Art for the Consumer
A rather abrupt deviation from the traditional mimesis of artistic trade emerged during the 1950s, as the world recovered from yet another global conflict. As the post-war era crept along, numerous instances of recognizable imagery began manifesting themselves, circulating in the mass media with various replications and modifications. Though this movement had made its way from England to the United States in the early fifties, the term Pop Art was not deployed until the year 1955, in which Reyner Banham suggestively implemented the term.
Challenging the orthodox formalism of post-modernism, Pop Artists used prefabricated images, removed from their context, isolated, and combined with unrelated material to fill their compositions, echoing the growing pains of a
post-war consumer society. Pop art reflected the idea of the readymade, as the artwork replayed within the context of the industrialized process of mechanical production and reproduction and the resulting feeling of flatness and expressive void. Their aim was to revitalize the image and make it seem more resonant by the virtue of being deployed as it was originally found rather than deliberately reconfiguring the work of another artist.
Through this process, everyday objects that would otherwise seem mundane, transformed into brilliant displays of assembled pieces that through their combination, were elevated to the next level. Such concepts are featured in Edward Ruscha’s Standard Station or Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam! The latter Pop artists began incorporating images from mass media, which was not entirely new as it was done previously in Cubist, Dada, and Surrealist work. Nonetheless, these new iterations were distinctive in the way they transformed the image through reframing, replicating in a different medium, and rescaling. This is best exemplified in Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe, in which a large, high quality print of a celebrity is drastically cropped around the face and above the shoulders for emphasis to then be transformed in the studio and placed in a golden background. The combined effect of the movement’s “recycled” pieces and elements engraved a lasting impression, which remains embedded into American history and continues to influence art, publishing, and advertising.
The artists of the Pop Art movement, like others before them such as Marcel Duchamp, questioned the very definition of art. Artists blurred the lines between commercial and fine art. They challenged the idea that art was to be produced and consumed by the elevated few within the established art world. Instead they declared that art was everywhere, and the glorified artist was not the sole owner of the word. The influences of this cultural revolution still are evident in our mass produced global community. We encourage people, young and old, to take control of this expressive from expression.
Please feel free to print out this blank Campbell's Soup worksheet that was glorified by Andy Warhol.