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Manifesto Scale and Context. MACRO. Pop Art emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in parallel in the late 1950s in the United States. It refers to Pop ular culture. It is characterized by themes and techniques drawn from advertising and comic books.
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Manifesto Scale andContext
Pop Art emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in parallel in the late 1950s in the United States. It refers to Popular culture. It is characterized by themes and techniques drawn from advertising and comic books. Like pop music, Pop Art aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasising the banal (everyday) or kitschy elements of any given culture.
Claes Oldenburg was a famous Pop Artist, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects.
"I am for an art that is political-erotic-mystical, that does something else than sit on its ass in a museum." -- Claes
His sculptures, though quite large, often had interactive capabilities. One such interactive early sculpture was a soft sculpture of a tube of lipstick which would deflate unless a participant re-pumped air into it.
Many of Oldenburg's giant sculptures of mundane objects elicited public ridicule before being embraced as whimsical, insightful and fun additions to public outdoor art.
"The main reason for the colossal objects is the obvious one, to expand and intensify the presence of the vessel -- the object," Oldenburg has said. "Perhaps I am more a still-life painter -- using the city as a tablecloth."
The artists who participated in the Pop Art movement took ordinary objects from daily life and forced us to look at them in a new way. They made the objects bigger than life and/or repeated the images so that we couldn't ignore them.
In the case of Claes Oldenburg, the completed artwork was also placed in a particular environment. . . sometimes an unusual one. Oldenburg often used images of food, such as hamburgers, French fries, an apple core, a baked potato, etc., to name just a few.
“100 Cans”, Andy Warhol, oil on canvas, 1962
Warhol tended toward items mass-produced in the commercial art world. “Marilyn Monroe”, 1962
“Knives”, Andy Warhol, 1981-82, acrylic and silk screen ink on canvas
What do you see as the popular images of today that could be celebrated in a Pop Art sculpture?
What might a modern-day pop artist living in a Middle Eastern country select for a pop art image?
Sublime: adj 1: inspiring awe 2: worthy of adoration or reverence 3. lifted up or set high 4. that which is grand in nature or art, as distinguished from the merely beautiful
“Sublime” refers to an aesthetic value in which the primary factor is the presence or suggestion of transcendent vastness or greatness, as of power, heroism, extent in space or time. It differs from greatness or grandeur in that these are as such capable of being completely grasped or measured. By contrast, the sublime, while in one aspect apprehended and grasped as a whole, is felt as transcending our normal standards of measurement or achievement. Two elements are emphasised in varying degree by different writers: 1) a certain baffling of our faculties by a feeling of limitation akin to awe and veneration; 2) a stimulation of our abilities and elevation of the self in sympathy. (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The two philosophers most associated with the sublime are Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Burke said, “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operated in a manner analagous to terror, is a source of the Sublime, that is, it is capable of producing the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling”. (http://saucyjack.phys.columbia.edu/sjk/node7.html) Burke believed vastness and uniformity could produce a sense of the sublime. He believed delight was closely related to the sublime but differentiated between delight and pleasure. Pleasure=beauty=society Delight=sublime=personal
John Singleton Copley, 1778, “?” Copley’s painting depicts the rescue of Brooke Watson, who was a young orphan working on a trading vessel when the attack took place. He was repeatedly bitten by the same shark before being rescued, and his leg had to be amputated below the knee. It was rare to survive such traumatic episodes back in the eighteenth century, but Watson survived. In fact, Watson survived long enough to actually see Copley’s 1778 painting. Nor was he a poor trader at the time either. He had moved to London in 1759, become a successful trader, and eventually a Member of Parliament. (All of this after his early life in Cuba, trips to the American colonies before the Revolutionary War and forays into Canada.) Almost a decade after Copley’s painting was finished, Watson went on to his most prestigious post: in 1796, the man known to the world as a young orphan so near death in Copley’s painting served as Lord Mayor of London.
For Immanuel Kant, the sublime could not apply to objects, only to the mind. He felt the sublime represented a force larger than a human, so that in its presence a person experienced a state of awe. • He felt: • The sublime is something which arouses enjoyment but also horror • Beauty is different from the sublime. It is a pleasant sensation making one feel joyous • The sublime must always be great but simple e.g. a vista that moves one • Beauty on the other hand must be small but ornate e.g. something which charms one like a field of daisies • The sublime is that which is great. It moves a person with elation, terror, delight and awe. • Night, according to Kant, is Sublime, while Day is Beautiful. Tall oaks and lonely shadows are Sublime while flower beds, low hedges and shaped trees are Beautiful.
Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”, 1818
Caspar David Friedrich, “Arctic Shipwreck”, 1824 It has been said that Friedrich’s work symbolises the “inaccessible majesty of God”. The persistent existence of ice in the Polar sea signifies God’s eternal being, while the wrecked ship denotes man’s impotence and mortality.
Romanticism was an 18th century artistic and intellectual movement that grew in part as a revolt against the aristocratic, social and political norms of the Enlightenment period and the rationalisation of nature. In art, it stressed: • Strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and • the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of nature. • It was influenced by ideologies and events of the French Revolution. • It elevated the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists who altered society. • It legitimised the individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. • (Wikipedia)
John Constable (Eng.), “Wivenhoe Park, Essex”, 1816, oil on canvas Constable used atmospheric conditions as allegories for his emotions. At the time of this work he was rushing off to marry his fiancee of 7 years.
John Constable, “Hadleigh Castle”, 1829, oil on canvas At this time, Constable’s young wife (of 12 years) has died of consumption and Constable has fallen into a black hole of despair. Constable’s work can be seen as an epitomy of Benedict Spinoza’s belief in the oneness of Man and Nature. Constable wrote to a friend, “Painting is but another word for feeling… I am fond of being an Egoist in whatever relates to painting”. Constable is a landscape painter, but a human presence is still indicated by tiny figures, indicating the unimportance of humanity in terms of the sublime nature of nature itself.
William Turner, “Snow Storm – Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth”, 1842
“We were making the world’s first measurements of underwater turbulence in a lake at the foot of a Patagonian glacier. Every three or four minutes, there was this huge explosion and ten million tonnes of ice sheared off the face of the glacier and came crashing down. It’s scary when there’s two of you in a rubber dinghy two metres long. You wait in deathly silence for the noise, then a 300m wall of ice drops into the water, creating two-metre waves you have to ride over at full speed to get to the face of the glacier. We’d drop our instruments into the water, record our measurements and get the hell out of there. You never knew when the next bit of glacier was going to drop and you didn’t want to be under it. The first day, we were terrified and only got to within half a kilometre; on the last day, we’d go within 20m of the glacier face. It’s all part of the global warming jigsaw – we need to know how fast the glacier is moving and measure the heat transfer. Venice is at the opposite end of the work spectrum. We sail into the lagoon at 5am, when the sun is coming up and the fog is lifting and it’s unbelievably beautiful. And then after measuring water flows, we go back and have wonderful meals in the most civilised place in the world.” Jorg Imberger, “Life Lines”, The Australian, January 8-9th, 2000
Lorenzo Bernini, “The Ecstacy of St Theresa”, 1647 – 1652 I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God.
The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.”
Mark Rothko’s “Orange and Yellow”, 1956 “Rather than using the representational models of (19th century Romantic painters, Rothko created sublime experiences for the viewer through seemingly simple combinations of abstracted colour, light and space. Many have hailed Rothko’s work as transcendental, creating spiritual work for secular times. Rothko’s canvases of the 50s and 60s engender a sense of sublimity through their size, space and light. Painted with think layers of paint that allow the colour beneath to show, the saturated canvases seem to radiate an inner light source. Rothko’s floating rectangles vacillate between figure and ground, focused and hazy, creating a tension within the composition and perhaps within the viewer.
The German photographer, Andreas Gursky, takes pictures of enormous spaces – stock exchanges, skyscrapers, mountain peaks – in which crowds of people look tiny and relentless, making their presence felt in the world, like a minute, leisurely colony of ants. Also like ants, these people appear to spend little time examining their own encroachment – architectural, technological and personal – on the natural world. In their determined, oblivious way, the people in his photographs make clear that there is no longer any nature uncharted by man. In place of nature we find the invasive landmarks of a global economy. Taken as a whole, Gursky’s work constitutes a map of the postmodern civilised world.
Andreas Gursky, “Bundestag”, 1998 The vision is not a comforting one. Many of Gursky’s pictures, though beautiful, intensely colourful and wonderfully composed, leave the viewer with an uneasy feeling. Whether because of the spread of architectures or the bustling crowds they show, or because of the equalising treatment given to all subjects, from the Dolomite Mountains to a car show in France, the pictures are both awe-inspiring and disturbing.
“Library” by Andreas Gursky, 1999, Cibachrome print, mounted to plexiglass, Edition 2/679 x 142 inches
Chuck Close, "Big Self-Portrait", 1967-1968, acrylic on canvas
Ron Mueck (born 1958) is an Australian hyperrealist sculptor working in Great Britain. Mueck's early career was as a model maker and puppeteer for children's television and films, notably the film Labyrinth for which he also contributed the voice of Ludo. Mueck moved on to establish his own company in London, making photo-realistic props and animatronics for the advertising industry. Although highly detailed, these props were usually designed to be photographed from one specific angle hiding the mess of construction seen from the other side. Mueck increasingly wanted to produce realistic sculptures which looked perfect from all angles. In 1996 Mueck transitioned to fine art, collaborating with his mother-in-law, Paula Rego, to produce small figures as part of a tableau she was showing at the Hayward Gallery. Rego introduced him to Charles Saatchi who was immediately impressed and started to collect and commission work. This led to the piece which made Mueck's name, Dead Dad, being included in the Sensation show at the Royal Academy the following year.
Dead Dad is a rather haunting silicone and mixed media sculpture of the corpse of Mueck's father reduced to about two thirds of its natural scale. It is the only work of Mueck's that uses his own hair for the finished product. Mueck's sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images. His five metre high sculpture Boy 1999 was a feature in the Millennium Dome and later exhibited in the Venice Biennale. Detail of the foot in “Boy” In 2002 his sculpture Pregnant Woman was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia for AU$800,000.
