Important Ideas that Changed Art Forever – Pop Art

Key Artists: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake.

Pop Art emerged in post war America in a climate of optimism, consumerism and hope. The advertising industry was flourishing, guiding people towards what they should now purchase and where they could go to get it. Abundance meant more food and more choice, and this meant more images, more packaging and more adverts. Huge billboards were plastered across the buildings and highways and flat, graphic images were repeated again and again and again all across the country.

The growth of the Movie industry had also paved the way for celebrity culture to sweep across the nation. Stars were seen and idolised everywhere, from the red carpets of film premieres, to the TV shows and adverts that they starred in. This was the cultural backdrop that Pop Art reflected. The Artists that made up the movement adopted consumer items and recognisable objects as such as flags, tyres, targets and soup cans as the motifs that would go on to characterise their work.

Jasper Johns had a sell out show when he exhibited his series of Flag paintings. These were slight variations on the American flag, and they were bold, unforgettable and edgy. Borrowing such a loaded image, Johns was able to reuse it for his own means, and he recycled it freely and with a kind of nonchalant bravado.

 

Robert Raushenberg had made great use of repetitive screen-printing, and combined a free and expressive way of working with everyday objects such as car tyres into paintings, sculptures and assemblages. His work looks crude but it is highly sophisticated and subtle in the way that it captures a throwaway, consumer society that was beginning to boom.

Warhol and Lichtenstein

It wasn’t until Andy Warhol, arguably one of the World’s most famous artists of all time, rose to fame and success that Pop Art found its true ‘King’ and established its own roots. Henry Geldzaher said ‘Andy’s going to feed a lot of artist’s for a long time.’ His screen-printed portraits of celebrities were striking and raw, yet they had a mechanical quality that made them highly reflective of the society that Warhol was a part of. His famous Campbell soup can has now become a symbol for an entire group of artists and condenses, culturally and visually, a period of world history into, well, a can.

Warhol repeated images until they became meaningless. Yet in that process, they gained cultural power and prestige. Mass production itself gave the work quality, and he used the methods that the industries around him employed in his own art to create cultural artefacts, instead of tin openers, fridges or cars.

Roy Lichtenstein did the same with Comics. In a similar method, he stole images from comics, a source that was traditionally seen as ‘low’ culture, and turned them into gigantic, graphic artworks. His artworks are flat and bold, and he celebrates the aesthetic that the printer produced. Lichtenstein embraced the technological element as an important part of determining the final image.

A reaction against the Art of the time

It is worth noting that Pop Art also emerged as a reaction to the dense, serious and highbrow artworks of the Abstract Expressionists. Rothko, De Kooning, Pollock and the other painters created highly individualised and deeply personal and emotional works. The Pop Artists turned that on its head. They rejected these principles in favour of championing the everyday and the mundane.

Pop Art and everyday culture

Pop Art had an interesting and productive relationship with lowly and ordinary items from normal American life. Many of its figurehead artists explored the idea that anything could be art. Andy Warhol himself declared that ‘ Everything is Art’ and there was an optimistic feel to Pop Art artworks that made them all-inclusive and easy for people to relate to. Many critics were baffled by the use of cans and flags as symbols, and rejected the concepts and aesthetic as base and trashy. Claes Oldenburg also talked of Pop Arts relation to American culture, and the way that it chooses the objects and characters that find their way onto its canvases. He said ‘I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all’.

Oldenburg is another important figure that created sculptures by resizing different, and often amusing, objects into new settings. He turned toilets into couches and tiny pairs of cherries into huge, monumental sculptures. His work is iconic and playful, yet it is serious and sensitive to the world around it that it both mirrors and represents. He said:

‘I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all’

In the UK, Richard Hamilton made collages from newspaper cutouts, and Peter Blake and David Hockeny also experimented with the flatness and graphic style that characterised Pop Art. There was an acceptance of the American aesthetic and ideas, but a quirky reworking that also poked fun at their American counterparts across the pond.

Pop Art was highly influential for the prestigious photorealist artists that emerged in the USA, and paved the way for the use of everyday paraphernalia as subject matter for paintings. Without Pop Art, art today would not be the same.

‘Pop Art’s legacy has transcended the Artworld’ Wayne Turncliffe

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Susan Copich: Beneath the Veneer of Suburbia

Susan Copich is a renowned American Photographer, famous for her provocative and insightful series ‘Domestic Bliss.’ These artworks are tragicomic instances that reveal her hidden thoughts and inner darkness. The photographs are at once stark, funny and brutally honest metaphors and portrayals of suburban American life, and touch on something much deeper within the human condition.

Take the artwork ‘Anger Management’ for instance. Copich can be seen with an odd, deadpan expression and wildly tussled hair. In a moment of quiet hysteria, she has been caught and snapped seconds before twisting the head off and decapitating a toy puppy. In the background stand her two children, identically dressed with matching pigtails and looks of bewilderment adorning their faces. The atmosphere is tense and dramatic.

Shot from on high, the viewpoint creates a distorted view of the bodies, with Copich’s head looking bulbous and menacing. With her eyes fixed on the camera, she catches our eye as we look into the artwork. The sparse room has no decoration other that a plain rug, and the square pattern frames the figures within the space.

Referencing contemporary culture

Copich continually references popular American culture, and the artificial film set style quality that she often employs throughout the series always manages to create an odd and fascinating quality. Her two girls are reminiscent of the haunting twins from ‘The Shining’ by Stanley Kubrick, as they stand all orderly to attention behind their mother.

The false, superficial feel of the objects and lighting are like the kind that might be found in ‘The Truman Show’, the tale of an unsuspecting Man played by Jim Carey who lives his whole life in a Big Brother style film set island town, unaware that the entire world around him is full of actors and everything is scripted. Copich toys with these themes of a carefully controlled surface with the wilder undercurrent that flows beneath.

In ‘Snap’ she appears in a serial killer style room that has been completely sealed in plastic sheets. Wielding an axe, with a shovel in the corner and a wheelbarrow full of soil and clothes, she seems crazed and wild, yet elegant in a black dress, heels and a pearl necklace. This artwork is brought together perfectly by the high viewpoint and sensitively matched composition of form and colour. Look closely and you will see that the deep red of the shovel handle matches that of the wheelbarrow’s frame. Splashes of red are splattered throughout the photographs on the wall like bloodstains from a crime scene. The images themselves are prints from the Domestic Bliss series. Here she references her own work, providing a macabre yet serene environment in which to view the photographs. It is almost as if they are themselves victims, and this strange context is a metaphoric studio that enables us to look deep into the darker, yet insightful, depths of her psyche.

A Choreography of the Body

Copich comes from a professional background of contemporary dance and Pilates, disciplines that both require an extremely high level of control over ones own body and movement. Throughout her ‘Domestic Bliss’ series, she continually draws on this expertise to create dynamic and exciting interactions between the people in her artworks. She has a deep and considered understanding of this element of her work, and it can be found especially in photographs such as ‘Toy’, ‘Mommy Time’ and ‘Spare the Rod’.

Deadpan, Black Humour

One persistent theme that seeps through all of Copich’s artworks is her dark sense of humour. She places such odd scenarios in incredibly familiar domestic settings. The effect is that we are uncomfortably forced to think about and confront the problems and tensions that exist beneath the carefully controlled facades that we present to the world.

In ‘Witching Hour’, she sits drunk at the table, completely oblivious that her children are drinking the wine and sticking their tongues out at her. One outstretched hand reaches across the table towards one of her daughters in a feeble attempt of affection. But it is rejected, and only furthers to pull her shawl off her shoulders and expose her cleavage. This helps to add to the inappropriateness of her behaviour, and augment the unsettling atmosphere.

Creating a Strong Emotional Response

There is no doubting the power of Copich’s artwork. It is confrontational, bold and addresses volatile subjects. This gives each work a charge, and it exactly for this reason that her work is so infamous.

Oscar Wilde said that ‘the world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.’ Copich knows this, and visualises the quiet, desperate rifts that emerge in everyday life. She uses intelligence, humour and artistic sensitivity to call attention to these stranger, and perhaps darker, moments that exist in the lives of everyone. They are familiar and universal, whether we like to admit it or not, but that is exactly what makes her work so captivating and unforgettable.

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Important Ideas that Changed Art Forever – Abstract Expressionism

What is Abstract Expressionism?

Abstract Expressionism is a form of painting that championed individual self-expression as the central driving force for creating a work of art. It developed in the 1940’s and 1950’s in the US, and is easily recognisable for its large-scale canvases and gestural brushwork.

In most examples, the artworks were created by wildly emotive actions, with the representation of a certain mood or emotional state as the chief aim of the artist. Most Abstract Expressionist Artworks contained no recognisable subject matter, so the emotional mood was, in itself, the content of the work. Religious or mythic ideas were also explored in some cases. It was also seen as an exploration of sorts, each artwork became a method and a language to examine, describe or uncover a certain emotion.

The Movement can be divided into two subdivisions: the action painters, such as Pollock and De Kooning, and the painters that worked with expansive areas of colour and form like Rothko and Newman.

The action painters furiously worked and re-worked their canvases, building up many layers of passionately applied colour and marks. Pollock described this process in the following way: ‘The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.’

The second grouping of artists chose to use simple palettes and huge areas of colour, filling their canvases with powerful, minimal compositions. These paintings are much calmer, but no less evocative than the action painters. From this branch of Abstract Expressionism, colour field painting developed, which turned away from including any mythical or religious ideas and feelings within the work. This subsequent movement also became known as post painterly abstraction.

Abstract Expressionism and scale

One characteristic trait of many Abstract Expressionist artists was that they worked on a grand scale. Critics were outspoken in their beliefs that this came from delusions of grandeur and self-importance, which in some cases may have had some truth to it, but this was done generally to increase the power of the impact of the artwork. In the case of Rothko, he wanted to evoke powerful and meditative ideas and experiences through his paintings. He stated:

‘I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them however is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereotypical view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it.’

Painting in new ways

Jackson Pollock often laid his canvases on the floor, and dripped and flung the paint across his compositions. This was an important moment in the long and rich history of painting. When the paintings dried, and were hung on gallery walls, the movement of the artist and the physical process of painting could be clearly seen and understood. The ‘act’ of painting because an incredibly important part of each artwork, and lines and marks that stretched across entire canvases, very simply represented basic and profound instances of subjective human expression. In his own words, he claimed:

‘On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.’

This concept opened painting up into new realms. The importance of the action of the artist during the creation of an artwork (the artist being ‘in’ the painting) was also heavily influential for performance art, as it focused attention onto what they did, and how that resulted in an artwork.

Political Dimensions

Although many of the Abstract Expressionist artists were outspoken critics of the US government, the movement later became funded and popularized in part by the C.I.A. With the tense political atmosphere between the US and Russia, and the subsequent Cold War, the artworks became a symbolic way to demonstrate the free and culturally advanced society that free market capitalism supposedly represented. In Russia, Social Realism was the artistic style of the age, depicted figures and icons of Communism in heroic, allegorical stories. The opposing governments adopted these differing artistic styles as subtle and sophisticated forms of propaganda, and on this stage, they clashed.

Abstract Expressionism, when removed from this context, had no real political agenda, so it is ironic that is was used in this way. As a general idea in Art, this movement had a huge and undeniable impact on painting, and on many other artistic disciplines. As a visual language, it has been widely appropriated by general mainstream culture, and its influence can be seen on everything from advertising to theatre.

Key Artists: Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still

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