Pop Life: Art in a Material World

I'm not much of a fan of pop art and neither, it seems, is the curator for Pop Life: Art in a Material World at the Tate Modern. With room titles like "Worst of Worhol" and "Almost Infamous" for the YBAs, there isn't much sympathy for those artists who have come to dominate popular consciousness. Not that they would care anyway. Warhol, Koons, Hirst et al weren't out to make art that would impress those operating in the narrow world of galleries and critics, they were out to make art which infiltrates the marketplace and the media hype machine which supports it, the 'real' world as they saw it.

Undoubtedly, they were successful, many artists in the exhibition have become household names that would be recognised by anyone down at Argos. Plus the exorbitant price tags that their work generally commands is a clear sign of commercial success. But why Warhol and Hirst and not other artists? Why has the 'real' world gobbled up their work so voraciously and not others? Maybe Pop Life could answer that.

Looking at the work on display it seems that successful pop art has to be either iconographic, (working with easily recognisable images) or shocking (death! sex!), or ideally both.

In this pomo world where everything is flattened to the level of image, it is art that is simple and distinctive in appearance, easily recognisable and reproducible (quite like a brand logo) that is most able to wind its way through the various media. Simple iconic images can be easily transmitted through print without any real loss to its "artistic value". Warhol's famous self portrait can be photocopied a hundred times without it losing the main thrust of its impact but would an abstract expressionist painting survive such treatment? Iconic imagery is thus most suited and resilient to dissemination through the media.


But how does one get noticed in the first place? Paint household items! Kill an animal! Show your penis! Shock tactics are required to attract the media attention so loved by our pop artists. The pointing of cameras and the baiting of readerships with stories of wacky art opens up media channels for the pop artist, who then responds by shovelling images down those channels to feed the media machine the easily digested images it craves.

Controversial and easily recognised art (e.g. Hirst's dead animals in formaldehyde) causes media buzz which then breeds awareness and fame/infamy. The artists, their work and the media icons derived from their work thus become artefacts of fame. As fame is extremely desirable for many people today, ownership or association with these artefacts is highly prized. The artefacts become glamorous (glamour being the perceived happiness of being envied). Wealthy people playing status games then purchase pop art works or commission artists to do vain projects. With money now involved, the price of the work goes up, pushing up its perceived desirability in the process. This self-propelled cycle causes a pop artist's work to reach ridiculous heights (witness Hirst's September 2008 auction). Although the recession means that these same heights might not be reached for a while, the pop art bubble will just inflate and deflate in relation with how much money is lying around.

Warhol and those in his wake have turned art into business and business into art. By engaging and infiltrating the market (and associated media machine), they have managed to use it as a medium to create work which embodies fame and fortune, with secondary importance placed on what the art object itself actually looks like. Those most adept at doing this have become brands in themselves, their names carrying exorbitant market value.


Are these successful artists self-aware? Do they comprehend the ridiculousness of this whole conceit? Perhaps, but if they were aware why would they complain? To them it may just be a big joke that brings in a load of money every time it's told.

Is that wrong? Should art be used for something else? Should art be used at all? What should art be doing? Should it do anything? Should art be moral? Is worthwhile art art which contributes to some moral or ethical project? Is reducing human suffering the highest purpose of art or even a legitimate purpose of art? Is pop art harmful? Can I ask any more questions?

I'm moving into the realms of art and morality which, as you can see causes me to use lots of question marks. Maybe I should get this book to see if it can answer any of those questions.

As the crow flies

I've been to the Barbican a number of times but on every occasion I'm always impressed by the grandeur of this arch-modernist concrete clash of apartments and capital 'C' culture. With birds singing and fountains flowing in the geometric ponds it does feel like a utopian paradise (if you can afford it mind you).

With utopia on my mind I was appropriately primed for an exhibition on probably the most high profile utopian architect of them all, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret! Or Le Corbusier to most people (which translates to 'The Crow-like One', hmmm....). The exhibition was biographical, covering his early influences and his key works throughout his life. All the big ones were there like Plan Voisin, Unite d'Habitation, The Radiant City etc etc

Plan Voisin aka 'How to Butcher Paris in One Easy Step'

Unite d'Habitation in Marseille - this one actually worked, people LIKE living there

The Radiant City - a model of social alienation and destructive car dependency

Le Corbusier would be familiar to anyone who has come within a scale ruler's length of an architecture or urban planning class but it was nice to have them all in the one spot. In this way it's much easier to appreciate his life-long mission to create a perfect form, be it a building, city, chair, whatever.

Besides his greatest hits, I found his rough sketches and contemplative doodles very interesting. I'm so used to seeing the finished product that it was nice to see evidence of the creative process. It somewhat humanises Le Corbusier's god-like auteur image. As a god-like auteur Corb has been analysed to bits so I won't go into that here, but this IS a blog and I have an opinion so here goes: While his ideas are noble and the execution of those ideas are flawless, his designs treat people as elements of a machine and have no regard to how humans actually behave. Culture, society, desire, 'soft' humany things, are subsumed by the juggernaut of rationality. Consequently, he designs sublime and elegant buildings which perfectly fulfill an abstract function but the assumptions behind that function are flawed and out of touch with reality. Corb is an architect's architect, not a people's architect, and that makes him a dangerous influence on our built environment.

Annette Messager at the Hayward

Through the magic of facebook I was indirectly recommended to go see the Annette Messager retrospective at the Hayward, the art component of the beautifully ugly brutalist animal that is the Southbank Centre.

Being only an armchair enthusiast and not a lecture-hall-seat devotee to art history I was unfamiliar with her work. So a quick peek at the Timeout rundown (art authority that it is) enlightened me on the fact that she is an artist concerned with gender politics who executes work with a sense of play, as in child's play. Great! I thought, I did a bit of gender studies at uni, I can tackle this! But I was also intrigued with this 'play' aspect. Could this exhibition be fun too?


Messager's work involves a wide variety of materials and media, from drawing to my favourite of contemporary art, the wacky installation. And in line with what our friends at Timeout said, there is a clear preoccupuation with gender issues. Messager uses craftsy, domestic materials like wool and plastic shopping bags to allude to gender roles but also uses stuffed toys and feminine clothing to play up 'softness'. These 'feminine' media are employed in quite morbid or violent constructions. In these works it's easy to make the connection between the experience of being a woman and the associated societal injustices and marginalisation of the women's world view. References are often made to the female body and how it is viewed as object and landscape. This is all interesting in itself and but what makes this different from feminist art I've seen is the apparent childlike whimsy and tongue-in-cheek approach.

It's too hard for me to cover most or even a significant minority of her work in great detail. That gets boring very quickly, especially when I'm writing this for 'fun'. I recommend you go down and have look for yourself. It's a great exhibition that's well curated so you're not left hanging at all.

What I will do is write about a couple of works which grabbed my attention for longer than the required 30-60 seconds of furrowed brow I usually give.

The Horrifying Adventures of Annette the Trickster

Tucked into a corner in the first room, this piece is more introverted than the giant winged Chimeras on the opposite wall. It consists of a dozen or so framed photographs of pen sketches, each sketch depicting acts of violence and torture by evil looking men against a nude bonded woman. Why is this woman being tortured? Is she being punished? Is she innocent or guilty? The scenes of torture and bondage and the word "trickster" brought about associations of the Salem witch trials where certain women, often those who lived alone or secluded lives with other women were scapegoated for their gender role deviation and blamed for the poor villagers' misfortune. Here Messager draws parallels with those atrocities and the experience of being a woman artist in 70s France.

Although the subject matter is dark, the sketches are done in pen on grid paper, a medium not uncommon inside the classroom. In fact, the informal drawing style and uncomplicated compositions of each sketch make them appear as though they were drawn at the back of some boring class on a Friday afternoon. With such a pulpy, comic book title to the work, Messager includes in that element of childhood (or adolescent) play that is present in all her work.

Story of Dresses


Here Messager places young girls' dresses in wooden boxes with glass lids. They are attached to the wall with the glass facing the viewer allowing us to see each dress. On each dress is a series of pictures of otherworldly objects or fantastical places. The combination of childhood dresses and these images conjure up memories of that special type of wonder one experiences as a child. The colourful dresses relate this wonder to childhood appearance and by extension, childhood identity. By having these dresses and pictures kept in coffin-like boxes and arranged coldly against the wall as if by an entomologist, Messager presents the death of childhood as cultural artifact, to be contemplated by the chin-stroking adults of the gallery. One can see the irony in having childhood 'critically engaged' in this way.

Fables and Tales



3 stacks of fiction books with 2 stacks of stuffed toys in between, on each stack of books is a single stuffed real animal. Here Messager equates stories with stuffed animals (tales, tails, geddit?). After contemplating how uncomfortable it would be to be stacked like that I wondered why children's stories always involve anthropomorphic animals? Would the often moralistic tales of childhood be less palatable to children's tastes if they involved everyday human people? Is it a reflection of parents' concern to teach children about rights and wrong while also sheltering them from the harsh realities which play out everyday by having these stories acted out by animals and thus maintaining some buffer from the real world? *breathes in heavily* well? maybe. The 3 stuffed (as in taxidermy stuffed) animals led me to speculate what stories with speaking animals would be like if they were real. What if a free range chicken did start shouting that the sky is falling? Presented this way would we still search for the moral of the story or just start a program of anti-psychotic drugs for this crazy chicken?

Articulated-disarticulated

The final work in the show, A-D consists of a dozen or so soft animal toys of indeterminate species subjected to motorised pulleys, pulling and yanking their limbs in a sad spectacle of futility against hardship. Saddest, and funniest, of them all is the cow/bear looking thing, sad already with half its stuffing missing, being dragged by the neck, tracing a square on the gallery floor for eternity. According to the description on the gallery wall, this pieces was a reaction to the mad cow disease saga in the UK but really, it reveals the absurdity of life, suffering and our earnest efforts to survive.

In other news there's a new post at Empty Swimming Pool.