POP ART (dec 29, 1947 – mar 10, 1972)
Description:
1947 - 1972
- Discussed cultural and social change due to technology
- Shaped from the technological revolution (TV, typewriters, telephones)
- "This is tomorrow" Pop Art exhibition
- Reaction to abstract expressionism
○ Anti-figurative and anti-realist
○ Depicted the psyche
- Epic (i.e. Large abstract expressionism paintings) was replaced with the everyday
- Represented the outside world
- Celebration of fashion
- Referenced the everyday
- American mass culture and mass media
○ Obsessed with sex, automobiles, and food
- Aggressively urban and contemporary
- many artists worked in the advertising industry
- British and American pop art developed independently
- Idealized American wealth in post war England
- Britain was obsessed with all things American and things that were not seen in Britain after the war
- "positive Dada", creative rather than destructive
- A positive response to prosperity, wealth, and production
- Embraced the work of mass media and advertising (unlike Abstract expressionism that aimed for uniqueness and individuality)
- Raised low media (mass-produced consumer art) to high media
- Ambivalence: mixed feelings about ideologies and philosophies
- Focused on stereotypes and labels (the "mom", the "strong man", the "bad girl")
- Influenced in the industrial design of cars
- Suburbs were invented (people were able to travel by car)
- Science-fiction and automation/machine
○ Believed that machines and technology make things better
- Embraced consumer goods
- Fashion:
○ Accelerates replacement
○ Things go out of style before they couldn't be used
○ Uses up images quickly (ex. changing hemlines)
- little to no comment on society
- expressed America's growing political and cultural dominance after WWII with consumer culture and irony
- Appropriation: The practice of creating a new work by taking a pre-existing image from another context—art history, advertising, the media—and combining that appropriated image with new one ("to borrow")
PAOLOZZI
- Founders of the independent group
- Collage of cuttings from advertising, magazines, and comics
HAMILTON
- Part of the independent group
- Involved the use of existing imagery already processed in 2 dimensions
- Emphasizes flatness and frontal presentation
- Decorative
- Many different technologies
- Femininity vs. Masculinity
- Satirical collages
- Layering of painting and photographic techniques
- Benday dots
- Silk - screen prints
- Working in London using almost only American images
- "There was an obsession with all things American after the war, because UK was in a deprived condition"
- Interested in Duchamp's work
- Absence of commitment to the object
- Ready-mades
JOHNS
- Neo-dada
- Encaustic paint (oil paint with wax)
- Flag and target paintings and other iconic objects
- Not about patriotism or nationalism, simply about the flag
- Assemblage (2D and 3D forms) -> now called an installation
- Transformation of non-art objects into sculpture
RAUSCHENBERG
- Very unusual materials (old puppets, tires, pillows, stuffed animals...)
- Used many materials/media in one piece
- Not concerned with making it beautiful
- Dripping paint and gestural brushstrokes (similar to abstract expressionism)
- Referred to as neo-dada, due to use of found objects/ready made and assemblage
- "Combines": new art form that broke down barriers between sculpture and painting
KEINHOLZ
- Vacuum artist, independently developed his own art practice, not influenced by other artists on the east coast
- Was originally a nurse, musician, and salesman
○ Made his work in a vacuum (no art training or knowledge of what was going on in the art room)
- Tableau
- Works of protest
- Art depicted his disgust in brothels
- From his experience in a mental hospital nurse
- Equates patriotism with consumerism
- Opposed to war (Vietnam War, where many men were drafted)
- Vulnerability of the private life due to social beliefs and morality
- Depicts misery due to America's prosperity
- Reacted to the events of his time, protests against Vietnam war, civil rights movement, freedom movement
- Darkest of the pop movement: prostitution, insanity, war, moral invasion of the privacy of the individual
SEGAL
- Rough and lumpy plaster casts of people
○ Rejects traditional sculpture
○ Abstract of repulsive
- Anonymous, non-distinguishable features
- Ready-made props
- Cold-war anxiety : potential of total annihilation, brief comparisons to Pompeii
- Social upheavals (Vietnam War, Quebec wanting to leave Canada, etc.)
- Figures have lost their individuality to the commercial products around them
KAPROW
- Happenings: performances that bore little resemblance to traditional theatre
- Gatherings of people (pointless but brought people together)
- Planned interactive environment
- People would move from event to event on cue
- Assemblage: collage that involve 3D objects and actions
- "an assemblage of events performed or perceived in more than one time or place, an environmental artwork activated by performers and viewers"
- Assemblage in time
- Used materials from the farm (chicken wire, …)
OLDENBURG
- Soft objects: Parodies of objects
SAINT-PHALLE
- shot-reliefs: Shooting a gun at plastic bags of paint
- drip paintings/art created by chance
- parodic comment on Action painting and Performance Art
- work delivered strong political and personal messages dealing with issues like sexual abuse
- Worked with objets trouves
- Low forms of materials (ex. wire mesh, toys, hair rollers, paper machee)
INDIANA
- Artist of the American dream
- word-paintings with a stark simplicity suggesting the flashing words of neon signs
- stenciled letters and precise hard edge coloured shapes
- Obsessed with labels
- Inspired by traffic signs, commercial stencils, and old trade names
- Interested in cars and highways
- Pop is "instant art"
- art shows the brutality and bitterness of modern life
ROSENQUIST
- Blurs art with commercial products
- Reflects training as a billboard painting
- Source material gathered from magazines
- Large paintings (like billboard size)
- Marilyn Monroe: a small town girl who rose to fame
- Celebrity culture
- Smooth and seamless brush strokes (very different from abstract expressionism)
- Large paintings turn into abstract planes of colour
- Paintings are about the relationships between the objects and not the objects themselves
- large work surrounded viewers with the aggressiveness of war
- Smooth, seamless, no visible brush strokes: resembles advertising, very different to abstract expressionism
LICHTENSTIEN
- Inspired by comics and advertisments
- used limited flat colours based on those used in commercial printing
- Benday dots: seen in a comic when viewed up close but eyes blur them as one colour
○ Lichtenstein enlarges these dots and hands paint them
- inspired by photomechanical reproduction
- Hand painted but the content is from a printed source
- Speech bubbles
- depicted violent action and sentimental romance (inspired by WWII battles)
- meticulous paintings contrast greatly with the gestures of abstract expressionists
- Example of an artist responding to a technological process; Ben-day dots (dots that make up the colour in images in paper)
WARHOL
- Connection to commercial design (Coca-Cola, Campbell's)
- Large boxes painted to look like soap boxes
- Appropriation/borrowing of material
○ Equivalent to quoting
○ 2D equivalent of a found object
○ Creates the question of originality
- Silk screened images from the tabloids (eliminates the personal signature of the artist)
- "when you see a gruesome image over and over again, it loses its effect"
- "he wanted to be a machine"
○ Studio was called a factory, production was like an assembly line of silk screening
- Fame was part of the American dream
- Icons: Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Jackie Kennedy
- Uses repetition with variations
- disturbing impersonality to press photographs of death and disaster photographs
- Artists were not merely produces but their art shares their aura
- repeated objects in grids (objects are presented like they would in a grocery store)
SNOW
- Highly polished surface
- Animated by the reflections of passing people and light
WIELAND
- Multiple mediums (quilts, collages, embroidery
- Spoken feminist and nationalist (Canada)
ROSLER
- brought the war back home
- Combines imagery to offer a critique of American complacency in the Vietnam War
Added to timeline:
120JAV
Date:
