The Luo Brothers - Welcome the World Famous Brand Name (1993)
Monday, June 13, 2011
media-saturation
Considered as a whole, pop exemplifies a mixed response to mass culture: some examples appear to celebrate consumer products and media stars, while others indicate a critical, analytical response. The term 'pop art' encompasses a wide variety of paintings, sculptures, prints and collages produced by professional artists who used popular culture and mass media material as sources of iconography, techniques and conventions of representation. Pop art can be characterized as a meta-art or meta-language (a meta-language is any language used to talk about another language) in that it takes as its object of scrutiny not reality perceived directly but existing representations of reality and in the realms of graphic design, packaging, the cinema, etc. The fact that the pop artists did not follow the impressionists and work directly from nature is an acknowledgement that, for modem city dwellers, 'nature' - in the sense of fields, trees and mountains - has been almost completely replaced by a humanly constructed world of buildings, interiors, motorways, signs, posters, newspapers, magazines, films, radio broadcasts, television transmissions and computer simulations. In short, billions live in a media-saturated environment.
"action" painting
Roy Lichtenstein - Little Big Painting (1965)
In 'Little Big Painting,’ Lichtenstein’s subject-matter is a detail of brushwork from an action painting. Action painting was a sub-category of abstract expressionism, the dominant art movement of the post-1945 period. At one and the same time, Lichtenstein pays homage to his forebears and renounces them by parodying their stylistic mannerisms.
Abstract expressionist painting was emotional, intuitive, spontaneous, autographic, personal, serious and morally committed - in short, a 'hot' or romantic style. American pop painting, by contrast, was unemotional, deliberate, systematic, impersonal, ironic, detached, non-autographic and amoral - a 'cool' or classical style. In action painting the violent, direct brushstroke was the sign of an existential authenticity; Lichtenstein's painting presents us with the sign of the sign of authenticity. As a result, the mark is drained of all energy, its movement is frozen, it is transformed into a decorative emblem. The paint-thickness and substance of the original is denied by Lichtenstein who makes the stroke even more two-dimensional so that it does not sit on the surface of the canvas in the same way - it becomes more illusionistic. Lichtenstein takes a small detail and inflates it. He thereby implies that action painting has become overblown, that its pictorial rhetoric no longer carries conviction. The automatism of action painting, he seems to be saying, has become automatic.
By using the conventions of representation derived from graphic design, Lichtenstein presents us with brushstrokes which appear to have undergone mechanical reproduction and processing. (This suggests that his source material may have been a reproduction of an action painting rather than an actual action painting.) The pop painting looks mechanical but the irony is that it too was painted by hand - only Lichtenstein has gone to great trouble to hide the fact. Another irony: a painting whose subject-matter is brushstrokes is executed in such a way that the minute brushstrokes which formed the image are disguised.
Lichtenstein's strategy was to translate the 'language' of abstract expressionism into the 'language' of graphic design. 'Non-commercial' fine art appears to have become commercial applied art. Again, the implication is that by the 1960s abstract expressionism had become hopelessly commercialized and mediatized, and therefore it had ceased to deserve its high moral and artistic status. It is relevant to add that the leading action painter, Jackson Pollock, was one of the first American artists to benefit from the full mass media treatment - an article and picture spread in Life magazine (8 August 1949). In an analysis of the marketing of the abstract expressionists, Bradford Collins has argued that they were sold on the basis of a bohemian legend. It is evident from the above analysis that some knowledge of painting and the history of American art since 1945 is required before the iconoclastic implications of 'Little Big Painting' can be understood. To generalize: works of art whose subject-matter is other works of art, or which employ self-referential devices, are likely to appeal mainly to an artworld audience, to those knowledgeable enough to be able to grasp the references and in-jokes. Works of art that take as their subject matter familiar media images, in contrast, have the possibility of being appreciated by people without specialist knowledge.
Whaam!
Roy Lichtenstein - Cup and Saucer (1966)
In these sculptures representational conventions are foregrounded and/or made literal. Lichtenstein's intention is to focus our attention on the artist's 'language', the 'how' rather than the 'what', the form rather than the content. In interviews he has stated that it was the abstract qualities of form, colour and the means of depiction that appealed to him about comic strips rather their content. Lichtenstien's work is figurative, and yet it is a subtle kind of abstraction or formalism. For most viewers, however, the content of his work is still important.
'Whaam!', a painting which freezes the decisive moment of violent conflict between two jet fighters, is one of Lichtenstein's most famous works. War comics - the source for 'Wham!' and several other, related paintings - utilize an emblematic style which precludes any sense of the actual horror and suffering of war. Lichtenstein's method of reworking such imagery pushes it even further towards the decorative. Both are examples of what Raymond Williams once called 'the culture of distance': the audience is distanced, shielded from the reality of war by the antiseptic style of representation. Viewers who can imagine what death in air combat must be like may well find the contradiction between 'Whaam!'s' violent content and the cheerful, decorative manner with which it is depicted, chilling.
Roy Lichtenstein - Whaam! (1963)
fragmented self
When I first laid eyes on the Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris, for example, I was drawn to Leonardo da Vinci's small masterpiece by the famous smile and struck by how the face before me appeared unified and immediately recognizable. Yet I knew that behind that familiar face was an illusion. I thought of Picasso's portrait of Dora Maar, who was the artist's muse, model, and lover. Picasso's fractured perspective creates facial features that have seemingly unnatural relationships and proportions. Most of us find da Vinci's Mona Lisa much closer to the way we normally perceive the world than Dora's disjointed planes. But the brain makes us who we are from a jumble of components that are fragmented and distributed through the cortex and thalamus in a way. that is analogous to the way Picasso sometimes painted.
Pablo Picasso - Portrait of Dora Maar (1937)
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