ARTPOPLITICS showcases annette hollywood’s work of the last 20 years with many images and several texts. The title alludes to a wordplay typical for hollywood’s artistic approach and at the same time structures the works into thematic chapters: ART ARTIST POPLITICS POP POLITICS LIT.
“…hollywood’s work operates in a zone that falls outside of the current earnest but cynical contemporary art scene. It is low budget, feminist, DIY, popular, interactive and not very marketable! But it also reveals what artists can do and be, once they are pushed by principle and passion to not ‘play the game.’ Her work asks the question of the relation between high and low culture and gives a different answer than the one that thinks that art and culture are the same thing, or imagines that art can simply take up pop culture and subsume it, as it does everything else. Art is also a feminist question, not just at the level of representation—Who gets to be an artist? Who gets to be seen? Who gets paid?—but also at the level of strategy: how can art overturn the male gaze, the dull fake-neutrality of humorless ‘male’ art? How can humor operate to overturn our assumptions about how and when we should be having fun? We are desiring beings, and amusing and amused beings. We watch culture and it watches us. hollywood’s works ask us to overturn this opposition between passivity and activity, and we find ourselves playing outside, but making serious points, but we are smiling, and it doesn’t undermine what we have to say at all, but only recognizes this possible space where we can do all these things at once, and with joy.”