of pop art themes. I say “subversive” because pop art, typified by the likes of Warhol and Lichtenstein, has notoriously affirmed mass cultural consumerism and capitalism in general. Granted, there’s no one correct way to interpret art; that depends as much upon the viewer as on anything else. Potentially, one could interpret Warhol’s endless soup can’s as a statement on the homogenizing, dehumanizing effects of mass culture, and – following Benjamin – as a commentary on the sapping of the artwork’s “aura” by such a culture (contrast the magic of a Romantic landscape or the staggering mystery of a Symbolist painting with the cold, one-dimensional eeriness of a Warhol). But all too often the “neutrality” of pop art has been malevolent. Usually, apparently neutral stances, especially on issues of politics and culture, affirm the status quo. It's hard to detect any critical distance between Warhol and his subjects, only admiration. Infamously, Warhol even said that “making money is art" and "good business is the best art.” Whether this was meant to be tongue in cheek, it expressed a barely-concealed truth about the art world and pop art especially.
Artist Michael Eppler.
Michael Eppler, however, takes images that Warhol would have used uncritically and puts them in unsettling juxtapositions that bring out their hidden content, the facts of their social context, what I like to call the unconscious of the image. Disturbingly, he places Ronald McDonald next to starving African children, and depicts Donald Duck strangling a sweatshop worker. In another painting he reproduces the infamous image of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner next to dancing Teletubbies who have replaced US soldiers, situated in a sprawling, Bosch-like cornucopia of horrors, rich in color and textures. Such scenes remind us of the terrifying realities that underlie the glittering edifice of consumerism. By using art to vent his personal frustrations and rage over what he calls our “ultra-materialist society,” “exploitation” and “globalization,” Eppler provides us with an artist’s insight into ourselves and the world in which we live. Hopefully we will see more from Michael Eppler in coming years. His critical touch is much needed.
Painting by Michael Eppler. Title: Sammies Bad Dream. (60"x76"; water color). Click to enlarge.
Painting by Michael Eppler. Title: Karl Marx. (20"x28"; oil on canvas). Click to enlarge.
