Learning Journal exercise: Pop Art

I was sadly not present for last week’s lecture on Pop Art. But I will do this exercise based on the reading material, videos and links given on the moodle page.

The pages on Pop art covered reading a small history or the movement’s theories and artists. Reading a manifesto from one of the artists of the time. A little bit of history from the Tate website. Watching a lecture on Andy Warhol having trouble keeping up in the world of commercial illustration. And Finally looking through a digital gallery of works of Pop art by many artists, it also came with some questions to think on.

I feel the most important ideas in in these pages is the perceived rebellion against what was seen as worthy of being art. Making art about things like advertisements, foods, cars, comics, and movie posters. It’s all very crass and graceless. It seems the most important thing here is the desire to get dirty and down with the common folk rather thinking about arty things.

It seems like a misstep to me. You should be defined by what you are. Not what you’re not.

The work I found most interesting were the paintings of Roslyn Drexler. That might be a bit disappointing with her being the most “Normal” artist on display here. I liked her bold colours and strong sense of power. She adds to emotion to the posters she bases her works on and gets to the heart of what she sees. But it does make her work comparitively safe when the rest of the pop artists was have seemed to be making pure nonsense back in the day. That lack of “madness” is probably why she is so much less well known

I also find the works or Roy Lichtenstein interesting. But for all the wrong reasons. I find his work to be a cold mockery of comic book art. Draining it of all the drama and emotion that makes the medium so powerful and just leaving behind tropes and conventions of the medium. A cruel parody of the art of the working classes done by a rich, wealthy man. The fact Lichtenstien is reported to have been frightened of the men he stole from would suggest he felt that way too.

reading up on him here has done nothing to warm me up to the man.

 

Does any of this relate back to my subject, animation? I don’t think so. Animation as it’s name would suggest is about bringing things to life. Pop art takes living art of others. kills it. and puts it’s corpse on display where educated people can see it. Animation is used to tell stories and build characters. Even abstract animation follows this rule. Pop art doesn’t have stories and characters. It has bits on piece of those things taken out of their context and preserve as some kind of record of what life outside the museum might be like.

Animation creates. Pop art records the creations of others.

 

The part I struggled with the most was listening to the lecture on Andy Warhol’s strugges in the advertising world. I just didn’t find it interesting and I really wanted to be doing other things.

I guess I could fix this by trying to watch it in smaller parts rather than trying to watch it all in one go.

 

 

As for the final question. My feelings on pop art remain unchanged despite having read up on it in greater detail now. Maybe I’m just being closed minded but everything I read just seemed to confirm my feelings. Pop art is a cold and cynical movement more concerned with the meta-context around itself than making good art.

It is often said a good work of art stands on it’s own merits. Regardless of who made it or when it was made. Honestly I with Pop art to be crude, cold, and uninteresting with or without context.

When Andy Warhol and Wolf Vostell paint bottles of Coca-Cola I don’t get any thing from either one, even though their styles are so different. One is crude and the other is elegant. But niether seems to say anything about coke. I don’t sense nostalgia, hatred, fear, relief or anything a sugary drink might inspire. Just a statement of “This is a thing that exists”

And I already knew that.

 

But putting my personal feelings aside. I still think it’s failure. In his manifesto  Lawrence Alloway says he wants art that relates to the common man and the world he lives in. A man who might vanish and turn up three weeks later painting walls for money.

But Pop art refuses to see why things like soup cans, movie stars, Comic books, and cars matter so much to people who can’t afford to study philosophy. It is part of the cycle of left for them. Not a crazy oddity to be broken down and remade. When actual working class people make art they make rap and Reggie music. They draw comic books about flying Snowmen and gun toting Judges. They paint great works of biblical art on the city walls or make fairylands of floating rubbish. They don’t make art about drinking coke. They make art about being human.

 

Pop art failed miserably. It ended up being more elitist and removed from real life than Abstract Expressionism could have ever dreamed of being.