Pop Art

by C Grellet and L Sirión

Read more about the subject here.

Older post to visit:

Pop Art & Opt Art

Looking for Modern Art in London

The Return of Pop Art

Campbell’s Releases Warhol-Inspired Soup Cans

In honor of one of their biggest fans, Campbell’s will release their tomato soup with Andy Warhol-inspired designs.  The cans celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Warhol’s pop art masterpiece, “32 Campbell’s Soup Cans.”

“I used to have the same lunch every day for twenty years,” Warhol had famously said of Campbell’s soup.  The company sent him cases of it, knowing how much he loved the brand.

The Warhol-inspired tomato soup will be available at Target locations starting in September.  They retail for $.75 per 10.5 oz can.

The Campbell’s Facebook page is giving fans a chance to turn their portraits into pop art.

“In the future, everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” Warhol said, and now a few soup fans can get their “15 minutes.”  A few users’ photos will be selected and featured on the company’s Facebook page.

More on Andy Warhol and Pop Art in this blog.

http://lenguaycultura2isfd97.blogspot.com.ar/2011/10/pop-art-opt-art.html


http://abcnews.go.com

Beat Generation and Hippie Movement Summary

Beat Generation : Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg.

Beat Generation refers to a group of American post World War II writers, that became prominence in the 1960´s.

They saw runaway capitalism as destructive to the human spirit and opposed to social equality. In addition to their disappointment with consumer culture, they were against the repressive generation of their parents.

By the time, the taboos against frank discussions of sexuality were seen as unhealthy and damaging to the mind.

According to Literature and Art the Beats stood in opposition to the clean and almost antiseptic formalism (as they used to name it) of the early twentieth century modernists.

They fashioned a literature that was more bold, courageous, straightforward and expressive than anything had come before.

Underground music styles like Jazz were especially evocative for Beat writers.

The word “Beat” was primarily used after World War II by Jazz musicians and workers, as a slang term meaning “Down and out” or “Poor and exhausted” . But Jack Kerouac twisted the meaning of the term, explaining that “Beat” means “Beatitude” not beat up, Beat generation writers also used the term in connection with music, Kerouac often said; “You feel this, you feel it in a beat, in jazz real cool jazz”.

Other central elements of Beat culture included, experimentation with drugs, alternative forms of sexuality, an interest in Eastern Religion and the rejection to materialism.

The Beat Generation was a Literature and Cultural movement and the best known writers were; Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, these authors are considered the producers of the best work of the time.

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was an American poet that opposed Militarism, Materialism and Sexual repression. Ginsberg is best known for his epic poem “Howl” where he severely denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. Howl is one of the classic poems of this period and was dedicated to his friend Carl Solomon. As all of the controversial Beat Generation writings, the conservative people saw it as dirty, vulgar and with obscene language. It seemed especially outrageous or shocking in 1950´s America because it represent both heterosexual and homosexual sex, at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every US state. 

He used phrases such as “fucked in the ass” “cocksucker” and “cunt” as part of the poem’s depiction of different aspects of American culture, he used sex to criticize the emptiness and constant hunger that could exist in the lives of Americans.Ginsberg’s willingness to talk about taboo subjects made him a controversial figure during the conservative 1950´s and a significant figure in the 1960´s.According to his writing technique, he developed and individual style that was identifies as Ginsbergian. His choice to brake away from traditional poetic structure was fiercely criticized as chaotic and unpoetic, but for him it was an open excited expression of thoughts and feeling that were naturally poetic.

William Burroughs (1914 – 1997) was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. Much of his works are semi-autobiographical mainly drawn for his experience as a heroin addict. He write 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collection of essays, but perhaps his best known novel in “Naked Lunch”, a work that along with the poem “Howl”, went to the court for being cases under sodomy laws. He was an analyst and a critic of the moral, politic and economic system of American Society.

His major works can be divided into four different periods:

-          Early Work (early 1950´s)

-          The cut-up period (mid 1950`s to mid 1960`s)

-          Experiment and Subversion (mid 1960`s to mid 1970`s)

-          The red night trilogy (mid 1970`s to mid 1980`s)

(The dates refer to the time of writing, not publication).

Drugs, homosexuality and death are the most common themes, along with Ginsberg helped made homosexuality cool and highbrow, providing a gay liberation.

Jack Kerouac (1922 – 1969) was an American novelist and poet. He is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as, Catholic Spirituality, Jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty and travel. Some critics have labeled his work as “slapdash” “grossly sentimental” and “immoral”.

He became an underground celebrity and with other beats, the progenitor of the Hippie Movement.

In 1969 at age of 47 Kerouac died from internal bleeding caused by cirrhosis, the result of a lifetime of heavy drinking.

Since his dead, his literary prestige has grown and several unseen work have been published, such as; “On the road” “Doctor SAX” “The Dharma bums” “ Mexico City Blues” “The Subterraneans” “Desolation Angels” and many others.

In the 1960´s elements of the expanding Beat movement were the legacy for Hippie Counterculture, which was a movement that arouse in the United States during the mid 1960´s and spread almost all over the world.

The Hippie culture spread worldwide through a fusion of Rock, Folk, Blues and Psychedelic Rock, it also found expression in Literature, dramatic arts, fashion, and visual arts including films, posters advertising rock concerts and album covers.

Hippies rejected established institutions, criticized middle class values, opposed nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, embrace aspects of Eastern Philosophy and sexual liberation, they promote the used of many drugs, they create international communes or communities and firmly believe in Peace, Love and Personal Freedom.

The peace symbol was developed in the UK as a logo for the “Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament” and was adopedt by US Anti-War protestors during de 1960´s.

Hippies were often pacifist and participated in non-violent political demonstrations such as; Civil Right Movement, The Marches on Washington D.C, and Anti-Vietnam war demonstrations.

The degree of political involvement varied widely among Hippies, the Yippies were the most politically active Hippie sub-group.

In addition to the non.-violent political demonstrations, Hippie opposition to the Vietnam War including organizing political action groups to oppose the war, they refused to serve in the military and conducting “teach-ins” on college campuses, because that covered Vietnamese history and the political context of the war.

The Flower Power is a Slogan used by American counterculture as a symbol of passive resistance and non-violence ideology. It was implanted in the opposition movement to the Vietnam War.

The expression was first coined by the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1965, as a means to transform the protest into peaceful affirmative representations.

Hippies included the symbol wearing clothes with many flowers and vibrant colors, wearing flowers in their hairs and distributing flowers to the public, becoming known as flower children. The term later became a strong reference to the Hippie Movement.

 

The political ideals of the Hippies influenced other movements such as; Anarcho-Punk,

Rave Culture, Green Politics, Stoner Culture and The New Age.

Some of the most noticeable musicians and bands of the era were: Janis Joplin, Creedence, Carlos Santana, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Bob Dylan and many others.

Text: Natalia Gatica

Link to  same topic in our blog:
http://profesoresyalumnosisfd97.blogspot.com/search/label/Beat%20Generation

Looking for Modern Art in London

I´d like to share with all of you a video I made with pictures of great modern Art works I took last July, 2011 in Tate Modern, London. Hope you like it!!!

Pop Art & Opt Art

by Urquiza and Peña

Pop Art
The term Pop Art originated in the middle 1950`s in Britain ,and in the late 1950`s in The United States. It’s an international movement in painting, sculpture and printmaking.
It was the first pos-war art movement to embrace mass media, photography, imagery,popular culture ,consumer products, and photos of media stars.
Artists of this movement were looking for a more playful and ironic strategy.
Unlike abstract expressionism, pop art incorporated a wide range of media, imagery and subject matter that up to this moment it was excluded.
Pop artists cared a little about creating unique art object; they preferred to borrow their subject matter and techniques from mass media, photographs, icons and style into visual artefacts.

There are lots of artist such as Eduardo Paolozzi, Roy Kingenstein, Richard Hamilton. And the most important was Andrew Warhola (1928-1987) known as Andy Warhol. He was an American painter, print maker, and a film maker, record producer, author. He was a leading figure in this visual art movement known as Pop ART.
He applied the technique called "silkscreen”. Silkscreen is a technique that uses " woven mesh " to support an ink blocking stencil, the attach stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable material which can be presented through the mesh as a sharp -edged image onto a substrate. A roller is moved across the screen stencil ,forcing or pumping ink past of the woven mesh in the open areas. Through this technique we can transfer the same image.
Andy Warhol started doing silkscreens in 1962.One of his well-known painting using this technique is the one called " Marilyn Monroe”, it contains fifty images of the actress, which are all based on a single publicity photograph from the actress film " Niagara" (1953), twenty-five pictures on the left side are brightly colored while twenty five on the right side are black and white and also blurred or faded. The juxtaposition of the cold images with those in black and white is thought to symbolize to Monroe`s life and mortality.

Pop and Opt Art

Work prepared by Monjes and Aceto

Andy Warhol with Argentinian artist, Marta Minujin


"El dìa que me encontré con Andy Warhol en la Municipalidad de La Plata", oil on linen, 2007 by La Plata´s Artist Andrés Compagnucci

Older posts on the subject, here
Other related artists, here.

Andy Warhol, Mr America

More about Andy Warhol. You can see part of his work in MALBA, Buenos Aires. For more info, click here.

To enlarge and read, click images:









Taken from the information leaflet given in the exhibition. To know more about Mr Warhol,

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts