Art and consumerism

towards a culture of postmodernism

The abstract expressionists or ‘the New York School’

1930s AmericaIn New York many art critics and artists (including Pollock, Rothko and Newman) committed to socialist politics

1930s America

The New Deal government establishes a huge welfare programme

Federal Arts Project (FAP)Starts in 1935 (to 1943)

Artists employed by the state to produce art for public clients (subways, schools, hospitals, prisons etc)

Reginald Marsh: 20-cent Movie (1936)

Jackson PollockExpressionistic contours

Reference to the crisis in the American economy that forces American people to migrate within their own country

Jackson Pollock: Going West (1935)

Mark Rothko

Rothko paints people on the New York subway

Features a ‘stretched’ expressionistic style – features a social criticism in the way the figures are stretched and separated

Mark Rothko: Subway 1937

Cesare SteaCesare Stea: Sculptural Relief for the Bowery Bay Sewage Depot (1936)

The grandeur of the sculpture (20 sq. M.) symbolic of the nation’s need to rebuild itself. And the personification of the worker as an ideological emblem

Towards Abstract Expressionism These works were seen as mediocre and inferior to European modernism

This begins to change with the obliteration of the social themes that had dominated between 1938-48

Rothko: Multiform (1948)

Pollock: Male and Female (1942)

By 1941….Many socialist become repulsed by Stalin’s rule in the USSR and as social realism as an enforced form on national culture

Social realism becomes discredited in the USA

Clement Greenberg…

Greenberg…The defining influence on Abstract Expressionism and the rise of the New York School

Essay: ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ called for the assimilation of abstraction into American painting and rejected social realism

Believed that illusionist art could only be defined by its limitations

Greenberg champions the virtues of an art ‘free from the ideological struggles of society’

Pollock: One (1950)The avant-garde should be about ‘the physical, the sensorial, absolutely autonomous and entitled to respect for [its] own sake, and not merely vessels of communication’

An existentialist drive behind the work (not ideological) a response to a post-war (post-holocaust) hostility of the age

‘Drip Paintings’ represents a palpable sense of movement and rhythm (liked sometimes to Jazz music) and the artist’s movement around the canvas.

Drip technique brings a rejection of narrative; allows for an element of ‘automatism’

“Jack the Dripper”… Autumn Rhythm (1950)

Pop Art: Richard Hamilton ‘Just what is it….’ (1956); Hamilton’s description of Pop Art

Marilyn Monroe (1962)Pop art in America makes an impact about 1961

For the first five years it was more or less underground

Appeared to completely reject Abstract Expressionism

Where it succeeded is that it got through to the public

James Rosenquist: I love you with my Ford (1961)Pop artists become established an rich in a very short space of time

Seen as an art movement coming to terms with America’s urban environments

Its roots lay Dadaism and ‘assemblage’ and according to Edward Lucie-Smith featured an absence of ‘commitment to the subject matter it depicts’ and thus lacked the political impetus of Dada

Coca-Cola Bottles (1962)Pop art is still a very ‘learned and self-conscious’ art movement

Warhol wanted to eradicate the idea of a hand made art altogether and used images based on photographs

Still the idea is that we take a fresh look at the objects and signs that are so familiar from everyday life – consumer culture in other words…

The American Underground Scene

• The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group:

• ‘We don’t want false, polished, slick films-we prefer them rough, unpolished but alive; we don’t want rosy films-we want them the color of blood.’

Barbara Rubin, Christmas on Earth (1963)

1. the tacit gay sexual liberation activities that subverted heterosexual, same-race sexual norms;

2. the expression of community in attending these films after midnight;

3. and the ironic appropriations of popular culture.

Kenneth Anger, Scorpio Rising (1964)

The underground becomes ‘aboveground’