6

Contemporary Art: The Legacy of Pop

Summary

  • Contemporary Art -The Legacy of Pop comments upon contemporary life using imagery drawn from today’s popular culture.
  • Artists featured within this theme are Jeff Koons and Gilbert & George.

Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein influenced the sensibilities of Post-Pop artists. The works of Gilbert & George, and Jeff Koons, for example, included subjects from daily life, representations of celebrities, vivid colours and the techniques of mass reproduction.

Koons drew his imagery from glossy magazines, junk mail and advertising brochures, which he combined into lavish compositions via the computer. These compositions were then painted by his assistants in a pain-staking, photo-realistic way.

Gilbert & George took the cult of celebrity one step further, by humorously putting themselves into their exuberantly coloured pictures.

Their works offer a personal critique and interpretation of contemporary life in London, drawn from today’s popular culture.

 
 

Artist

Jeff Koons Sandwiches 2000
from the EasyFun-Ethereal series

Jeff KOONS - Sandwiches (from EasyFun-Ethereal) 2000

Jeff KOONS
American 1955–
Sandwiches (from EasyFun-Ethereal) 2000
oil on canvas
304.8 x 426.7 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG in consultation with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin
© Jeff Koons
2006.8

 

"…I find they are full of references to high and low culture, mixing surreal images with snatches from adverts. The first, enormous, canvas as you go in is entitled Sandwiches - a jumble of archetypal US deli-style sandwiches, complete with olive eyes and a chocolate smear moustache. They make you want to laugh out loud."
Olive Clancy Jeff Koons: King of kitsch – BBC 2001

Jeff Koons has always been controversial. His critics attack him as being kitsch and too commercial. Koons follows the tradition of appropriating popular culture from Dada to Surrealism to Pop Art.

Madly playful, luscious and gleaming, Koons’ EasyFun-Ethereal series explores the nature of art in a media-saturated era. Jeff Koons intends to ‘communicate with the masses.’

In Sandwiches 2000 we see a blend of landscape, Pringles logos and lashings of milk

hovering fruit and vegetables, whilst slices of meat are arranged with salad and numerous dressings to form smiley faces, as if for a child's birthday party. The painting Lips has the feeling of a Del Monte advert about it. Fruit, sweetcorn and fruit juice float about as if in zero gravity, and an eye and two mouths sit within a swirl of baby sweetcorn…  
John Hudson 2001

Jeff Koons’ work communicates extremely well with the general public perhaps due to the gleeful childlike subject matter and photo realist accuracy of his imagery. Smiles made of commercial mustard, faces of manufactured meat, sparkles and orbs of over cute eyeballs – all there to enchant adults and children alike to consume or over-indulge.

Koons gathered clippings of visual source material from advertising, marketing, and the entertainment industry and slogans from glossy magazines. He then created large digital images. The final canvas was painted from these digital images in oil by his team of highly skilled studio assistants. Koons has around 50 assistants. They precisely imitated the colours, shapes and surfaces of the computer images through the traditional technique of oil on canvas.

 
 

Artist

Gilbert & George Dream 1984

Gilbert & George - Dream 1984

GILBERT & GEORGE
Italian/English 1943–
English 1942–
Dream 1984
243.8 x 254 cm
gelatin-silver prints with handcolouring
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Gift, C.E.D.E.F., S.A., Geneva
© Gilbert & George, courtesy of Jay Jopling and White Cube (London)
86.3412

"I do believe that the most important invention out of it was making ourselves the art, the living sculpture. Making ourselves communicate with the public, making ourselves aware that we have a public in front of us. But that only comes because we became the art."
Gilbert

Gilbert & George’s work Dream 1984 references the history of portraiture. They often playfully insert their own cameo appearances into their large wildly coloured photographic works made up from a grid of smaller panels. In Dream, a young man represents youth and innocence. Behind him is a strange image of an enormous inverted spider.  Gilbert & George draw on their personal experiences and sources such as film and music videos.

It has been widely observed that since 1965, when Gilbert & George met and began working and living together, they have merged their identities so completely that we never think of one without the other; no surnames, individual biographies or separate bodies of work hinder their unique twinship.

Gilbert & George appear at cultural events dressed as eccentric artistic celebrities, wearing matching business suits with their faces and hands covered with a metallic patina. They make no division between their life and their art; they are their own works of art. They see themselves as ‘living sculptures’.

The range of their art has grown to include photography, drawing, painting, written texts, film and performance. These constructed black and white ‘photo-pieces’ are dyed with intense colours; the resulting brilliance captivates the viewer like massive light flooded stained-glass windows.

Dream 1984 was made using conventional darkroom facilities and techniques – photographic film, an enlarger, photo chemical baths and hand applied colour dyes. More recently Gilbert & George make art using digital photography, scanners, computers and digital printers.

 
 

Activities

Middle Years

6.1 Compositions from the Canteen: A Practical Activity

Senior Years – VCE Art & VCE Studio Arts

6.2 Formal Elements and Techniques

6.3 Researching the Influence of Pop Art

6.4 Jeff Koons: Commentaries on Art