The dense allusions of North Korea Spiderman Orgasm (2007) typify much of Tom Pounder's recent work, which has increasingly departed from the principles of Abject Extractionism, the school with which he is most closely associated. In it he erects a panopticon of semantic relations among multiple fractured narratives, with the playful badinage of a 2 Live Crew record.

breast Windows Vista Steve Irwin. New York City penis The Beatles. The bathos-soaked mindlessness of these triads, set in hypertrophied fonts on vividly saturated colour-planes, functions as coded commentary on the very process of artistic critique. We are not permitted to admit the words conceptually for their desultoriness; nor can we press them into the service of rational analysis as Extractions. Rather, Pounder is interested in documenting what he terms the "folksonomic tragedy", by eavesdropping on the emergent dialogue that supervenes and sits atop of user, machine, system and network.

According to the artist, North Korea Spiderman Orgasm was inspired by a session spent surfing the world wide web. As he describes it, "I thought, isn't it funny how some things get searches, like The Simpsons, and it's all about what's on TV or on Trevor McDonald at that moment. But sexual organs are popular all year round. And they're never on TV. And I thought, I could make art out of that."

 

 

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