Post 4 : Pop Art myths and the "Myths and Heroes" notion

Retroactive I (1963) by Robert Rauschenberg

It is known that a hero is a person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act and is regarded as a model or ideal. Can this definition be apply for a contemporary figure? There is a sort of taboo around this notion of hero and his use that can be controversial. A fictional hero, can be a universal hero (like Superman), a character who match exactly with the definition given and who is recognize by everyone as a hero. But for a real person it's much harder because when you are a politician for example you can take measures that seems heroic to your supporters but awful to your opponents. There will is always be a man in the world to tell you that you are wrong even if you are right and fictional character do not have this problem. Nevertheless Pop art disregarding of this problem decided to represent a lot of popular figure of their times (which mean 1950' and 60').  Using those new popular culture heroes Pop art denounce once again the mass-medias who mystified those heroes by their discontinuous flows of images.

The collage Retroactive I was made by Robert Rauschenberg in 1963, two weeks before the assassination of the President John Fitzgerald Kennedy the 22th of November in Dallas. Rauschenberg was one of the Pop art precursor, even though he was never really affiliate to the movement, he influenced  it a lot for sure. Rauschenberg's fascination with popular imagery and his philosophy of "anything goes aesthetic" was certainly is biggest contribution to Pop art, which would mimic the look of popular culture as opposed to Rauschenberg's more subjective renderings. His work is sometimes called Neo-dada in reference to the 1920's movement that like him was completely free of any artistic rules. Rauschenberg used images of current events gathered from magazines and newspapers for his 1963 collage Retroactive I. A large press photograph of John F. Kennedy speaking at a televised news conference was the source for this screen print on canvas. He juxtaposed the image of Kennedy with another photo silkscreen of a parachuting astronaut. The overlapping, and seemingly disparate composition, creates a colorful visual commentary on a media-satured culture struggling to come to grips with the television era.

Pop Art has been, like surrealism in his time, a new step in art history, he revealed new form of artistic technics like collage. But most important their constant critics on mass-media reminded to everybody that art is essentially a way of expression and not just a way to make money.  Thanks to Pop Art, I think we are more aware of the consumer society that surround us, they succeed to recreate an art of contestation, very good representation of their times that we can qualified of revolutionary in many domains and not just Art. Finally, I think they successfully introduced a certain modern mythology with the help of Hollywood, or "myths-making machine", that provide them typical modern myths such as James Dean, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and many other figure of great charisma that we can't no longer find nowadays.

Post 3: Pop Art Myths

Post 3: Pop Art Myths

Collage advertising comics
Pop Art has inherited, the tradition of collage from the Cubism and Dadaism but they add's a subsersive and allegorical component  to it. When can say that the first Pop image is the Richard Hamilton's print Just what is that made yesterday's homes so different, so appealing ? made in 1992. Andy Warhol who worked as a designer and adman ,at the beginning of his career, contribuated to the birth of this new tendency. Warhol also helps ,with Roy Lichtenstein, to introducing comics on large-format paintings, like the famous Look Mickey that for some represent the myth of Narcissus.

Just what is that made yesterday's homes so different, so appealing? (1992) by Richard Hamilton

Emblems
In the 1950', the american society is inundated, thanks to the mass media, by advertising and so by slogans, logos and brand names for consumer products. Eventually, this provided a cascad of visual ideas for Pop artists who saw in this a great way to criticize the immersing society by showing objects, trademarks or logos on painting without other adjustment. The most famous of them are of course Warhol's Campbell's soup that shows everyday objects repeatedly.

Campbell's soup (1962) by Andy Warhol

Myths
In his golden era, Hollywood was seen as a dreams factory and idol or moviestar like Marlon Brando, Marylin Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor became myths for the general public. Pop artists inspired by those american idols decided to illustrate them in their works. Alex Katz was the first one to explore this new path, followed by Andy Warhol and his Marlon or the transifiguration of Elizabeth Taylor as Queen of the Nile by Mimmo Rotella. But this is truly the British Pop artists who succeed to combine great american idols with their own popular culture and by this they created their own myths like Blake's Beatles or Hamilton's Rolling Stones.

Marlon (1966) by Andy Warhol

Swingeing London (1972) by Richard Hamilton

Portraits
Pop Art by basic their work on preexisting images reinvented the genre of portraits and opens the door to postmodernism in which the representation no longer follows reality but rather precedes it. With this new perspective, there is no longer an implicit subject behind images, the portrait becomes a simulacrum. By his series of self-portrait in 1978 Warhol once again surprised everybody with a new kind of portrait where he fades away and becomes a virtual image. David Hockney was also the pioneer of this new technic by putting a polaroid image as basis of his portrait.

Nicolas Wilder studying picasso (1982) by David Hockney

Landscapes Interiors Still Lives
With the rise of consumer society, objects are reduce to their arbitrary meanings, against this Pop Art had to come back to a traditional genre of painting like Landscapes, Interiors and Still lives. The originality of Pop Art was to make a private space a public and commercial one. The contemporary urban milieu became for many pop artists a source of inspiration from Lichtenstein to Tom Wesselman.

Still Life #34 (1963) by Tom Wesselman

Urban Eroticism
The sexual revolution of the 1960' affected Pop Art by a new definition of the woman as a sexual symbol. This change of norm was directly brought by mass media that spread nudity and hedonism in  pictural ads  or TV advertising. Some artists such as Roy Lichsteiner, Allen Jones or Richard Lindner had found a new subject, the woman and her erotic symbol.

M-Maybe (1965) by Roy Lichtenstein

History Painting
Pop art has always claims to be representative of their time by their new form of art but also by their ability to put contemporary figure in their paintings. It was the case with Warhol as we all know but also for Rotella, Richter or Rauschenberg who look forward to reinterpret modern and past history with a new kind of iconography.

Mao (1973) by Andy Warhol

Retroactive II (1963) by Robert Rauschenberg

Art about Art 

 The notion of "Art on Art" is essential in Pop Art process that consist in asking questions about the evolution of art directed at older painters. Many great Pop artist used Old masters paintings to create a new versions of it, for example the Birth of Venus by Botticelli in Warhol version or Equipo Crónica's Velazquez that is accompanied by a critic of this veneration for the old masterpiece.

The Living Room (1970) by Equipo Crónica

Post 5: Myths & Heroes

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EwsOvjz-mbM8o-s8LUrWVoUmz1xpkkJ5GnXIQsJgUus/edit?usp=sharing

Post 2: The Idea of Progress: Quality vs Quantity

Presentation of the Apple Watch in September 2014

The first document, is a video that present the brand new product of Apple, the Apple Watch. The video begins with a view from space of the earth lighting up while the view move back until we find out that it was a video playing on an Apple Watch. At the beginning, music tempo refinement is very low but it increases during the video and at the end, it is regular and joyful. The contours of the product are shown from all perspectives, and we can see that they are perfectly clean. During all the video there is an insistance on the purity and refinement of the product, for example the white background, the slowmotion, the close-up and the very powerful light. All those processes allow the viewer to watch the product closely and in details, to see that there is nothing unrelevant on it, the watch is just simple. The watch is shown like a perfection of technology and modernity. We have here a basic Apple ad with a simple product (a watch is not something very special) turn into a modern and design technological tool that we desperately want to have.

Lake of Baotou, Mongolia interior

Chart of Rare Earth world production in 2009

This image of a perfect company, white like snow, that Apple wants to give with those ads is compromising because, before to end up on our wrist, an Apple watch is made in china with several littles minerals called rare earth. The rare earth is very expensive to extract, requires great machines and to drill very deeply.  It's dangerous for the miners but also very dangerous for the environment that is completely devastated after the extraction. China is the first producer of rare earth with 97% of the world production, that's why the second document is taking place in the city of Baotou near Mongolia in North China. As we can see, the lake, like the landscape has been totally destroyed by the extraction of the minerals. The industry and the mines around are rejecting all there chemicals and toxic products necessary to extract the minerals in the lake. Before the discovery of rare earth in the region the lake was like any other lake, which means blue, but now is just a pond of chemicals products. On the pictures the tubes that rejects the chemicals worth all the speeches of the world. This is the ugly truth behind products like the Apple watch, that are made on those destroyed lands like Baotou.

But we can't only blame Apple, they just fulfill our needs, we need to blame us as well. We always complaining about how China destroys the earth and looking for richness while their nature is dying but that we don't understand is that we are the cause of all this. The chinese are the victims who are just responding to the constant and growing demand of the western economy. Chinese workers are the real victims of Europeans unlimited needs of technology.They are forced to work in mines where the mortality is very high and they are exposed to all sort of chemicals during the process. Apple and all the phones companies  are guilty of the destruction and the degradation of a large part of China, but we are also guilty of letting companies like Apple doing whatever they like in others countries while buying their new products like the Apple watch which is very nice, but honestly useless.