Feature Articles


February Issue 2001

Pop From the Permanent Open Through April 15 at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery
Essay by Dr. Will South,
Curator of Collections, Weatherspoon Art Gallery

British artist Richard Hamilton defined Pop Art as "popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business." Pop Art was a movement that emerged in England and America in the 1950s and its imagery was based on consumerism and popular culture, which does in fact cater to being low-cost, mass-produced, sexy and Big Business. Artists used comic books, advertisements, packaging, and images from television and the movies to create art: superheroes, hard candy, and household appliances became the basis of paintings and sculpture. Art could be large, brightly colored, unrefined, even copied straight off a cereal box-brand name and all. And, it could be fun. Part of the immediate and widespread appeal of Pop Art when it first appeared is that its images got instantly to the point: everyone could relate to these images from everyday life, however unlikely they may have appeared in a museum or gallery in the 1960s. Unlike Abstract Expressionism, an heroic style that involved the deep, hidden feelings of the individual artist, Pop Art celebrated the ordinary public perceptions of common citizens. On the surface, Pop art was uncomplicated.

Though there is a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor in many examples of Pop Art (Roy Lichtenstein's Shipboard Girl in this exhibition), it was more engaging than cynical in the way it embraced contemporary life after World War II. The television was everywhere, Rock and Roll dominated radio airwaves, and American products were being sold cheap with repetitious, but bright and infectious, forms of advertising. Pop Art mirrored popular culture back to consumers in whimsical, sometimes satirical ways. The most famous Pop artist, Andy Warhol, went so far as to name his New York studio "The Factory," and there he and his assistants produced as many as eighty silkscreen paintings per day of everything from Campbell soup cans (Erika Rothenberg's painting, Inspirational Vegetables, in this show is in the Warhol tradition) to Coke bottles to Marilyn Monroe's lips, all repeated over and over like merchandise stacked on a supermarket shelf. Art could mimic life, and life could mimic art, and ultimately these distinctions would not matter since we would all act and think the same in the future. As Warhol said, "I think everybody should be a machine." And here lies part of the serious nature of Pop Art-the idea that mass culture eliminates individuality and numbs perceptions via repetition. Pop Art can be enjoyed for its brashness, cleverness, and often superb technical craftsmanship, but it can also still ignite debate, as it did in the 1960s, on topics such as the power of the media, the identity (or its loss) of the individual in a corporate society, and the usefulness (or not) of art as an educational or civilizing device. Pop Art may often appear to be simple and slick, but it posed questions about contemporary art and social values that remain relevant and, for the most part, unanswered.

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