by Francis Russell.

Enshittification is a recent coinage by media scholars used to refer to digital platforms’ life cycle of innovation, normalisation, and decline. A new digital product or service appears, providing some novelty to the user, quickly gains market dominance, which thereby triggers the search for profit. At this terminal stage, the user is locked into a platform that becomes increasingly unusable, as management strip the copper out of the walls in the pursuit of surplus.
        If we’re being charitable, enshittification has a mimetic quality, with the crudeness and ugliness of the word embodying the seemingly inescapable processes of decay and decline it references. In a less charitable mood, however, the popularity of the term suggests something rather bleak about contemporary critical discourse. The frequent invocation of enshittification to explain that, well, things are pretty shit, seems to function more like a viral marketing campaign—the Frankfurt School by way of Shark Tank, perhaps—than the kind of ideological critique that can render the invisible visible. But there’s no arguing with success, since, despite enshittification providing us with the worst of both high theory’s terminological awkwardness and advertising’s empty frivolousness, it was chosen as the Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year for 2024. 
        These prefatory remarks shouldn’t be taken as a complaint about declining standards in critical rhetoric or style only, but, instead, as a way of introducing, perhaps polemically, the broader problem of critique’s legacy amidst the naked banality and stupidity of so much contemporary politics and culture. “The relentless transparency of all things”, as Jean Baudrillard wrote, disarms critique and leaves the critic mute; reduced to merely pointing, increasingly exasperated, at what is obviously going on. Or, worse than being mute and ineffectual, the critic potentially and unwittingly adds to the world’s cynicism and confusion by undermining whatever stability and surety remains. As Bruno Latour warned, when mistrust, if not paranoia, is the norm, are there any illusions left to disperse?
        It is in light of this problem that I would like to turn to the work of artist, editor, and critic Jeff Gibson, and, more specifically, the 2024 book Jeff Gibson False Gestalt (co-published by Griffith University Art Museum and Perimeter Editions). Edited by Wes Hill with additional contributions by Thomas Crow, Susan Best, Tara Heffernan, and Angela Godard, this beautiful full colour monograph presents a theoretically astute overview of Gibson’s legacy as an artist and thinker concerned with the paradoxes of multiple decades of mass media. Whether in his role as an artist or as an editor for influential publications like Art & Text and Artforum, False Gestalt makes a compelling case for Gibson as an artist and thinker attuned to contemporary culture’s ambivalent relationship to mass-produced images. As Hill writes in the book’s conclusion, Gibson has arguably spent his career attempting to address “the hold images have over us and our determination for them not to” (147). Discussing works produced over forty years, False Gestalt reveals Gibson’s oeuvre as attempting to conceptually analyse and creatively synthesise a range of tensions in our collective response to print and digital mass media: that we simultaneously take mass media images to be a waste of time and yet we find little else as captivating; that mass media images are typically stupid, predictable, and inane (especially when compared to high art) and yet we tend to be tricked and manipulated by them; that mass media images are a crass by-product of monopoly capital and yet are also highly innovative and experimental; that mass media images are a product of vast systems and are consumed by the homogenised masses, and yet individuals routinely derive personal and idiosyncratic meanings from them.
        Not only do these tensions remain pertinent, the works by Gibson that embody and explore them maintain a capacity to delight, confuse, and surprise. Given the ubiquity of internet memes in everyday communication, the aesthetic strategies deployed by Gibson—parody, pastiche, and juxtaposition—would suggest a corpus faded by overexposure. Nevertheless, series like disPOSTERS, Dupe, and Pictopoesis resonate with today’s anarchic and ironic modes of digital exchange whilst maintaining a distinct visual signature. This is not only because Gibson’s work evinces a clearer grasp of design principles than the output of your average shitposter—such that his works are almost always handsome even if odd or unexpected—but also due to the fact that his works shatter online culture’s pretence of eternality and totality. By virtue of his longevity, Gibson’s work helps to remind us that while certain and almost archetypal images from the 70s, 80s, and 90s have become engrained in the internet’s visual repertoire, the mass media of those decades contained subtleties that can be hard to appreciate outside of retrospectives. 
        From an art historical perspective, however, this volume could have perhaps contributed more to the reader’s appreciation of the critical and contextual differences between Gibson’s work and that of comparable artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman, or Raymond Pettibon. False Gestalt rarely stages a comparative reading of Gibson’s work, and while this is perhaps more a practical reality of the scope of False Gestalt as a text rather than a missed opportunity per se, it is at times difficult to evaluate Gibson’s art historical significance. Far more successful, and potentially closer to the editor’s and contributors’ respective aims is False Gestalt’s capacity to unpack Gibson’s particular ethos for approaching mass produced images—both in terms of their status as culture and their effect on culture. Although increasingly démodé, and tragically so, False Gestalt presents Gibson as an artist and critic very much in step with the theoretical and political disposition of Australian Cultural Studies in its heyday—as exemplified by the works of figures such as Meghan Morris or Niall Lucy, and for whom lowbrow art or mass culture was neither something to be disdainfully abhorred under the auspices of maintaining standards, nor celebrated in the manner of the poptimist. As Hill clarifies,

seduction and superficiality are generative fixations for Gibson, not targets. His way of talking back to a trope and its ‘environment of reproducibility’ starts by first acknowledging his active fascination; his sensitivity to the way a popular form ‘massages’ us into abandoning our principles. (80)

Principles can be read here as referencing the elitist’s commitment to avoiding the sensationalism and sentimentality of mass-produced images and mass-produced culture, but it can also be read as indicating the poptimist’s dedication to overcoming the high/low binary. Most are familiar with the former, which perhaps can be expressed no better than via Adorno’s admission that “every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse”. While the elitist knows that they should overcome their attachment to “trash culture”, they are seduced by its superficiality, and often struggle to escape the “culture deserts” that make poor choices impractical. Following Hill’s argument, we can understand Gibson as a pluralist on this point, an artist willing to be fascinated by the processes through which we come to abandon our principles rather than assuming the “critical” position of polemical condemnation.
        The latter, the poptimist’s struggle to uphold their commitment to the notion that popularity is no barrier to quality or sophistication, is potentially more foreign to us although it needn’t be. For, as the cultural theorist Robert Briggs argues in his “Culture & Pedagogy: On the Popular Art of Reviewing Popular Art”, insofar as the regular occurrence of “a person’s defense of their decision to see a Schwarzenegger film, say, by claiming that they felt like watching something that wouldn’t require them ‘to think’” reveals an anxious attachment to cultural hierarchies that purportedly died along with high Modernism (117). In response to these anxieties, the poptimist either reveals themselves to be a crypto-popessimist, or retreats into an inverted snobbery, one that looks down on difficult art, literature, and music as conservative and reactionary. “I only watch TikToks to unwind” and “TikTok is a site of radical democratic politics” both reveal the poptimist as abandoning their principles in response to the seductive superficiality of mass-culture. Accordingly, the value of Gibson’s work for a critical examination of cultural hierarchies and our relationship to mass images is evinced, not simply in the admission that everyone, and not just the hoi polloi, is made stupider and worse by mass culture despite their vigilance, but more surprisingly and productively by a willingness to engage with the persistence of such hierarchies despite our supposedly enlightened and postmodern—or metamodern or whatever—appreciation for cultural relativism. Or, to return again to Hill, part of what makes Gibson’s work so compelling is his capacity to “see stupidity as seductive, to find something undiscovered in the overestimated, something reflective in the declamatory” (147).
        While this ethos is easily detectable in Gibson’s earlier series—especially those that show the influence of his interests in 70s punk rock and DIY aesthetics—his recently concluded Instagram-based series Pictopoesis might at first seem too quietist to suggest any particular stance or orientation as regards the image. As Angela Goddard notes, this serialised work, comprised of a weekly “four-part composition of assorted commercial products that are lightly Photoshopped and arrayed on a white field […] appears distinct for its lack of political intent” (119–24). This is likely to be the viewer’s first response, as the arrangements of consumer products can seem oddly catatonic on an initial encounter. However, such muteness is inseparable from a subtle mutability, and while Goddard perceptively draws our attention to the work’s subversive dry humour and penchant for the absurd, these works also speak to the internet’s dual logic of dispersion and control. Regimented and yet associative, literal and yet symbolic, the image groupings that comprise Pictopoesis are maybe the works closest to the book’s thesis of Gibson as the artist of the false gestalt. As Hill argues, while “Gibson’s often serial work accentuates our inclination as viewers to look through unsystematic displays of imagery for an overriding pattern, behavioural explanation, or line of commentary” he is better understood as attempting to stage “a host of uncanny, symbolic, metonymic, and synecdochic relations with just enough intensity to belabour scrutiny” (12).
        While this might seem like an abdication of responsibility, I would argue that it is an ethos or aesthetic disposition that is preferable to the “critical project” of reheating yesterday’s hot takes. While the critic always faces the risk of taking too great a pleasure in their capacity to productively weave meanings and associations out of what might be, for others, a symptom of something dangerous or malignant, surely the explosion of opinion and discussion that is concomitant with the commercialisation of the internet requires the critic to cultivate a sufficient ethos of openness and pluralism such that they are able to discover in the object of critique something worth sharing. The alternative would seem to be the need to discover new neologisms to circumscribe mundane online discourse within the faux-profundity and quasi-precision of critical vocabulary. Indeed, and as Tara Heffernan writes with reference to Gibson’s use of neologisms in his text-based series Dupe, “the act of coining them constitutes a shortcut for the author, cultivating an air of inventiveness and intellectual confidence while signalling their familiarity with the fickle currents of the world/s they inhabit” (89). Although they are certainly fine-tuned to the fickle world of image production and circulation, the works covered by False Gestalt do not attempt any shortcuts nor do they hasten to provide the viewer with an overarching causal explanation or moral determination as regards the world of mass-produced images. This is an ethos worth cultivating, especially in a contemporary political climate where the left and right are often unified in their attachment to the narrative that everything is toxic—food, culture, identity, art, and politics—and the desire for authenticity feels inescapable. Against such tendencies, False Gestalt presents a body of work that maintains, even after almost three decades of the commercial internet, that there is something to gain from lingering with media we might find narcotic or moronic. Which is effectively to say that, following Gibson, when it comes to the mass-produced image there is something yet unseen, yet unthought.

Francis Russell is a former academic and trade union official. He researches contemporary art and alienation, drawing on the legacies of Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and phenomenology.

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Images courtesy of Perimeter Books.