Art has always drawn its material from life. When the world was young and livestock was the currency essential to survival, man drew animal pictures on the walls of his caves. Millennia later, when the supernatural phase following death became the end-point of this life, religious art flourished. Gradually, the world became more mercantile, more secular, leading to the blossoming of consumer culture in the 1950s. It was inevitable that an art was going to grow from the heaps of manufactured goods that had begun to pile up around us. The origins of pop art lie in the materialist, consumer culture of the twentieth century. In the Yale Dictionary Of Art And Artists, pop art is defined as: a movement that emerged quite suddenly in British and American painting and graphics at the beginning of the 1960s and took for its source material the imagery of mass culture, exploring it in opposition to the high intellectual culture presumed to be the resource and habitat of fine art.
However, this sudden emergence of pop art was preceded by a lengthy cross-fertilisation and incubation of accumulated ideas. Richard Hamilton (b. 1922) worked in advertising before attending St Martin’s School, Royal College of Art and the Slade School. In 1956 he exhibited Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing. In it, we see a man with the high-maintenance, Herculean physique so beloved of commercial imagery in the 1950s and 60s in what looks like a normal domestic living room. However, the woman lying on the couch nearby is almost naked, except for a very large hat that covers her head and almost obscures her face. A fully-clothed woman on the staircase is using a vacuum cleaner. In short, the group are surrounded by references to consumerism; the Ford car insignia, a television set, a large tin of ham, a tape player, the furniture and the carpet. The humungous breasts of the naked woman are reminiscent of a trend among female film stars of the 1950s. The expansive window of the room looks out upon a Warner’s Theatre cinema. The subjects of this image are living out their varied fantasies, and it is the fantasy juxtaposed with the banal trash of everyday living that makes this image so unsettling.
This tie-in with fantasy is ironic. According to Paul Morehouse, who curated Pop Art Portraits (National Portrait Gallery, 2007) the work of US pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1999) strove to move away from abstract expressionism and towards ‘realism’ in art. In 1961 Lichtenstein painted Electric Cord (Castell, New York) a ‘simple’ image of an electric cord, neatly wound and ready for use. Most people would be hard-pressed to name a more banal subject for a painting than this everyday object. Lichtenstein invests the subject with an extraordinary presence; the loose loops of cord at both ends and the plug swinging loose in the centre imbuing the image with an arresting anthropomorphic jauntiness. And yet, it is unmistakeably the image of an electric cord.
It was George Macunias who coined the word monomorphic to describe this ‘single event’ genre of images. Although most of Lichtenstein’s subsequent images are composites of things, there is an eerie directness about every object in every image. Lichtenstein painted Girl With Ball (Museum Of Modern Art, New York) in the same year as Electric Cord. It is a simple – some might say crude – comic book-type image of a young woman holding a beach ball above her head, yet it cries for our attention; the woman’s wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression, her extraordinarily-rippling hair, the thrust of her bosom, the tiny hands that clutch the ball. This same appeal runs through all of the images Lichtenstein created down through the decades.
There is a completeness about his paintings, yet they are free from superfluity and embellishment. Every dot and dash seems laden with meaning, as do the bold, bright colour and the onomatopoeic tag-lines. Over time, Lichtenstein created increasingly complex, often abstract images such as Razzmatazz (1978) and Go For Baroque (1979). However, he still produced monomorphic images like Cup and Saucerin 1977. With no small dash of irony, his images often referred to those of other artists.
The flat imagery of Still Life With Folded Sheets is a world away from the solid, well-rounded still-lifes of the seventeenth century Dutch and nineteenth century French artists, while Artist’s Studio, the Dance contains a definite reference to the Henri Matisse painting, The Dance. But it is in Artist’s Studio, Look Mickey (1973) that we witness the genesis of earlier pop art imagery.
In 1919 a young man named Walt Disney started a job creating newspaper advertisements in an art studio. After this inconspicuous beginning his rise to fame is legendary; the menial sketching jobs he undertook to learn the craft of drawing, the businesses he began that eventually petered out under financial pressures. However, by 1925 the Disney Brothers’ Studio had opened in Hollywood. In 1932 a Disney cartoon short named Flowers and Trees won an Academy Award. One decade later, with the production of feature-length animations like Snow White And The Seven Dwarves, the name Disney was – and still is – known the world over. It is not a good idea here to try to pinpoint the secret of Walt Disney’s success. He was not the greatest ever artist, and industrial relations between him and his animators were often rocky. Somehow, he won such popular appeal that he became a household name, and his work was bound to influence popular art. Because they created everything by hand, early animators had to be as literal and sparing in their craft as they possibly could, adding embellishment only in the final stages. This directness, which I have already traced in the work of Lichtenstein, is still evident in pop art today. We see it in the work of Jeff Koons (b. 1925)
Koons is a self-taught artist who worked on Wall Street before he began to exhibit inflatable toys and domestic appliances as art. He also takes inspiration from nature, his most famous work being Puppy, a giant, floral sculpting of a puppy in front of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. In Pop Life: Art In A Material World at Tate Modern, 2009, Made In Heaven was the section of the exhibition made over to his images and sculptings of he and his former wife, Ilona Staller, in various love-making poses. The shock stems from seeing these ‘natural’ acts transmogrified into the highly-coloured images of comic-book kitsch. I find the work of Koons unsettling not in that it parodies itself – much art does – but that I am ever unsure of who the joke is upon; is it art sending up nature or do his industrially-made objets poke fun at ‘classical’ art? A gentler form of pop art stemmed from the brush of the late Keith Haring (1958 – 1990).
This US artist drew his inspiration from graffiti, that indigenous decoration of public walls, everywhere. He studied graphic design at the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, then moved to the School of Visual Arts in New York. He was displaying chalk drawings in a New York subway when he was spotted by photographer, Tseng Kwong Chi. Haring’s work has been described as having bold lines, vivid colours and active figures, in short, all the tenets of pop art. By 1983, he was friends with luminaries like Madonna and Andy Warhol. Keith’s art was unusual in that he directed it towards decorating ‘made’ objects, like mugs and jackets and T-shirts. Before he died tragically young, he was world-famous. At the Pop Life exhibition, an entire room Pop Shop was set aside for his work, its walls, floor and ceiling covered in his intriguing, brain-teasing doodles.
The most famous pop artist of all was Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987). Much has been said and written about him and his work. Unsurprisingly, he worked in advertising before arriving onto the New York art scene in the 1960s. His reproduced Brillo boxes and soup tins, his Marilyns, Maos and Elizabeth Taylors are now an intrinsic part of our cultural consciousness. Warhol not only drew his art from the consumer ephemera about him; he was able to express visually the phenomenon of celebrity packaged into saleable units. Warhol made his Marilyns five years after her death. I have never liked these images with their crude paintwork and garish colouring, nor the sleepy-eyed predatory expression. It is a chilling reminder of what we may be reduced to after our deaths, a serialised image reproduced on peoples’ memories, if not in reality, and not necessarily at our most attractive.
Despite the light-heartedness of pop culture, Warhol was imbued in the dark side of life. He was aware of the more horrible happenings around him, particularly the death of John F. Kennedy, and many of his reproduced images were of guns, knives and the electric chair. One, unusual foray into nature was Skull, (1976) this image of a skull being perhaps a belated response to an attack on his own life in 1968. This thread of horror-and-fun runs through the work of short-lived German artist, Martin Kippenberger (1953 – 1997). In 2006, Tate Modern produced a retrospective of his work. Among the collection of installations was The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s America (1994), a vast installation inspired by an unfinished novel by Frank Kafka. The installation was a collection of over 40 tables and twice as many chairs, including a basket chair, bean-bags, and two electric-chair like chairs with straps and gas funnels attached that spin about a carousel rotating about a giant wooden, fried egg.
This juxtaposing of unlikely objects is actually a tenet of surrealism, and indeed, there is not a large leap between it and pop art. Walt Disney quickly cottoned on to the power of morphing in his work, and it is no surprise that he made the ultimate surrealist novel, Alice In Wonderland, into a feature-length animation. But the art of Disney is too much inspired by nature to be truly pop art. The authentic practitioners will always be those who draw upon consumer objects for their material, its essence being the reproduced pastiche of the man-made object.
Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) studied art and English at Yale University. In 1962 he organised The Store, a solo exhibition of plaster and paper imitations of everyday things; food, clothing and consumer goods. Visitors to the store were also given the opportunity to purchase the installations. Objects for sale included potato chips and candy bars made from wood, plaster and enamel. Oldenburg deliberately fashioned objects that are mass-produced and widely distributed. This production of material “multiples” parallels Andy Warhol’s serial imagery. In creating multiples, artists were required to think about the challenges relating to the mass production of their work. In overcoming the problems involved, Oldenburg actually invented a number of production processes, fashioning his succession of out-sized potatoes, profiteroles, plates of Jell-O and slabs of wedding cake from materials as diverse as cast iron, latex, leather and bronze. The results are funny, spooky – Broken Button (1980), and even elegant, Tilting Noon Cocktail, (1983).
In this craft of multiple production, the earlier pop artists were almost visionary. Today, everything is reproducible and available, often at the touch of a button. We seek goods on the criteria of a manufacturer’s brand stamp. Celebrities ‘brand’ products with their names and disperse the goods worldwide – remember Warhol’s Marilyns? – endowing them, the celebrities, with the creepy property that they always are and should be ‘ available’ to us. We download ‘soft’ goods like music, movies and texts via the Internet.
The material well-being created by this economic activity has been deemed good, but it is many years since the pursuit of consumer goods was solely an attempt to engage with reality. Life has become increasingly ‘private’ since the 1960s. Shopping malls are sites of consumer wish-fulfilment; a car is a mobile techno-bubble, cocooning the occupants from extremes of weather and other human contact, and gated estates are security-guarded enclaves of social privilege. We find fulfilment through the satisfying of material desires in private places, not in communal spaces, whether grand or mean.
Perhaps the most damming comment on consumerism today comes from an artist that everyone loves to hate, Damien Hirst. In 2007, he unveiled his installation, For The Love Of God, a platinum skull encrusted with diamonds, worth an estimated £50 million. As the camera bulbs popped and flashed, ties with Andy Warhol were forgotten. Press copy zipped around the world, and one onlooker described the skull as a £50 million disco ball. (Maev Kennedy, Guardian Newspaper, June 2007) A disco ball, maybe, but what a comment on life! No-one aspires to be a skull, but that is what we all become. Many people aspire to wealth, but how many actually acquire it? Hirst’s installation is aspiration and final destination sited in one, horrible (some call it) piece of work. The art that began in the 1960s has not gone away. In today’s more materialist world, I doubt if it ever will, and wonder where it may lead us yet.
Mary Phelan, copyright © 2010
Sources
Claes Oldenburg The Multiples Store, Claes Oldenburg, 1996.
The Yale Dictionary Of Art & Artists by Erika Langmuir and Norbert Lynton, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000.