Lowenna Valerie Waters discusses Tate Modern’s Pop Life: Art in a Material World exhibition and considers whether Pop Art is relevant to contemporary art .
Pop Life: Art in the Material World was originally called Sold Out, until Damien Hirst complained and the curators felt obliged to change it. In my view, the previous name sums up what this era of art (spanning from Warhol to the late 90s) was all about: playing the media machine and shamelessly self publicising. It’s about mass reproduction, it’s about glossy self promotion, it’s about advertisement, it’s about not just selling one’s art but selling oneself. This is crystallised in the infamous words of Warhol: “Good business is the best art”.
The chief protagonist of the Pop art movement was Andy Warhol himself. He set the scene for the subsequent artists in the exhibition, who were mainly practising in the 80s and 90s. They fly on his shirt tails and continue with his maxim of unashamed self promotion, engagement with the mass markets and celebrity persona as a facet of an artist’s practice.
In the first room of the show, we are confronted with Warhol’s sombre and challenging self portrait. Familiar glacial stare framed by a stack of unnerving, dishevelled hair. That the face is instantly recognisable is no coincidence; Warhol tirelessly interwove his image and his art. It advertised video tapes, appeared on chat shows, adorned wallpaper. He even said the reason for creating self portraits was purely self promotion.
The other two giants of the exhibition, both also included in the opening room, are Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami. Both artists are known for being incredibly acute manipulators of the media machine. They have both turned their artistic practice into lucrative multi-million pound commerce operations.
Murakami has arguably taken Warhol’s factory to the next level, mass producing female figurines (such as the one we are confronted with upon entry into the exhibition) and packing them into chewing gum packets – akin to toys in kinder eggs.
Koons is arguably the most significant contributor to the mid 1980s DIY art scene in Manhattan’s East village. His contribution to the show includes the iconic Rabbit balloon. But perhaps more interestingly to a student audience there is the exclusively over 18’s room full of, for want of a better phrase, hardcore porn. Explicit, shocking images of Koons making love to his then wife, the platinum blonde porn star La Ciccolina. This is immortalised in a series of large-scale, pastel photographs and rococo luxuriant sculptures.
The theme of pornography continues throughout the exhibition, embodying the theme of selling out all too literally. Andrea Frazer’s Untitled 1983 video piece depicts her having sex with an anonymous collector of her work, chosen by the gallery at random; who paid her £20,000 to do so. Inextricably linked to the whole phenomenon of Pop Art are the controversial group of Young British Artists (YBAs). We have Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas with their Bethnal Green shop selling pieces of handmade merchandise. Likewise, there is a sizable contribution from the monolithic Damien Hirst. His cynicism seeps from every pore of his bling gold cabinets, full to the brim with glinting diamonds, his gold-encrusted wall plaques decorated with butterflies and yet more precious stones. Obviously, there is a formaldehyde preserved calf, likewise encased in gleaming solid gold. We see Warhol’s influence piercingly here: mechanical production, self branding, publicity spinning and money grabbing. This is exemplified in the painfully ironic ‘Beautiful Inside my Head Forever’ auction held at Sotheby’s. Hirst made a record breaking £112 million the day after the collapse of the Lehman Brothers.
In my opinion, the Pop Life exhibition is a must see. The debate is still out over whether the artists included have actually sold out or whether they have simply been catapulted into the stratosphere of fame. However, I am inclined to believe that there is a proportion that has done just that; sold out. They have exploited the all too willing media and in the process complied with it; their art becomes a means to an end.
An appropriate place to finish is with Maurizio Cattelan’s dead horse installation. With this piece of visual metaphor, Cattelan is alluding to the ultimate decline of the Pop art phenomenon: the artists are simply ‘flogging a dead horse’. Yes, the exhibition is shocking, entertaining, bombastic, outrageous, but ultimately I believe it is time to move on. Pop art has sold out.
Pop Life is showing at the Tate Modern until 17th January.
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