POP ART

As the number of modern artists and their productivity grew, scarcity and value were maintained by an increasing demand for competent innovation and originality. The affluent fifties and sixties saw a series of schools pass rapidly through the galleries. Free abstraction which had reached its peak of energy with the action school yielded to the camp realism of "pop art" and the controlled geometry of "op art." The notion of "action" reached its logical climax in "happenings" as experimental ideas led to the simultaneous erosion of the boundaries between artist and spectator and between one medium and another. In the midst of all this innovation, the challenge thrown down by Marcel Duchamp just before he died in 1968 that the museum of the future would be an empty loft was taken up by the "minimal school," which used simple everyday objects and, without transforming them, physically converted them to art through contextual placement in gallery or museum.

Pop art was a conscious recognition of the impact of mass culture on our senses. It transformed the objects and images of everyday life through a series of processes ranging from enlarged hamburgers ( Claes Oldenburg Floorburger, for example) to soft telephones or the hauntingly real-unreal life casts by George Segal. In the latter, white plaster figures are positioned among real but cast-off props taken from such everyday material as run-down coffee shops or discarded buses.

Pop art and minimal art are both the arts of the mundane -the mundane transformed either through the manipulation of one or more aspects of the real object or image, or through placement in a context which defines art almost by an act of defiance.

The direct descendant of these two schools (but also opposed to them) is "hyperrealism," in which the human figure is "exactly" reproduced. Hyperrealist sculpture is so real that it has led to a revolution in the technical reproduction of figures for those marginal art forms found in wax museums, the focus of which has been "living" history.

The final transmogrification of the silent wax works of Madame Tussaud (popular hyperrealism) comes appropriately enough in the technological wizardry of Disneyland in California and Walt Disney's World in Florida. There, things move!

Mark Rothko: Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (1946). Oil on canvas, 72" x 80". Formerly San Francisco Museum of Art.

Summary:

Pop Art is a movement that first emerged in Great Britain at the end of the 1950s as a reaction against the seriousness of abstract expressionism. British and American pop artists employed a common imagery found in comic strips, soup cans, and Coke bottles to express formal abstract relationships. By this means they provided a meeting ground where artist and layman could come to terms with art. Incorporating techniques of sign painting and commercial art into their work, as well as commercial literary imagery, pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol attempted to fuse elements of popular and high culture to erase the boundaries between the two.

More about Pop Art:

Contemporary movement in painting and sculpture concerned in form and substance with popular mass culture. The term was first used by the English critic Lawrence Alloway to describe the work of several English artists who began in the early 1950's to focus on consumer products, advertising, movie stars, and other articles of mass consumption, partly as criticism of the vulgarity of modern life. The Pop movement began to emerge in the United States, where it has had its fullest expression, in about 1960, in the work of such artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol. The American version, with its clean, antiseptic forms, its use of commercial art techniques, and its deadpan mimicking of commercial products, can be seen as a reaction to the highly personal and often agonized vision of Abstract Expressionism and as an effort to reexplore the unavoidable milieu created by mass culture. The result is often comic or critical, but more significant perhaps is the hermetic ambiguity that attends most Pop Art, its iconic irony. Antecedents are to be found in Cubism. Dada and Surrealism, and in the work of such artists as Jaspar Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

Pop Art is defined in the Random House Dictionary as follows: 'Fine Arts. a style esp. of figurative painting, developed in the US and current in the early 1960s, characterized chiefly by magnified forms and images derived from such commercial art genres as comic strips and advertising posters.' In the ten years or so of its use the term has had more meanings than this and its shifts reveal the pressure of opposed ideas of culture. For this reason, its history is, perhaps, worth recording.

The term, originated in England, was meant as a description of mass communications, especially, but not exclusively, visual ones. By the winter of 1957-58 the term was in use, either as Pop Culture or Pop Art. Its users were art-oriented, if not themselves artists, and interested both in extending esthetic attention to the mass media and in absorbing mass-media material within the context of fine art. It was an expansionist esthetics, aimed at relating art to the man-made environment of the 50's. Advertising, color photography and color reproduction, (big screen) films, (early English) TV, automobile styling were regarded on equal terms with the fine arts; not the same, but equally interesting. The group was criticized in the mid-50s, as being pro- American, because a majority of the admired films, ads, science fiction, and commercial photography was American, inasmuch as the United States was, and is, the most fully industrialized country. (Pop art, before it is American art is an art of Industrialism.) Pop Art was pro- urban and accepted the media's roots in mass production, at a time when traditional esthetics in England was mostly pastoral or universalizing. Pop Art, in its original form, was a polemic against elite views of art in which uniqueness is a metaphor of the aristocratic and contemplation the only proper response to art.

Pop Art/Phase 1 involved an open attitude in which art was scattered among all of man's artifacts, and could be situated anywhere. Hence the idea of a Fine Art/Pop Art continuum was necessary. In place of an hierarchic esthetics keyed to define greatness and universality and to separate High from Low art, a continuum was assumed which could accommodate all forms of art, permanent and expendable, personal and collective, autographic and anonymous. On the other hand, art was not regarded, owing to its environmental functions, as a social service. Rather it was put in a situation of complexity which demanded all kinds of attention and not assigned a set level in a pyramid of taste. At the time it was recognized that Pop Art/1 had an affinity to the definitions of culture by anthropologists, as all of a society, and not, as art writers and specialists prefer, as a treasury of privileged items.

From 1961 to 1964 Pop Art came to mean art that included a reference to mass-media sources. This was the period of its maximum influence as an art movement : the compression of the term facilitated its rapid diffusion. By restricting its terms of reference to works of art with certain kinds of imagery, Pop Art/2 arrests the expansionist element in Pop Art/1. During this time Pop Art consolidated its formal properties: the explosive definition of culture as everything shrank to an iconography of signs and objects known from outside the field of art. This appeared to be such a drastic operation mainly because the articulate art world of that moment was habituated to the formalities of Abstract art. The productions of Pop Art/2 are dualistic, with unexpected structure conferred on existing subject matter or with structure following the display of unexpected subjects. The ambiguities of reference and speculation on the status of the work of art itself, basic in this period, are well within the iconographical limits of art from Futurism to Dada to Purism.

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Pop Art Movies between 1964-1970

A dramatic change came over British films after 1964, a change that coincided with the victory of the Labour government, with its emphasis on youth, progress and innovation, and the birth of ‘Swinging London’. The film that symbolized this change and caught the mood of the moment was Tom Jones (1963). Henry Fielding’s picaresque eighteenth-century novel, with its story of the rise of a poor boy to fame and fortune amid an uninhibited celebration of sex and conspicuous consumption, was brought to the screen by John Osborne, Tony Richardson and Albert Finney. The style they adopted was far from the reverent naturalism of previous classic novel adaptations. It was jokey and knowing, and it employed slapstick comedy, speeded-up action, captions, asides to camera and an urbane narration. This irreverent eclecticism, inspired by the techniques and ethos of pop art, set the tone and style for the rest of the decade. Tom Jones, bawdy and funny, celebrated a previous permissive age of gusto, gourmandizing and zestful free living, appearing at a time when the Labour election victory promised ‘100 days of dynamic action’ and a programme of social reform in an era of full employment and growing affluence.

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Sean Connery as James Bond 007

Succesful Pop Culture Movies

At about the same time as Tom Jones, James Bond, the other great cult figure of the 1960s, hit the screen. Doctor No (1962) was the first of what became a series stretching to the present day; it starred Sean Connery as Bond, and set the pattern for an unbeatable blend of conspicuous consumption, brand name snobbery, technological gadgetry, colour supplement chic, exotic locations and comic-strip sex and violence. Although Bond was, in Raymond Durgnat’s words, ‘the last man in of the British Empire Superman’s XI’ (1970:151), pitted against Fu-Manchu (Doctor No) or travelling on the Orient Express (From Russia With Love, 1963), there were crucial differences between Bond and Richard Hannay or Bulldog Drummond—both of whom experienced cinematic revivals around this time, Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1959) and Drummond in Deadlier Than The Male (1966) and Some Girls Do (1968). Bond was both a sexual adventurer and essentially classless, Connery’s Glaswegian accent distancing him from the upper-class English gentlemen who customarily played secret agents. This put him firmly in line with other 1960s icons. The films were classically in the 1960s style—cool and knowing, sharing with comic-strip adaptations like Barbarella (1968), Batman (1966) and Modesty Blaise (1966) an ironic sense of distancing from the nature of their source material.

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New Bond Daniel Craig in James Bond 007: Casino Royale (2006)

The Beatles Group Members:

John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr

Pop Art Musicals

A Hard Day’s Night is a celebration of the decade’s greatest cult figures, the Beatles, and their music. The film is built around their image as cool, youthful, irreverent, quirky and quick-witted provincials. They were the first pop idols not to be processed into safe ‘family entertainers’ and in the process emasculated. Both Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard, initially viewed as threateningly sexy, had been carefully transformed into ‘the boy next door’, a Mickey Rooney de nos jours. Cliff in particular, who had starred in Expresso Bongo (1959) as a sexy working-class teen idol on the make, entered the 1960s as the distinctly unthreatening hero of a series of highly traditional screen musicals (The Young Ones, 1961; Summer Holiday, 1962; Wonderful Life, 1964). The Beatles, however, were securely anchored by Lester in the new pop art and pop culture.

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Cliff Richard

The selections in this volume have been previously published in various publications, including Art International: "Melpomene and Graffiti: Adolph Gottlieb's Early Work"; Artforum: "The Biomorphic '40s," "Agnes Martin," "Robert Smithson's Development"; Art News: "Gesture into Form: The Later Paintings of Norman Bluhm"; Arts Magazine: "Jackson Pollock's Black Paintings," "Marilyn as Subject Matter," "Roy Lichtenstein's Period Style," "Hi-way Culture (with Notes on D'Arcangelo," "Art as Likeness," part of "Allan Kaprow: Two Views," "Arakawa: An Interview"; Auction: "Pop Art: The Words," "The Expanding and Disappearing Work of Art"; The Nation: "Jackson Pollock's 'Psychoanalytic Drawings,' " "Willem de Kooning," "Sol LeWitt," "Jasper Johns' Map," "George Segal," part of "Allan Kaprow: Two Views," the discussion of Kenneth Noland in "The Uses and Limits of Art Criticism," "Radio City Music Hall"; Studio International: "The Public Sculpture Problem." "The Reuben Gallery," "Barnett Newman: The Stations of the Cross and the Subjects of the Artist," and "Systemic Painting" are from the catalogues of exhibitions that I arranged at the Solomon A. Guggenheim Museum in 1965 and 1966. "Serial Forms" is from the catalogue of the exhibit "American Sculpture of the 60s," arranged by Maurice Tuchman at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1967, and "Leon Polk Smith" is from the catalogue of an exhibition arranged by Gerald Nordland at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1968. "Rauschenberg's Graphics" is the catalogue text of an exhibition arranged by Stephen Prokopoff for the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, in 1970. "Artists and Photographs" was published on the occasion of an exhibition of this name at Multiples, Inc., in the same year. "Photo-Realism" was written for the catalogue of an exhibition of selected works from the Ludwig Collection and others, shown by the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1973. "Notes on Op Art" was first printed in The New Art, edited by Gregory Battcock (1966), and the introduction to "Stolen" is from a book published jointly by Multiples Inc., Colorcraft Lithographers, and the Dwan Gallery in 1970.