Pop Art: A Glorification Or Critique Of Consumerism?

Emerging in the mid 1950s in Britain and late 1950s in America, Pop Art reached its peak in the 1960s. It began as a revolt against the dominant approaches to art and culture and traditional views on what art should be. Young artists felt that what they were taught at art school and what they viewed in museums did not have anything to do with their lives or the things they saw around them every day in record stores, supermarkets etc.

Pop Art plundered myriad themes, images and references from popular culture and brought them into the fine arts and paintings. Mickey Mouse, Elvis, Coca-Cola, Marylin Monroe and American comics left the world of advertising and magazines to find themselves on canvases and in art galleries and museums. Later, the term “pop philosophy” would be used to describe the school of thought concerned with the objects of mass culture, such as film, fashion, comics and advertising.

'Pop art and its trademark images- Marilyns, Ben-Day dots, Coca-Cola bottles, lipsticked lips- have become 20th century classicism, as canonical as Cubism and as appealing as candy. '

( Kennedy, 2015)

Andy Warhol ( 1928 - 1987), was a leading figure within the American Pop Art movement, who chose his subjects from the world of consumerism. The famous multiple compositions, like ?One Hundred Cans ( 1962)?present a different kind of arrangement in which the artist explores the idea of repetition via Campbell's soup cans, everyday products, so characteristic of the modern world. In fact, this is not a collage but a screen print which has been transferred to canvas and finished by hand in oil paint. It is designed to make us look again at images and commodities we take for granted:

' Warhol's work in the early sixties was a baleful mimicry of advertising, without the gloss. It was about the way advertising promises that the same pap with different labels will give you special, unrepeatable gratifications.' ( Hughes, 1991, p.348.)

Warhol is most celebrated for his celebrity portraits of figures like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy. In many ways he foresaw the celebrity culture in which we are now living: 'Warhol asks questions of the spectator about the appearance of the twentieth century and about whether this kind of subject is appropriate in an art gallery.' ( Acton, 2004, p. 147)?

In our current age of ubiquitous consumerism these images still seem to be deeply relevant and, ' now even more vivid than their original sources, exposing the eerie banality of the world that modern communications have created. The multiple images mimic the mass- produced news photographs that swamp our retinasm and make an unsettling judgement on our notions of fame and success.' ( Ballard, 1997, p.59)

Consequently, far from glorifying consumerist society, Warhol's images suggest darker truths:

' The multiple images of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy drain the tragedy from the lives of these desperate women,...' ( Ballard, 1997, p.60.)

Art had carried references to popular culture throughout the 20th?century, but in Roy Lichtenstein's works the styles, subject matter, and techniques of reproduction common in popular culture appeared to dominate the art world entirely. This marked a major shift away from?Abstract Expressionism , whose often tragic themes were thought to well up from the souls of the artists; Lichtenstein's inspirations came from the culture at large and suggested little of the artist's individual feelings. His approach was rather cool and distanced. Consequently, he like many of his contemporaries, deconstructed the Romantic idea of the artist being a conduit for some higher, creative force.

Although, in the early 1960s, Lichtenstein was often casually accused of merely copying his pictures from cartoons, his method involved some considerable alteration of the source images. The extent of those changes, and the artist's rationale for introducing them, has long been central to discussions of his work, as it would seem to indicate whether he was interested above all in producing pleasing, artistic compositions, or in shocking his viewers with the garish impact of popular culture. Lichtentsein's work utilises comic strips, '...whereby a simple narrative sign- an image from a comic strip, not meant to be aesthetically scanned, existing only to tell a story- asked to be given the kind of detailed and all-over attention proper to art in a museum.' ( Hughes, 1991, p.353.)

Lichtenstein's emphasis on methods of mechanical reproduction - particularly through his signature use of Ben-Day dots - highlighted one of the central lessons of Pop art, that all forms of communication, all messages, are filtered through codes or languages. Arguably, he learned his appreciation of the value of codes from his early work, which drew on an eclectic range of modern painting. This appreciation may also have later encouraged him to make work inspired by masterpieces of modern art; in these works he argued that high art and popular art were no different: both rely on code.' The enlarged printer's dots, were a way of distancing the image, making it seem both big and remote, like an industrial artefact.' ( Hughes, 1991, p.353)

In Claes Oldenberg's Two Cheeseburgers, with Everything ( 1962), ' that very quality of the " excruciatingly banal" (as he puts) is celebrated. The enamel on the cheeseburgers, dripping in its gloopy parody of Abstract Expressionism, is like syrup. One imagines a gross, tawdry taste on the tongue, as bright and synthetic as the colour itself, and shudders. The mockery of desire is an image of frustration. Appetite and repulsion are built into the same object.' ( Hughes. 1991, p. 357.)

From my perspective, it's this kind of witty self- contradiction that is most appealing when viewing Oldenberg's work.

James Rosenquist's The F- 111 (1965) is a direct attack on the so - called American Dream. He used to paint billboards for a living and utilised them as a rich source of mass imagery in this particular painting.

' It summed up Rosenquist's vision of America as a flawed and self- destructive Eden, a paradise based on excessive and obsessive consumption of images and things. The title was the name of a fighter- bomber the United States was using against the Vietnamese; its fuselage runs the length of Rosenquist's enormous painting, its sleek profile, now glittering and now silhouetted, interrupted by emblems of the Good Life at its simplest level of self- advertisement- cake, flowers, a hairdryer, a winsome little girl and so forth.' ( Hughes, 1991, p.354.)

In the U.K, Richard Hamilton created a collage for the catalogue of the seminal 1956 exhibition at London's Whitechapel Gallery.The exhibition is now generally recognised as the genesis of Pop art, and as early as 1965 Hamilton's Just?What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? was described as "the first genuine work of Pop." Within it are a contemporary Adam and Eve, surrounded by the temptations of the post-War consumer boom. Adam is a muscle-man covering his groin with a racket-sized lollipop.( ... 'the word Pop makes its first appearance in art, emblazoned on hilarious phallic sucker the muscle is holding,' ( Hughes, 1991, p.342). Eve perches on the couch wearing a lampshade.

'The?living space is crowded with up-to?the-minute objects of desire: the TV?set, the vacuum cleaner, the tinned ham, the tape recorder, the body builder's muscles, the cone-shape coolie hat perched on the sexy naked housewife on the sofa. Hamilton's consumer's catalogue is well observed and playful. But at a more profound level it is horribly disquieting. No other work of art of its period expresses so precisely the jarringly ambivalent spirit of the age.' ( MacGarthy, 2014.)

Hamilton employed images cut from American magazines. In England, where much of the middle class was still struggling in a slower post-war economy, this crowded space with its state-of-the-art luxuries was a parody of American materialism. In drawing up a list of the image's components, Hamilton pointed to his inclusion of comics (picture information), words (textual information) [and] tape recording (aural information). He is clearly aware of the work of Dada photomontage art, but he's not making an anti-war statement. The tone of his work is lighter. He is poking fun at the materialist fantasies fuelled by modern advertisement.

To conclude, rather than merely glorifying consumerism, I believe that Pop Art via distancing, parody and irony offered, at least initially, a critique of consumer society whilst ostensibly simultaneously celebrating it. Although it is often thought of as bright and breezy, a more or less unthinking combination of consumerism and conformism, I hope that this article reveals that Pop Art was a much more complex phenomenon than it appears to be at first glance.

Reference List:

Acton, M. ( 2004) Learning To Look At Modern Art. London and New York: Routledge.

Ballard,J.G. ( 1997) A User's Guide to the Millenium: Essays and Reviews. 2nd ed. London. Flamingo.

Hughes, R. ( 1991) The Shock Of The New: Art And The Century Of Change. 2nd ed. London:Thames and Hudson.

Kennedy, R. (2015) ' When The World Went Pop.' The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/arts/design/new-exhibitions-explore-pop-arts-foreign-agitators.html

MacGarthy, F. ( 2014) 'Richard Hamilton: they called him Daddy pop'. The Guardian.

Available at:https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/07/richard-hamilton-called-him-daddy-pop