TEXT BY WILL BALLANTYNE-REID

So do you have a heart and a head?Then, baby, you are on my list! My pop-up store’s an open door policy

Pop Art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big business

I am writing this text at the desk of Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage. There’s a personally-dedicated pop-domestic by Richard Hamilton hanging in the hallway. The cottage’s window frames are painted yellow, radiating off the green leaves of plants that grow up against the house despite the harshness and hostility of the landscape. Much like multiple pairs of Bransfield sunglasses, it’s a trick of the light: an illumination of everyday hardship and casual joy transformed into something transcendent. An artist’s object-offshoots made holy in an instant. Partly castaway, partly carnal, glistening with desire and a splash of real life (whether by way of the Dungeness sea breeze, or the sound of passing traffic on Cambridge Heath Road where NEVEN stands.)

Two weeks ago, I was sat with Woodsy at his studio in Bow to discuss this solo exhibition ‘Hoping’ – NEVEN’s inaugural offering – and to listen in full to his album Populism, which constitutes a sort of lyrical underpinning, incantation, and rallying cry. Like Jarman, Woodsy’s work performs a sort of alchemical process – combining ephemeral artefacts of pop culture with a political defiance and outrage, so as to transform them into amulets of protection and resistance. In this installation at NEVEN, four opalescent cases contain dozens of pairs of Bransfield-branded sunglasses. The cases face each other across a pink bench, recalling the altar-like composition of such hallowed spaces of artistic veneration as the Rothko Chapel or the soft, sweeping lushness of Monet’s Water Lilies Room at MoMA.

Their borders have been painstakingly diamanté-d with lyrics from the album’s third track Hoping: “I don’t where my truth fits / Into post-truth if truth be told. / We sit, not shocked by anything, now / And watch fake news unfold.”

Appearing here, row on row in their silvery cabinets, I’m reminded of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and its legendary cover; a flipped and cropped Life magazine image by photographer J.R. Eyerman from the 1952 premiere of Hollywood’s first full-length 3D (‘Natural Vision’) feature. The image shows the audience in “a virtually trance-like state of absorption”, and has gone on to become a touchstone in representing late-capitalist consumerism and its potential for zombifying alienation. In this instance, the sunglasses are rosé-champagne tinted (say no more) and one hundred pairs will be given away at the opening. In this way – at least for one night only – the audience and the artist are able to share a communal vision of the world. The sunglasses themselves are of course one of the ultimate ‘pop’ objects, beloved and beatified throughout the 21st century and its most iconic hallmarks of commanding camp. It’s Grace Jones in a gold pair under disco lights on the dancefloor of Studio 54. It’s Peggy Guggenheim in repose and full garb in the back of a Venetian gondola. It’s Anna Wintour, inside and dead-eyed. It’s Patsy Stone in black wayfarers on a New York rooftop with cig, beehive, and Stoli. It’s Warhol, well, anytime.

Debord, like Adorno, wrote on pop culture’s cornerstone of ‘standardisation’ – its focus on regularity and repetition as manifest by “stereotypical forms and schematic formulae.” Bransfield’s multiplication of the sunglasses makes them simultaneously more precious and more available, seemingly self-replenishing as to recall the sugar-coated softness of sweets in an installation by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. In this way, the installation appropriates the inter-dynamics of pop culture, capitalism, and our desire both to consume and be consumed. It speaks to how the rampant marketing of product (only amplified by the digital era to an extreme both theorists would surely balk at) intersects with, and illustrates, an almost-religious veneration of ‘brand’. This is a conceptual thread that connects the installation to Bransfield’s earlier series The Chains That Were Sold To Me By An Algorithm (2022), originally exhibited at Palatial Projects and re-rendering the “rude boy Cuban diamond necklaces” marketed to him through Instagram’s algorithmic ads. Here, the series is continued through an individual votive work in NEVEN’s alcove.

Asked to describe Pop art, Warhol himself – with typical deadpan conciseness – explained that “it’s about liking things.” In conversation, Bransfield describes an encounter years ago with a Kardashian-annointed section of Boots befit with countless rows of flesh-tone compacts in a spectrum of pink-tone packaging. The artist was struck by how the hazy homogeneity of the product’s veneer obfuscates its intrinsic tangle of commerce, labour, class, and geopolitical complexity. As for many of us, the offering – that transaction – holds the potential for a complicated act of transubstantiation. By stepping into the Skims we might just become Kim. Through Goop we grasp at Gwyneth. By converting this gallery space into a sort-of sunglasses shop, up-ending its essential function as a commercial entity, the artist engages this dissonance both on the terms of capital’s mystifying gloss, and by subverting the notion of ownership that underpins both the capitalist market and (of course) the art world. Put the glasses on now and you too become Bransfield.

The artist perceives the installation as “fucking with this idea of exclusivity”, explaining that “what creates the rarity is that if you’re not there on the night you don’t get a pair.” Simultaneously, the existence of Populism – the album – further disrupts the audience's (or collector’s) attention and investment. Bransfield speaks of the dawn of file-sharing platforms like Napster and Limewire, which coincided with his first encounters with the work of Gonzalez-Torres. “It was already becoming obvious, pretty much overnight, that music was going to become this porous thing that you didn’t pay for. There was some link there with Felix, in upending the collecting process and forcing the collector to be this sort of janitor whose job is to replenish the sweets, or the stacks of paper. I remember thinking, imagine if there was a product that you could have outside the gallery – in your home, on your stereo, or on your headphones – that somehow was a soundtrack to a work of art you knew was elsewhere. So there was always this thing that brought you back to a time when you saw something in a gallery.”

It is in this cultural deconstruction and mimicry – absorbing and exporting the machinations of our algorithmic world – that the subversion of ‘Hoping’ is enacted. The exhibition shares its title with one of Populism’s stand-out tracks, a razor-sharp and anthemic meditation that encapsulates this project and its “constant zipping back-and-forth between the personal and the political, the private and the public, the self and the state.” In the song’s bridge, the artist’s voice echoes bureaucratic, data demands for “Proof of address / Any kind of utility bill / Gas, water, internet / Phone or leccy” with a despairing refrain that “(Maybe someone cares about me?)”. The track also samples a “disembodied breath” from the real-life recording of “a single mother on benefits, having her Universal Credit cut”, witnessed by the artist whilst he was signing on. This hyperventilating breath – deliberately stripped of identifying characteristics and transmogrified into a beat – becomes an embodiment of the track’s narrator, described by the artist as “someone flagrantly hoping into open air that their life is going to be ok, whilst there’s also this implication that there’s some force of the state just fucking stomping on their hopes and dreams. And they’re just hoping and hoping, whilst being stomped on and stomped on.”

The album itself opens with the sampled sharp exhale of an NHS midwife, a friend of the artist, who “sort of blows the disco beat onto the dancefloor. It’s a body that’s directly related to the state, which in turn is directly related to how more bodies and souls are born in our country specifically.” Bransfield has previously incorporated samples and field recordings into his albums, “recording trumpets in Sigmund Freud’s bedroom, and strings in a former psychiatric ward” for his 2015 album Psychologist. But in this instance the samples – and our knowledge of their existence in the extensive terrain of the album’s sonic landscape – touch on a profound (in)humanity that exists all around us; beneath the glossy facade of this city’s constant motion, and beyond the myriad ways in which our lives are beautifully repackaged and sold back to us both online and IRL.

José Esteban Muñoz conceives of ephemera as “linked to alternate modes of textuality and narrativity like memory and performance: it is all of those things that remain after a performance, a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself.” With this installation and its accompanying album – not to mention the hundred Bransfield-branded sunnies that will circulate out into the London night after NEVEN’s opening – the artist surely echoes Muñoz in achieving a sort of ‘anti-evidence’. That is, to achieve some sublimation of fantasy and dire reality – both virtual and real, digital and analogue – that speaks directly to our age in all its algorithmic intangibility, post-truth slippage, and selfie-slick dissonance. And what is Pop, if not to be a mirror of the times? Hold on babe, I’m just checking my reflection in the champagne surface of your new Bransfields x

WOODSY BRANSFIELD (b. 1987, Coventry, UK) is a British artist whose work combines musical production and performance with more traditional fine-art processes.

He received his BA in Sculpture at Brighton University in 2008 and was the recipient of Arts Council’s DYCP Award for his independent, MFA-equivalent study programme The Chic Academy with mentors Mark Leckey, Prem Sahib and Larry Achiampong (2022). Recent exhibitions and projects include Allow Cookies, Kupfer, London (2023); On the edge of fashion, Rose Easton, London (2023), The Chains that were Sold to me by an Algorithm, Woodsy’s, London (2022). Populism Live at Tate Britain, London and MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2019). Bransfield lives and works in London.

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