Pop Art (pt. 7)

You can see Claes Oldenburg's famous Clothespin sculpture in Philadelphia.  Once again, we see an everyday object magnified to an extreme and plopped right down into a busy town center, as though it were another building.  This photograph by Tara Bradford particularly blends the clothespin in well with the surrounding skyscrapers and even makes the sculpture appear bigger than those other, impressive buildings.  This is the effect Oldenburg had in mind: to blend in these larger-than-life items almost as social experiments, to spark a public reaction as much as to comment on contemporary culture and the function of art in the community.  Much of Pop Art is made for the people.

Pop Art (pt. 6)

Similar to Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg took ordinary, manufactured objects and enlarged them as statements of society's dependence on industrialization.  A sculptor, Oldenburg also chose unconventional locations wherein to position his artworks for public viewing.  They most frequently appear, not in museums, but in regular, everyday public places, such as this giant pickaxe, which rests awkwardly on the grounds of a park in Kassel, Germany.

The focus is vaguely reminiscent of Georgia O'Keeffe's enlargement of the flower.  Oldenburg's attention to conventional objects in unconventional places displays not just the intricate social critique of a pop artist who seeks to comment on the nature of consumerism in American culture but a memorable effusion of one of the basic qualities of artists of all mediums; and it is the thing which has come to define art in the modern era perhaps most of all—the ability of the artist to think outside the box.  After all, most of the fun in inventions such as this lies in wondering why the artist chose to position the pickaxe the way in which he did; and why that particular location; and why so big; etc., etc.  This is the heart of ingenuity, creativity, and, in a way, art itself.

Pop Art (pt. 5)

If it's pop culture we're dealing with here, then I don't need to say anything regarding the developing style of graphic art in the '40s and '50s.  Comic books today still carry such a significant relevance in society that we're almost drowned in them.  I can no longer count how many superhero movies Hollywood has produced over the past decade.  Clearly, this is a medium that has embedded itself into the fabric of social culture today.  Images such as this, the Drowning Girl, therefore, are still today instantly distinguishable.

In 1963, Roy Lichtenstein produced this painting, a rip-off of an actual panel in a real comic series.  He changed a few things, however, and made the image his own; and today it is considered one of the staple inventions of Pop Art.  It features the kind of typical melodramatic action common to most genres of graphic art fiction; a girl with blue hair is drowning in the ocean or some other stormy body of water (true to the genre, we can't see anything else because this is a single frame of what would ordinarily be a string of images, telling a story—I trust all of my readers are avid comic book fans).  We can see tears beginning to stream down her cheeks, a true "damsel in distress" as per the superhero stories.  A word bubble, the most famous element of comic book fiction, appears at the top with the following melodramatic lines of the perishing girl: "I don't care!  I'd rather sink—than call Brad for help!"  The exaggerated drama and overemotional theatricality of such a frame is characteristic—almost archetypal—of the genre which Lichtenstein is here recreating and elevating to the art world (and the girl's blue hair, too, haha!).  As a product of the culture of the day, this recognizable image bears implicit connotative significance in the eyes of viewers everywhere who get the reference; and that's definitive Pop Art.

Pop Art (pt. 4)

No doubt Warhol's most famous contribution to the art world was the simple image of a Campbell's Tomato Soup Can.

Once again, such a straightforward image can speak for itself.  It's commonplace, widespread, and instantly recognizable.  Perhaps I can't identify with Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series, but in America back at this time this would have been something I looked at very regularly, maybe even on a weekly basis at the grocery store.  It would therefore have its own meaning with me—(perhaps to remind me that we're out of tomato soup).  The art here ceases to be about the artist (as with Van Gogh and Pollock) and becomes about the public.  This is a cultural image of a public reality: countless people buy this kind of soup, even today.  To qualify such an entity as a work of art is a statement on the lifestyle of the American crowd in the Postmodern Era.  America is, after all, infamous for its consumerist-centered commercial industry; why not marry art to that?  And the implications of a work such as this on American consumerism surface most visibly when examining the artist's larger collages of Campbell's Tomato Soup Cans.  Warhol even went so far as to include 100 Cans in one of his works (and he titled it simply that).

When you think about it within the progression of art history up to now, it isn't as deconstructive to art theory as one might first expect.  When Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal to an art salon in 1917, it was a clear, satirical jab at the institution of the art world at that time; but there is a degree of sincerity in Warhol's Tomato Soup Cans which goes beyond a mere avant-garde shift of focus onto the unexpected.  Shouldn't the fact that this is an object seen by so many people on a regular, everyday basis be a vindication for it to ascend to the level of art?  This is capturing culture.  In the Baroque Era, kings and queens and princes had their portraits painted to display to the public, and that was a statement of societal construction; it asserted the dominance of royalty.  Similarly, we looked at several propaganda paintings of Napoleon Bonaparte from the Neoclassical Period, which made direct statements on French politics at the time.  Art has perhaps always reflected pieces of the society in which it appears.  The Postmodern world simply embraced a broader hierarchy of significance, from continental maps to a mere can of soup—and that is reflective of the philosophy of such a time as well.

Pop Art (pt. 3)

It was Andy Warhol who defined Pop Art in America in the 1960s, and he did so with simple collage constructions of very well-known people and things.  This is a collage of negative photographs of Marilyn Monroe.

We see the famous movie actress in a variety of vivid and energetic colors—none of them quite right for a realistic image of Monroe.  Like Color Field painting, the color scheme of the work comes across as mostly random or arbitrary, but this time we get a clear image of something we can relate with.  Whatever is to be read into that goes largely unspoken; it's a given that everyone who looks at this will be thinking the same thing: "That's Marilyn Monroe."  Yet we are handed nine prints of the same thing, copied and structured evenly next to each other.  We are given in excess the image of this pop culture icon, and we may perhaps read into that.  A statement on glamour and publicity, this striking work of art catches our eye with many bright colors very much like the actress herself attracted attention from her audiences (and John F. Kennedy).  Seeing her in this light almost oversimplifies her allure—it's all merely colors and duplications; but no one can question that Monroe was one of Hollywood's most prolific actresses and, indeed, a symbol herself of the American lifestyle.  All the appeal and shallowness, the fascination and turpitude of pop culture comes out through the image.  The artist merely reproduces it and adds a simple stylistic touch of color and form (like a painting).

Pop Art (pt. 2)

Jasper Johns, for example, began producing collages in the 1950s which formed the image of the American flag.  This 1961 painting, entitled Map, shows in rough order a map of the United States.

Similar to a Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock creation, the artist has slashed paint onto the canvas with strong emotion.  The vibrant colors, red, yellow, and blue—which are the three primary (and most vivid) colors—lend further intensity to the painting.  It's a huge painting and one associated with the Modern Art tradition of Abstract Expressionism; but it displays an image (albeit compromised and messy) with which we are all familiar.  And when you think about the simplicity of the subject, too, you can glean an understanding of what Pop Art centered itself around.  This is a mere map of the United States.  Why paint something which is already so well-known?  What significance is there to be found in such a commonplace image?  This movement of art continually asserts that there is abundant meaning in images from popular culture; that audiences can choose for themselves what such an image means to them.  But here Jasper Johns has slashed away at his subject in an expressionistic approach that causes us to see the map of the U.S. in a fuddled, unattractive, and visually startling light.  This is the ability of Pop Art to alter our perspective on things otherwise taken to be ordinary and familiar.

Pop Art (pt. 1)

It might be a shock to you, but some people don't appreciate Modern Art.  Especially during its upswell, art which was so ahead of its time received little real recognition among the general public, and the new generation of artists noticed this and challenged these techniques with new art styles.  It was time for something new, a breath of fresh air from the higher complexities of Abstract Expressionism.  And in America, the 1960s was most certainly a time of change, both cultural and ideological.  A new art form swept the nation, and it's one that is still with us largely today.

If you ask me, the reason why the Modern Art movement failed was that it didn't connect with its audience.  We can see this by looking at the successive generation of artists and the qualities of their art.  The new generation of artists challenged the old techniques and introduced a style all its own.  Pop Art portrays images from popular culture, and it came to the U.S. around the 1960s .  In England during the 1950s, collages with magazine clippings and pictures of familiar household objects became popular; this theoretical ideal then crossed over to America to influence the next artistic movement.  As we will see, this type of art is wholly devoted to commonly understood and widely recognized objects or people.  Modern Art had been about artistic ideals of stylistic approach and creative technique (such as with Pollock), but that apparently didn't do a whole lot for the general public.  Not everyone can look at a Diebenkorn or Rothko color field painting and appreciate it as a masterpiece; after all, it's just color on a canvas.  But perhaps people would appreciate the images more if those images showed things which they knew and could respond to.  Pop Art dominated in well-known, instantly recognizable images.