Pop Goes the Art World

Strong emotions may arise from the subjects presented by Pop art, but this style rarely takes inspiration from the spiritual, sensitive, emotionally expressive. In fact, Pop can be seen as a direct reaction against abstract expressionism, the preceding movement that tried to appeal to the viewer's emotions through pure color and form (very much like the painting discussed in the previous blog).  Pop art is more concerned with the exterior rather than interior--cultural criticism prevails over the internal angst.  Because of this, Pop art was thought to be a more accessible or democratic art form and therefore more attuned to contemporary life.  Pop artists began to grow tired of anything related to the reconciliation of  blobs of paint and human emotion.  They wanted to explore the human condition through tangible, worldly associations.  So they made fun of what they didn't like.  Pop art revels in parody, humor, kitsch, graffiti, pornography, satire, comics etc.--anything that is typically seen as low brow culture by the bourgeoisie.  

The most well know pop artist is of course Andy Warhol.  I'll use his Gold Marilyn of 1962 (below left) and Lee Krasner's Celebration of 1960 (below right) to better illustrate this transition.

Krasner's painting depends on the viewer's imagination and emotional sensibility.  Nothing from the real world is depicted in this image to signify a specific celebration.  The only way to connect the painting with its title therefore, is to imagine the general implications of the color and form.  This is by no means a somber, quiet image.  It's loud and boisterous.  Every form merges into the other in an orgiastic chaos that could only allude to a celebration of music and dance.  The brushstrokes are aggressive, agitated, and very conspicuously applied, with large globs of paint producing heavy impasto.  The shapes are biomorphic (of or relating to nature) and individually discernible as if these entities within the image are moving and dancing in dynamic motion; but every identity is nondescript.  No reference to reality is indicated, the viewer is left to fill those gaps him/herself.

The Warhol on the other hand, leaves nothing to the viewer's imagination.  Whereas in the Krasner painting, the entities  are unidentifiable and the cause for celebration is ambiguous; in the Warhol, the spectator is confronted with an instantaneously recognizable subject, a screen printed image of Marilyn Monroe, the great starlet of the 50s and 60s.  The image is silkscreened onto a canvas that is covered in gold leaf.  It's a very frontal image, simplistic in nature, mysterious in meaning.  

When the Viennese Symbolist artist, Gustav Klimt, produced his Kiss in 1907-08 (below left) people constantly referenced it's gold leaf embellishments as an homage to Byzantine mosaics and iconic portraiture (below right).   Warhol parallels Klimt's modus operandi, but does it in a much more modern way. Consider the year Warhol created this painting, 1962--the same year of Marilyn Monroe's death.  This is not a portrait so much as it is a memento mori (an object serving as a warning or reminder of death, such as a skull).  Warhol asks the viewer to remember Monroe just as the Byzantines remembered the great monastic recluses of their time--icons (or a person representative of a symbol of something).  In a sense, he's making fun of this very serious art tradition where the great religious men of the past are remembered forever by means of art.  Here Warhol attempts to commemorate the great people of the past (men or women (or both)) who were the main protagonists in his fascination of glamour and fashion.   

But Marilyn Monroe was representative of nothing else but decadence and glamour gone wrong in hollywood right?  You'd be half right, but if you stop there, Andy wins.  Think about the term "superficial."  Warhol loves superficiality.  He loves assimilation, disguise, deception,  and any other entity that distracts people from reality.  This includes things like glamour, fashion, make up and the like.  Why would he want to do this?  Partially because I think Warhol liked to play games with his viewers.  The Krasner painting lends itself to a very subjective experience, one could imagine all sorts of things happening within it and one may also feel isolated from the celebration or comforted by it's optimistic bright colors and dynamic shapes.  Warhol demands a much more methodological reading of his paintings.  He likes the unsolved riddle to have layers to peel apart. Warhol after all was so often mischaracterized as a no brainer, pop idiot who didn't know whether he was a foot or horseback (could you blame his critics?  Consider the video below). 

The truth is, it was all a farce. Warhol was very well versed in art history and knew exactly what he was doing.  He wanted to portray himself a certain way in order to (I think) be somewhat of a performance artist, one who truly lives their performance and makes people think of him in a very specific way.  This was as much of a deception as Marilyn Monroe's career, because everyone knows that Marilyn was not as happy in her private life as she was on screen.  Everything about Marilyn Monroe was part of her performance, it wasn't real.  From her relations with men, to her very name (Marilyn Monroe's real name was Norma Gene) Marilyn Monroe was an embodiment of the fake, or make believe glamour.  She played as much of a bimbo persona as Warhol and both pulled it off miraculously (Marilyn Monroe had an IQ of 163 which at the time would have made her the intellectual equivalent of Einstein).

So what do we have with Gold Marilyn?  A prediction.  A screen printed photograph that commemorates what Warhol saw as the quintessential celebrity of our time.  He very much predicted our culture's fascination with fame and fame's ability to lead to it's victim's demise (either by reputation or in death).  But look again and consider the nature of her actual portrait.  Warhol brilliantly paints over the screenprinted photo, as if to add yet another layer of glamour onto the pure or real photo.  The luminous color then represents the celebrity of Marilyn Monroe that was painted onto the real woman of Norma Gene, and of course he does this throughout his career with virtually every main celebrity of through the 80s.  

Emotionless, sterile, severe?  Maybe.  But prescient?  Certainly.  Warhol allows the viewer to see the world through his eyes, bereft of spiritual transcendence.  But yet another layer to Warhol's superficial work of art is it's entire disparate meaning from one's first glance assumption.  Most of Warhol's art has deep theological, darker meanings about existentialism, ontology, and death.  He leaves the viewer to pick apart these deeper meanings instead of providing all of the answers.

The battle between abstraction and real world motifs continues to this day.  Which do you prefer and why?  What other cultural phenomena did Warhol predict and is that the appeal of great artists in general?  Is the role of the artist partially to predict the future?