Richard Sides and Gili Tal’s Deep down the masters have always been anarchists, an installation of T-shirts, cardboard boxes and shopping bags, was first shown in 2018 at London’s Le Bourgeois in the collaborative Reduced to Clear. Another version was shown as part of Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen’s Swiss Institute exhibition, Readymades Belong to Everyone, the same year. Turning awkward memes into slogan T-shirts to emphasise “the blasé cheapness of such clichés”, as Zachary Hall put it in a review for Hyperallergic. The work highlights the awkward, parodic juxtaposition of marketplace politics with fast fashion in an “environment that acts as an expanded collage for others to inhabit”, the ultimate branding of self. Their remakes of 1990s Friends T-shirts, as well as their use of awkward contemporary slogans, explore current “lifestyle philosophies” such as minimalism (a declutterer’s “all you need is less” rather than fine art’s formalist creed) and confirms various societal addictions not least to cheap, bulk, reproducible product.

In Foxcon (2021), Phillipa Horan created a portrait of a factory run by one of the global economy’s largest technology suppliers, which has been mired in controversy for labour-rights violations and worker suicides. Horan sourced images of the factory online, then added slogans of toxic positivity – “BeYOUtiful” – as pedalled by the increasingly pervasive “wellness” industry. Scented candles, water aerobics with weights and women with cucumber patches on their eyes, sit incongruously with the technology workers. In essence, Horan’s painting places individual care against the absence of state care and suggests that we are not going to be saved by a carcinogenic candle.

Emily Pope’s ongoing series of “positive posters” encapsulates and opposes this mood exactly. Produced in a simple paper format like flyers, viral statements, political advertising and the protest placard, her work alerts us to the subversion of the commodification and production of meaning.

In a profile of Alan Michael for Mousse, Moritz Scheper argued that his use of hyperrealist techniques to deliver repetitive subjects might be seen as a response to the tedium and banal cruelty of the world from which consumerist wellness is supposed to provide an escape. The artist, he wrote, “aims to confront Photorealism with the exhaustion of its own narrative. For what was at one time an economic system full of promise has by now, thanks to a neoliberal reboot, come to cripple every area of our lives.” Later in the same piece, Michael himself remarks: “The world has dissolved, but I think it’s interesting to represent things as if nothing happened, as if continuity exists.”

In his fantastic 2007 essay-lecture, “I Was a 1980s Commodity Fetish”, late writer Roger Cook elaborated on what it was like to exist as both an academic and a model, and argued the case for actually becoming the merchandise. French philosopher Alain Badiou, writes Cook, “declares these last decades a period of conservative restoration, of the acceleration of global capitalism, commodification and the domination of the ‘get rich’ ethos of Reaganism and Thatcherism”. As Badiou wrote, our capitalist world is “coded, oriented or channelled by the infinite glitter of merchandise”. For all these artists, absorbing the stranglehold of the capitalist markets is the only way to combat uniformity. To repeat and represent, to misuse the exploiter, and to extract from the terrible synthesis of financial and economic activity is the only aesthetic strategy that can contain and evoke our limitless consumer mindset, and the unreasonableness of more products coming our way in the form of cosy self-care as its antidote. ◉