ABSTRACT
Neogeo was a label given a group of artists who emerged in the East Village and became the focus of art-world attention in 1986. They were Ashley Bickerton, Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, and Meyer Vaisman, as well as Haim Steinbach and Allan McCollum, who were soon associated with them. The neogeos are best treated as two closely-connected groups. One, consisting of Bickerton, Koons, Steinbach, and Vaisman, appropriated commodities and their labels from consumer culture. They were influenced by Duchamp's readymades; pop art, notably Warhol's pictures of Campbell's soup cans and sculptures of Brillo boxes; and the deconstruction art of Barbara Kruger. Both the neogeos and commodity artists considered consumer society and the mass-media that fueled it as "spectacle." They were influenced by fashionable post-structuralist and neo-Marxist theory. Although commodity artists were influenced by Artschwager, they did not distort everyday objects imaginatively, as he did.
