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