Java.March.2017
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ARTS<br />
AD PROPHETS<br />
The Propeller Group at PAM<br />
By Demetrius Burns<br />
Historically, graffiti has diametrically opposed the<br />
colonization of advertising. It surfaced in response<br />
to the billboard advertisements spewing their<br />
calculating messages throughout communities. To<br />
suggest that someone could start off as a graffiti<br />
artist and end up in advertising might seem like a<br />
stretch. However, the Saigon-based collective The<br />
Propeller Group (TPG) is made up of three former<br />
graffiti artists (Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Matt Lucero<br />
and Phunam) who have created an ad agency<br />
doubling as an arts collective. They decided that the<br />
best way to make an impact in the advertising world<br />
was to infiltrate it.<br />
TPG started in 2006 and incorporates the lexicon of<br />
politics and advertising to make multimedia art that<br />
creates dialogue about propaganda and power as it<br />
relates specifically to the history and aftermath of<br />
the Cold War. “I think the Cold War has always been<br />
a psychological state that is inherent in the idea of<br />
empire,” Nguyen said. “To bring it back to aesthetics,<br />
it’s interesting to think about the different images<br />
and iconography and symbols that have come out<br />
of the Cold War. I think that’s what our work tries to<br />
speak to.”<br />
In 2011, TPG developed an advertising parody<br />
entitled Television Commercial for Communism,<br />
which was featured in the New Museum’s “The<br />
Ungovernables” 2012 Triennial edition. In the<br />
work, they wrestle with two seemingly warring<br />
ideologies—communism and capitalism—in an<br />
attempt to speak about the inherent propaganda<br />
belied by both. “A lot of moments in the history of<br />
advertising coincide very directly with the history<br />
and development of communism throughout the 20th<br />
century,” Nguyen said.<br />
TPG opened its first survey exhibition, co-organized<br />
by MCA Chicago, the Blaffer Art Museum at the<br />
University of Houston, and Phoenix Art Museum, in<br />
June 2016. TPG’s exhibition currently is up at the<br />
Phoenix Art Museum, through May 14, and consists<br />
of their multimedia and fine art projects of the last<br />
five years.<br />
One of their multimedia projects examines the AK-47<br />
compared with the M-16. The former is a semiautomatic<br />
rifle created by the Soviet Union during<br />
the Vietnam War, and the latter is a rifle created by<br />
the United States in response. The group saw a Civil<br />
War exhibit that featured two collided bullets, and<br />
they replicated it by shooting bullets in a gel block.<br />
What resulted is a fine art piece that speaks to the<br />
collusion of the Cold War and the warring ideologies<br />
fraught within. Both nations consider these guns<br />
as “weapons of peace,” which speaks to the way<br />
propaganda enforces nationhood.<br />
The Propeller Group has produced a film, The Living<br />
Need Light, the Dead Need Music, that explores the<br />
funerary elements of the South Vietnamese and of<br />
New Orleans. They also have a video called The<br />
Guerillas of Cu Chi, in which cameras are placed at<br />
targets in a shooting range where tourists shoot guns<br />
16 JAVA<br />
MAGAZINE