Is the Picture still the same even when the people taking it have changed?
The Relevance of a Pop Artist in the 21st century: A Personal Opinion.
I am not meeting my friend Loz Taylor this week as he has a very important meeting involving his other great love beside Demo Pop Art - Horse Racing - and although, as we have seen, the two worlds can be compatible, he has not yet found a successful way of being in two places at once! Therefore it is left for me to ponder a subject matter for this the latest in my series on Demo Pop Art.
In putting together these articles I often, as you know, quote from Pop Art legends such as Warhol, Lichtenstein and the like, and I am often conscious that even though Lichtenstein only passed away as recently as 1997, I am constantly quoting from dead Artists, Artists that popularised their movement 40 years or more ago. I can’t help but ponder then whether it can be as relevant now to base art production on today’s Popular Culture, since that “mass” is taken for granted as being our main means of production and celebrity culture has become so commonplace it appears available to us all for far more than 15 minutes. Indeed a contestant on big brother or the apprentice can have very realistic expectations of their own chat show series and having their weddings photographed by Hello magazine!
But I think personally that when Warhol was referring to the picture never changing, even if the people in it do, I don’t think he was referring to the physical change of the subject matter in subsequent years, but more the capturing of a moment in time as proof positive that it existed. He loved that the photograph preserved an exact and perfect beauty, regardless of how that perfection may fade in time. Indeed all through his productive phase he used photography and printing techniques as a way of “capturing” the present as a portent to the future because for all his obsession with the here and now Warhol was an astute and intelligent man who could not have succeeded in the way he did without an eye on both the present and the future and what was to come. He was also a romantic who would have wanted some form of preservation for not just his work but the times in which he enjoyed creating it. I have observed this as a recurring theme when delving into the background of Pop Art and Pop Artists. It is interesting to me as a non-practitioner of the visual arts to note the drive of these men and women was to exploit much of what was around them and that which was “Popular” by taking the subject matter they wished to use out of its original context and mix it with other media or objects to create what they considered to be relevant Art and yet instead of breaking away in some new form of surrealist movement to propagate their ideals they all felt an overwhelming urge to in some way copy and therefore preserve the very things they were taking out of context. In other words the subject matter of the piece became just as important to the fame or infamy of the piece as the artistic idea it was trying to purvey.
The difference with Warhol though is that he was not concerned about leaving intact the connection between his work and its subject matter for all to see indeed in his later years his work became almost like that of the Royal Portrait painter except rather than being commissioned by Royalty he sought out his subjects Marilyn Munroe, Elvis Presley, Jackie Onassis, driven by his own deep fascination with Celebrity culture and mass media. I truly believe that Warhol enjoyed creating images that although augmentations of the reality were no less an homage to it for that. In short what Warhol was doing in his silk screen print work and his “normal” photographic studies was leaving for posterity a trace element of the truth behind his beloved popular culture.
Marilyn silk screen print
Elvis silk screen print
So, yes it is now 64 years since Eduardo Paolozzi first used the term “pop” in his work “ I was a rich man’s plaything”, 15 years since we lost Lichtenstein nearly 25 years since Warhol’s departure and my question of the relevance of Demo Pop Art seems to be answering itself as I write. Is it necessary in 2011 to create “time capsules” of the now for the future whether in their existing or some altered state….No the media now exists to preserve anyone or anything in a million and one ways and for all time and incredibly Warhol’s screen printing techniques are now available as an I phone app! (I feel he would have somehow approved) so you can transform the appearance of your friends (or enemies) for fun. However the salient point here is the need to retain the relevance of creating that trace between beauty and truth in the time which is yours and yours alone.
Eduardo Paolozzi’s I was a rich man’s plaything.
Some may feel when you see the vast array of Warhol merchandise that is out there at present that it is a “cheapening” of his legacy that he has become in many ways the victim of his own predictions that when we repeat the same thing over and over we get acclimatised to or de-sensitised to it. It is my belief however that in knowing that it would happen he was already planning for it and that the incredible growth in the mass production of his own images and the still huge demand for them shows just what an extraordinary visionary he was.
It is with exactly this belief and also (having researched the genre) with the knowledge that there is a distinct lack of non-conceptual and non-traditional art out there at present, that I can foursquare place Demo Pop Art in the frame as the 21st century representative of the Pop Art tradition and say YES it is entirely relevant.
Having said that then I need to clarify my reasoning and that is the very thing that should have been obvious to me all along. It is that very “traceable element” not that Taylor does not use contemporary imagery, he does, and not that he does not in certain works then re-hone that imagery and extrapolate or modify it by adding his own connotation, he does this also, as in “perfect score” for example, but it is the fact that his images have the same perceptible and observable link to some solid theme or concept as many major Pop Art Works.
“Perfect Score”
Of course it could be argued that Warhol himself was not a true Pop Artist in that he spent a large part of his productive era replicating pre-existing items rather than going down the more traditional metamorphic path of say Richard Hamilton’s “Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?” below.
Richard Hamilton (24 February 1922 – 13 September 2011)
Taylor is operating in a world that is now changed irrevocably the innocent eyes that were startled and sometimes blinded by the assault of Pop Art’s bold imagery are now steeled and cynical and they cast a doubting glance on any art that big money hasn’t shown them is good art.
However there are many links of course between Taylor’s work and that of the Pop Art pioneers, but I believe there are even more between Taylor and Warhol, not only artistically but ideologically. Taylor considers his Art to be contemporary and meaningful but also that it should be aesthetically appealing. He employs modern imagery to present his own thoughts on the world and it is important to him that the themes he illustrates can be traced back to something solid and meaningful he also believes that Art should be available for the masses to collect but more than that he has the same ideology regarding producing his work as a business and employs the same work ethic with a view to making his art and products successful in the market place.
Of course there are also major inherent flaws in this comparison the most notable of which becomes apparent when you compare what their individual works are meant to convey when viewed by their audience. When you view the works of Warhol of course you have to keep a certain context in mind, that being that he was making a strong statement about what was then a burgeoning world of mass production, consumerism and celebrity culture reminding the world how available it all was regardless of who or what you were and it is difficult to look at them coolly in isolation and perhaps it is a mistake to do so. But I feel it is true to say that primarily, instead of finding his own individual and unique subject matter, though at first he tried to, in reality he perfected his own unique and individual style instead. At the suggestion of his friends he painted the things he loved i.e. consumer products, celebrities, money etc. He replicated and then sometimes remodelled what he saw and because of that from then on he stood apart from the main stream of Pop Art. In short the message in a Warhol piece is in essence what the image itself is saying, his Campbell’s soup cans or Brillo boxes are brilliant symbols of the time and the society that created them, but they are still representations of something already conceived and designed elsewhere.
Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s soup can.However, What Taylor does in his best work I feel is present an image that instead of itself being an entirely complete message it is in effect a conduit, channelling a strong idea or a theme and delivering it directly to the viewer. The difference being that the idea or theme is often something that is not necessarily within the piece itself but can directly be traced from it. Less direct, more subtle. Yes, he uses imagery from his own world and his own time and in this way he provides a genuine continuance of the Pop Art genre, but unlike Warhol, these images have a deeper meaning individually rather than as the kind of mass statement Warhol was making.
So here is an interesting question to leave you with. If we accept that the previous paragraph can be accurately said to describe the qualities of both Warhol and Taylor, then I dare to extrapolate the theory even further and ask…Does Loz Taylor and his work “stack up” as an extension of an Art form from more than 40 years ago? Or does in fact Andy Warhol have more in common with 21st Century Demo Pop Art than with 20th Century Pop Art?
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