Pop Art | Richibi's Weblog

September 5, 2014

parsing art – David Hockney‏

“Rubber Ring Floating in a Swimming Pool“ (1971)

David Hockney

_________

in responding to the powerful dictates
of Abstract Expressionism, dominant
in mid-Twentieth-Century art, its return
to essentials, the technical elements
of the medium – as indeed was taking
place in music and literature as well
during that period, see John Cage,
or Samuel Beckett, for instance, if
you dare – David Hockney, as well
as other related artists at the time,
were, it would seem, looking to
reconnect with a more general public,
their, after all, burgeoning market in
the post-war rise of the Middle Class,
not only with objects it would find
familiar, even iconic, Campbell Soup
cans, Marilyn, but with outright fun,
a not inconsequential attribute

out with ontological musings, they
were saying, dry taxonomy, and in
with, as it were, the bomp sh’ bomp
sh’ bomp

or Pop Art

noteworthy for its sense of
outrageousness, levity

and fashion, incidentally

not either inappropriately, fashion
was what the popes had been doing,
after all, adorning the Sistine Chapel

David Hockney here takes colour field
– flat, undifferentiated areas of a single
colour, a founding element of Abstract
Expressionism – and applies it to a
recognizable surface, which,
incidentally, he insists in his very title,
is not “Abstract”

we delight in the ingenuity of this
conjunction, form has become
function, or the reverse

and note furthermore the aptness
of other painterly preoccupations,
texture, a consideration that goes
back to Vermeer, and further

dimensionality, there is no horizon
to force representation of a third
dimension, which nevertheless
ingeniously doesn’t obliterate
clear three-dimensional
perspective

geometry, a hats-off to Mondrian
perhaps, and Cubism, though
we’ve come a long way from the
more diaphanous and shimmering
Cubism, just click

in fine, I’m impressed by the manner
in which this painting, despite its
naked and overt representation of
its subject, devoid of any context,
urges a more theoretical
consideration than substantial,
indeed “Abstract” rather than
grounded, rock, materially
speaking, solid

does “Rubber Ring Floating in a
Swimming Pool“ inform the form,
in other words

or does the form inform the
“Rubber Ring Floating in a
Swimming Pool“

is this grammar or a poem

you tell me

Richard

January 16, 2013

“Dumbo”‏

“View of Murnau“

Wassily Kandinsky

______________________

once again a movie for children of all ages –

including for Zoë, incidentally, whose birth

date is coming up in May – “Dumbo“ is another

Walt Disney masterpiece, and once again

fraught with the tropes, the creative novelties

and devices, of the most modern arts

it’s not difficult to intuit the influence of

Saint-Saëns‘ – an awful lot of sibilants

in the possessive case of only those two

capitalized syllables, by the way – his, I say,

“The Carnival of the Animals“, its dance,

especially, of the elephants, for Disney‘s

famous sequence here of elephants on

parade, wherein psychedelia makes an

appearance in 1941 no less, years ahead

of its historical, and revolutionary, great

fruition, surely informing Warhol,

Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, and just

generally the entire Pop Art coterie

he was transferring however what he’d

been learning from the German especially

Expressionists, their attraction to bold,

dissonant colours, flat uninflected

surfaces, arbitrary and malleable

dimensions

what Disney brought significantly to the

mix was essentially the spirit of fun, which

is what transformed all art after the First

World War, that generation’s response to

the utter failure of all that had come before,

politics, economics, ideologies, even the

very concept of the existence of God, none

of these had prevented the horror that had

been that signal event, the best defence, as

we said in the Seventies, was living well,

therefore the Roaring Twenties, therefore,

for that matter, the Seventies

we haven’t retreated from that imperative

yet, be it for better or for worse remains

still to be seen, for faith or fun, the opposite

poles of personal responsibility, both fell

and heal

animals, incidentally, courtesy of the spirit

of Henri Rousseau

Richard

January 3, 2013

“Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs”‏

“Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs“ is an

enchanted movie for children of all ages, that

means especially you, Manolito, that means

especially you, Aidan

you might however notice, in a more analytical

vein, the introduction of German Expressionism

already in more popular culture, Nolde, Kirchner,

even some Edvard Munch, the Norwegian, in the

bold, garish colours that expressed horror and

perversion for them following the First World War,

and did the same for Walt Disney later if you’ll

consider the evil queen’s mirror and mask, or

van Gogh branches in the threatening forest, flat

surfaces, notably on faces for instance, touched

with only daubs of colour for only perfunctory

shading and character, prefiguring incidentally,

Andy Warhol‘s Pop Art

artists talk to each other

musical atonalities, also, show up, to attest to

modernity, in the music tooted out by the pipe

organ, delivering ornery pipes and a climactic

cuckoo who can only emit a shrill, discordant

screech, we can thank especially Prokofiev,

the popinjay among the atonalists, for that,

with necessary nods to, for their more

theoretical groundwork, the more exacting

Stravinsky and the too dour, not to mention

for many too dire, Schoenberg

Walt Disney was introducing modern art not so

surreptitiously at all to the larger popular culture,

acclimatizing children especially to the new

upended and revolutionizing art, crayons at

the behest of individuality

you’ll also find interesting that Snow White

succumbs to an apple, much like Mother Eve,

both of whom are absolved, it’s worth pointing

out, by nothing other than transcendental,

transformational, regenerative and ever

inspirational, Love

think about it