NYC Art Scene POPS to Life!
Pop art is splashed across the walls of New York City’s art spaces this fall. From the endless white walls of the City’s cultural institutions to the auction house playgrounds of the extremely wealthy to warehouses nestled deep in the Meatpacking District, pop art is all around us. In an age where celebrity and fame are omnipresent, tabloids and tweets tell us where celebrities eat, what they eat or if they are eating at all; pop art takes on a whole new meaning. Most of us spend more time than we care to admit loving or loathing the stars that take residence on the covers of magazines and our obsession is validated when the latest celebrity arrest is fodder for headline news on CNN. And now celebrity has made its way into the halls of great art. But what does this all mean? We know that pop art takes the pictures of products and celebrities that we see every day and reinvents them, adding the right touches of color to give stale, cliché images new meaning and life. But what are these soup cans and pop icons telling us? That’s exactly what I set out to learn on an artistic pilgrimage that took me (and my Warhol-worshipping roommate) across the city and through the evolution of pop art.
We started close to home at the Brooklyn Museum, which, in the waning days of summer, hosted an exhibition that featured art from the last decade of Andy Warhol’s life. Accustomed to Warhol’s Marilyns and soup cans and intrigued by his wild nights at Studio 54, my sidekick and I thought we had Warhol all figured out. How wrong we were. Warhol’s final paintings possessed a great deal more depth and self-reflection than his more famous works, as if he used the principles of pop art he created to hold a mirror to himself. The idolatry Warhol typically showered upon his muse, Marilyn Monroe, was replaced with painting after painting of Christ-like figures, which made me wonder what kind of spiritual journey Warhol may have taken at toward the end of his days. Portraits of Elvis had transformed into portraits of himself and an artist’s search for identity and meaning was beautifully rendered in classic Warhol style. I left the Brooklyn Museum feeling privy to the deepest secrets from the mind of a master, as if Warhol himself were whispering his most personal thoughts and questions into my ear.
The intimacy that captivated me at the Brooklyn Museum was starkly contrasted by the On To Pop exhibit at MoMA. On To Pop features the classic pop art I had expected to see in Brooklyn. But this exhibition focuses on more than just Warhol. Alongside Warhol’s Double Elvis (1963, silkscreen) and Gold Marilyn (painted in 1962, the year of Monroe’s suicide), were works by other pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Edward Ruscha. The art that adorned the walls of MoMA was inspired not only by pop icons, but by our everyday worlds. My roommate and I fell in love with a 1963 work by Roy Lichtenstein entitled Drowning Girl. Painted in comic book style Benday dots, the work was inspired by a DC Comics book called Run for Love! The woman in the painting is drowning, but asserts that she’d rather drown than ask her ex-lover for help. The bright colors and in-your-face boldness of the painting pack a punch, communicating a powerful feminist message in the playful way that only pop art can. Though small and featuring more mainstream work, On to Pop is absolutely worth a visit for anyone interested in pop art and serves as a colorful reminder of the power of pop. (While you’re at MoMA, take a walk around the Abstract Expressionist exhibition for a big-picture glimpse at the roots of pop art. And check out the Jackson Pollack works!)
After looking at the classic images of pop art and the self-application of its principles from one artist, I found myself wondering about the cultural context of pop art. Are these images trapped within the golden age of the Marilyn, Elvis and the Hollywood pf yesteryear? Or will we be seeing silkscreen and Benday dot paintings of Britney Spears or Justin Beiber in exhibitions to come?
I found the answer to my question crammed inside a tiny warehouse in the heart of the Meatpacking District at the latest exhibition of renowned graffiti artist Mr. Brainwash entitled ICONS. A key player in the graffiti art movement, Mr. Brainwash has been at large in the art world since he first exploded on the scene in 2008. ICONS showcases some of the most provocative and insightful artwork I’ve seen since arriving to New York. Mr. Brainwash takes the classic pop art style and revolutionizes it by creating a perfect marriage of pop and graffiti art. Using mixed media, his works take icons from across the eras, from Charlie Chaplin to The Beatles to Snoopy and immortalizes them using spray paint, silk screen, tires and broken pieces of old records. These brazen images are complemented with words that communicate peace, love and hope in a time of uncertainty. They contemporize the messages of activists Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lennon, they pay tribute to artists like Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol (Brainwash turns Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans into spray paint cans) and they worship the modern beauty of Kate Moss and Madonna. As I strolled past the sculptures and paintings of ICONS, I realized that pop art will always be around, always relevant, as long as artists use their creative genius to explore and revolutionize pop culture.
