How Pop Art predicted the 21st century American Experience
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REVIEWS, Stuttgart — Traveling to
The magnificent and exciting Stuttgart StaatsGalerie was holding an extensive Pop Art Exhibition at the time of my visit. It was a well curated exhibition of the Pop Art movement in the
Here is my journey through that exhibition, and an increasing realisation that modern art of a time period is often a window on the future, or one possible future.
Prominent Pop Artists
Peter Philips, For Men only-starring MM and BB - was an interesting work preceding the sexiness of the 60s, as so often art was a precursor to what was to come. 1961 preceded
Lichtensteins 63 Crying Girl captured the fear of the age. A fear that we were all dots in a system and did not matter. And, yet, we still felt human in an age when even our image and stories were just a collection of dots.
Likewise, Lichtenstein’s 1965 screenprint captured themes of feminism, violence and the change from male dominated patriarchal societies to the start of a more soft and female age. Well, soft and female, even hip baby, in amongst all the thrusting machinery images he also created at that time.
Wesselman’s nudes and works captured the sensuousness of a latent consumerism that has now in the early years of the 20th century reached its zenith.
Presciently, Wesselmann foresaw the rise of collective sexualisation of food, consumption and automobiles before this theme reached its current mass penetration.
There is something artificial and self-serving in the media images of sexuality, often linked to product sales, that Wesselmann foresaw. It is more than slightly disturbing the ways in which media now sexualise youth, and turn sex into something that wallpapers our experience of driving a road.
Outside my apartment in Melbourne there is a single billboard in the distance that rather pessimistically declares ‘Sex’ to all comers (pardon the pun) and then offers to help me with it.
Its glaring red and yellow writing is the first thing I see in the morning. Not good for the appetitite on an otherwise beautiful skyline.
Wesselman’s 1965 posterized Nude foresaw this flat, lifelessness of sex, and continual state of low-grade arousal. A flat image that is somehow strangely titillating. Always great art foresees the future to come.
Degrees of Prescience.
Allen Jones also had foresight, but less presciently than Wesselman.
Mel Ramos’ Hunt for the Best, reflects how a bottle is a Freudian phallic symbol in the hands of the media. I’ll have blood red ketchup with my sex thanks, or is that mustard and ketchup on my Weiner?
Sorry, too hard a pun to resist.
Warhol’s Self Portrait was somehow the most commercial, flat and lifeless and yet it sees beyond the commercial flat surface to foresee how variation is always introduced into the mechnical.
Warhol sees the flat and the commercial and beyond it again, into a world where individual artistic variation is somehow greater than process. a world beyond 2010.
Lichtenstein, has In the Car. This 1963 work (used as the base image for this post) I have never seen in the flesh, captures the automobile with its promise of affluent wealth, sex and male driving power. Read that as you will.
We are a collage of consumption and media
Warhol’s films are disturbing. Rauschenberg, among my favourite artists, captured a de-constructed American male, is he the sum of his products and media images?
Rauschenberg’s ambiguous Jasper Johns dedication however says more about the relationship between the two artists and interplay between their ideas, than it does culture.
Rauschenberg’s screen images captured man as aLa descrizione proviene dal fatto che il giocatore del gioco di casino online puo’ disegnare sempre un’altra scheda ad un totale morbido senza pericolo “di rompersi” superando 21. sum of media, a sense that cubist deconstruction had reached its artistic climax when reassembled as a series of disposable images. A world not round but flat, operating on a flat plane.
Domenica Rotella’s 1962 work Marilyn Monroe a collage of poster and lacerations captured the disposability of this American Age, at least lived outside
This work too, I had never seen before hanging.
Allan D’Archelangelo’s Marilyn of 1962 was however too obvious. DIY Barbie perhaps lacks layers and subtlety.
Less Future Relevant, Relevant to the Times
Some works captured momentary obsessions of film, like the monster movie, beach movie, Elvis movie and even fears of communism triumphing over the free world. fear was a big word.
Richard Hamilton’s 1962 Kennedy space portrait, with the title too long to print, captured the optimism and threats of the age. A seminal sense of the Kennedy promise.
Warhol’s Double Elvis hinted at the cheapness, the disposability and the falseness of celebrity. Cowboy, singer, menace and sex symbol for females to fantasize over, all in one image. Perhaps a false world, and a false symbol, seen later as one cheeseburger and soda too many zipped into an imploding white jumpsuit.
Warhol, Rauschenberg & Lichtenstein: the farsighted
Elvis, and Warhol, in many ways stood for the age, and fired a shot into the century beyond. Peter Blake’s Got a girl had similar themes, but it Warhol’s simplicity that better captures themes.
In the 21st century, our mirror of self is now constructed as media images of unreal people. Unreal celebrities who do not lead the lives described, yet are depicted in tall tales of their exploits.
At the same time as we have ‘reality TV’ based on a hyper-reality, not a real reality.
A 21st century where reality is the first casualty of the gun of the image.
Warhol and the other ‘Pop Artists’ foresaw the lot.
It’s too late to come to
Christopher Hire:
Author of the Global Innovation Review, and Chief Editor of this journal. Focussed on innovation, innovation cities and positive social change globally.
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