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UNIVERSITATEA "BABES - BOLYAI"
FACULTATEA DE STUDII EUROPENE
SECTIA STUDII AMERICANE
POP ART
IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
Introduction
Pop Art is
one of the most important movements in art in the history of the
In the late
1950s and during the sixties, Pop art had flourished in the
I have
chosen the thematic of Pop art for my thesis as to show, how the commonplace,
almost invisible objects in our lives have such a profound impact upon our
lives, and how the conspicuous consumption
in
It is necessary to have the skill and open-mindedness when it comes to analyze the work of a Pop artist, in order to understand the message which lies beneath the canvas. As one can realize the drama depicted by the representation of a huge hamburger, for example, the closer he/she gets to understanding the surrounding world, even if the message is masked, hidden in the elements of that particular work of art.
In the present paper, I shall try to highlight the main aspects of the Pop art movement, focusing on historical, social and aesthetic elements, which are of paramount importance if one wishes to have an all-encompassing view upon the subject. Thus, the purpose of the present work is to offer an encompassing view upon the evolution and role of Pop art in the twentieth century art world and culture.
In order to highlight the relevance of this movement, I shall present in the first chapter its historical evolution, both in England and the United States of America, and then I shall detail the peculiar socio-cultural, political and economic context in the United States, which have fueled the need for a new perspective on reality, for a new consciousness and for a new style in art as well. This novelty in art was rendered by the Pop art movement, criticizing, satirizing the flaws of the consumer culture and the conformity of the American society on the whole.
Further on, I shall present the aesthetics of Pop art, by drawing a parallel between this movement and the ones which preceded it and to a larger or lesser extent, have influenced it as well. I shall focus mainly on the aspects of the new materials and objects in art and of the new aesthetic, concepts closely linked to the industrial and technological developments experienced on a global scale mainly in the twentieth century.
In order to highlight some of the most important aspects presented in the first and second chapter, I shall present thirdly the most notable artists of the American Pop art movement; this chapter shall include a critical and a personal note on a few of their works, pinpointing the essential ideas and intentions of the artists, as well as personal remarks regarding the way in which I perceived those creations.
Later on, I shall present the movements which followed Pop art, focusing on the influence Pop art had upon them; moreover, I shall provide a brief outlook on its contemporary status and role in the society of the twenty-first century.
After presenting the aspects enumerated above, I shall provide a brief conclusion and a personal stand regarding the work I have elaborated.
The methodology used in the present paper relies mostly on compilation, alternated with a personal note, by having provided my ideas and opinions regarding the contents of this work.
After choosing the subject and establishing a guideline for the elaboration of the present paper, I have searched for the proper bibliography, organizing the essential information in conformity with the thematic of my work. The notes and references were inserted in the body of the text using the Sorbonne system of reference, placing the notes at the bottom of the page (footnoting).
In the process of elaborating the subject, I have opted for extracting the main ideas from the studied bibliography, and I have also inserted quotations, where there was necessary to emphasize a certain standpoint or crucial aspect for the line of thought of the present work.
Chapter 1 Pop Art
in
A brief history of Pop Art
"Pop art expresses the assault of the visual, the aggressiveness of the multicolored commercial, of the neon tube, of the comic book, of the immense poster on the roadside; but it cannot be discussed, I believe, only in relation to these forms of the commercial art . "
Defining art is a serious task and it requires a thorough research of the thematic. Art was an important element throughout history, and it is a defining stamp for each and every culture in the world.
My thesis is centered upon the definition of Pop art as referring to the visual arts, encompassing here media like sculpture, painting, and to a lesser extent, photography. To reach to the very essence of Pop art, one has to analyze a multitude of elements, ranging from cultural, societal, economic, political, historical, and many other aspects. All these have shaped the popular culture and its derivative, Pop art.
It has often been said, that the cultural highway until the beginning of the
twentieth century had only a one-way traffic, from Europe to America;
nonetheless, this was something to be reverted with the advent of rapid
industrialization and commercialization, steps that enhanced the traffic of
culture and goods from the opposite direction as well, and also conferred to
the United States of America the role of one of the two superpowers of the
world in the last century. On a global scale, the greatest influences came from
the
This visual spectacle, along with an overtly urbanizing and commercializing wave, has swept across the globe, leaving deep imprints on every culture it infiltrated into.
Pop art, as a movement, emerged in
The cultural sensibility of the Independents has resulted in spectacular
and vibrant debates, especially in what concerned the art-industry relationship
and popular culture, which later on became a defining aspect of the Group,
marking also the birth of Pop art. The most memorable names present at these
debates were Lawrence Alloway (art critic and curator), Eduardo Paolozzi (photographer),
Nigel Henderson, spouses Peter and Alison Smithson (architects) and Richard
Hamilton (painter). Their efforts had resulted in a multitude of debates and
reshaping of their contemporary thoughts on art and culture, through a series
of exhibitions, newspaper articles, lively debates and a serious commitment to
the essence of cultural change. In trying to give a comprehensive definition of
the role of Pop art, Lawrence Alloway had a pivotal place in theorizing this
new venture in art styles. In his 1958 article, The Arts and the Mass Media, in The
Architectural Design, he underlines the role of the contemporary fine arts
in "eliminating the gap created between
life and art", by becoming "one of
the new possible means of communication, within a larger framework, which
should also include mass arts" ; it
had been proposed that there should be a continuous interrelation within fine
and popular arts, in which permanent and ephemeral, " objects that defeat time and those which are subdued to it" can
coexist without prejudicing the sensitivity of the beholder, nor the standards
of society. Expositions like that of Parallel
Between Life and Art in 1953, or Man,
Machine and Motion in 1955 or TIT (This
is Tomorrow) in 1956 offered a perspective on the new interpretation of art
under the influences of consumerism and spectacle. In This is Tomorrow, one work of Richard Hamilton held the leading
position among other displayed works, which is considered to be the first genuine
Pop representation by art historians. This work is called Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? This
creation of the New Surrealist trend (as Pop art was considered then) had a
huge echo upon the art world of the mid-1950s
The London Pop art movement nonetheless, had three important phases, each bringing some novelty in style and shaping the movement as to clearly detach itself from its precursor, Abstract Expressionism.
In the 1960s, the most prominent advocates of the British Pop Art movement were Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Allen Jones, and Peter Phillips.
Peter Blake, for example, worked in the environmental phase, which underlined the fascination with the urban settings and of urban popular culture, deeply rooted in the American concepts of industrialism, and transmitted through a complex system of images, be that televised, taped, photographed and reproduced thousands of times; in the "New Vision" gallery of London, he and artist Tony Gifford held an exhibition which highlighted the immediacy of the environment in art forms; this exhibition, nonetheless, lacked a subjective implication of artists, the two focusing more on the technique and mechanism of elaborating the art work than on a participatory note to the work.
The third phase in British Pop art is considered to have been started
with exhibition of the Contemporary
Youth, opened in 1961 by a group of students of the Royal Art Academy of
London. Born after the Second World War, these young artists were experiencing
to the fullest the noise and crowdedness of the urban setting, having the rush
and the exaltation of the urbanites, necessary to be skilful Pop artists. These
young artists were at their turn influenced by their predecessor in British Pop
art, Peter Blake and the American artist, R. B. Kitaj, who had studied for a
while at the
In the
In
The changes in the psychology of the individual under the influences of the trend of commercialization, late capitalism, social inertia conferred by the ""degraded" landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel" , were an alarming sign for the American society.
The American Pop artists reacted against these trends by inspiring themselves from the popular culture of their times, commenting thus the wrongful path society has undertaken. Erich Fromm also observed in 1956 the alienation experienced by the American society under modern capitalism, and the effects consumerism had upon the individual, transforming it into a commodity. Also, the effects of the mass media have created an impermeable vicious circle, for it catered information to the masses to such an extent, as it confused rather than informed, and thereafter, came the dilemma: what do people really want? In an attempt to answer this question, Jean Baudrillard stated: "Not only do people certainly not want to be told what they wish, but they certainly do not want to know it, and it is not even sure that they want to wish at all", thus they "rely finally on the apparatus of publicity or information to "persuade" them, to construct a choice for them."
This obscuring of the human mind, the brainwashing of the masses as to
become malleable and deceivable was the main fueling agent for the Pop artists
in
In the present paper, I shall elaborate in the coming chapters mainly the influence of the New York movement, as it had a more mature stylistic approach to the current of Pop art, and it also had a great significance in the development of the Californian perception of Pop art.
In
These artists nonetheless, based their career in the initial phase upon the previous styles, as elements of Dada, Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism can be found in some of their works. The novelty, nonetheless, lay in the techniques used in creations. From the collage, assemblages, happenings, found objects, staging, environments and every other form they embedded in their works, it was a clear distinction from earlier styles, by employing methods like serigraphy, hardedge colorfield , Benday dots and the most visible characteristic, the huge size of the works of art. All these have created the effect of an immensurable, fantastic universe of a satirized popular culture, running parallel with the real world, in an attempt to make a difference.
The
Jasper John's Flags, Robert Rauschenberg's Combines, Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans, and many more had catered the viewer with an unusual, commonplace subject matter, a simulacric thematic, which, nonetheless, had infiltrated into every sphere of human existence, but had seldom made its way to galleries or museums of art. The Pop Art movement had done it: it managed to narrow down the gap existing between life and art, merging the two, combining elements of kitsch with fine arts, thus creating a vivid, witty and very much contemporaneous form of art.
The
1.2 "Whither
Goest Thou,
"It has often been said that in the
The American society of the 1960s can be seen as a battlefield from a socio-political, cultural, economic and ideological point of view. The troubled society experienced also the widening of the generation-gap, which was voiced through the "roars" of the counter-culture movement.
Every aspect of human life changed under the tutelage of the technocratic authoritarianism, a "regime of experts" instituted for the well-being of the people who were by then overwhelmed by the technological intrusion in their daily existence. Technology, rational thought, objectivism and an estrangement from their peers were the logical and "reasonable" assets of the people of the technocratic society.
The American counter-culture of
the 1960s was a rejection of this malicious virus- technocracy of the '50s and
its derivative, consumer culture, and its most ardent followers were the youth.
Nevertheless, the social manifestation called counter-culture swept across the
entire globe, encompassing regions, like
Counter-culture is seen also as one of the most crucial evidence for the generational gap between the adolescents of the 60s and their parents, and a keen proof for the changes occurred in the global sociological environment. From the point of view of Theodore Roszak, the counter-culture of the 60s meant a voicing of the social injustices brought upon by the technological reduction of the man to a mere robot in the society.
The Great Refusal, in the words of Herbert Marcuse, meant a disruption from the reality of the cold, uninviting and alienating society of the 50s, and a creation of an opposing group, which could overturn, or at least try, the harmful effects brought by the technological and economic advancements. And the specificity of this counter-culture lies in the people who brought it into the limelight. The students, the young generation might seem as a group inapt for the creation of a change of such magnitude, but their efforts in liberalizing and freeing the minds filled with pre-conceived ideas and with the expert orientations given by think-tanks can be seen as the cultural battle of the 20th century.
The young Americans of the 60s were given the context and the tools with which to oppose technocracy. They were born in a society where their efforts could be seen as a constitutional right, and thus their demands led to much more than a mere echo. Their efforts put in the ending of the Vietnam War, in the protests against the social norms of the 50s-all paid off and opened the eyes of many indoctrinated elders of their time. However prophetic and in a modern sense, irrational, might have been perceived the hippies or the beatniks, their nonconformist style and their elusion of the "real" was a clear definition of the need for change.
In the second chapter of his book, Theodore Roszak presents an appraisal of the revolutionary efforts of the young generation of the 60s, highlighting the importance their counter-culture has had for the changes in society. Also, the creation of free universities was a major pace toward a change in perception of reality; New Left radicalism, beat-hip bohemianism and the transition from the outward to inward brought fore a form of self-examination and an inner consciousness that made the alienated man of the 60s aware of the meaning of "One man, one soul" .
The overtly mechanical reproduction of goods and also of feelings meant a dehumanization of society. The call of the youth for a change was the most effective "wake-up call" for an inert generation of conspicuous consumers.
The counter-culture thus meant a social revolution which prompted a new
way of thinking reality, a new way of communicating with the people, a new way
of self-perception and of self-awareness. As Roszak exposed brilliantly, the
counter-culture was a youthful opposition,
a fresh and lively experience, a cultural revolution which enlightened the
obsolete and indoctrinated technocratic regime. Without such a youthful
experience, the relevance of the self
would have not found its expression in a world dominated by conformism and
depersonalization. What occurred in the 1960s were a rejection of the Western
rationality and the appraisal of emotions, intuitions, feelings. The youth of
Also, the 1960s witnessed a huge boom in urban development and suburban planning. This aspect of life influenced greatly the widening of racial and ethnic gaps, separating the industrial and decaying downtown from the suburbs, which promoted the middle-class successful accomplishment of the American Dream. The urban setting, the cradle of most of the great "happenings" in history, has become a perpetuation of the racial and ethnic inequalities, an aspect which fueled great anger in the slum and ghetto dwellers, which were in most cases invisible entities of society, or, put in a modern approach, urbanonymous . Nonetheless, this invisibility was soon to be inverted into a very much visible social change, brought about by the Civil Rights Movement; this movement, was, nonetheless, preceded by events which were of paramount importance.
The starting point of the Civil Rights Movement was
Nevertheless, there were people who supported not the peaceful
coexistence views of Martin Luther King Jr., but the separationist approach of
Malcolm X, a dissenting, rebelling leader of the "black power" movement. His
name, "X" suggests his loss of identity, his dilemma regarding the origin and
the place of the African American in his contemporary social settings. He was
the founder of the Organization for Afro-American Unity, which lured into its
configuration even white people. On the
In such a chaotic social context, many people still had their reserves toward African-Americans' and other minorities' rights. Of paramount importance now was to change the obsolete mentality of intolerant citizens.
The Voting Act of 1965 enabled registering African American voters in localities where they previously were not allowed to. By 1968 one million African Americans were registered in South. Also, 1968 was the year when Congress banned discrimination in housing. The most important achievements of the Civil Rights Movement were the decisions taken in the Supreme Court, marking judicial precedents in the field of civil rights. Then affirmative action came on the scene. These policies were adopted in order to create opportunities in employment for the skilled African-Americans. During 1965 - 1970 different affirmative action policies were adopted. The Black Panther Party was created (founders: Huey Newton and Bobby Seale), asking rights to control schools, welfare programs, the police system in areas habited by poor Black people, and the right to bear arms for self-protection.
Also, women were demanding their rights in society; they grew conscious of their possibilities and social necessities, and grasped the moment to ask rights for the American womanhood. Second-wave feminism, a reactionary movement of women led to the creation of the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW), led by Eleanor Roosevelt, a fervent advocate of women's right. Other advocates were Betty Friedan, who wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963, encouraging women to turn towards career, independence and other social roles, to prove their capabilities. This approach led to another turn in the field of civil rights: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin and religion ; in 1966, the National Organization fore Women (NOW) was created; in 1973, Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the early term of pregnancy, under the Fourteenth Amendment's provisions on the right to privacy.
All these successes prompted also Native Americans and Lain-Americans
(Mexican-Americans) to take a step further and to make their presence be felt
in the social arena of the
As Theodore Roszak pointed out, The New Left, the Black Power Movement, Free-Speech Movement, Civil Rights Movement, Feminist Movement and many more were the social results of the efforts put in by an adolescentizized "dissenting thought and culture" .
In these times, the Vietnam War, which started under the Kennedy
administration and reached to its darkest peak under the Lyndon Johnson
administration, only fueled more rage and frustration. Antiwar demonstrations
were breaking out in every corner of the country, and young men burned their
draft cards in sign of profound dislike with the American "democratic"
principles. Violence stemmed at the Democratic National Convention in
Nonetheless, the youth of
Also, the beat writers, including Jack Kerouac with his outstanding work, On the Road, or the visionaries like Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey pointed to a new cultural dimension of society, achieved through psychedelic drugs. The literature of the sixties has embedded the countercultural wave, the sentiments of alienation, the need to break free, the fears of the subconscious and the means through which one could escape the postwar craze; drugs, communal life, hitchhiking, sex, careless pleasure, music, nonconformity . all these were defining stamps for the alienated individual of these roaring years.
Popular culture grew at an alarming rate, throbbing with a "vibrant, neon life of its own, clearly
separating itself from "high" or classical culture."
Nonetheless, this was an outcome of the democratic view on life, contrasting
the elitist trends of the formerly over praised high culture. The imagery of
the vernacular or popular invaded
Thus, the blending of popular culture, loaded with profound commercial interests, and art, became a natural synthesis. One of the most notable example is when the Houston National Bank commissioned local artists to paint pictures that were enlarged upon billboards along the city's major highways, it was estimated that some 650,000 people would see them daily. Art was thus brought into the everyday life of each and every American, ripped out of the sterile and protective sphere of a museum and displayed along the sanctuary of modern mobility: the freeways. One could observe art from a speeding car or a motorcycle or glaze upon the artwork as it were a mere illusion, fading away as the vehicle departed . Or one could simply contemplate upon the essence of the imagery while stuck in a traffic jam. The limitlessness of this new display option soon became the core element of the new art form, Pop art, emerging from the vernacular spectacle. Pop art relied greatly upon the masses of people who would find the objects and elements employed in the work of art at every corner of their existence, as small-scale reproductions (and also the source of inspiration) of their masterpieces.
In an era of major changes, Pop art transposed the societal values on the canvases of its artists, as a mirror for an inert nation; this mirror reflected in a distorted, enlarged formula the falsehood of the technocratic promises and statistics, showing that there is a reality beyond that perceived through the means of mass-communication, or rather said, mass-deceit. The irony embedded in Pop art was a necessary asset for realizing a successful commentary on the social values perpetuated in a consumerist era.
Chapter 2. Pop Art. Its Precursors. Its Aesthetics.
Towards Pop Art.
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DIFFERENT FEATURES OF OBJECTS UNDER INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION Pre-Industrial Industrial intricacy simplicity expensiveness economy uniqueness uniformity rarity quantity irregularity precision human error, fallibility flawlessness intuition calculation age newness permanence change, improvement treasuring expendability art and utility sharply dis- functionalism, art tinguished representation, "working' realism geometric forms, FUNDAMENTAL SOCIAL CHANGES Pre-Industrial Industrial Aristocratic democratic demographic isolation population masses local, regional culture mass culture (audiences, communication) production, consumption) individual production group production of goods by single in quantity by craftsmen by specialized labor hierarchical, tribal mechanical, social model electronic social model NEW FORMS AND MOVEMENTS IN ART Theater of cruelty Theater of the absurd Happenings Photography Film Environments Functional architecture Objets trouvee Assemblages New Movements in Paintings: Impressionism Abstract Expressionism Futurism Cubism Dada Surrealism Pop art Op art Minimal art Modern Dance Aleatoric music Serial music Electronic music |
NEW MATERIALS AND OBJECTS IN ART The scientific model, scientific concepts and laws the machine materials from technology, machine products standardized objects (repeated patterns) electronic mechanisms and instruments ordinary materials ordinary objects NEW PERCEPTUAL ACTIVITIES extended range of perception greater inclusiveness of objects inclusion of other sensory receptors - tactile, kinesthetic rejection of aesthetic prohibitions Eg. erotic elimination of distinctiveness between object and perceiver, spectator, creator and object creator and perceiver performer, artist and perceiver integration of art with life chance prosaic events commonplace objects dethroning of art, inclusion of : primitive, grotesque, brutal, dreamlike functionalism, art as skill, technology social commentary THE NEW AESTHETIC Negative features 1.Denial of importance of unity, harmony. These contribute to the isolation of the art object 2.Rejection of the ideal (eg. beauty)as the end of art 3.Denial of distance and of the contemplative attitude 4. Denial of disinterestedness. a)Denial of separation of art object from life b)Denial of the uniqueness of art, of institutional arrangements that perpetuate this, i.e., museums Positive features 1.Continuity between life and art a) Process, movement b) Functionalism 2. Perceptual integration of elements in the aesthetic situation 3. Artistic creation as cooperative enterprise Basic Concept: THE AESTHETIC FIELD 1. A more inclusive "general theory of aesthetics" 2. Integration of: a) artist b) object c) perceiver d) performer 3. Functional relation between: a) creator-perceiver-performer b) object working c) aesthetic experience as a functional activity 4. Inclusiveness a) materials b)events 5. Diffusion a) greater continuity between aesthetic and non- aesthetic b) closer connection of art with society, as commentary, satire, criticism |
Fig. 1. .2.1. Aesthetics and the contemporary Arts
In order to have a clear picture of how the aesthetics of modern and contemporary art evolved, one must take into consideration Figure 1 above. To analyze more closely Fig.1, it is important to underline the fact, that it is a guideline to the changes and artistic movements that led to the appearance of Pop art. It encompasses the most important concepts regarding social changes (presented also in Chapter1) and the aspects of new materials in art, of new perceptual activities and of the new aesthetic, which shall be elaborated further on in the present Chapter.
This subchapter focuses on the new movements in painting, particularly Dada, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, as defining influences on Pop Art. Nonetheless, these influences are also visible in the aesthetic reception of the mood of Pop, as they form a collage of artistic traits, transposed in a popular medium. The above mentioned influences are visible even in the early namings of Pop art, such as Neo-Dada, New Realism, New Surrealism, or to a lesser extent, Neo-vulgarism.
The peculiarity of Pop art was rendered by the choice of themes implied in the works of art belonging to this movement. People had seen and known the banal, commonplace pictures of food, beverages, ads, labels, comic strips, but they were accustomed to seeing them on television, supermarkets, magazines, but never did these elements invade the art galleries. The images or the real objects, enlarged usually to enormous sizes, were put on nearly blank canvases, which outraged, at least at the beginning of the movement, both viewers and critics. The movement was perceived as a mockery brought both to critics and viewers, until these managed to comprehend the depth of this new artistic style. Nonetheless, the surprise of the beholders was understandable, as the formerly acknowledged artistic canon, with Abstract Expressionists at center, catered nonrepresentational, serious, formal works, which had undoubtedly been greeted as fine art.
Nonetheless, one should turn to the earlier movements in art forms, most notably in paintings, like those of Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism.
Futurism and Cubism were of paramount importance in the art history of
the early twentieth century, as their representatives experienced with new
formal elements in their creations. Cubism brought the novelty of putting the
form as the basis for a painting; nonetheless, the form and spaces were
envisioned through the use of geometrical figures, which could create a
mechanical representation of motion, capturing also elements of time and space.
A compelling example for this would be the work of Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 (1912),
which captures the anatomy of the body in motion with a surgical precision.
This work was presented also in the famous
To go further in the timeline of art history, one should also mention the
great influence Dada had upon the later styles and movements in art. Dada
emerged on the cultural scene with the coming of World War I, in
Dada stressed the importance of the absurd, irrational and unpredictable,
setting out on a war against traditional standards of aesthetics. Some of the
most important artists and proponents of the Dada movement were Tristan Tzara,
Marcel Janco( Iancu), Jean Arp, Marcel
Duchamp, Hugo Ball and on American soil Man Ray. Starting with 1916, in
Nonetheless, when one analyzes the works of Pop artists, it is easily observable, that Pop art lacks that revolutionary fury, that passion to contest the established values, which characterized for example Dadaism. The Dada anger in its anti-art, nihilistic character, as expressed even in the Dada Manifesto in 1918 and in1922, in Lecture on Dada by Tristan Tzara:
"Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting. Dada knows the correct measure that should be given to art: with subtle, perfidious methods, Dada introduces it into daily life. And vice versa. In art, Dada reduces everything to an initial simplicity, growing always more relative . The Beautiful and the True in art do not exist; what interests me is the intensity of a personality transposed directly, clearly into the work"[49],
could be felt in every work of the artists belonging to the current; it was a fury as passionate, as to contest cubism, futurism, expressionism and the "art of the museums" as well, and this deep sentiment was missing from the Aesthetics of Pop art; how ever fragmentary this was, it relied more on subtle allegory and allusions, on disharmonious satire, than on a rage clearly expressed. The fury was rather replaced with the feeling of disgust with the values expressed by the middle class, thus having a more personal touch added to the subjects depicted. However, Dada managed to influence Pop art through its militant advocacy for change, through the implementation of the irrational and haphazard in its works, which were role model aspects for the representations in Pop art.
Also, deriving from the Dadaist approach, there is Surrealism as a key influence upon Pop art. Surrealism, through the employment of the psychoanalytical aspects of the dream and subconscious, managed to transpose dreams, nightmares, fears, deep sentiments onto the canvas, through symbolic representations: melting and disproportionate objects, bright colors, curves and decadent, decomposing figures. The Surrealists were among the first avant-garde approaches to a change in the overall mentality of the post-industrial society, to the anxieties of the turn of the century, to the dilemmas of the alienated individual in a mechanical model of society. One of the major representatives of the surrealist trend was Salvador Dali, engaging in a pseudo - realistic depiction of the Freudian psychoanalysis.
The surrealist elements are visible in Pop art especially in the way they perceive eroticism and sexuality, in a society where sex is itself a commodity and a taboo liberalized and freed from the pristine principles of the pre - twentieth century moral framework. As sex became a public matter, ripped out of its private, personal sphere, art grasped the chance for representing it in various ways, suggesting the erotically loaded values of society. Money, sex, fame, these were the guiding principles in the post-industrial mass - community and popular culture.
Furthermore, on should not neglect the most recent precursors of Pop art,
namely, Abstract Expressionism. In the 1940s, the center of Western art moved
from
The most prominent representatives of Abstract expressionism are Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky and many others. Abstract works of art have been made even at the beginning of the twentieth century, as for example the 1917 ready-made work of Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, which is, nonetheless, a common urinal, signed R. Mutt. This commonplace item became a work of art as "its new name and new point of view" could render it a new concept, blurring its functionality.
Nonetheless, after the Second World War, in the
Mark Rothko was the adept of color field painting, which depicted large fields and surfaces of homogeneous colors, along with color stripes, which conferred unity and harmony to the geometrically precise lines and contours.
An adept of de Kooning, the would-be-Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg also experimented with technical novelties, like that of the assemblage, three - dimensional compositions of objects, which reached excellence as the Combines in the Pop art phase.
An important movement, minimalism, developed along Pop art, but their coexistence in those times was seminal for the theories concerning Pop art as well. Minimalism consisted in the combination of optical illusions with severely reductive structural elements. Artists like Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Sol Lewitt and Dan Flavin used extremely simplified forms, "usually of a geometric character, either in a single concentrated image configuration or in serial runs or sets." Though aesthetically bland and neutral-looking, these artworks "may be the vehicle for an aggressive assault on the spectator's sense impressions, through color saturation, rhythmically repeating imagery, or immense scale."
All in all, these experiments with form, structure, color, and idea have represented a further step in the avant-garde movements in the United States, prefiguring the appearance of other forms as well, which will gradually and irreversibly break down the barriers between life and arts, and in-between artistic media as well, blending sculpture, painting, photography, performance, environment, music and the commonplace under the umbrella of an all-encompassing artistic form, as the contemporary arts could be labeled.
The distance between artist-object-performer-perceiver is almost inexistent, as the contemporary art forms rely exactly on the implication of the public, as cooperative entities in the process of creating the works of art. This is the case with the happenings and performance art as well, where there is a direct implication of the public, in order that the aesthetic experience could be genuinely experienced. This implication of the perceiver into the work of art, as by staging the events and putting at its center the perceiver, is the utmost closeness between life and art.
2.2. American Pop Art seen from the point of view of aesthetics
As presented in the first chapter and through the art movements preceding Pop art, in the former subchapter, the turn of the century has brought about a sharp shift in societal, cultural values and in consciousness as well. Perceivable even in the 19th century, the crisis of modernity has brought forth immensurable criticism and evaluation. Friedrich Nietzsche presented the errors of the Western metaphysics and the challenges of the future in regards with the present, showing that society is predestined for a step towards nihilism and decadence. Also, Karl Marx exposed the fact, that the individual is alienating itself in relation to the means of production, which would have as an imminent consequence a world - scale revolution, due to class struggle. The Hegelian theory rested upon the supposition, that society is moving with a fast pace towards Absolute Freedom in which history and art would be subsumed. All these created a feeling of angst in face of modernity, a disturbing collective consciousness about what the human kind is heading for. Also, there was a perceivable contrast between "experience and information, expressing the fear that through the fragmentation of modern life and the disjointed sensationalism of the newspapers, we were losing the capacity for deep experience and feeling" .
This fragmentation of modern life, brought about by the revolutionary mass - proliferation of information and mass - (re)production of items, had been the subject of various critical debates, offering a plethora of data upon the world as we know it today, seen from different, often contradicting angles. The representatives of the Frankfurt School, most notably Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin offered a complex analysis of the social changes in relation to arts, in order to highlight the different reception and status of artworks, as well as that of aesthetics in a mechanical age of reproduction.
To start with, one should mention the seminal impact of
the age of mechanical reproduction upon the work of art. Walter Benjamin, in
his 1936 writing, The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction, emphasized the benefic impact mechanical
reproduction has upon the works of art, stating : for the first time in world history,
mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical
dependence on ritual" . He
viewed the genuine work of art as being endowed with an "aura", a patent of
tradition, time and uniqueness; the mechanical reproduction strips away the
aura, as "the technique of reproduction
detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition" .
What he conceived of as being benefic for the artworks, nonetheless, was
contested by the critical theory exposed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.
The two
Various modern art movements have seemingly collided with the understanding of art at the core of the tradition of aesthetic theory. In traditional view, the essence of art was comprised in the properties of the artistic object, and its ability to render the viewer an aesthetic experience, an intrinsic perceptual interest, given by the artworks' significant form. The development of abstract art in the first decades of the twentieth century did not pose a perceivable threat to the artistic convention, as they could be included in the mainstream aesthetic theory without problem. Nonetheless, with the advent of various anti-art movements, by the readymade, by the integration of banal images and insignificant forms into Pop art, and by the minimalist and conceptualist attempts at dissolving the art object itself, art itself and aesthetics were facing a crucial turning point. Thus, the aesthetics of Pop art is a much debated subject matter, as many critics found it arguable, whether the works of Pop artists can be labeled art in the first place, since their source of inspiration was deeply rooted in the realms of popular imagery.
As Thierry de Duve has pointed out as well, the status of art has undergone a sharp shift in the context of the twentieth century: "anything visual can be called art . [t]he sentence "this is art" is a convention. Historical knowledge alone is required to make and judge art, some intellectual curiosity or interest for the "logic" of Modernism, some strategic desire or interest to see it further extrapolated and tested on mere institutional grounds. Art fades into "art theory" .
This fading into art theory of Pop art was firstly undertaken by Clement Greenberg. He was one of the most fervent opponents of the Pop art movement, as well as the outstanding critic and advocate of the American avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism. In his notorious essay, Avant Garde and Kitsch, published in 1939, later reprinted as the introductory essay in his collection of critical writings, Art and Culture, in 1961 , he is a vehement opponent of the popular mass arts, with their culture of Kitsch, so wide-spread and reproduced with a dazzling speed by the means of mass production, then catered to the audience through mass media. The above mentioned essay was meant to highlight the dangers of a mass art of such span, which could be regarded as a form of decadence of fine arts, in the years of late capitalism. Clement Greenberg, in his critical standpoint, tried to overturn the decaying cultural standards and revive the essence of Abstract expressionism, that is, "abstract art . is a purely aesthetic activity, unconditioned by objects and based on its own internal laws . " , something that he could not recognize in the Pop artworks evoking the commonplace; for Greenberg, Pop art was sharply anaesthetic in its choice of imagery. Greenberg went further on, as the assertion of the value of the work of art in its own right, not just as a representation of a beautiful reality, led to a focus on "the expressive resources of the medium, not in order to express ideas and notions, but to express with greater immediacy sensations, the irreducible elements of experience."
Nonetheless, Pop art embodied a vivid social commentary; it was an art form which deserved proper criticism and theorizing, a viewpoint which could expand its rather scarce reception by art critics and beholders, especially in its first years of existence.
What was crucial to understand, had been the fact that, though these artworks are produced by means of mass technologies, they are not mass artworks, nor "structured for ready assimilation and reception by mass audiences" .
Pop art raised numerous questions, and the answers came firstly under the institutional theories of Arthur C. Danto and George Dickie, who delineated the commonplace source of inspiration from the genuine works of art of Pop artists. In order to give a proper definition and clarification for the paradoxes of Pop art, these critics engaged in theorizing and defining the essence of it; for example, in his 1964 essay, The Artworld, Arthur C. Danto offers an encompassing view upon the aesthetic status Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes have, while their commonplace counterpart, the mass-produced Brillo boxes, definitely do not embody aesthetic qualities, and cannot be categorized as art . In Danto's words, " To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry - an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld" .
His institutional theory rests upon the supposition that there are artrelevant predicates in the larger context of art theories, which define the artworks solely. Predicates P, Q, R are the only atrelevant predicates in critical use at a certain moment in history, thus endowing every artwork with some or all of these predicates. But he goes further on, by supposing that "an artist determines that H shall henceforth be artistically relevant for his paintings", which elevates H, a commonplace item up to that moment, into the sphere of artrelevant predicates. This elevation or transfiguration of the commonplace is the key element the aesthetics of Pop art rests upon, as its artists rendered a new, aesthetic characteristic to objects previously belonging to the vernacular sphere, bringing it to the realms of the artworld and broadening this artworld with new aesthetic predicates.
The case of the Brillo boxes is quintessential in order to understand how Danto's theory functions; Danto wants to assert the fact, that the visual resemblance of the work of art and the original carton box is of greater significance, than the art - theoretical difference. This calls for our attention to the fact, that the Brillo box is already a product of the designer's work, while the boxes of Warhol do not claim the elevation of the commonplace by artistic talent or vision. They can be considered and evaluated as art simply because they were assembled by hand in the Warhol Factory for gallery sale, they wear Warhol's brand name, thus detaching themselves from the Brillo brand. As Warhol intended, his art is more about the packaging, than the content; in this sense, the uses of the Brillo label in the artwork and in the commonplace coincide, both functioning as packaging, one advertising scouring pads, while the other the Warhol persona.
Danto's theory was later reevaluated by George Dickie, in his 1969 essay, Defining Art, later modified and reprinted in his 1974 book, Art and the Aesthetic, offering a definition of the work of art as follows: "A work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact, (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld)"
The institutional theory of George Dickie, in its definition, is strikingly similar with that of Danto, since both claim that works can be elevated to the status of works of art not in the terms of some particular inner property they possess, but in relation to a contextual relation, which in Danto's case is labeled "artworld", a historical and theoretical context, while in Dickie's acceptation it is rendered by a set of persons who form the "institution".
The theory proposed by Dickie asserts that the definition of art must be made in terms of non-perceptual relational properties. He questions the dilemma set by Morris Weitz, that is, art cannot be defined in terms of its sufficient and necessary conditions; in Dickie's definition of the work of art mentioned above, he has given the classificatory sense of the works of art, meant to challenge the problematic of defining art.
However, Dickie's theory has its flaws too, because it focuses on the authority of a recognized social function, and his acceptation of the artworld lacks not the function he attributes to it, but the "social recognition of some 'invested' authority it would need to have for his theory to work" .
Nonetheless, one could see in this institutional theory the end of art, where the commonplace can enjoy the same appreciation as the fine or high arts, conceptualizing the aesthetic experience and transfiguring art into art's theory as well. It is the death of art, as art creates itself and also consumes itself in the process of creation. This nihilistic process was foreseen by Hegel as well, when he stated: "Art no longer counts for us as the highest manner in which truth obtains existence for itself. / One may well hope that art will continue to advance and perfect itself, but its form has ceased to be the highest need of spirit./ In all these relationships art is and remains for us, on the side of its highest vocation, something past" . However, this approach can be reevaluated through the lenses of the Heideggerian philosophy, which can solve the riddle of art, as he termed the paradoxes of postmodern art; Heidegger, in his The Origins of the Work of Art, aligns with Danto's statement upon the artists' aesthetic choices, as he asserts: "The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other" , and art is the source for both. In the supposition that the artist is the origin of the work, he approves of Danto's institutional theory, regarding the endowment of a certain work with the aesthetic predicates of the artist's own choice, thus conferring to it the status of work of art. Nonetheless, this possibility could not have been materialized unless art was a temporal phenomenon. The fact, that art is an exposure of Zeitgeist, of the spirit of the time, is highly visible in the twentieth - century artworld, beginning with the ready-mades of Duchamp to the American starting point of this truth-reveling essence of the artwork in the Pop art phase.
The informational era, deriving from the multiplicity of production and communication means, poses a threat to the understanding and experiencing the works of art through the lenses of the spirit of the time. Aesthetic experience is a three - folded phenomenon: first, it is valuable and enjoyable (evaluative dimension), secondly, it is vividly felt and subjectively savored, through its immediacy (phenomenological dimension), thirdly, it is a meaningful experience, not mere sensation (semantic dimension).
Nonetheless, in the age of mechanical reproduction, these dimensions are blurred, and in the viewpoint of Arthur C. Danto, they are more or less ignored, giving place to the dimension of interpretation, which can determine "the relationship between a work of art and its material counterpart".
However, in what regards the institutional theories of art, they were largely dismissed by Leon Rosenstein, who exposed both the flaws and merits of the two main theories, concluding that "artworks have been reduced to art theories by the artists, "art" has been reduced to a theory of art by art theorists, art theory has been reduced to a circularity infinite regress, and self - contradiction."
To go further along the line of theoretical approaches to Pop art, it is relevant to discuss the thematic brought forth by Noel Carroll in Modernity and the Plasticity of Perception. The author relies on Walter Benjamin's seminal thesis on the work of art in modern time, and by emphasizing the latter's role, it proposes to argument upon the changes in perception as well in the modern and postmodern era. The assault of the visual thematic, the plethora of the objects to be contemplated, all these brought along also the decay of the aesthetic distance, which is defined in relation to Benjamin's work as "response- dependent property of objects that enjoins us to experience them "at a distance"" . These elements of the visual assault brought about by Pop art as well, nonetheless, do not change our mode of perception; we rather tend to develop alongside societal changes, thus having the same perception upon the surrounding world, but in different timeframes. Noel Carroll has delivered an equally important work in what regards modernity, namely The Ontology of the Mass Art; this work is seminal especially because it addressed the difference between mass arts and art forms like Pop art, having at its core the basic principle that mass arts have been destined for the larger segment of the population, offering low quality, easily reproducible, transmittable and understandable type of information. In this regard, Pop art elevates itself from the mass arts, because, although it employs the means of mechanical reproduction and relies on the imagery of the popular masses, it does so in order to bring about social criticism and an allegory, not visible enough to be perceived by a large, artistically untrained segment of the population.
Nonetheless, as we have seen in the examples of Danto's and Dickie's theories, in postmodern times, the tendency to go beyond traditional aesthetics is of an imperative importance, as traditional aesthetics alone no longer offers an encompassing view on arts. "Philosophy, which had sought to remain above the critical interpretation of individual works, insofar as it had sought to provide a universal concept of aesthetic experience, is compelled to descend to their level to clarify and assess the claims about art that they embody. Philosophy and criticism become inextricably intertwined, and both become bound to art history."
Chapter 3.The Artist and his Work
3.1. Robert Rauschenberg. Bridging the gap between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art
"Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in the gap between the two.)"
Robert Rauschenberg (1925- 2008) studied art at Black Mountain College in
North Carolina, in order to study with Joseph Albers, but the most profound
impact on his work was the influence of the composer John Cage and of the
modern dance choreographer Merce Cunningham; these two offered the incentive of
a new freedom and of a new perspective upon art on the whole. An adept of
Abstract Expressionism, Willem de Kooning, was also a student at
The maturity of Rauschenberg's style can be observed in the early 1950s when he employed the collage technique in his works. European artists had already introduced found objects, pieces of paper, and various other materials on the canvas since the early years of the twentieth century, but American artists had rarely practiced this technique. In 1955 he had created Bed (held in private collection), made up of an actual pillow and a quilt, splashed with various colors of paint, and "much running of pigments in action-painting manner."
Also, in 1963, in the work Estate, he used popular photographic imagery, applied to the canvas by silkscreen. The fusion of images, blending of color-notes, and the use of action-painting forces the spectator to "'read' the picture as if it were on a screen, its narrative consistency perhaps shattered, but its nostalgic poignance thereby heightened."
It was obvious that art had departed from the Abstract Expressionist style, but the early American Pop art had still employed some elements of Abstract Expressionism, as well as surrealist, dada and cubist elements; nevertheless, these were reiterated into artworks with the use of new techniques of mass reproduction.
Also, of paramount importance were his "combines", works of art which blended different media into a single creation. This technical novelty intrigued critics and viewers alike, and there was a need for an explanation of the etymology of the word. In March 1977, he was interviewed by Roberta Olsen from the "Soho Weekly News", who asked for this explanation. Rauschenberg replied: "some people started saying my work was more like sculpture than painting, while others disagreed and said it was more like painting than sculpture . My work was sculpture and painting, a combination of the two. So the next time someone asked me, I said 'combine'"
Oil, printed paper, printed reproductions, metal, wood, rubber heel and tennis ball on canvas, with oil on angora goat and tire on wooden base mounted on four casters, 106.6 x 160.6 x 163.8cm
The above combine was reworked several times, before reaching its final form; placed horizontally, the work depicts a stuffed angora goat with paint-daubed snout, having a car tire around its middle, surrounded by various collage items, from paper prints to tennis ball . Nonetheless, this work of art is an equivocal one, leaving room for many debates, as the tire represents the constraints of the consumer society, while the goat can be seen as the captive social animal, or a symbol for the Biblical sacrifice, or a scapegoat for all the flaws of society.
The parody and irony in Rauschenberg's combines are key elements. Also, a key aspect is linking art with life and time as well. Temporality is the message in several of his works, as he introduces elements evoking his childhood years or gives the work of art an autobiographical note. This effect is also rendered in the Figure1.3.1. above, as the rubber tire is evoking his childhood surroundings, himself living next to a tire factory.
Also notable creations are his Factums, I and II, created in 1957. These are rather conceptual artworks, blending into an Abstract Expressionist style, but the fact, that they are twin creations, one modeled after the other, brings them closer to the Pop art movement, where the repetition, stereotyping and mass-(re)production dominated the artistic quest.
Claes Oldenburg
"I am for an art that is politial-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.
I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.
I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap and still comes out on top.
I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.
I am for an art that takes its forms from the lines of life, that twists and extends impossibly and accumulates and spits and drips, and is sweet and stupid as life itself. I am for an artist who vanishes, turning up in a white cap, painting signs and hallways . I am for an art that is smoked like a cigarette, smells like a pair of shoes. I am for an art that flaps like a flag, or helps blow noses, like a handkerchief. I am for an art that is put on and taken off, like pants, which develops holes, like socks, which is eaten, like a piece of pie."[95]
From this encompassing statement, one can read the bare, essential elements of the artistic manifesto of Claes Oldenburg. A daring artist, he comprised the quintessence of the role Pop art had in the contemporary society, and through his works, he catered to the amazed viewer a satirical and witty representation of the consumer culture.
Claes Oldenburg (1929- ) was an Abstract Expressionist artist in the early stage of his career, but he shifted from that style around 1959, affiliating himself with the emerging Pop art movement. He did not just offer a satire of the American commercial culture, but also questioned the identity of art itself.
His disproportionate works at the exhibition in the
(Painted sailcloth stuffed with foam rubber. Approx. H. 132.1 x D. 213.4 cm)
The assemblages of Claes Oldenburg carry a deep social commentary, as they criticize the consumerism and the compulsion to consume. Also, other of his works, maquettes or ghost models, as he called them, as his Soft Typewriter, made of vinyl, kapok, cloth and plexiglass, are representing the materialization of "works of art in alternate state of matters - hard and soft, shiny and dull" , as to recreate a feeling of molding arts into one anther, in this case, literature with arts, through the soft tone given to this typewriter, as almost melting under the eyes of the beholder, as a Dali surrealist creation. The typewriter represents ideals and dreams, an entire manifesto, one could say, as it blends all kinds of materials into an assemblage meant to render a literary meaning.
3.3. Andy Warhol. The art-factory
Andy Warhol (1930-1987) was considered as the "guru of Pop Art in the early 1960s . , who took the most ordinary
objects and the most popular personalities of American culture, gave them
heroic scale, and turned them into art."
For Andy Warhol, the department stores were a new kind of art museums, and his
parodies of supermarkets through the use of a multitude of Coca-Cola bottle or
What Warhol created was a new kind of still life in a twentieth-century
massmedia, popular-culture mode, by isolating and enlarging images of everyday
items. Nonetheless, he didn't paint the objects themselves, but rather focused
on reproducing them the way in which they were presented in the media. In
sculpture, counterparts to the
The works of Warhol which received the greatest appreciation from critics depicted the heroes and heroines of his contemporary popular culture, most notably movie actresses Elizabeth Taylor and the internationally appraised love-goddess Marilyn Monroe, also, the symbol of the "youthful opposition" in the 1950s, James Dean and Elvis Presley, the rock'n'roll hero who has been an idol of the young generation in the '60s.
The most frequently used technique in Andy Warhol's works was silk-screening, a method which greatly diminished the role of the human implication in delivering the artwork. He relied mostly on his disciples and assistants, who carried out many of his masterpieces in the art-laboratory we came to know as Warhol's Factory. This Factory hosted a number of bright and skillful artists, who helped their master, Andy Warhol in delivering some of the most spectacular works. In 1963, Warhol's assistant stated that by employing the silk-screening technique, each painting took about four minutes; Warhol's explanation to the choice of this mechanical process in his Factory was: "in my art work, hand painting would take much too long and anyway that's not the age we're living in. Mechanical means are today" . "The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine."
To come back to one of the most preferred choice of
objects in his works, it is important to analyze the impact of the
For example, in Big
Torn
Figure 5.3.4. Big Torn
Also, an important element of the consumer culture, the
item that dethrones the other previously acknowledged values, money, and especially the dollar bill is
an important choice of subject in the works of Andy Warhol, and many of his
fellow Pop artists. The dollar bills appeared in many of the drawings of Andy
Warhol from 1962 on, as if they had been carefully mastered by a stylist; some
of these drawings are a deep social critique, as in some stances, the dollar
bills are stuffed into a Campbell's Tomato Soup can, having next to the can a
tied-up bundle of bills, or in some of these drawings there can be depicted the
portraits of Lincoln and Washington on the bills. Through these images, the
perceiver is empowered with an awareness of the fact, that the consumer culture
has shrunk the historical symbols embodied in the dollar bill to a mere
commodity, carried around, transfigured into goods, traded and used, having
lost its symbolical meaning in the advent of consumerism. Nonetheless, as
Tilman Osterwold has emphasized, it is precisely in these drawings that one can
see the true might of
3.4. Roy Lichtenstein
"I want my painting to look as if it had been programmed. I want to hide the record of my hand"
In the case of Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), who
became familiar with artistic quest firstly as a hobby, pop art became a
defining element of his later career. He studied at the Art Student's League
and then at the
Roy Lichtenstein has an interesting, daring style in his works under the tutelage of the pop art movement. His early phase in pop art was characterized by paintings inspired from comic book panels, a topic he renounced to largely beginning with 1965. His most notable painting out of the first works meeting the popular mass cultural needs was Look Mickey (1961, currently at National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Created as a response to a challenge from his son, Look Mickey became one of his most famous art crafts of his early stage as pop artist.
The painting, oil on canvas, sized 48 x 69 inches,
represents the two well-known comic book and
animated cartoon
figures, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. The techniques used in the case of this
painting included hard edged figures and Benday dots. The two methods were
defining for the reactionary style to abstract expressionism, both generating
an impression of roughness, of lack of artistic softness and a vibrating
illusionary effect. The large, homogeneous masses of the colors blue, red,
yellow, white in this painting, create a sensation of having in sight a rather
banal work, but exactly in this banality lays the mastery of greatness in pop
art. Lichtenstein represented a comic book image, depicting Mickey and Donald
at fishing; the text written on the painting is "Look Mickey, I've hooked a big one!!" , also suggesting the
consumerism of the 1960s' society. Catching the "big fish" became an aim for
almost every citizen in the
Another important work of Roy Lichtenstein is Drowning Girl, was created in 1963. The painting, oil on canvas, sized 68 x 68 inches, depicts a girl, a popular heroine of comic books , as she is about to drown. The boxed caption on the painting: "I don't care! I'd rather sink -- than call Brad for help!" is a metaphor for women's stubbornness in the more emancipated ages of the 1960s. The woman figure also suggests the shift from a naďve comic book environment to a more mature context, where the needs of the masses are not met anymore with the playful characters of Mickey or Donald; the '60s brought to fore maturation and emancipation that would backfire . as it happens with our heroine. She is too stubborn to accept the help coming from a man, which could cost her life. The question this painting could suggest is whether women's emancipation should have its limits and what are those? The two dominant colors, pink and blue, suggest two elements for the observers: one could be a correlation between male-female gender issues, and another one could be the red and blue colors of the American flag, suggesting the socio-cultural context in the American society. Water, a recurrent element in his works, could suggest the homogenizing element in the American melting pot. The girl has her eyes closed, from which tears are pouring. This could indicate a regret for the lost innocence of the consumerist society, but it is also a purification process, which might help the symbolic heroine (she could symbolize for example the statue of liberty here) regain her strengths and start life all over again, having this time a new perspective on reality.
Another of his works is Picture and Pitcher, 1978 (painted and patinated bronze, sized: 94 1/2 x 41 x 26 inches). This work represents a geometrical configuration of a hanging picture and a pitcher on a chair, one of the creations that depict still life. Besides black and white, the artist includes the bright yellow, as to suggest the rays of light falling upon the objects. The pitcher is transparent, and we can discover the recurrent element of water in it too. Another recurrent element is the house seen in the picture, a motif he often used in his later works of art. The interesting scenario created by the artist is given by the game of words he uses, since picture and pitcher are similar in spelling. The suggested idea here could be the transparency of words and worlds, the mirroring of reality through a half- full pitcher.
To illustrate some of his later works, one should mention the brushstroke series he created in the last years of his life. The painted and fabricated aluminum sculptures represent an important element of his creativity.
Created in 1996, Brushstrokes, found
at
As all artists, Lichtenstein kept up the pace with the changing world. He abandoned the modern movement of pop art and his works took on a more post-modern, surreal trait. The imitations of brushstrokes, created in a sculpture have the effect of diminishing the limits between the branches of art; through vivid colors, the artist shows the strokes, as they were set out to color the entire world, through their dimension and powerful visual effect. One who observes this work of art would surely imagine that the artist had in view the notion of blending all art into one, and also . blending all art into none. His creativity thus has pointed out the last limit one's brush can reach, namely: the sky.
All in all, the works of Roy Lichtenstein changed the concept of modern art and contributed significantly to its further development.
Pop art, as we know it today, would have not been the same without the energetic, intensely and brightly colored images Roy Lichtenstein offered us. He created works of art that reflected reality in a whole new manner, through the eyes of the consumer himself. Lichtenstein has given us both the comic and ironic view over reality, mirroring life in a unique manner.
Figure 6.3.5. Look Mickey
Figure 7.3.6 Drowning Girl
Figure 8.3.7. Brushstrokes
Chapter 4.Further Developments in Pop Art
4.1. Influences on other artistic endeavors
Pop art, through its powerful imagery and profound impact on society, created the framework for the development of other artistic endeavors, ever more daring and challenging. The next steps in arts were higly expressive and inclusive, in what concerns the relationship between artist - object - perceiver - performer. They were mainly evolving out of the dissonance of society, out of the noises and crowdedness of the city, from the turmoil of the sixties and Pop art, from happenings and installations. Two of the most influential derivatives of Pop art were Fluxus and Graffitti art. These two have had a huge echo upon the concept of art, in a time when Pop art was already put under severe criticism as the movement which could represent the end of art. These two forms of art had managed to go beyond the imaginable realms of art, creating moments and impressions which urged the perceiver to fully analyze the art work laying, hanging, evolving under one's eye.
To begin with, one should mention Fluxus, a movement which greatly relied on the flow of life, on the simplicity of the message, but nonetheless, it delivered this message with a mastery of illusions and allusions, choosing its subjects which were meant to urge the viewer to cast a reflective glimpse upon the work of art. The quintessential role of these art forms was in the message they delivered. It comprised a very powerful meaning in a very limited spatial and temporal activity, it emphasized also the ephemeral aspect of the work of art, but nonetheless, shed a new light upon life, reality and self-awareness. It has opted for a type of representation and presentation which could give an echoing social commentary, a vibrant and lively act that could bring the perceiver to the Olympian peaks of artistdom, as the main "artists" of the Fluxus visual arts were the perceivers themselves, if they managed to rise to the ideational level Fluxus expected them to rise. [121]
To mention just a few of the most interesting representatives, one has to say that within the sphere of music, there was John Cage, with his atonal, disturbing vernacular sounds embedded in his art, as a means to bring the flow of life into the world of music. Also, as a spiritual leader of the movement, George Maciunas has had a huge merit in giving Fluxus the shape and orientation which could evoke the flow of life in every art work this movement has produced. And, within the painterly endeavors, stagings, live performances of Yoko Ono, the world's "most famous unknown artist"[122] ( as her husband , John Lennon had characterized her), we may find the frail and sensitive messages of the hippie mentality and culture.
During Yoko Ono's times, the idea of art was being re-examined by artists. Under the auspices of Abstract Expressionism works of art were obviously heavy, oily and fat. The aesthetic experiments of Fluxus, John Cage and Ono were applications of a series of conceptions about unrestrained frontiers, between music and noise, action and the mere imagination of it, between artist and his or her receptors. The roots of the mixture trace from Zen philosophy that was aimed at inducing enlightenment in the minds of the auditor, it was meant to change its perception upon world and self. Both Cage and Ono came in contact with Zen. The aim of the latter's instructions was to induce enlightenment in the mind of viewer about the being of art as the re-imagination of the imagined. Moreover, influenced by her husband, she employed her art not only to change minds in terms of art and reality but in terms of war and peace, emphasizing the importance of her connections with the whole world. White Chess Set of 1966 was one of her most inspired pieces: eveything was painted white instead of a regular, expected white-black opposite sides. Thus, the game falls appart, as one cannot identify which pieces belong to which side. By loosing track of the pieces, the players come, in an ideal situation, to mutually understand their concerns and to establish a new type of relationship, based on empathy. The work determined peace attainment on a small scale but, by joining forces with Lennon, Ono could attempt to achieve piece on the largest, world-wide scale. The 1969 Bed-in for Peace the being in bed together in a work of art; enjoying the publicity made by press representatives who were invited into their hotel bedrooms, the artists launched a new philosophy in which, just as in White Chess Set, love and togertheness took the place of conflict and competition.
I was very impressed by John and Yoko's ad which appeared as a Christmas greeting in the same year. In large letters was written the message WAR IS OVER!, while beneath it , in small letters, there were displayed the words IF YOU WANT IT; the fact that there was not used the definite article suggested not the end of the Vietnam War, but the end of war as a human condition. In this respect people were urged to GIVE PEACE A CHANCE, to make love, not war.
Cut Piece was her masterpiece, a performance enacted several times, including Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965. While she impassively sat on the stage, like a resigned martyr, the audience was invited to cut away pieces of her clothing. A man came to cut the shoulder straps on her undergarment, she raised her hands to protect her breasts, but did nothing to stop the action and the action ideally continued until she was stripped bare. Thus art joined real life; a real, living woman was slowly cut stripped away of her social frames, caging her into society's labyrinth.
A highly trained musician who gave gave her first concert at the age of 4, who sang opera and lieder while still young, a disciple of Cage and an avant-garde singer who uses verbal slobs and damped screams, Yoko Ono is one of the most original artists of the last half-century. An important work in terms of originality is Fly, which "shows a housefly exploring the naked body of a young woman who lies still, as the fly moves in and out of the crevices of her body, or moves its forelegs, surmounting one of her nipples"[123]. As the soundtrack is uncanny, the attendees cannot know whether if it is the voice of the fly, the suppressed voice of the woman or the weeping voice of an outside witness to this process of rape. Yoko thus conveys the feeling of a bodily invasion, of a violation of intimacy, of a rape.
Moreover, she was famous for her instruction paintings (meant for others to do), on which one can depict the following message:
"Borrow the Mona Lisa from the gallery.
Make a kite out of it and fly (it).
Fly it high enough so the Mona Lisa smile disappears.(a)
Fly it high enough so the Mona Lisa face disappears.(b)
Fly it high enough so it becomes a dot. (c)"
These instruction paintings were also a form of dismantling the barrio between life and art, as it clearly stated the involvement of the viewer in imaginarily delivering the proposed tasks. It can also be seen as a reiteration on a conceptual level of Duchamp's actual addition of a mustache and beard to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, followed by a note on a ready-made: "Use a/ Rembrandt as an/ ironing board"
The gap between art and reality has been also overcome by grafitti; originated in the the late sixties, this form of art has been developing ever since, though it is not readily accepted as being art like those works located in galleries or museums, because of its presentation and often illegal location. The aesthetic qualities make graffiti an art, despite the unconventional places of presentation.
The term graffiti is the plural form of the Italian word grafficar which signifies scribbles,
drawings or messages that are painted, carved or written on a surface; it also
means "to scratch", whether we are
talking about cave paintings or messages scratched on walls. Graffiti has been
found on ancient Egyptian monuments and they have been preserved also on walls
in
Individual markings - slurs, political statements, commonly found on exterior surfaces and bathrooms, usually handwritten represent the simplest forms of individual markings. However, they have little or no aesthetic appeal.
Gang markings of territory, consisting of tags and messages that promote new events taking place in the neighborhood, and murals for community enhancement and beautification are also forms of graffiti.
But the truly graffiti art - the creative use of spray paint to generate artwork - originated in New York and it was acknowledged first as "New York Style" graffiti, heralded most prominently by Cy Twombly and Jean Michel Basquiat. Started in the late 60s, by teens using permanent markers to tag or write their names, the spray paint allowed the label to develop in size and color. The spray can was the tool that separated the "taggers" from the artists who employed color, forms and styles in a creative manner. The main force that fuels the development of modern art graffiti consists of finding creative, innovative modes of displaying tags in highly visible places, instead of scribbling them in obscure, insignificant ones.
The term "subway art" comes from the subway trains painting which began in the middle to late 70s. Instrumental to the development of graffiti art, as the trains became the stage for the style wars which was a time when everyone who wanted to be recognized as the best artist or the 'King' or 'Queen' of a subway line got- up, the subway art put great emphasis on style and artistic talent and had as main goal the creation of burners which are pieces that stand out because of creativity, color, vibrancy, crisp outline - no drips, and overall artistic appeal.
The recognizable artistic talent of the graffiti artist
establishes his or her reign on the subway line and not the mere appearance of
a name in a hundred different places, as the subway trains in
Round popcorn or bubble letters emerged from these forms, as a wild style of interlocking, complex type of calligraphy that is hard and almost impossible to read, computer and gothic lettering, 3-D lettering, fading which blends colors, and the use of cartoon characters. Exactly the ability, the gift that enables creators to produce such complicated pieces separates the taggers from the real graffiti artist, or named shortly, graffitist. While taggers scribble, graffitists do art!
The factors that encouraged more and more artists to support
and develop this new form of art and to implicitly influence creators from all
around the world, despite
Because of the dangerous environment of the subway yards and lay-up stations, laws, police and because one cannot do all of personal work on subways, artists created another innovative from of expression - freight art - in which they paint railroad, freight cars with the expectation that their artwork will travel across the United States and throughout the continent.
The question that inevitably arises is what makes people create such forms of art? The prospect of fame, recognition of personal artistic talent, maybe the fact that they are considered the best ways of self-expression; the art of writing establishes a series of boundaries between the artist and the receptors regardless of cultural, lingual, or racial differences. Moreover, creating graffiti art with a crew satisfies the feeling of belonging and recognition; Michael Walsh observed the fact that some see their art as ritual transgression against a repressive political and economic order, for others is a way of self-characterizing as rebels who react against the established art market or gallery system in the sense that art is not only that which appears in the gallery as determined by the curator; for others, their works of art are living proofs, testimonies against capitalism and private property. Their art is rewarding and exciting.
According to the institutional theory mandates that art is displayed by
the art world to be accepted as art and it is determined by the members of the
art world. Art world has recognized graffiti as art, starting with the 70s. Lee
Quinones, a N.Y. artist who bombed, painted a whole train, was invited to
exhibit his work on canvas in Claudio Bruni's Galleria Madusa in
The unique, defining essence of graffiti is given by the appropriation of the public space to convey its message. Artists perceive graffiti as a struggle between them and the city, as a counter-culture or a negation that offers in the same time a new vision that transforms the city into a personal, holy space. Jean-Michel Basquiat, in Adventures in Counterculture, depicts graffiti as a way of salvation: "SAMO (Same Old Shit) as an end to midwash religion, nowhere politics, and bogus philosophy. SAMO as an escape clause. SAMO save idiots."
Once graffiti was introduced to the art world, two trends came to light: on the one hand, the art world of artists, collectors, dealers, curators helped graffitists evolve in style, presumably by sharing their artistic knowledge and, on the other, the exposure helped to expand graffiti to all parts of the world.
The outcomes of the recognition of graffiti art by the art world is relevant due to social, political and economic influence of the art world, as the recognition helps to increase the awareness and overall understanding of the art form. Moreover, it prevents the all-encompassing generalization that all graffiti is vandalism and, in consequence, have to be treated illegal or, disregarded from an aesthetic point of view, because of their unconventional display places.
Thus fluxus and graffiti in the form of spray-can art are considered modern forms of art which sprang from Pop Art. Their forms, colors, arrangement of elements confer them a special artistic status when they come to be analyzed according to artist's intention and value to audience.
4.2. A brief outlook on its contemporary status
Based on the conceptions of Joseph Beuey, nowadays the ruling power is not art anymore, but the economy, and art dissolves in an external medium represented by the division of labor, losing thus its specificity and its logics.
A group that focused upon experimentation of economic strategies as a result of the camouflage of art in the products of conspicuous consumption was the Supernova artistic group that was formed in Cluj Napoca in 2002, by László István, Ciprian Muresan and Cristi Pogacean.
The group was named after an exhibition displayed at Casa Sindan, when the idea of a brand was established.
In 2002, Supernova participated with three other artists - Bogdana Poptomas, Aurel Cornea and Oana Felipov at an exhibition named American Erection 02 that was more of an exercise of cultural strategy, challenged by the fact that the Romanian cultural institutions do not elaborate programs through that would finance the projects of young artists who are directly involved in the process of consolidation of the contemporary art. The event was meant to attract rich people who would support them in exchange of advertisement.
The work of Ciprian Muresan
- Who Is Britney ? - exploited the image of the pop singer Britney
Spears, a symbol of the youth subculture which promote stars for the looks,
ways of clothing and libertinage. These stars become parts of a larger industry
that tends to conquer various fields. These precedents are taken to another
sphere, as, in his film, he makes love with the symbol- image, adding to this
projection a painting of large dimensions that hugs a crying character which
looks very much alike with the over-symbolized Britney. 
Figure 10.4.9. Who is Britney?
While László István employed simulacras of plastic materials of the well-known characters of Power Puff Girls, hanged over the heads by ropes, Cristi Pogacean presented two identical models of projectiles that had the goal of synthesizing the American mass culture: consumerism, given the resemblance to Pepsi bottles, the military power, a real myth for the American people and the sex subculture, through the phallic shape of the pieces, idea supported by the inscription American Erection which appeared on one of them.
The group focuses upon the use of media symbols of the contemporary culture and upon the delivery of the art object wrapped in the forms of the society of consumption. Thus, we are permanently exposed to an unlimited manipulation and we do not do a thing to oppose it, we just let ourselves carried by the wave.
The name of the group appeals to Dacia Supernova, a car without outstanding qualities; it is a label that compensates the lack of qualities; to use a term with such connotations - super-new, used in all the languages of the world in the same sense - means to establish a relationship of synonymy with the contemporary art.
In 2003, the group has launched the Art for the Masses project, a specific project of the faction, a manifesto meant to shape new directions, using old elements emptied of their meaning. It analyzes the relationship between the artistic process and the economic one, based on the structural equivalence of the two well-defined systems. As they have managed to put an artistic brand in a commercial space, the members consider that they have attained their goal. This is in fact the work, not just the product or the documentation; it is exactly the fact that the product entered the market. Label versus advertisement.
In the 60s, the Fluxus group emphasized the non-professional, non-elitist facet of the artist who was intorduced to a new circuit, a circuit which had as a starting point the art-amusement - exhibitions were a combination of festival and event, which supposed a live performance of the artistic art and a discovery of the trivial, marginal, ommited, stupied and irrational facts and actions, of the fetishisms of unuseful ideas and inventions; they focused on the insignificant.[134]After more than 40 years, Supernova materialized them by launching Supernova Cola.
The label represents a worker, a
proletarian, who generously offers a bottle of Cola, remindig the audience of
the Statue of Liberty, a symbol for thousands of immigrants who came to the
Figure 11.4.10. Supernova Cola
The resemblance of the bottle to the other Pop art reproductions of the Coke symbol is strikingly similar, nonetheless, this bottle carries an irony and a message far more profound and to its very core Romanian.
Thus, Pop Art of the 60s was the precursor of several artistic endeavors
that influenced the way of thinking and acting of people all around the globe,
including
Conclusions
Nonetheless, when it came to artistic endeavors, The
United States lagged behind
The turmoil of the Sixties, the great amalgam of ideas brought upon by a dissent with the post - World War II ideologies, with the technocratic, consumerist values exposed by a large population mass and with the growing brainwashing effect of the mass media, of the assault of the spectacle in society - all these have created the necessary environment for the proliferation of the new artistic endeavor of Pop artists; they have employed in their works a satire and a profound social commentary, which was a part of the counterculture wave sweeping across the continent, transposed onto the canvas.
Even if its beginnings can be traced back to the Old
Continent, it has evolved to be a genuinely American experience, which also
managed to shift the cultural poles of the world of art, elevating
I have also presented in a nutshell the former artistic styles, which have influenced to a larger or lesser extent the development of Pop art. The emergence of Pop art, nonetheless, was an unexpected and repelled happening in the American context at its beginnings, especially because its first critics saw in it the perpetuation of the popular culture, not the irony and satire it embodied.
In order to confer Pop art with the artistic appreciation it deserves, I have focused on delivering a theoretical approach, which links the criticism of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger and Clement Greenberg, with the theories of Arthur C. Danto, George Dickie, Noel Carroll and others on the ingenuous aesthetic choices of Pop artists in the artworld; in an era which is considered as the end of art, Pop artists both perpetuate this theory and negate it with the birth of a new, more inclusive art form, which brings under its umbrella both life and art. The times brought upon by the Culture Industry questioned art itself; Pop art, a paradoxical movement, aimed exactly at contesting the depreciating evaluations it received., and as Danto and Dickie have highlighted, it managed to fulfill this task.
After offering a theoretical frame for the Pop art movement, I have focused on the works of Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, in order to highlight the American exceptionalism in some of their masterpieces. These, along with other Pop artists, have reflected in their works the bridging of the gap between life and arts, just as the American nation managed to blend artists into its cultural realms through its assimilatory mechanisms, bridging the gap between different nations and cultures, as to show that impossible is nothing. In the Babel Tower of America, both American and immigrant artists set on delivering the epitome of the counterculture art movements: Pop art.
Further on, I have shifted attention to the further artistic endeavors on American soil, influenced by Pop art; graffiti art and fluxus, to mention just these two, have a message just as powerful and dissenting with the obsolete postwar mentality, as Pop art had. And last, but not least, I have brought forth the example of a genuinely Romanian Pop art manifestation in the twenty- first century, the Supernova case, as to show that the tentacles of Pop art reach far beyond its period of flourishing. The peculiarity of this case is rendered by the fall of communism, reinterpreted under the auspices of the Americanization of the global community. The Romanian group of artists has embodied in its dissenting thought the characteristic Romanian sarcasm and irony we are all familiar with, as to pinpoint the cultural roots of its works.
All in all, Pop art offered the mid - twentieth century American society an alternative to the middleclass values so conspicuously consumed, so conspicuously advertised and incorporated in the core societal value rankings. The countercultural aspect of Pop art transfigured it into one of the quintessential art movements in the twentieth century, contesting the existing values in society and art, both in theory and practice.
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Pictures of the enlisted works of art were retrieved from:
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https://faculty.indy.cc.ks.us/jnull/sculpassoldenburg.jpg
Definition of Art given by: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992, p. 46. 1. Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature. 2a. The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium. b. The study of these activities. c. The product of these activities; human works of beauty considered as a group. 3. High quality of conception or execution, as found in works of beauty; aesthetic value. 4. A field or category of art, such as music, ballet, or literature. 5. A nonscientific branch of learning; one of the liberal arts. 6a. A system of principles and methods employed in the performance of a set of activities: the art of building. b. A trade or craft that applies such a system of principles and methods: the art of the lexicographer. 7a. Skill that is attained by study, practice, or observation: the art of the baker; the blacksmith's art. b. Skill arising from the exercise of intuitive faculties: "Self-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practice" (Joyce Carol Oates). 8a.arts. Artful devices, stratagems, and tricks. b. Artful contrivance; cunning. 9. Printing Illustrative material.
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Cf. Craven, op. cit, p. 567. Hardedge Colorfield Painting :The term was coined in 1959, by Jules Langsner, writer, curator and Los Angeles Times art critic, referring to the works of a group of painters in California, most notably Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella, who rejected the painterly techniques and gestural brushstrokes of the Abstract Expressionists, adopting an impersonal type of paint application and delineated sectors of color, conferring sharpness and clarity to the artwork; the common elements, nonetheless, in both Hardedge Colorfield Painting and Abstract Expressionism were the complete independence of the work and a nonrepresentational style.
Named after Benjamin Day, illustrator and printer, the term refers to small colored dots, which, to create an optical illusion, are closely-spaced, widely-spaced or overlapping, being considered as an important technical element in the artistic career of Roy Lichtenstein especially, who enlarged them to an enormous scale in his works.
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Dickie, George, in Yanal, Robert J, The Institutional Theory of Art, reprinted in in Kelly, Michael (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Oxford University Press, 1988., p. 2.
Carroll, Noel, Modernity and the Plasticity of Perception, Symposium: The Historicity of the Eye, p. 15.
Carroll, Noel, The Ontology of Mass Art, in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 55, No. 2, Perspective on the Arts and Technology (Spring, 1997), pp. 187-199.
Rauschenberg, Robert, quoted in Hunter, Sam, American Art of The 20th Century: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1973, p. 325.
Cf. Adkinson Richardson, John, op. cit., p. 550. - the fact that these letters, pronounced in French, create the off-color pun: "Elle a chaud au cul!" is also a sign of nonconformist action
Kozloff,Max, Rauschenberg, December 7, 1963, reprinted in Peter G. Meyer (ed.), Brushes with History, Writing on Art from The Nation: 1865-2001, New York, Avalon Publishing Group Inc., 2001, p. 313.
Raushenberg, Robert, in Roberta J. M. Olsen, Raushenberg, The Extraordinary Ragpicker, Soho Weekly News, March 1977, p.23, reprinted in Sonja Longolius, Robert Raushenberg's 'Combines'-Masterpieces of the New Sensibility, Berlin, GRIN Verlag, 2007, p.3.
Claes
Oldenburg, Store Days,
Max
Kozloff, New Works by
https://www.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/PD--13720403/SP--A/IGID--2732086/Ten_Marilyns_c1967.htm?sOrig=SCH&ui=FAA2B2630BB54151B7DBD70F9BDF16B1
Jones, Caroline A., Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist.
Chicago,
Madoff , Steven Henry, ed. Pop Art: A Critical History.
https://www.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/PD--13573022/SP--A/IGID--2703418/Big_Torn_Campbells_Soup_Can_c1962_(Pepper_Pot).htm?sOrig=SCH&ui=FAA2B2630BB54151B7DBD70F9BDF16B1
Cf. Jones, Gerard
Men of Tomorrow-Geeks, Gangsters and the
Birth of the Comic Book;
Cf. Pearson, Roberta E. and Uricchio, William The Many Lives Of Batman-Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media, New York, Routledge ,Chapman and Hall,Inc, 1991., pp. 123-124.- A new style (U.P.A) developed on the animation field after the Second World War; this style transformed also the comic books and the earliest animated cartoons; they "grew up", and their adulthood was represented by an avalanche of gags, aggressive intelligence of the characters, intriguing and ironic scenes - a period which was exactly the opposite of the naďve, innocent moments described by Disney.
The images of the works of art of Roy Lichtenstein were retrieved from : https://www.lichtensteinfoundation.org/frames.htm
Cf.
Sell, Mike, Avant -Garde Performance and
the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings, Fluxus and
the Black Arts Movement,
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Adventures in Counterculture, p. 174, quoted in Andrew Johnson, "The End of Art or the Origin of the New Art?"
Cf. Mihulet, Anca, Un sequel in forta al pop-art-ului . si chiar mai mult decat atat, two chapters from her dissertation paper,p.9. , available online at: https://www.2020.ro/resources/files/SUPERNOVASIVERSION.pdf
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