What's Pop?
Pop
Art embraces everyday objects. Pop Art is popular, but it would not have
to be called Pop Art. The Boston Pops performs popular classical music,
a contradiction in terms perhaps to iPod-toting “pop” music
fans. Pop is an almost irrelevant descriptor, like “cool” or
“great” or “nice.” Like the Bauhaus influence on
art and design and the Mingei movement in Japan, Pop Art aspires to be people-centered,
full of story telling, and easy to look upon. Pop Art explores what we are
watching, hearing, or feeling everyday, the information blasted at us in
this world of high speed digital media. What Pop Art does best is make us
look at our days and the things that fill them in new ways.
We are all familiar with Andy Warhol’s images of soup cans. When he and other Pop artists began working in the late 1950’s, many painters were focusing on abstract images; Warhol’s realistic depictions of everyday objects was revolutionary. The production methods of Pop Art also challenged the status quo. If Andy Warhol were working today, he would be making gigantic silk-screens of the rap artist Eminem. Younger artists have learned lessons from Pop, like Jeff Koons, who made a likeness of Michael Jackson with his monkey, Bubbles. Koons, Dale Chihuly, and Damien Hirst have large factories of art churning out the product of their ideas on an assembly line. The techniques may be new, but the process is not. Art making has always involved more than merely an artist creating work. Students, patrons, knowledgeable experts, and critics all play a role. Someone was carrying torches and gourds full of paint for the men or women who blew their handprints on the walls of caves. The technologies have evolved, but art making has always been a process that involves a whole community.
In 2000, the Susquehanna Art Museum presented PostPop and Grace Hartigan: Painting from Popular Culture, exhibitions that showed how Pop Art related to abstract expressionist painting and themes. A popular icon, the motorcycle, became a doorway to seeing and understanding art in Motorcycles and Art in 2004. Pop Art is everywhere. Its lifespan is as long and influential as that of Rock and Roll music.
We hope you enjoy our exhibition.
- Rusty Baker, Executive Director/Curator