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Pop to Popism

Robyn Ferrell
Eyeline 83
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The Art Gallery of New South Wales’s summer blockbuster ‘Pop to Popism’ sliced and diced modern art along the fault line of consumerism, putting Australian work alongside international classics.

The exhibition showed artists taking their content and methods from mass media, commercial art and popular culture, as the new mood brought about by pop art took hold. This move was different from other art movements, in that it collapsed the opposition of fine art to its others. This was visible in every corner of the exhibition, down to the pop-up café with Moet at $42 a piccolo. It was the unconscious of the exhibition, itself an artefact of this revolution, as one of the long line of ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions designed to be seen by all and sundry, ready or not.

The vitality of art has of course survived pop art, but the conception of fine art and the gallery has not recovered. The exhibition showed how it has been transformed in all directions: the use of its space (the picture plane gave way to installation); the permissible mediums (oils surrender to acrylics, photography and video); authorised palettes (bright pop colours were all over everything) and styles (Howard Arkley’s airbrush, Martha Rosler’s collage, to name two); the graphic, cartooning and posters become art, and text was pasted on the image, found objects incorporated onto canvas and a host of other unorthodoxies. Beneath it, the show bore witness to the seismic shift that has made even ‘priceless’ into a commodity, and the ‘original’ into a gnomic category rather than a self-evident source of value.

This began, the exhibition observed, with the rise of mass consumerism in America after World War II. It

Martha Rosler, Cleaning the Drapes, from the series House beautiful: bringing the war home, 1967-72. Photomontage. © Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

Martha Rosler, Cleaning the Drapes, from the series House beautiful: bringing the war home, 1967-72. Photomontage. © Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. 

Howard Arkley, Triple fronted, 1987.

Howard Arkley, Triple fronted, 1987. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 169.9 x 241.9 x 5.5cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales Mollie and Jim Gowing Bequest Fund 2014. Photograph Diana Panuccio. © The Estate of Howard Arkley. Courtesy Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art.