MY MAGICAL ATTIC: POP ART DESIGN AT BARBICAN CENTER

December 07, 2013

POP ART DESIGN AT BARBICAN CENTER

POP ART DESIGN AT BARBICAN ART GALLERY, BARBICAN CENTER UK

Jane Alison, Senior Curator

22 October 2013 – 9 February 2014

POP ART DESIGN AT BARBICAN ART GALLERY, BARBICAN CENTER UK

Jane Alison, Senior Curator

22 October 2013 – 9 February 2014

An exhibition of Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, in cooperation with Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk and Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

The exhibition is supported by tp Bennett.

Brash, colourful and playful, Pop Art was a movement that signalled a radical change of direction in the postwar period. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s Pop was characterised by an intense dialogue between the fields of design and art. Pop Art Design is the first comprehensive exhibition to explore the origins, motives and methods of this exchange. Pop Art shaped a new sense of cultural identity, with a focus on celebrity, mass production and the expanding industries of advertising, television, radio and print media. Pop Art Design brings together around 200 works, by over 70 artists and designers, including iconic and lesser known works by such artists as Peter Blake, Judy Chicago, Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Elaine Sturtevant, Joe Tilson and Andy Warhol and shown alongside objects by Achille Castiglioni, Charles and Ray Eames, Allen Jones, George Nelson, Gaetano Pesce and Ettore Sottsass among many other important protagonists of this period. The exhibition also presents a wealth of graphic material from posters and magazines to album sleeves, as well as film, photography and documentation of Pop interiors and architecture. Fifty years after it exploded on to the art scene, Pop Art Design paints a new picture of Pop Art – one that finally recognises the central role played by design.

Jane Alison, Senior Curator, Barbican Art Gallery said: ‘Pop emerged in the 1950s yet, amazingly, this is the first major show to throw light on the relationship between Pop Art and design. Featuring key Pop artists and groundbreaking designers it’s a must see for anyone fascinated by this iconic period and its enduring legacy. We are delighted to be working with our generous partners at Vitra Design Museum, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Moderna Museet and thank them for their enthusiastic collaboration.’

After the Second World War the world changed radically. Artists and designers explored to dynamic effect the aesthetics of film and television, advertising, typography, packaging design, everyday products and new technologies. Consumer culture spread rapidly from the USA to Europe, where London became the pinnacle of a movement that glamorised youth and creativity. A new generation of young people became the focus of popular culture for which seduction and optimism about the future were both form and message.

Focusing on the dynamic relationship between Pop Art and design, the exhibition is arranged thematically and presents not only a fascinating panorama of a past era but also offers new insights for both disciplines. Instead of merely celebrating the zeitgeist of an epoch, the exhibition takes a more detailed look at the Pop phenomenon: at the migration of motifs between art and design, at the relationship between everyday object and image and, not least, at how everyday life first came under the influence of pop culture.

Highlights on show include Robert Rauschenberg’s proto-pop painting Tideline, 1963; Studio 65’s Leonardo sofa which has rarely been exhibited since it was first produced in 1969; James Rosenquist’s I Love You with My Ford, 1961; Judy Chicago’s spray-painted Car Hood, 1964; the monumental floor lamp Moloch by Gaetano Pesce, 1970-71; Allen Jones’s provocative Chair, 1969; Joe Tilson’s Page 1, Penelope, 1969; Gunnar Aagaard Andersen’s Portrait of my Mother’s Chesterfield Chair, 1964; The Bishop of Kuban by Eduardo Paolozzi, 1962; and Richard Hamilton’s iconic The Gold Guggenheim, 1965-66.

For the London showing at Barbican Art Gallery Pop Art Design will have a greater focus on the significant contribution of British artists and designers to Pop, reflecting a very individual identity in art and design from the 1960s.

ARTISTS AND DESIGNERS IN THE EXHIBITION INCLUDE

Luigi Colani | Allan D’Arcangelo | Jim Dine | Guido Drocco & Franco Mello

Kiki Kogelnik | Roy Lichtenstein | John McHale | Victor Moscoso | Olivier Mourgue

http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=14797

JAMES ROSENQUIST, I LOVE YOU WITH MY FORD, 1961

Collection Moderna Museet

Photo: Moderna Museet-Stockholm/Prallan Allsten

GAETANO PESCE UP 5 & 6 / LA MAMMA

DONNA, ARMCHAIR AND FOOTREST, 1969

Italy Collection Vitra Design Museum

GAETANO PESCE UP 5 & 6

GAETANO PESCE MOLOCH, FLOOR LAMP, 1970- 1971

Bracciodiferro Srl, Genova (GE), Italy

Photo: Aldo and Marirosa Ballo Collection MNAM/CCI,

Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

STUDIO 65 ROWAN MOORE BOCCA SOFA 1970

GUIDO DROCCO, FRANCO MELLO CACTUS, FIRST SERIES, 1972

Manufactured by Gufram Collection Fondation Beyeler, Riehen

STUDIO 65 PRATONE LOUNGE CHAIR, 1971

STUDIO 65, CAPITELLO CHAIR, 1971

Manufactured by Gufram Collection Vitra Design Museum

Photo: Andreas Sütterlin

STUDIO 65 LEONARDO SOFA, 1969

Manufactured by Gufram Collection Vitra Design Museum

Photo: Andreas Sütterlin

ANDY WARHOL CLOSE COVER BEFORE STRIKING, 1962

Collection Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

The Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society

ANDY WARHOL, FLOWERS 1970

Silkscreen on Smooth Card. Postmarked. Unframed.

Dimensions: 18.3 × 18.3 cm

the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society

MARILYN MONROE, II.26, 1967

Screenprint on Paper

Dimensions: 91.4 × 91.4 cm

The Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society

TOM WESSELMANN SMOKER BANNER, 1971

Private Collection, Siegen

ACHILLE CASTIGLIONNI, MEZZADRO STOOL

MARTIAL RAYSSE SOUVIENS-TOI DE TAHITI EN SEPTEMBER 61, 1963

Collection Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

BARBICAN ART CENTER

THE BARBICAN CENTRE

A world-class arts and learning organisation, the Barbican pushes the boundaries of all major art forms including dance, film, music, theatre and visual arts. Its creative learning programme further underpins everything it does. Over 1.5 million people pass through the Barbican’s doors annually, hundreds of artists and performers are featured, and more than 300 staff work onsite. The architecturally renowned centre opened in 1982 and comprises Barbican Art Gallery, a second gallery The Curve, the Barbican Hall, the Barbican Theatre, the Pit, Cinemas One, Two and Three, foyers and public spaces, a library, Lakeside Terrace, a glasshouse conservatory, conference facilities and three restaurants. The City of London Corporation is the founder and principal funder of the Barbican Centre

The Barbican is home to Resident Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra; Associate Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra; Associate Ensembles the Academy of Ancient Music and Britten Sinfonia, and Associate Producer Serious. Our Artistic Associates include Boy Blue Entertainment, Cheek by Jowl and Michael Clark Company. International Associates are Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig and Jazz at Lincoln Center.

BARBICAN ART GALLERY

One of the leading art spaces in the UK, Barbican Art Gallery presents the best of international visual art with a dynamic mix of art, architecture, design, fashion and photography. From acclaimed architects to Turner prize-winning artists, the Gallery exhibits innovators of the 20th and 21st centuries: key players who have shaped developments and stimulated change. The Curve is dedicated to a vibrant programme of new commissions, created by leading international artists in direct response to this distinctive gallery space

www.barbican.org.uk

THE ARCHITECTS

The Barbican Estate was designed by Chamberlin, Powell & Bon, now considered one of the most important modernist architectural firms in post-war England. In 1954, the young architects were building the nearby Golden Lane Estate for the Corporation of the City of London and were asked to submit designs for the Barbican.

Between 1955 and 1959, Chamberlin, Powell & Bon produced three schemes for the redevelopment of the area that became known as the Barbican. The architects initially suggested a ‘small exhibition hall’ in their first proposal but by 1959 this had grown into a major arts centre including a theatre, a concert hall, an art gallery, a public lending library and a restaurant. Approval was given in 1959 for the residential blocks to be built and construction began in 1963, lasting for twelve years.

CONSTRUCTION

The Barbican’s distinctive tooled-concrete finish is the result of an extremely labour-intensive technique. After the concrete had dried for at least 21 days, workers used handheld pick-hammers or wider bush-hammers to tool the surface and expose the coarse granite aggregate. It required great precision: pick-hammering involved pitting the surface to an average depth of 1.25 cm and bush-hammering to no more than 0.6 cm deep. The residential blocks alone necessitated over 200,000 m² of concrete to be tooled.

To fit the arts centre in the restricted site, the architects and engineers resorted to an ingenious solution: to excavate the site twenty metres below ground level and place the majority of the centre below the elevated walkways or ‘podium’ level. The architects compared the arts centre to ‘the hull of a large ship in which much is contained below the water.’

THE ESTATE

At the time of their completion, the Barbican towers were the tallest residential towers in Europe. Chamberlin, Powell & Bon had previous experience of designing high-rise residential blocks. Their Great Arthur House on Golden Lane Estate, which is visible to the right just behind Cromwell Tower, was briefly the tallest residential building in England when it was finished in 1957.

https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/our-building/our-architecture

BARBICAN ART CENTER

HEART CONE CHAIR 1959 VERNER PANTON

VERNER PANTON, SWIMMING POOL, 1969

Spiegel Publishing House (Hamburg) © Panton Design, Base

LIVING TOWER 1969 VERNER PANTON

EERO AARNIO, BALL CHAIR 1963

EERO AARNIO, PASTIL CHAIR 1967

JOE TILSON’S PAGE 1, PENELOPE 1969

EVELYNE AXELL ICE CREAM 1, 1964

CLAES OLDENBURG, LONDON KNEES 1966

PLASTIC ARMCHAIR 1950 RAR CHARLES RAY EAMES

IN THE CAR 1963 ROY LICHTENSTEIN

YELLOW BRUSHSTROKE II BY ROY LICHTENSTEIN, 1965

Source:Gar Powell-Evans / Courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

GEORGE NELSON ASSOCIATES INC. (IRVING HARPER)

MARSHMALLOW SOFA, 1956

Herman Miller Furniture Company Collection Vitra Design Museum

POP ART BY LAWRENCE ALLOWAY .....

'' Ours is the age of advertisement and publicity ''

Soren Kierkegaard

The aesthetics of twentieth-century art, or much of it, derive from the eighteenth-century separation of the arts from one another. 1 Art was strictly defined as pure painting, sculpture, architecture, music, or poetry, and nothing but these five media could be properly classified as fine art. This act of tight discrimination was powerfully reinforced in the succeeding centuries. Nineteenth-century aestheticism sought the pure center of each art in isolation from the others, and twentieth-century formal theories of art assumed a universal equilibrium that could be reached by optimum arrangements of form and color. No sooner were the arts purified by eighteenth-century definitions than the supporters of pure fine art declared their differences from the popular audience which was not committed to high art. Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Dr. Johnson all recorded their alarm at the gross new public's taste for realism and sensationalism in novels and plays. Anxieties were expressed about the effects of novels on young ladies—anxieties which were very like the fears of parents and teachers in the 50s about the effect of horror comics on children and in the 60s about the effect of the violence shown on TV. Connections exist between fine and popular art, but they are not numerous: Hogarth worked for a socially differentiated public, with paintings intended for an affluent and sophisticated audience and prints aimed at a mass audience. Goya drew on English political prints for his execution picture, The Third of May, 1808. 2 Daumier alternated between the directed messages of his political cartoons and the autonomous paintings. Toulouse-Lautrec's posters were pasted on kiosks in the streets of Paris. Despite such individual reconciliations of fine and popular art, of elite artist and public taste, representatives of the two taste groups have remained antagonists.

As the popular arts became increasingly mechanized and progressively more abundant, elite resistance hardened correspondingly. Popular culture can be defined as the sum of the arts designed for simultaneous consumption by a numerically large audience. Thus, there is a similarity in distribution and consumption between prints, on the one hand, and magazines, movies, records, radio, TV, and industrial and interior design, on the other.

Popular culture originates in urban centers and is distributed on the basis of mass production. It is not like folk art which, in theory at least, is handcrafted by the same group by which it will be consumed. The consumption of popular culture is basically a social experience, providing information derived from and contributing to our statistically normal roles in society. It is a network of messages and objects that we share with others. Popular culture is influential as it transmits prompt and extensive news, in visual, verbal, and mixed forms, about style changes that will affect the appearance of our environment or about political and military events that will put our accepted morality under new pressures. There is a subtle and pervasive, but only half-described, feedback from the public to the mass media and back to the public in its role as audience. The media have expanded steadily since the eigtheenth century, without a break or major diversion. The period after World War II was Edenic for the consumer of popular culture: technical improvements in color photography in magazines, expansion of scale in the big screens of the cinema, and the successful addition of new media (long playing records and television). In addition, cross-references between media increased, so that public communication expanded beyond its status of "relaxation" (the old rationalization for reading detective stories) or invisible service (such as providing essential political and national news).

Marshall McLuhan believes that the arrival of a new medium consigns prior media to obsolescence. It is true that each new channel of communication has its effect on the existing ones, but so far the effect has been cumulative and expansive. The number of possibilities and combinations increases with each new channel, whereas McLuhan assumes a kind of steady state of a number of messages which cannot be exceeded. Consider the relation of movies and TV. At first, movies patronized the tiny screen and the low-definition image in asides in films; then movies began to compete with TV by expanding into large screens (CinemaScope and Cinerama, for instance) and by using higher definition film stock (for example, VistaVision). (Three-dimensional movies were resurrected but did not get out of the experimental stage.) Today, TV shows old movies (more than two years old) continually and in so doing has created a new kind of Film Society audience of TV-trained movie-goers. In addition to making TV films, Hollywood is making sexier and tougher films, leaving the delta of family entertainment largely to TV. Movies, now, are more diversified and aimed at more specialized audiences, which is not what McLuhan's theory (which would expect the extinction of the movie) requires.

( .....................................................

....................................... Page 4 - 5 ................

.................................................................. )

In the postwar period an uncoordinated but consistent view of art developed, more in line with history and sociology than with traditional art criticism and aesthetics. In London and New York, artists then in their twenties or early thirties revealed a new sensitivity to the presence of images from mass communications and to objects from mass production assimilable within the work of art. Robert Rauschenberg, writing about Oyvind Fahlstrom, described the artist as "part of the density of an uncensored continuum that neither begins nor ends with any action of his." 3 Instead of the notion of painting as technically pure and organized as a nest of internal correspondences, Rauschenberg proposed that the work of art was a partial sample of the world's continuous relationships. It follows that works demonstrating such principles would involve a change in our concept of artistic unity: art as a rendezvous of objects and images from disparate sources, rather than as an inevitably aligned setup. The work of art can be considered as a conglomerate, no one part of which need be causally related to other parts; the cluster is enough. Rauschenberg's combine-paintings and silk-screen paintings investigate the flow of random forms and the emergence of connectivity within scatter.

As popular culture became conspicuous after World War II, as history and sociology studied the neglected mass of the past and the neglected messages of the present, art was being changed, too. It is not, as ultimatistic writers have it, that the emergence of a new style obliterates its predecessors. What happens is that everything changes, but the past's continuity with the present is not violated. As an alternative to an aesthetic that isolated visual art from life and from the other arts, there emerged a new willingness to treat our whole culture as if it were art. This attitude opposed the elite, idealist, and purist elements in eighteenth- to twentieth-century art theory. What seems to be implicit here is an anthropological description of our own society. Anthropologists define culture as all of a society. This is a drastic foreshortening of a very complex issue in anthropology, but to those of us brought up on narrow and reductive theories of art, anthropology offers a formulation about art as being more than a treasury of precious items. It was a two-way process: the mass media entered the work of art, and the whole environment was regarded, reciprocally, by the artists as art, too. Younger artists did not view Pop culture as relaxation, but as an ongoing part of their lives. They felt no pressure to give up the culture they had grown up in (comics, pop music, movies). Their art was not the consequence of renunciation but of incorporation.

Pop art is neither abstract nor realistic, though it has contacts in both directions. The core of Pop art is at neither frontier; it is, essentially, an art about signs and sign-systems. Realism is, to offer a minimal definition, concerned with the artist's perception of objects in space and their translation into iconic, or faithful, signs. However, Pop art deals with material that already exists as signs: photographs, brand goods, comics—that is to say, with precoded material. The subject matter of Pop art, at one level, is known to the spectator in advance of seeing the use the artist makes of it. Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans, Roy Lichtenstein's comic strips are known either by name or by type, and their source remains legible in the work of art.

What happens when an artist uses a known source in popular culture in his art is rather complex. The subject of the work of art is doubled: if Roy Lichtenstein uses Mickey Mouse in his work, Mickey is not the sole subject. The original sign-system of which Mickey is a part is also present as subject. The communication system of the twentieth century is, in a special sense, Pop art's subject. Marilyn Monroe, as used by Andy Warhol, is obviously referred to, but in addition, another channel of communication besides painting is referred to as well. Warhol uses a photographic image that repeats like a sheet of contact prints and is colored like the cheap color reproduction in a Spanish language film magazine.

There has been some doubt and discussion about the extent to which the Pop artist transforms his material. The first point to make is that selecting one thing rather than another is, as Marcel Duchamp established, sufficient. Beyond this, however, is the problem raised by Lichtenstein who used to say, apropos of his paintings derived from comics, that he wanted to compose, not to narrate, but this is precisely what transformed his source. I showed early comic strip paintings by Lichtenstein to a group of professional comic strip artists who considered them very arty. They thought his work old-fashioned in its flatness. Lichtenstein was transforming after all, though to art critics who did not know what comics looked like, his work at first appeared to be only a copy. In fact, there was a surreptitious original in the simulated copy. Pop art is an iconographical art, the sources of which persist through their transformation; there is an interplay of likeness and unlikeness. One way to describe the situation might be to borrow a word from the military-industrial complex, commonality, which refers to equipment that can be used for different purposes. One piece of hardware is common to different operations; similarly, a sign or a set of signs can be common to both popular culture and Pop art. The meaning of a sign is changed by being recontextualized by the artist.

The success of Pop art was not due to any initial cordiality by art critics. On the contrary, art critics in the late 50s and early 60s were, in general, hostile. One reason for this is worth recording, because it is shared by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, to name the supporters of irreconcilable earlier modernisms. Greenberg, with his attachment to the pure color surface, and Rosenberg, with his commitment to the process of art, are interested only in art's unique identity. They locate this at different points—Greenberg in the end product and Rosenberg in the process of work, but Pop art is not predicated on this quest for uniqueness. On the contrary, Pop art constantly reveals a belief in the translatability of the work of art. Pop art proposes a field of exchangeable and repeatable imagery. It is true that every act of communication, including art, has an irreducible uniqueness; it is equally true that a great deal of any message or structure is translatable and homeomorphic. Cross-media exchanges and the convergence of multiple channels is the area of Pop art, in opposition to the pursuit of an artistic purity.

Thus Pop art is able to share, on the bases of translatability and commonality, themes from popular culture. Any event today has the potential of spreading through society on a multiplicity of levels, carried by a fat anthology of signs. It is impossible to go into the full extent of the connections between popular culture and Pop art, but the extent of the situation can be indicated by a few representative crossovers. Lichtenstein made a cover for Newsweek when the magazine ran a Pop art survey in 1966, and Robert Rauschenberg silk-screened a cover for Time on the occasion of a story on Bonnie and Clyde. Here, artists who draw on the field of mass communications are themselves contributing to it. Some of the best photographs of Edward Kienholz's environmental sculptures appeared in a girlie magazine, Night and Day. As art is reproduced in this way, it becomes itself Pop culture, just as the works of van Gogh and Picasso, through endless reproduction, have become massproduced items of popular culture. Van Gogh would have welcomed it because he had the greatest respect for cliches, which he regarded as the authorized expression of mankind, a kind of common property that especially binds us together.

In New York, the first large paintings derived from comic strips were by Andy Warhol in 1960, such as his Popeye. The following year, Lichtenstein made his first painting of this type, a scene of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Though actually taken from a bubble-gum wrapper, the style of drawing and the kind of incident resemble comic strips based on Walt Disney's film cartoon characters. Previously, Lichtenstein had done cubist versions of nineteenthcentury cowboy paintings and of World War I dogfights, "the Hell's Angels kind of thing," to quote the painter. The contrast of popular subjects (cowboys and Indians, old planes) and their Picasso-esque treatment is certainly proto-Pop. Lichtenstein did not know Warhol's slightly earlier work but was, independently, on a track that led logically to the comics. Early Pop art, in fact, is peppered with convergences of separate artists on shared subjects. The fact of simultaneous discovery is, I think, a validation of the seriousness of the movement and refutes criticism of Pop art as a sudden or momentary affair. It would not have developed spontaneously in different places in the late 50s had it not been an authentic response to an historical situation.

QUOTED FROM BOOK '' AMERICAN POP ART '' BY LAWRENCE ALLOWAY .....

POP ART DESIGN AT BARBICAN ART GALLERY, BARBICAN CENTER UK

Jane Alison, Senior Curator

22 October 2013 – 9 February 2014

I may work as a freelance Architect. I graduated Yıldız Technical University Istanbul, Turkey. I prepare all the presantation by myself. This blog is my magical attic. Blog include that I already collected and will collect time by time past to future. Some of them influence me with their story , other fascinate me charm of colour, some is bents me differ of design. Some of them come into my life all the fascinating contex together that fuse different concept with there imagination and presantation. They all take part enjoyable place in my memory library to be as metaphor. Some of them I already forgot but when I seen them that make me in good spirits. Other is unforgettable. Some of them connect before to now that make to come new people in our life with new stories. Dream and reality fuses in life. All of them take part in this blog that I love.
I share all the knowledge of art, architecture, interior design, industrial design, people’ s story etc… without professional doubt. After all this progress , my magical attic will improve, get rich, increase and multiply when new comer join us day by day as our universe.
Please you may not hesitate to contact me. I may prefer to hear your idea that you could share with me your own work or other' s people work.

You could contact me :
mymagicalattic@gmail.com

PAGES

December 07, 2013

POP ART DESIGN AT BARBICAN CENTER