Investigation Of The Relationship Between Pop Art And Postmodern Architecture

Introduction

Art movements and architecture have throughout history always been ingrained with the time in which they existed, influenced by it and/or challenging the norms of their society. They affect the world around them as much as they are a mirror of it. Perhaps no art movement has been so unashamedly upfront about its influences as pop art. And arguably no type of architecture has been so clear in its intention to fit both the landscape and the times in which it was created as post-modern architecture (albeit this will mean looking backwards for inspiration and fitting in with existing surroundings). Both of these movements arose in the 1960s even though architecture naturally has longer lead times and did not hit the mainstream until later. They both break with what came before, and their drivers can be traced back to changes in consumer culture which in turn were driven by capitalism and the post WWII economic boom, especially in the US. Statement of purpose and research objectives

This essay aims to explore the relationship between pop art and post-modern architecture in light of consumer culture. It investigates how consumer culture contributed to the development of both pop art and post-modern architecture through identifying similarities and comparing discrepancies between the two. Aspects of consumer culture like advertising and entertainment, together with famous pop art pieces and post-modern buildings, are used as examples to explain and contrast the different relationships. The research therefore seeks to accomplish the following objectives: To discuss the incorporation of elements of consumer culture into examples of pop art pieces and post-modernist building in order better to understand how prevailing economic and cultural conditions inspired the development of the movements both independently and together. To investigate the future of the art scene and architecture based on the current times and the shifts we are currently seeing, based on our understanding of how consumer culture has shaped and influenced pop art and post-modernist architecture.

Theory, research and empirical finding

Three perspectives in which to view consumer culture

I rely on three perspectives of consumer culture as outlined in Featherstone, M. Featherstone argues that it is important to view consumer culture as just that, a culture of consumption and not simply derived from production. Below are the three main perspectives described by Featherstone: The production of consumption: This is the most basic perspective and has its basis in classical economics and the expansion of capitalist commodity production, which in turn has led to accumulation of material culture in the form of consumer goods and sites for purchase and consumption. This has led to the increased importance of consumption in the West, and is generally greeted as either an “equalizer” (since more people have reached a more affluent state), or as a potential “ideological manipulator” that inhibits a “better set of social relations”. The notion of consumption as an ideological manipulator is evident in how consumers are “trained” e. g. through advertising. Throughout history, poverty has always been apparent and wealth has been exclusive. Historically, civilizations were considered prosperous when their governing classes ruled in lavishness and extravagance. Nevertheless the general public “writhed for meager survival. ” Nowadays, minimum standards of nourishment, accommodation, and clothing are still not guaranteed for most individuals. Beyond these minimum necessities, former extravagances as homeownership, luxury goods, transport, leisure, and entertainment are no longer limited to elites. The general public partake in appreciating all these things and produce the highest demand for them. The limitations of this perspective are that it fails properly to address the actual practice and experience of consumption. Modes of consumption (physical, status, social markers etc): This perspective is a sociological way of looking at consumption, where it is viewed as a zero-sum game where satisfaction is based upon using consumption to display differences between groups or belonging. It’s zero-sum because the satisfaction is relative; to raise in status through consumption another needs to match it or be left behind. In this view it’s also important to distinguish between different types of consumption, like routine or leisure, durable and non-durable goods or commodity and non-commodity consumption (although products can move between categories over time). Modes of consumption also highlight the symbolic aspect of goods in western countries. For example, a vintage bottle of wine can be consumed and enjoyed in that way, but can also never be “consumed” as such and rather be enjoyed by being looked at, handled and perhaps shown off to peers (to show social class and status). Douglas and Isherwood (1980) also argue that our enjoyment of goods is only in part attributable to their physical consumption and that what they represent (their markers) is also very important. Consuming dreams, images and pleasure: this perspective is based on the desires that leads to consumption and which traditionally is displayed in advertising and in shops to lead to more consumption. This can even have direct physical impact through excitement and pleasure.

The change in consumer culture post WWII

The post-war period witnessed massive development in the American economy. A combination of innovative technology and a more engaging and wide spread media procreated mass consumerist values in the public. Industrialized production models which had gained footing during the war now gave rise to mass produced consumer products ranging from cosmetics to washing-machines to cars, which publicists and marketers proclaimed would lead to happiness through convenience for their buyers. The rising accessibility of T. V. , along with various development in print technology and a massive push in advertising, brought new importance to graphic art and pictures as well as to the development of identifiable brand logos. The late 1950s through to the 1960s were characterised by an excited burst of corporate expansion driven by the creation of a competitive environment in America due to the government’s efforts to curtail monopolies. It followed that the exponential growth of competition led to increased need for brand awareness to help with marketing. The period between the early 1950s and late 1960s also witnessed the emergence of self-service supermarkets which in turn led to more emphasis being laid on consumer packaging as a way to stand out in the aisles. The continued dramatic growth of the consumer goods industry further saw the transformation of and need for advertising. Ads became bolder with a focus on the use of fewer words and more colourful, larger and more photographic designs. It was into the artistic and cultural context that Pop artists advanced their characteristic style in the first half of the 1960s.

The emergence of pop art

Pop Art is an abbreviation for 'Popular Art. ' The expression first appeared in an article titled 'The Arts and the Mass Media' by the British critic Lawrence Alloway in February 1958 on the subject of Architectural Design. It broke through in the early 1960s, when magazines like Time, Life and Newsweek published cover articles in its distinctive style. Easily identifiable by noticeably condensed pictures of popular themes, it give the impression of an attack on the values of modern painting, and encompassed abstract ideas as a representation of universal realities and individualistic means of expression. Pop art became a significant movement in the 1960s and coincided with massive corporate expansion. The need for marketing and advertising platforms was recognised to have contributed to the development of pop art that primarily incorporated these aspects of the popular culture. Pop art was equally a response to Abstract Expressionism, which was perceived as snobbish and detached, as it was a merriment of the postwar consumer nation. Pop is full of life and irony, it is not philosophical or emotional. The financial affluence of the 1960s and 70s manifested in a vast form of communication. Ads were jam-packed in newspapers, television screens and billboards, becoming more and more overriding and influential. The influence of this imagery triggered the development of Pop Art itself and started to test old-fashioned conventions of what art was meant to signify. Artists such as Claus Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein used advertisements, product packages, comic books, music and films as the focal point of their work. The emergence of pop art indicated a significant change in modern art. Instead of focusing on themes like classical antiquity, morality, and myth of the ‘high art’, pop art primarily integrated the elements of popular culture (Osterwold 2003). This meant that any mundane or commonplace materials and objects could be incorporated into the artworks, by celebrating the subjects of everyday life, pop art elevated popular culture into the same level as traditional fine art. Pop art was represented by very different styles but had common attributes such mass-media, mass-culture and mass-production. The movement flourished in the period of unprecedented economic prosperity whose manifestation was demonstrated in the pop artistic upheaval. Although many of the artists associated with the movement are from New York (e. g. James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg), many of the artists who would popularise the style were drawn across the world. Through the creation of sculptures, images and paintings from mass culture objects and mass media stars, the pop art movement aimed at breaking a boundary between ‘low’ and ‘high’ art. The resurgence of printed imagery in the US and Europe can also be seen to have coincided with the movement’s development. As noted above, pop art was in part also a reaction against the abstract expressionists. Whereas abstract expressionism searched for trauma in the soul, pop primarily focused on the mediated world through objects like cartoons and aspects of the contemporary such as advertisement and (primarily) imagery at large. Abstract expressionist snobbery is illustrated by the story of art dealer Sidney Janis who, when he broadened his taste to include pop art, found that all of the Abstract Expressionists that used to show with him bar Willem de Kooning fled to other galleries. According to Mamiya (1992) where many different things but their most important contribution to the creation of art was the machine-like production, the possibility to consume it quickly. It was created to be bought and then recreated, made to fill up space and connect the art world with the world we live in. Retrospectively there now appears to be widespread identification of 1960s American pop art with post-modernism. This is covered in more depth in the section below titled “Definitions of post-modernism”. Major pop artists rethought the borders that separate artistic inspiration from real life. Although common in all forms of music and culture, Robert Rauschenberg’s dedication to work in the crevices between real live and expression led him to include every day objects like pillows, car tyres and even a taxidermized goat in his paintings that included a combination of features of imagery and sculpture. Similarly, Claes Oldenberg crafted an piece called “the Stone” in an empty shop where he sold roughly shaped sculptures of popular branded everyday consumer goods. These pop artists were contradicting what they perceived to be as the inflexible and patronising viewpoints which led to Abstract Expressionism. The emergence of post-modern architecture

Modern architecture fixated on the direction and formation of the city and on a constructional proficiency. In several of Le Corbusier’s works such as Five Points of a New Architecture (1926) the emphasis is on the practical construction of structures more than any theoretical inferences. In Le Corbusier’s unrealized plan for Paris, 1925 designed to totally substitute the current city and re-build a capital which contains of an equal network of multistory buildings. On the contrary, Venturi requests designers to put emphasis on learning from the existing site. The importance developed on improving the landscape Instead of altering it, or in Le Corbusier’s theory, complete reconstruction and beginning all over again. In contradiction of other Modernist ideologies of minimalism and rationality, the post-modern era was subjective to the visually intricate phases of Baroque and Rococo. The chaotic vigour started to take over the direction of the official style of government, religious and housing buildings. Venturi assumed that architects now existed in an ethnic heritage which not only promotes us but offers valuable models upon which new design concepts can be founded upon. Regardless of the pronounced inspiration of Corbusier’s rationalist buildings, Venturi states “how harmful, modernisms is inconsistent with the wider and deeper architectural philosophy was”. Through this fresh perception, modernist architecture was perceived as sterilised and gloomy, and in turn no longer replicated the picture-perfect precision that it initially intended to. This directly challenged the Modernist design that it was not the full-bodied Modernism of the 1930s, but the shrill, out-of-date 1960s version. Architects exemplified a new type of design. The cities turned into a communicative scenery instead of a dull repetitive grid-iron of mass housing. It ignited the beginning of a different innovative design language of architecture without sky scrapers or the identical homogeneous formula of structures. Post-modern architecture is best described by what it is rebelling against which is modernism. Modernism focused on order and structure of the city based on the thinking of architects such as Le Corbusier, which led to a lack of variety (Eggener, 2004). The best example of this is most likely Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin, where he wanted to bulldoze and rebuild a large part of the Paris city centre with several large skyscrapers in a grid formation. Post modernism, led by Robert Venturi, rather wanted to focus on learning from the existing landscape which could be as much about history as the current times. In his 1966 book “complexity and contradiction in architecture” we can read the following in his preface to the book, where he quoted T. S. Eliot to explain how tradition, meaning “the historical sense” - “a conscious sense of the past” guided his own work. According to Venturi an architect must draw on historical precedent in order to represent an architectural thought. However, that sense of historical precedent could be very broad and have a vast difference of influences. In Venturi’s second book “Learning from Las Vegas” (written with Scott Brown and Izenour) we learn that their attempt to develop this post-modern architecture not of space, form and function but of iconography, the iconic richness of banality was helped by the sensibilities of the pop artist of the time who had revolted against abstract expressionism by turning to commercial art and advertising (Docker 1994). We also see that they throughout celebrate pop art and that it questioned the demand of modernism that art always had to be new original and scorning the everyday. As the time passed, artists moved away from traditional painting and began using techniques typically common in industry and mass production. Warhol started creating silkscreens, and then started to reduce hands on work by making other people paint for him in his studio, appropriately named “The Factory. ” Likewise, Oldenburg dismissed his early artwork and shows, to make huge sculptures of cake slices, lipsticks, and clothespins that defined his work in this era. It was also in Learning from Las Vegas we were introduced to the “Duck and Decorated shed” analogy which explained the 2 ways of embodying iconography in buildings. The duck is from a store on Long Island shaped as a duck which is to describe the type of building that was “submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form” while the decorated shed rather just applied symbolism. Definition of post-modernism (and how it applies to pop art) Post-modernism in art and architecture can be denoted as an equally a refusal of 'modernism,' in addition to art that arose 'after modernism. ' A number of traditional aspects have inclined towards this conforming alteration in art style from modernism to post-modernism. Maybe the largest influence is the arrival of the high-tech era. Similarly as recent society was subjective to the inspirations brought by the industrial age, so post-modernism had influences from the digital era. The consequences of this digital or high tech, culture, terrestrial borders have been demolished. Images of art are easy to get access to instantaneously to global spectators. Within the art world, artists and architects hold a ridiculous selection of imageries and sources even though refusing the unadulterated, unsoiled fundamentals that symbolized the 'finale' of modern art: minimalism. While modernists encouraged abstraction, post-modern painters encouraged a reappearance of old-fashioned demands and materials such as scenery and historical imagery. Selected post-modernists cast-off the modern idea that every art movement be entirely original; this refusal encourages the method of appropriating (adoption) from art or architectural history, or other sources, and mingling earlier imageries and designs in innovative combinations. Frequently, post-modern topics in the visual arts is concerned with social problems and activism. Just before the end of the era, and since post-modernism has its origins in literature, visual artists every so often integrate text into their craft. Postmodern design language is highly influenced by Dada, Surrealism, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, and Neo-Expressionism. Harrison (2001) establishes a range of post-modernist assumptions that she used to identify what “can now be regarded as aspects of post-modernist thought in critical responses to American pop art during the sixties”. She states that ““Post-modernist” responses to pop were prompted by those features that resisted accommodation within existing formalist or realist critical canons. ” and lists the following (numbering by me): The most prominent of these is anonymity that is lack of “authorial presence” or a “centred sense of personal identity. ” This is evident in its depersonalized technique, minimal, if any, transformation of source material, and obscure or uninterpretable “message. ” A further feature concerns the collapsing of distinctions between élite and mass cultural realms, evident in pop art's indebtedness to the codes, subjects, and, in some instances, technical processes of mass communications. Finally, there is that of the representation of “culture” as opposed to “nature,” the province of realism, insofar as it concerns the simulation of pre-existing signs. Critics theorized these features along either sociological or philosophical lines. They viewed them as reflective of Western urban society in its post-war capitalist-consumerist phase or, alternatively, as eliminative of a worldview in the sense of an authoritative, totalizing system of thought.

Analysis & Discussion

Both pop art and post-modern architecture are about breaking with the past and the dogmas that came before. They were both in a way countercultures to the pure industrialisation and consumerism of the previous years and current times, pop art often with an inherent criticism of the mass production and consumption and post-modern architecture breaking with the standardised way of building championed by the modernists. Pop artists were still clearly inspired by the mass-production and mass-consumerism and even though we can see criticism they still wanted art to be more attainable and not just for the upper classes of society. This can be viewed as being a democratizer in the same way as consumerism can be seen according to Featherstone’s most basic perspective of production of consumption. In this sense pop art could be viewed to have more in common with the modern architecture rather than the post-modern which took a step back from the pure efficiency of modernism. Post-modern architecture can be seen to work in the opposite direction, by leaving the standardised module-like building of modernism they make their buildings more expensive and hence less affordable, their view of the “consumption of buildings” would rather lend itself to the perspective of status markers (in modes of consumption) or even dreams. The social markers of buildings became less obvious in modernism and as a reaction to this in post-modernism we can see the ornaments and more aesthetically pleasing buildings. The idea of doubly symbolic aspect is definitely relevant for buildings, especially commercial buildings, and it can be likened to the decorated shed analogy that Venturi championed. There is also a clear difference in how post-modern architects went back to what was before for inspiration and to better adapt to surroundings while pop art completely broke with the past and where squarely focused on the here and now both in techniques and imagery. Consumerism and individuality (Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame and buildings that stood out), don’t know exactly how but there is something there

Conclusion

There are definitive similarities between pop art and post-modern architecture and we can clearly see how the consumer culture of the time influenced both. The response to the same stimuli did however lead them down different paths. Both Post modernism and pop art rejected the notion of the status qui of their fields. Post modernism rejected the “form over function” and the pure minimalist style of the modernist architecture and went on the opposite direction by adding extreme and unnecessary design elements where from and beauty ruled over the function of the buildings. The modernist style was to reduce any unnecessary elements in design which made the design mundane, dull, repetitive and boring. The lines were hard and sharp. Any unnecessary support structure was removed in designs. It returned architecture into basics. This was refreshing and interesting and even striking at first, but when every building on the horizon began to look like weird crossword puzzles the human brain wanted curves, waves, and color. Post modernism added all these and more. It brought flair to architecture and design. It destroyed preconceived notions. Architects and designers embraced their creativity and weirdness pushing design into the realms of “Alice in wonderland” rather than crossword puzzle in terms of inspiration. This freed them from the restrictive minimalistic views of the modernist design language. From this point forward, architecture and design had the freedom to go in any direction, literally they wanted without being bound by the status quo. The same way, in art, Pop Art rejected the “high culture” associated within the art scene that were inaccessible to the general public due to its high cost and complexities. Instead made art that was copied and tacky while being mas producible which made art accessible to all people. Pop art showed that anyone can become an artist by adding their touch to everyday objects and advertisement pieces. Pop art rejected the notion that put art and artists on a pedestal that was far beyond the reach of normal people. Even though pop art was inspired by Dadaism, pop art did not reject capitalism but embraced the capitalist inspired trends by including advertisements and advertisement derivative design in to pop art. Pop art wanted to maintain the capitalist economic structure while freeing the art from the elitist art scene. Pop art proclaimed that art was not only for the elite and made art for everyone.

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