After the end of the Second World War, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art had been promoted by the United Statesas part of efforts to establish itself as a new hegemonic center even of the visual arts. Since then, until the 1980s,American major museums had been quick to hold exhibitions shed light to ‘American Art’ from various angles. As a result,the deep and rich implications regarding ‘mass culture and consumer society,’ the central themes of Pop Art, although seemingly born with a critical attitude, were reduced to sweet sentimentalism, characterized by stunning spectacles and images of well-provided for life.
Gana Art presents two solo exhibitions of Roy Lichtenstein (1923 – 1997), one of the representative American Pop artistsin the 1960s, and Richard Pettibone (1938 – ) who offered a new approach through the issue of ‘reproduction of Pop Art’in the 1960s when Pop Art played a leading role in art history. The exhibitions explore the distinguishing traits runningthrough the two artists’ works that reflected the American culture at that time, as well as contributed to expandingthe realm of art, along with the historical values embedded in them.
Roy Lichtenstein, who took pleasure in incorporating mass cultural images from newspapers, magazines, advertisement, etc. in fine art, and then placing them within a new context, was well known, particularly by his cartoon-style works capturing vivid pictures of the times. On another level, he represented the images appropriated from art history in his own ways of reproduction, that is, Ben-Day dots and schematic simplification of form, thereby showing that another original versioncould be made. His Water Lilies series on display in the exhibition may remind you of Monet’s series of eponymous paintings in that they are painted with countless dots. Nevertheless, if the latter was based on an emotional approach to light and landscape, the former is more mechanic and artificial since it not only reorganized them in geometrical patterns such as grid matrix and dot, but also enhanced a cold stainless steel texture. This leads you to reconsider about the relationship between mass culture andfine art, the life-long subject of his art since when mass production and consumption were celebrated as virtues.
Richard Pettibone, who was first introduced to Pop Art in Andy Warhol’s first solo show in 1962, reproduced the works by Warhol who was being accused of making non-art, and inscribed his name alongside with that of Warhol.This ‘re-appropriation and re-reproduction,’ a more dramatized version of ‘appropriation and reproduction,’ was regarded asan ultimate epitome of the postmodern tendencies of the period. It was part of the artist’s strategy to reveal the contradictions in artistic movements that had a blurred boundary in terms of conceptual demarcation, although apparently opposed to each other, such as a pair of Dada and Pop Art, painting and photography, and so on. Nevertheless, rather than assuming a critical point of view regarding them, Pettibone tried to communicate with other artists, creating an opportunity for mutual criticism of the discourse of the times. Still actively working, the artist is producing very tiny and precise reproductions of works of avant-garde artistsin the previous age who intended to demolish the border between high culture and everyday life, only to form the grand narrative and establish another hegemony. And all these practices are directed toward one question: To whom does the concept in my own work of art belong?
Although the historical portrait described by Pop Art became a half a century long memory and its vivid colors and imagesmay fade away, Pop Art is still as sweet and fresh as a cake in your dream which you have never tasted. It whispers that it can bring you to the future, the kind of which you earnestly wish that your life would be able to reach at least once. This may be because Pop Art was born of ever-present progressive contemporary images, as well as through the endless reproduction.
Gana Art Chief Curator Lee Jang-Eun
