PopART
Warhol
Johns
Lichtenstein
Oldenburg
Rauschenberg
Rosenquist
Marisol
Rivers
Wesselmann
mid-1950s - late1960s
Pop Art IntroPop Art uses popular, commercial and social culture as subject matter.
eg: Hollywood, celebrity, media, advertising, packaging, pop music, comic books, parties and social events.
Pop art originated in England in the mid-1950s and was paralleled by America in the late-1950s.
Kitsch becomes a prominent staple in the art world that is, the idea that you can take something of banality/bad taste and turn it on its head…the world turned upside-down
It challenged orthodoxies in art and society by:
- merging high and low culture
- subverting mass media and it’s representations of society
“Neo-dada” was used to describe early work. Why?
“Pop Art” became common term around 1962.
Pop Art Intro• Because of the new self-confidence that the Ab Ex artists established for the American art scene (ie. that it did not need to conform to European academic orthodoxy) Pop Art could flourish.
• Pre-Pop arist Robert Rauschenburg encountered John Cage, an instructor at the Black Mountain College (where some of the Pop Art artists had studied). Cage a musical composer, posed some of the first important theoretical questions about the relationships between art and the media, between representation and reality.
•Question: Was a truck in a music school more musical than a truck driving past on the street?
Postmodernism
•Term used from about 1970 (though this is arguable)
•Describes changes in Western society and culture from the 1960s on.
•Changes arose from anti-authoritarian challenges to the prevailing orthodoxies across the board.
•In art, postmodernism was a reaction against modernism which was believed to be at it’s height during the Ab Ex movement. Essentially, that Pop Art broke down the divide between high art and popular culture and turned art into a commodity rather than something rare.
Key Point: Postmodernism refuses to recognise authority of any single style or definition of what art should be.
Begins with Pop Art and includes Conceptual Art, Neo-Expressionism, Feminist Art, and the Young British Artists of the 1990s.
Post-war North American Iconography
Popular Images and Icons
Ray Johnson, underground American artist
Elvis Presley #1
1955
Tempera and india ink on newspaper
Underground Arts
e.g. - Fanzines: self published and distributed pamphlets where developed out of science fiction fandom.
Underground Arts were influenced by:
American photographers, writers, and musicians also observing and critiquing aspects of popular and commercial culture. Such people included the Beat Poets
(Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burrough), Dylan, The Velvet Underground, etc.
Their critique was an attack on:
-postwar nationalism
-mass production
-affluence and consumer culture
-the American Dream and ideals of success
-status anxiety
-civil rights movement
-experimentation with mind altering substances
-sexuality
-the cult of celebrity and glamour
Beat Poets and Counter Culture
DYLAN AND GINSBERG
San Francisco 1965
Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #20, mixed media, 1962
Tom Wesselmann, Bathtub 3, mixed media, 1963
James Rosenquist, I Love You with My Ford, 1961. Oil on canvas, 6 feet 10 3/4 inches x 7 feet 9 1/2 inches
James Rosenquist (1960-61) President Elect 28 x 366 cm
Parade - Hoboken, New Jersey Robert Frank
The Americans (Book)
Photographs by Robert Frank with writing by Jack Kerouac
first pub. 1958
Influential dates
1954 – 64 Civil rights movement
1962 – Marilyn Monroe commits suicide
1963 – JFK is shot
1964 – Civil Rights act signed
1964 – Vietnam war begins
Hommage à Chrysler Corp. 1957Richard Hamilton
Woman seen caressing a gleaming car. inspired by adverts and popular imagery,
Oil, metal foil collage on wood
The Independent Group
Formed in London around 1952
the beginnings of British Pop