Java.March.2017

ARTS
AD PROPHETS
The Propeller Group at PAM
By Demetrius Burns
Historically, graffiti has diametrically opposed the
colonization of advertising. It surfaced in response
to the billboard advertisements spewing their
calculating messages throughout communities. To
suggest that someone could start off as a graffiti
artist and end up in advertising might seem like a
stretch. However, the Saigon-based collective The
Propeller Group (TPG) is made up of three former
graffiti artists (Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Matt Lucero
and Phunam) who have created an ad agency
doubling as an arts collective. They decided that the
best way to make an impact in the advertising world
was to infiltrate it.
TPG started in 2006 and incorporates the lexicon of
politics and advertising to make multimedia art that
creates dialogue about propaganda and power as it
relates specifically to the history and aftermath of
the Cold War. “I think the Cold War has always been
a psychological state that is inherent in the idea of
empire,” Nguyen said. “To bring it back to aesthetics,
it’s interesting to think about the different images
and iconography and symbols that have come out
of the Cold War. I think that’s what our work tries to
speak to.”
In 2011, TPG developed an advertising parody
entitled Television Commercial for Communism,
which was featured in the New Museum’s “The
Ungovernables” 2012 Triennial edition. In the
work, they wrestle with two seemingly warring
ideologies—communism and capitalism—in an
attempt to speak about the inherent propaganda
belied by both. “A lot of moments in the history of
advertising coincide very directly with the history
and development of communism throughout the 20th
century,” Nguyen said.
TPG opened its first survey exhibition, co-organized
by MCA Chicago, the Blaffer Art Museum at the
University of Houston, and Phoenix Art Museum, in
June 2016. TPG’s exhibition currently is up at the
Phoenix Art Museum, through May 14, and consists
of their multimedia and fine art projects of the last
five years.
One of their multimedia projects examines the AK-47
compared with the M-16. The former is a semiautomatic
rifle created by the Soviet Union during
the Vietnam War, and the latter is a rifle created by
the United States in response. The group saw a Civil
War exhibit that featured two collided bullets, and
they replicated it by shooting bullets in a gel block.
What resulted is a fine art piece that speaks to the
collusion of the Cold War and the warring ideologies
fraught within. Both nations consider these guns
as “weapons of peace,” which speaks to the way
propaganda enforces nationhood.
The Propeller Group has produced a film, The Living
Need Light, the Dead Need Music, that explores the
funerary elements of the South Vietnamese and of
New Orleans. They also have a video called The
Guerillas of Cu Chi, in which cameras are placed at
targets in a shooting range where tourists shoot guns
16 JAVA
MAGAZINE