Poster-Painting and Pop-art
When pop-art first emerged as a concept, it was coined so (by Alloway) because there is an obvious connection between the subject matter and the artworks. But I want to emphasize something important: What was depicted was not “reality” in it self, but a certain aspect of reality. It is most obvious in works like Lichtenstein’s paraphrases over cartoons, Warhol depict the graphics of the Brillo-box-design, or the news-paper, including the press-photography. It is not reality as such, but commercial and cultural objects, which are depicted.
In a sense, the “design” I used for my series of pop-art-paintings fra 2000 – 2015 had a certain similarity to the concept “Poster-painting”. What I did back then was a kind of abstract background, upon which I silk-screened different photographic images. Then, following the tradition of “art and language”, the paintings were always equipped with some kind of written “statement”, a type-set text. In some sense, such a pairing could be seen as a poster, but I never realized that at the time. More over: Those paintings were not designed as the “poster”-design – I.e. the white “frame” surrounding the central motif.
In the years that followed pop-art’s first emergence, that is in the 80’s and 90’s there was a post-pop-period, which in a more ironic way depicted different everyday objects. Many artists had realized, that the special feature of pop-art could be seen as an ironic commentary on consumerism, or just the “funny” combination of f.i. cartoon-figures in different painterly settings. It is in this period we have Jeff Koons and the quiet “kitschy” porcelain-figures of Michael Jackson and his own photography in a sexual encounter with his porn-star-wife.
I think it is fair to say, that after 2010 things turned out differently for painting and pop-art. Many painters was – and still is – not engaged with pop-art at all. Instead they are concerned with “identity” problems, factious universes or more or less naive depictions of reality, if they are not sticking to paintings most traditional expressions: simply to depict reality in a realistic manner. At the same time, however, pop-art “survived”, but in a very depraved way: Many many artists started to produce works, which was in no way original in the design or concept, but basically just variations of the standard recipe: A Micky Mouse in some unfamiliar environment, or endless repetitions of a Marilyn Monroe-photography.
Moreover, with the emergence of the digital canvas-printer about 2010, different works, which can hardly be described as genuine originals in paintings started to overflow the market.
At that time – round 2010 – I moved to Berlin and New York, to further study contemporary art and concepts, and at the same time I engaged in different philosophical art-studies, such as the ever lurking problem of “what is art”.
One of the key aspects in both categorization of artworks AND the somewhat different – but related – problem of quality of the work has to do with the question of CONTEXT. When Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” is recognized as an object of art, it har everything to do with the contextualization, and very little with the object itself. Take the urinal back to the mens room, and it looses its flavour of art-work. Now the tilting of the object contributes too, of course, as does the “plinth” on which it is installed in the museum. It is the overall combination of the expectations of the audience to see works of art, the museums “credibility” as a “placeholder for artworks”, the other art-works in the museum, all of that. As in the object “Hoover”, also by Jeff Koons, where two vacuum-cleaners are exhibited in a montre.
So I became rather obsessed with the following question: How can you as an artist ensure, that the object it-self “tells” the viewer, that it is art? How much can the object itself be a “stand-alone”? And further: How and why do we ascribe certain qualities to certain objects? What are the “built in” qualities and signifiers of “art”, and to what degree is that established by the exhibition-space, and its social status?
Some obvious answers come to mind: put even the finest painting in the gutter or the museums vault, and it does not “function” as art. Or it becomes “trashed art”, and therefore “bad”. All of this is well known, but still one might claim, that specially the social “uplifting” function of f.i. a painting installed in a museum is enormous. Yet there is usually more to it, because the painting itself, that is specially its relation to art-history, also plays a role. Even for the most illiterate spectator, there is always a build-in knowledge about art-history. Sort of a culturally heritage of visual knowledge. That sort of balances what social “uplifting” can actually do to an object, depending on the context.
The specific judgement is very dependent on not just the specific context but also the given style of the painting. A lobby in a major company, where a very large painting in a non-figurative style is hung, will probably be very hard to judge. One of the questions might be “WHO is the artist” ? Yet, even if such a question can’t be answered in the given circumstances, such a painting can’t really be “judged”. The old sayings about “taste” becomes predominant.
In other cases, we DO trust that f.i. the museum really DID a major job in evaluating the given work on display, and that seems to overrule our personal taste. A somewhat naive and rather “dark” figurative painter with rather significant traces of being made say in the late 1800’s hung on a museum will not give rise to any real questions. We automatically assume, that the painter is somewhat “famous” and “recognized” by a given art-community.
Another way of setting the whole framework for the discussion about quality has been discussed as the question of RELATIVITY. No work of art can – at least today – be judged on its own, but only relative to other works in a similar style og historical period.
Another important “clue” to the evaluation of an artwork is the question of modernism in general, and that means the question of “what is new”. In general my claim will be, that there is a rather wide-spread intuitive understanding of the question. Now in some sense, seen from a very individualistic point of view, every painting is new, every individual artist produces something unique. However, that is not how the general judgment of art works in a given culture. People are in general rather smart at categorizing different expressions, but again some expressions will produce more iconic results. When Lichtenstein produced his “remakings” of the cartoons, that was instantly recognizable as “something new”. Warhols screen-prints too.
Now MY claim will be, that my concept of “poster-painting” will be such an iconic impression, which immediately will present itself as “new” to the spectators. The reason is what we call mimetic: Anyone will right away recognize, that the “motif” is not the “painting” in the frame, but that the POSTER is the motif. Yet, it IS not a poster, but a genuine painting. Since no-one has seen such a “poster-painting” before – due to the simple but astonishing fact that it has not been made before – it quite obviously becomes “new”, and even in some art-historical sense new. Art-historical though in the sense, that it is still relative to the genre of pop-art.
This is where the circle ends. The Poster-paintings are really “just” pop-art-paintings version 3.0. They are self reflexive in relation to the whole question of art, art-history, qualitative judgements of art, and in some way critical of the whole art-world as a social institution, which just “art-washes” any object, that the institution for some reason accepts. They are critical of the idea of posters and reproductions in general, reproductions, which takes up space for real paintings. Yet they exploit that very mechanism, that when we see something in the format of a “poster” with some reference to a gallery or a museum, we “must think” that this is an acclaimed artist. At the same time, many of the “depicted” works ARE in some way references to art-historical works, and in that sense they are connected to art-history. They are never COPIES of real works, but represent some kind of riddles, as to “who is that artist, which paints in that particular style”?
I that latter sense, any of my paintings is an “homage” to the many great artist, who came before me.
