The Story of Pop Art - part 2
Kings and Queens of the Wild Frontier
‘Goring’s epigram ‘When I hear the word “culture” I reach for my gun’ was a frank declaration of war on the intellect: the rider must obey the horse.’
(Ghost in the Machine. Arthur Koestler. Hutchinson & Co, p258. 1967.)
Cubism represented a radical break with the nineteenth century, and its challenging if lyrical functionalism presented back to the urban viewer what they had seen happening with the factories of the industrial revolution. Marcel Duchamp experimented with cubist painting, but quickly jumped to become the first real conceptual artist. He predicted the century in questioning what art was in a time of questions and imminent conflict, and after a couple more high profile concept art installations and happenings, retired to play chess (often in public). Duchamp had ushered in the Dada movement, which itself had taken the simpler surrealism and brought it into the real world. Surrealism was gentle, painterly and fun, inspired by the psychoanalytic work in dreams by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Dada was more political, inspired by a dissatisfaction with logic and rationality, and informing cultural anarchism. In Italy, Umberto Boccioni and friends combined the nihilism of Dada and dash of cubism to create futurism, or paintings and sculptures of action. Futurism would come to be associated with Mussolini’s fascist party by dint of their nationality and forthrightness — but its clean lines were just that; they were just intended to be fresh and new, there was no real cruelty in them. Germany’s functional industrial design Bauhaus of the inter-war Weimar republic, spawning Paul Klee and Wasily Kandinsky as teachers and makers, was the commercial face of that country’s visual culture.
The expressionism of Munch and his pained vortices, Gustav Klimt’s intricately patterned romanticism and Egon Schiele’s neurotic sexuality were also becoming popular and their anxious stylisations well captured the frenetic tension of the day. The first world war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen dominated in its black and white simplicity, and the diaries of Anne Frank attempted to illustrate, explain or somehow compensate for the worst excesses of the second. With the mid-1940s surrender of Germany, atomic bombs dropped on Japan and formation of the United Nations, the now jaded gaze of the art world fell upon New York, and the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Marc Rothko. The dynamic drip and splatter paintings of the former contrasted dramatically with the vast, calm, meditative stillness of the latter. Pollock was by all accounts a violent alcoholic and Rothko would later ‘slash his wrists to the bone’ in suicide, but they were nevertheless ahead of Willem De Kooning, Clifford Styll, Bridget Riley and Yves Klein in the Big Action Painting boom, then orbiting the rock n’ roll world. In the late 50s and into the 60s, the grainy black and white focus remained on New York, but now split its lens with London.
The Beatles invasion coincided with the pop art of Andy Warhol, Roy Liechtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg, with their silkscreen repetition, cartoon comic strips and pop culture collages. The pop artists (as much graphic designers) were asking in an age of unlimited mass reproduction what constituted art? Pop and conceptual art started to collide with more regularity as Peter Blake’s celebrity covered cover for the Beatles album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band jostled for space in the broadsheets with installation sculptor Christo’s wrapping of world landmarks in fabric, challenging preconceptions of reality and appearance. The hippy dream dead, the glammy and greedy 70s and 80s took free will and applied the self, producing the electrified static of David Bowie, Jeff Koons, Yoko Ono, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel and a brave new raft of highly respected auteur film directors.
The late twentieth century was magical for the elevation of film to high art, from Roman Polanski to Quentin Tarantino; style became poetry, and script design became the dynamics of line. Koons and Warhol had demonstrated the close connection between advertising and art, and Saatchi & Saatchi in London in the early 1990s fully exploited that, putting on the Sensations exhibition (and politically backing the Conservative party in the UK.) The Young British Artists of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Fiona Rae and the Chapman brothers dominated the art world of the end of the century, as (even more than Charles Saatchi had), Tony Blair upended the relationship between politics and culture, with his ‘Oasis and Spice Girls’ version of cutting edge culture. Things could only get better. Illegal wars, the millenium dome, the war on terror, the economic crash, the internet, fakes news, the first black president and Banksy were over the buggy hillock of the year 2000 — but it was the preceding century which had seen the most terrifying, epochal, seismic shifts ever seen in human development: the 21st century had its artistic work cut out.
David Bowie’s avatarial ‘Sailor’ character, sometimes happily bantering with fans (the more beknighted of whom secretly knew it was their hero) drifted away from his own BowieNet virtual community in the early days of the 21st century. It seemed as if he had spent so many years waiting for ‘the coming man’ of the approaching millenium, the dissolute, ephemeral, zip-light character premonished by Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke and co, that the reality of it that he had helped usher in was a bit of a let down. How could it not be? The future of our imaginations, fired more by him than others, could never match up to the reality of time unfolding. The end of harsh free market capitalism coincided with Green Values, and a recycling ethos where nothing new was ever produced, all ideas had been used (up), the waste-free paperless office was upon us and what work that couldn’t be done by androids could mostly be done at home. So it was no longer necessary to leave your home to be productive, and it was less wasteful to do so too; short term jobs were paid by the hour for competitive tenured contracts rarely worth beyond £200, heavy-lifting research done by Google, and small gaps of human touch/empathy/wit necessary to give the inkling of organicness required taking the last fifteen minutes of the project before it had to be handed in, approximately twenty four hours later.
The inconvenient discomfort of Depth of Experience had been removed, as had space, time to breathe, pacing, thought at its own time, pre and post-reflection, and positive stasis. These were all seen as unnecessary and unproductive obstacles to productivity; bot-writing programmes were by programme developing their own idiosynsratic styles and wit, and were already way ahead in the facts. 3D printing could produce ten exact copies of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, each the exact same dimensions as the original, or to make them interesting having the heads of the flowers in different states of exhaustion for each product, then all connected up as one Super-Warholian painting. Around £300 would appear to be a fair price for such a work, the main challenge being how to transport it to the buyer’s home — a pain, and a waste of time, getting in the way or otherwise optimum productivity and consumers living the best versions of their lives. Maybe breaking the full piece down again, then reconstituting it at the buyer’s house could be the idea, if they had a space that could take it. If they didn’t, maybe the buyer could rearrange it in any way that the house’s dimensions would accommodate — also if the buyer wasn’t then happy with the colour schemes when they got it home, an algorithm built into the painting could activate with the press of a switch that would change the colour, from swatches retrievable from alongside the pieces. Sunflowers wouldn’t have to be the only subject either; maybe roses, daffodils or hydrangeas would suit your living room better. The options were endless really, only dependent on renewable electricity and some core materials for the 3D printer.
Still, these are more descriptions of ‘recycling art’ (a-la Marcel Duchamp’s readymades) than the more reflexive interpretive art. Recycling is an endless cultural saming, more similar to cultural Marxism than the flashes of the new. Interpretive art may take a video of a band rehearsing in a garage; posterise, reverse, master, then present it on nine televisions on a blacked-out stage in a(n underused) live music venue. Play on repeat, in 3D sound. It portrays the band, the music, or a version of it — their visuals, live experience, and the moment of watching live music. The making and appreciating of interpretive art is a question of confidence; of running with the ball and going as far with it as you can.
Open file, click record. Gary Numan, plastic-skinned, fascistic and robotic, stared psychotically out from millions of enormous teak-cased televisions in the corner of thick-carpetted living rooms across the UK, as Margaret Thatcher came to and consolidated power in the late 1970s. Adam Ant predator-stared before that could get you questioned or charged; replendant in Waterloo-inspired, Duke of Wellington finery and native American thick white make up stripe which every young boy would have a go at emulating, from his foot-squared place on the floor of the burgundy flock-wallpapered dining room, just next to the record player whose stylus was soon to be at risk of Grandmaster Flash-inspired, cack-handed experiments in domestic hip-hop. Ant’s Kings of the Wild Frontier was lined up sequentially in front of Spike Jones and his City Slickers, The Police and The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Revolver albums. The Technicolor phantasmagoria of Peter Blake’s design of the former, and black and white, art deco-style illustration of the latter fab four albums was in fact proto art rock personified; pre-naming, and pre-Bowie. For if The Beatles and the Beach Boys invented the nascent, raw kind of pop music from which all its myriad forms spiralled out, then David Bowie and Roxy Music conceptualised art rock when its own societal time came — because art needs conceptualising, damnit.
The throwaway, existential, pre-pubescent good times of She Loves You and Surfin’ Safari’ had been supplanted by the deeper, sexier, more dangerous, bizarro likes of Viginia Plain and Moonage Daydream — it was album tracks over singles, it was literary BBC2 over light entertainment ITV, it meant something and could be bended around the generations — art rock/pop was accidentally timeless. While a certain strand of indie purist might hold that only ‘classic’ artists in the seam of Talking Heads or MGMT can be considered real art-pop or rock, it’s in fact more of a head space than a sound (though adventurousness in one often goes with excitement in the other). Aim for balance in all things. Except art.
State of Independence: From Pop Art to Art Rock and Beyond https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0B45DXC98/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tu00_p1_i0
