Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

to include the wide-open field that was later (today) called “visual culture”and has led to the incorporation of all manner of popular imagery in worksof art.Nor did the pop artists honor traditional methods of creating art.Their aim was generally to alter the images they found in popular cultureas little as possible rather than emphasizing the activity of the artist as anoriginal genius. Not primarily social commentary or critique, pop art merelytried to accept and reflect what was found visually in the modern worldrather than retreating from it to an ivory tower of fine art. Humor or evensatire may have been included, but the main purpose was a kind of explorationof the boundaries between the images of art and those of everydaylife, especially commerce. Among others, the styles of pop art included RoyLichtenstein’s blown-up paintings of comic book scenes and comic-stylerendering of gestural brush strokes, Tom Wesselman’s Great American Nudes,Robert Indiana’s colorful traffic signs conveying messages of the AmericanDream, James Rosenquist’s gigantically scaled billboard-figure collages, MelRamos’s brand-name pinup ads, the ironic road signs of Edward Ruschaand Allan D’Arcangelo, and the comically constructed urban environmentsof Red Grooms.What pop art celebrated was not so much the commercial objectsthemselves as the look of media representations of such everyday objects.By the 1960s, the advertising and marketing of mass-produced consumergoods had reached an unprecedented level in the United States. Pop artistsused such images for their art, but they repeated and magnified them on ahuge scale usually with flat garish colors or different materials so that theviewer’s perception of them was inevitably altered and intensified. Thesubjects were basically interchangeable: Elvis Presley could substitute forChiquita bananas, a car crash, Marilyn Monroe, or a bottle of Coca-Cola. Thesubject lost its weight, another intentional deflation of the ideals of abstractexpressionism. At its most radical, pop art helped fuel growing calls towardthe end of the 1960s for the end of art as an isolated practice, for the mergingof art and life in general as a kind of cultural revolution.The most prominent pioneer of pop art was Andy Warhol (1927–1987). As an awkward, uneasy child of relatively poor immigrant parents,the young Warhol saw the grocery store’s endless rows of canned food assomething beautiful, signifying wealth, abundance, and psychological security.His art came to feature these kinds of commercial images as well asmovie stars and other mass media imagery. “Don’t look beneath the surface,” hesaid in one of his many provocative statements about his artwork, “There’snothing there.”140