Pop & Co.
"In the same way Duchamp’s Sèche-bouteilles stops being a functional bottle-dryer (not to become an artistic object but something else altogether, a hybrid object), Campbell’s soup cans stop being just that when used by Warhol", wrote Portuguese philosopher José Gil. Pop Art does not appear by chance, but rather incorporated most of the 20th century’s avant-gardes.
British Pop Art includes a group of artists whose works emerged from the mid-1950s onwards.
Why "Pop"? Simply to suggest that this form of art was based on the popular culture of its time, marked by the power of images.
However, if Pop Art was interested in the consumer society, it was often in an ironic way, as defined by the English painter Richard Hamilton in 1957: "Popular; Transient; Expendable; Low Cost; Mass Produced; Young; Witty; Sexy; Gimmicky; Glamorous; and Big Business."
Bearing no relationship to British Pop Art – and sometimes assuming a much less critical dimension –, American Pop Art included a series of artists from the beginning of the 1960s, which fail to represent a collective expression.
Nevertheless, a certain degree of coherence is observed in their common interest for everyday objects and the appropriation of mass media. The centre of American Pop Art is New York, where works by artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol were exhibited. "Once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again", wrote Warhol.
This Pop trend gained an international dimension from the beginning of the 1960s, which persisted until the 1970s. It is possible to find obvious relationships with the French New Realism artists, particularly Martial Raysse.
The work of the Portuguese artist Lourdes Castro also appropriates some Pop elements, in a very personal fashion.
Re-take
Filmmaker, musician, artist and art critic, with connections to the Fluxus movement, Ernesto de Sousa profoundly influenced Portuguese contemporary art. One of his pieces, the installation A Tradição como Aventura, first shown at Galeria Quadrum, Lisbon, in 1978 – and one of his most influential works of that decade – is presently recreated, mixing "corrected" texts and photographic assemblages. One of its modules is a photograph of Mitra, a minute classical sculpture, here reproduced in a large scale. The text of Saint-Augustin’s Confessions, which accompanies them, is manipulated through a gender change. In Suisses morts, Christian Boltanski uses photographs of obituaries taken from the newspaper Le nouvelliste du Valais. Why the Swiss? "Previously, my works showed dead Jews, but ‘Jew’ and ‘dead’ go too well together. There is nothing more normal than a Swiss person. And therefore there is no reason for a Swiss person to die, so all these dead people are only all the more terrifying.They are us." The piece 364 suisses morts consists of "photographs of photographs", shot by amateur photographers, therefore making photographic death appear more distant.
Another type of distance is created by Jorge Molder, who uses his own image in a fictional fashion. He poses for large Polaroid or black and white photographs, with or without objects, with or without lighting. His series are presented as narratives. Nox may represent the heart of night, darkness, but also a disturbing situation, a restless state, pervaded by fear and risk.
With Nox, only the certainty of the doubts that inspired these photographs persists.
Vivan Sundaram is the nephew of the great Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941) and the grandson of the photographer Umrao Singh. Sundaram, a conceptual artist, reworked a montage of Amrita’s photographs from the 1930s taken in India and Paris. This series explores the ambiguities of Indian society in regard to the contemporary world.
