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how pop art plundered consumerist culture

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The revelation in the 1990s that the CIA sponsored American abstract expressionism, that it flaunted the art of the drippers, the splashers and the colour-fielders as a commercial for capitalism, caused quite a stir. While communist bloc artists were squeezed into socialist realism - workers, factories, tractors, cornfields - the US avant-garde, serious and intense, was expressing itself on the floors of huge New York lofts.

The art movement that followed ab-ex, as it turned out, might well have done the CIA's work for free. It was a ready-made commercial for consumerism that could have been called "capitalist realism". But it became known as Pop Art. And Pop artists wanted to have their Coke and drink it. Here was art that was simultaneously in love with and critical of the ephemera of consumer culture.

When the Soviet Union agreed to hold a show of US products in Moscow in 1959, Russians were awed by the array of labour-saving devices and luxurious kitchens available to Americans. Hostesses distributed free lipsticks, infuriating the authorities. Those lipsticks, capitalist middle fingers in the crimson of the Soviet flag, could have served as an emblem for Pop Art, the ubiquitous pouting lips of sex translated into selling.

Indeed, at the Barbican's enjoyable Pop Art Design show, a whole room is devoted to lips. There is, of course, the Lips Sofa (credited to Italian Studio 65, although first envisaged in Dalí's brilliant portrait "Visage de Mae West"); Tom Wesselmann's disembodied smoking lips; and Warhol's Marilyn Monroe with the crudely painted pout. John Pasche's Rolling Stones logo is surprisingly missing.

And finally there are Pauline Boty's beautiful, under-regarded paintings. Boty, who died at 28, was at the centre of the swinging London scene. As a woman artist, she is a conspicuous exception here. Pop Art's objectification of the female form is voluptuously visible in the show but whether this is tongue-in-cheek or just plain sexist is never clear. The lipsticks are phallic, the pout is provocative and, in Allen Jones's lady-as-coffee-table, we have an unsettling image of domestic submission, the flipside of all those kitchen devices. But pop artists anonymised everyone, not just women - figures do not really feature here unless they were pre-objectified, such as Jones's woman or Mick Jagger's crotch on the cover of Sticky Fingers.

In a show ostensibly about Pop Art design, it is mostly art that is the star (Blake, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Warhol et al). The problem is that while there certainly was a field of design influenced by it, Pop Art reworked the ready-made, the already familiar imagery of mass culture: ubiquitous brands, paparazzi photos and the visual language of advertising. The design that derives from it is an extension of those images.

Some designs acknowledge this Duchampian crossover - notably the Castiglioni brothers' stool made from an appropriated tractor seat - but others do not. Impeccable (if overfamiliar) Charles and Ray Eames pieces, futuristic Finnish Eero Aarnio chairs and Peter and Alison Smithson's laughably naff sub-B-movie house of the future all sit a little uneasily here.

The one place where the Pop Art/Pop Design premise truly gels is in the work of Richard Hamilton. Having worked as a graphic designer and taught design, Hamilton created what became a virtual Pop manifesto in "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" This 1956 collage seems to predict all the constituents of Pop - even down to the word itself on the label of the phallic lollipop held suggestively at waist height by the posing bodybuilder. Here is body fetishism, the promise of sex, consumerism, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, the brands, the pulp fiction, the ads and the canned ham. The ceiling, meanwhile, is replaced by a looming moon, as space becomes attainable in a cold war rush to colonise the final frontier.

Hamilton was obsessed with design. Not the garish, sexualised images of mass culture that form the spine of this show, but the sleek technical perfection of the Ulm School. Emerging from a design school in southern Germany set up with Marshall Plan money, its rigorous modernism became a kind of postwar Bauhaus. The school's most visible success was electrical manufacturer Braun (and its chief designer Dieter Rams). Hamilton's "Toaster" (1967) is here, its modernist design depicted in silvered elevation, engineering realism made abstract, the object made art. The toaster sits, lonely and small, on the floor: minimalist modernism squashed by the scale and colour of Pop.

It is a telling moment. Pop Art is about making the banal into big art; design is about creating an image for the banal, so that it can be marketed.

Yet the design here actually seems less cynical than the art. The extravagant, futuristic forms are the result of new processes. Injection-moulded plastic furniture, PVC dresses and poured polyurethane armchairs indicate an optimistic belief in the possibilities of the future. The art, though, is an admission of defeat. How could anything better express contemporary life than supermarket shelves, photos of celebrities, and signs lining freeways?

Hamilton wrote a postcard to architect Peter Smithson in 1957, jotting notes on what he thought might be a new art. "Pop art," he wrote, "is Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low Cost, Mass Produced, Young (aimed at youth), Wicked, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business."

He was both right and wrong. Warhol became an industry, and Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons are in every oligarch's collection. Pop is certainly big business. This show is sponsored by Vitra, a Swiss furniture company that made many of the original pieces in the exhibition. The Pop artists blurred the space between shop and museum. The exhibition's creator, architectural agency AOC, has impeccably caught this blurring in a pastel-hued, subtly kitsch-infused set that blends Las Vegas, LA and Main Street, woven around the Barbican's concrete columns. Hamilton was right about wickedness, sexiness, glamour and youth, but he was wrong about Pop Art ever being expendable or easily forgotten. Its ephemerality is, ironically, inscribed in our culture for ever.
'Pop Art Design', Barbican Art Gallery, London, to February 9, barbican.org.uk

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How Pop Art plundered consumerist culture

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The revelation in the 1990s that the CIA sponsored American abstract expressionism, that it flaunted the art of the drippers, the splashers and the colour-fielders as a commercial for capitalism, caused quite a stir. While communist bloc artists were squeezed into socialist realism - workers, factories, tractors, cornfields - the US avant-garde, serious and intense, was expressing itself on the floors of huge New York lofts.

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designboom | architecture & design magazine

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the immersive museum features multiple 3-dimensional spaces set across an overwhelming scale of 10,000 square meters, and uses 520 computers and 470 projectors.

the immersive museum features multiple 3-dimensional spaces set across an overwhelming scale of 10,000 square meters, and uses 520 computers and 470 projectors.

the series depicts pianos as lonely centerpieces of the photographs within beautiful and forgotten interiors.

the series depicts pianos as lonely centerpieces of the photographs within beautiful and forgotten interiors.

walk upon stems of light and stare at a kiss dripping in gold.

walk upon stems of light and stare at a kiss dripping in gold.

the city shaped bowie. bowie shaped it back.

the city shaped bowie. bowie shaped it back.

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jake and dinos chapman: the sum of all evil

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the immersive museum features multiple 3-dimensional spaces set across an overwhelming scale of 10,000 square meters, and uses 520 computers and 470 projectors. the immersive museum features multiple 3-dimensional spaces set across an overwhelming scale of 10,000 square meters, and uses 520 computers and 470 projectors.

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Art - Barbara Kruger - Photograph Collage, Advertising, Slogans, Art

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BarbaraKruger.com is a tribute to Barbara Kruger, the American collage artist famous for her layered photographs. This site contains a store and shop, as well as many links of interest.

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Barbara Kruger

My graduate curriculum class this year explored "consumption" as a big idea in planning interdisciplinary art projects for the classroom. The need to address our consumption habits is of critical importance in the world today and we agreed as a class this was something that students could and should investigate in a K-12 art classroom.

When asked what they thought students should understand or be able to do as a result of participating in an art unit on consumption, the class came up with the following goals.

As a result of this unit, students will be able to:

understand the effects of consumption on our natural resources;think critically about and explain how the media influences our consumption habits;
create art work and images that raise public awareness of issues related to over consumption;

discuss how certain artists and designers raise questions about consumption and consumerism through their work;

discuss how artists and designers approach consumption differently from scientists and other professionals;

make changes in their lifestyles that promote sustainable living.

In searching for resources to use in teaching an art unit on consumption, the class discovered that there are a number of artists, designers, and image-makers today who are employing unique and creative approaches to spread the message of the effects of over consumption on our society and the environment.

The photographs of Chris Jordan, who deals exclusively with issues of consumerism and consumption, was at the top of our list of artists and designers to introduce to students. Here's a transcript of an interview with Jordan, in which he talks about the ideas behind his photographs and how people react to them.

Another photographer worth studying is Edward Burtynsky whose awe-inducing images of depleted landscapes serve as records of the impact of industrial consumption of our natural resources.

Edward Burtynsky Video

Artists that recycle waste projects and other throwaway materials in their work got our attention, most notably Nancy Judd and her recycled fashions. There are also excellent examples of recycling genius on an individual or community scale from all over the world, in the Folk Art From the Global Scrap Heaps exhibition on the Green Museum website.

Designer Kate Bingaman-Burt posts drawings of her daily purchases on her blog appropriately titled " Obsessive Consumption." Her work led us to consider the possibility of having students record their daily purchases over a week or month period in sketchbooks as a springboard for discussion about their consumption habits.

Lastly, the Art 21 website features a section on Consumption & Contemporary Art that explores how some contemporary artists address the idea of consumption and question commonly held assumptions about commerce, mass media, and consumer society.

We came up with a number of projects based on the goals of our consumption unit. Following are three of my favorites.

Project #1: Picture Consumption
Discussion Questions: How can trash or waste, be beautiful and ugly at the same time? How can humanity's consumption habits be captured in a single photograph?

Artists/Designers: Edward Burtynsky, Chris Jordan

Activity: Have students view work by artists that address the idea of consumption. Ask "Is this work beautiful?" "Is it ugly?" "Can it be both?" "What is it that makes this image beautiful?" What makes it ugly?" Classroom discussion should follow. Have students explore their own environments and using a camera, have them capture evidence of human consumption. Students should consider ways to make their images of consumption both beautiful and ugly at the same time. They might consider observing visual alarming qualities within trash, waste, or even through the media. Can students create an image of consumption that is both beautiful and ugly? A community art exhibit should follow of students' images about "Consumption Within Their Community."

Project #2: Making Ads for the Environment
Discussion Questions: How does the media steer us towards buying stuff? How do advertisers encourage us to buy products/objects that we do not need? How can we create advertisements that would encourage favorable and beneficial environmental change? What would we say? What would our ads look like? How can we focus public attention on buying renewable resources? What do artists have to say about the media's influence on consumerism?

Artists/Designers: Barbara Kruger

Activity: Start with a discussion: Why and how do advertisers steer us to buy items we do not need? Have students explore techniques used by advertisers to sell products. Divide the class into small groups and assign each group to one of the websites listed below. Students should research advertising tricks or techniques used to sell products. Students will return with their research and share with the class. Look at the work of Barbara Kruger and discuss how she uses similar advertising techniques to subvert the message of media. Have students select an environmental issue that they find important and worth advocating. Students will then create an advertisement image (inspired by Kruger's work) that will encourage others to consider the positive environmental message displayed. Works could be created on a computer or by using markers, color pencils and/or paints. Have students find ads that intrigue them (e.g., magazine ads, computer, television, newspapers) that might serve as models.

Once completed, the environmental advertisements should be displayed for the entire school to view. Students should have an opportunity to describe the environmental cause they support. Peers should reflect on each other's work.

Resources: Don't Buy It, Advertising Strategies, Advertising Techniques.

Project #3: Images of Consumption
Discussion Questions: What are some different ways to represent our consumption habits? How do these methods convey different ideas and messages? How do artists approach consumption differently from designers? from economists? from scientists? from environmentalists?

Artists/Designers Studied: Kate Bingaman-Burt, Chris Jordan, Barbara Kruger

Activity: Begin by asking students to list several objective ways that they might represent consumption habits (e.g., map, graph, pie chart, another pie chart, table). Provide examples of these methods for students to study. Ask "What sorts of ideas and messages do we get from looking at these charts and graphs?" Next, show and discuss several photographs and works of art that represent consumption in some way. For example, show Barbara Kruger's "I shop, therefore I am." Ask, "What do you think the artist is trying to say with this piece?" Follow-up with asking "What makes you think that?" Next, look at a Chris Jordan photograph from his "Running the Numbers" or "Intolerable Beauty" series. Ask "What do you see here?" and "What do you think this photo is about?" Lastly, show some of Kate Bingaman-Burt's drawings of her daily purchases. Ask "What do you see here?" Explain the idea behind Bingaman-Burt's work (i.e., recording her daily purchases and consumption habits). Bring the discussion to a close by asking "How are the images we've seen by artists/photographers similar and different from the earlier pie charts and tables we saw about consumption? Follow up questions include: "How do these methods convey different ideas and messages?" and "What can we borrow from these artists in creating our own images about consumption?"

Following the discussion, have the class decide on a way to collectively represent their consumption habits and to execute their idea. For example, working in small groups students might create short videos. They may also decide to work in the manner of Kate Bingaman-Burt, or one of the other artists studied.

If you try any of these projects out in the classroom, I invite you to share the results here.

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Art Junction | We Are What We Consume: Wrapping Art Curricula Around the Idea of Consumption

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Barbara Kruger My graduate curriculum class this year explored "consumption" as a big idea in planning interdisciplinary art projects for the classroom. The need to address our consumption habits is of critical importance in the world today and we agreed as a class this was something that students could and should investigate in a K-12 art classroom.