Pop Culture: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation
Date: January 10, 2014 – April 20, 2014
Curated By: Billie Milam Weisman
Venue: Boca Museum of Art
501 Plaza Real, Boca Raton, FL, 33432
https://www.bocamag.com/artists-re-create-subvert-american-pop-culture/
Exhibited Artists:
Douglas Argue, Richard Artschwager, Charles Bell, Blake Boyd, Roger Brown, John Chamberlain, John Matos CRASH, Date Farmers, Daze, Gilbert & George, Paolo Grassino, Red Grooms, Keith Haring, Vincent James, Pamela Michelle Johnson, Seung-Joo Kim, Yayoi Kusama, Andrew Lewicki, Srdjan Loncar, Maberry + Walker, Aaron Mcnamee, Blue McRight, Greg Miller, Joel Morrison, Daniel Oates, Claes Oldenburg, Todd Pavlisko, Giancarlo Pazzanese, Michelangelo Pistoletto, José Luis Quiñones, RETNA, James Rosenquist, Kim Rugg, Masaaki Sato, Richard Sigmund, Michael Speaker, Keung Szeto, Masami Teraoka, Robert Townsend, Alison Van Pelt, Mark Dean Veca, Andy Warhol, John Waters, and Yoram Wolberger.
Pop Culture: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation
When the Pop art movement first began in the mid 1950s, artists sought to challenge traditional conceptions of art making by incorporating aspects of consumer culture and everyday objects into their work. Artists during this period transformed those icons associated with mass media, comic books, and popular culture into visuals that often reflected a growing societal infatuation with consumerism. When it originated, the Pop art movement strove to ironically emphasize images representing the kitschy or clichéd elements of a given culture. Today, contemporary artists have elaborated on the traditions established by the Pop artists who created an aesthetic that reflected the changing needs and interests of varying societies. This exhibition brings together art that comments on popular culture of today and the vernacular of the 1960s with selected works curated from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation.
One of the most notable figures in the Pop art movement, Andy Warhol, placed images linked to consumerism, advertising, and entertainment celebrities at the forefront of his artistic production. Warhol laid much of the groundwork for his contemporaries by creating repeating silkscreen images of entertainment icons such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, which became known as his signature style. Artists today, such as Paul Rusconi, continue this tradition by portraying celebrity icons such as Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes in much the same vain. Whereas Warhol completely engaged the consumer object in its mass-disseminated original identity, Claes Oldenburg transformed banal articles into extraordinary works of varying scales and media, effectively abandoning conventional assumptions about visual demonstration. By employing comparable artistic methods, Srdjan Loncar depicts sculptural representations of antiquated pay phones and cell phones often through unexpected mediums.
Illustrations of the traditional American lifestyle became a prominent subject in the work of many Pop and contemporary artists. In the 1970s, Arman created Football Shoes, an assemblage of athletic shoes encased in a Plexiglas box, which evokes the decadence of a commodity-driven, throwaway society. By drawing attention to functional objects, works such as this comment on how we place undue importance on even the most mundane events in our lives. More recently, Joel Morrison’s Alligator Shoes take an unusual approach to traditional subject matter by creating juxtaposition between art and functionality. He comments on the duality of modern society by forming a dialogue between mainstream American culture and the alternative Punk lifestyle by casting the all-American casual Vans shoe with metal studs. Akin to the work of Arman and Morrison, Red Grooms chronicled the pleasures and absurdities of ordinary American life in the 1980s. In The Blue Restaurant, Grooms illustrates a cross section of society by depicting a local pool hall complete with figures wearing T-shirts, tennis shoes and varsity jackets.
The work of Keith Haring in a parallel sense incorporates some of the elements of contemporary life into his work. First known for his graffiti-inspired drawings in the subways of New York City, he elevated his iconic style by creating paintings on canvas that were eventually displayed world-wide. Artist Daze painted his graffiti art on utilitarian motorcycles, while Crash spray painted his images directly onto traditional canvases. Contemporary artist Retna has created his own unique language that is a blend of ancient script and graffiti. In a related sense, punctuation marks and other ideas associated with language have been incorporated into the art of Richard Artschwager as well as in video and digitalized works by Nam June Paik and Jenny Holzer. These works illuminate the manner in which consumerism is articulated through language, technology, and the public domain as a whole.
Throughout the history of the Pop art movement and extending into the present, cartoon, game and comic book characters like Pinocchio, Supergirl, Spiderman, and Pennybags, from the Monopoly board game, have been appropriated in the work of artists such as Blake Boyd, Greg Miller, and Mark Dean Veca, who sought to display popular fictional characters as the subjects of artworks. John Chamberlain, José Quiñones, Robert Townsend, Pamela Michelle Johnson and Andrew Lewicki respectively use crushed metal, beverage advertisements, kitchen appliances and junk food to more closely align consumer culture with artistic production.
The works on view demonstrate conceptions of Pop art as they emerged in the 1950s and 60s, as well as the ways contemporary artists today have extended and elaborated upon visual representations of mass culture and consumerism. Pop artists and their successors abandoned the traditions associated with high art in favor of works based upon the conventionalized imagery of commercial graphics. This exhibition demonstrates how the Pop art movement’s extensive history and vocabulary have influenced artistic production in our present cultural moment.