Activity #7

American Pop Art

An artistic look into American Pop Art and one of its most famous artists was explored in this exhibition, which presents 9 objects associated with this theme. In America Pop artists reproduced, duplicated, combined, overlaid and arranged visual details that make up American society, introducing shifts and transformations and acting like commentaries. Pop Art attempted to show that a detached look at the over familiar objects of daily life could give them new meaning as visual symbols. Pop artists took material in the mundane, mass-produced objects and images of America’s popular culture- comic books, advertising, etc. and turned them into something exciting. In this exhibition shows all of that. All of these objects in this show are taken from one of the most famous and enigmatic Pop artists, Andy Warhol.

One of the leaders of the pop art movement, Andy Warhol produced paintings and silk-screen prints of commonplace images, such as soup cans and photographs of celebrities. Repetition was a key to Warhol's work, as evidenced by his many recurrent series Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara, and Chairman Mao, among others. The use of photographic silkscreen gave the images a mechanical look. Warhol deliberately infused his work with a mechanical and impersonal character that intensified when he adopted silkscreen printing techniques in order to increase his production. The silkscreen process, which consists in the mechanical repetition of an image on fabric while reducing it to its essential outlines; stripped of its details, the form acquires a greater visual impact. This technique deriving from the advertising industry for which Warhol had worked, allows him to approach his ideal of objectivity, whereby perfection would be a matter of identical reproduction. This operation's effect would be to separate the image from the meanings attributed to it, preserving only its appearance, the pure image. Warhol attempted to keep his personal fascination with fame from showing through too clearly in his works, preferring to leave their meaning open to the interpretation of viewers. These 9 objects in this show exemplify all of the artistic talents Andy Warhol had. From paintings of the Campbell’s Soup can, to his famous mass produced silk screens such as the Marilyn Monroe.

American Pop art took me by surprise the first time I saw it. I was looking through our book and saw a picture of Andy Warhol, and thought this person looks very strange and interesting, so I read the little piece the book had on him. I saw some of his work in the Pop art theme and some work of others such as Roy Lichtenstein and Niki de Saint-Phalle and I enjoyed it very much. I found it so interesting how these artists took such simple things and turned them into art. What really intrigued me was why these artists constructed what they did, but a lot of them would not say why. Like Andy Warhol, they wanted to leave the interpretations up to its viewers. I look at these creations for long periods of time and have no idea what they mean or why they are there. But I realize it is up to me to develop a meaning behind the piece and I love that about Pop art. You can never be wrong about the interpretation, because it is your own.