test-ihavepop – Jurjen Semeijn

I HAVE POP

PRESENTS

How to have pop… and eat it too?

1.

Appropriate the mechanism. Not the style.

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2.

Commercial follow-up is part of the work.

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Nike called

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Nike called again. It was Nike UK.

They were celebrating the anniversary of the Air Max 90 and asked a handful of artists to make work for their Niketown flagship in London.

I proposed a monument to chavs.

In the UK, "chav" is a derogatory term for working-class kids, usually white, usually from council estates. It’s one of the subcultures that adopted the AM90 as one of its main signifiers. Tracksuits, caps, baggy jeans, the sneakers (or trainers, I suppose).

Without them, the AM90 is a running shoe. With them, it’s culture.

They said no.

About two years later I met someone who had worked at a boutique agency in Berlin. They’d pitched Ford, Opel, Mercedes (one of those) on honouring the cars that first-generation Turkish families drove from Germany back to Turkiye every summer. Loaded to the roof, children in the back.

Cars trusted to carry a family across a continent. Arriving as a status object on the other side. Loved, tested to the limit, and turned into cultural objects by a community that had no other way to signal arrival.

Everything a brand says it wants.

And guess what? They said no.

The chav in the AM90s. The Gastarbeiter family on the E5 with the roof rack piled high. These are the people who made the product mean something.

This is what brands say they want. Cultural relevance, authentic adoption. A product that becomes more than the product.

Until you pitch it with the actual people in it.

What brands call authenticity is the look of the street with nobody from the street in it. A heritage story with the heritage laundered out. The fingerprints cleaned off the object before it goes back on the shelf.

And then they wonder how they lost it.

But I made it anyway.

Reframed as a monument to the streets, the piece stood in Niketown for the exhibit. A plinth of asphalt, cobblestones, and bricks. Concrete legs from the knees down, in baggy jeans, wearing AM90s.

Exactly the same as it would have been.

3.

Institutional follow-up is part of the work.

Centraal Museum (Everyone's an artist)

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