We live in a world ruled by pop princesses and pancake houses, where video games have replaced books and writers no longer need grammar. But look deeper, and it’s easy to see that our sometimes witless world remains an inquisitive and clever place. In short essays, our writers probe those signs of intelligent life.
POP ART
In 1962, Andy Warhol sparked an uproar in the art world with an exhibition of 32 canvases depicting Campbell’s soup cans, each one corresponding to a different variety of soup the company sold at the time.
The screen-printed images were crass, lowbrow and — as time has proved — brilliant. He realized that mass media and mass marketing were triggering a massive societal transformation, and his seemingly kitschy soup cans became potent symbols of those changes.
But even Warhol, as prescient as he was, could never have foreseen the gargantuan and still-growing role that media, which have morphed into all kinds of novel technological forms, play in every aspect of our lives.
The pervasiveness of these new media explains why pop imagery has regained nearly as strong a role in contemporary art today as it had five decades ago. That is especially true in China, which is experiencing the kind of upsurge in commercialism and consumerism that swept the United States in the 1950s and ’60s.
In a 2008 canvas titled “The Sweet Embrace,” Zhao Bo concocts a crowded scene in which a cartoonish couple is depicted in front of a fantastical structure combining elements of the Forbidden City with a mound of recognizable signs topped by the familiar golden arches of McDonald’s.
Just like Warhol’s soup cans, the scene is crass and lowbrow in its way, yet the political and capitalist symbolism is so immediately recognizable that its message is instantaneous and unmistakable.
But China holds no monopoly on neo- pop art. In an installation last year at Denver’s Plus Gallery, Thornton artist Colin Livingston presented his distinctive take on the commodification of art — another Warholian theme.
He convincingly re-created a store, complete with overhead signs and even a cash register, stocking the shelves and racks with dozens of paintings and sculptures — sized small, medium and large.
Pop continues to shape the art world, because the societal forces that sparked it in the 1960s, though they have evolved, exert as huge an influence on the way we live as ever. And if anything, corporate logos like the golden arches are even more omnipresent and charged symbols.
Put simply, the low art of pop has become the high art of our time.
Kyle MacMillan
See ‘related items,’ above right, for 8 other signs of intelligent life in The Age of Stupid.
