POPPING MY ART: MY SEARCH FOR MEANING IN POPULAR CULTURE |
|
|
Ross on Warhol, mixed media on paper, collection of the artist |
|
|
I very clearly remember the first time that I saw the work of Jasper Johns (http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/1996/johns/pages/johns.flag.html) and Robert Rauschenberg (http://www.artchive.com/artchive/r/rauschenberg/bed.jpg). I was very attracted to the activity and organized messiness of the work they had produced. Though I did not understand anything about what motivated their work, I immediately fell in love with it.
It has always been my assumption that an affinity to a particular artist's work suggests that there is some sort of philosophical connection between you and the artist. Either you share their perspectives on life or share a biographical similarity. Therefore, I decided that it was about time that I sought to discover what it was that I shared with these two artists of the New York School in order to bring greater clarity to my own work.
|
|
|
Ross on Warhol II, mixed media on paper, 7" x 4 ", collection of the artist |
|
|
The content of Pop art did not desire to speak a visual language that aligned with that used within the art academy or fine art galleries. Instead, it sought to speak the common language understood by everybody is everyday life. Therefore, Pop contained images of the familiar, ranging from soup can labels to iconic images of celebrities. These images were highly specific and uncontrived in that they suggested the everyday events in which both the viewer and artist lived. These images were selected for their visual immediacy and sought to deconstruct the elitism and institutionalism which marked other movements within the same era as Pop art (namely abstract expressionism).
The Pop artists expanded the frame of reference for art. Going beyond the tradition of fine art, these "painters" gave reference to subjects typically ignored by artists. This meant that their work included references to humor, technology, and the banal elements of popular culture.
In many ways. these artists refused to see their work as "timeless" or universal and thus they sought to locate it in a specific time and place by making reference to exactly what was around them - in their cupboards, on the billboards down the street, on their TVs, in their movie theaters and on the record players.
|
|
|
Throughout my academic and aesthetic expressions, there is one solid link. Both question the authority structures of the institution of fine art. By this, I mean that both my paper writing in seminary and the body of my art work have brought question to the elitist nature of those who administrate, display, and critique works of art. Academically, I have produced a substantial paper which traces the evolution of the modern art ethos and questions its elitist, hyper-intellectual, and idealist nature. The art which I have produced throughout my "career" as an artist furthers that question.
Over all, my work is the work of an outsider. It is not the product of the art establishment in that I am not trained in a university, I have no real art classes behind me, and I have had little out-right professional development in the area of art. Therefore, I am more a folk artists than I am a refined and cultured artist. Like the pop artists, I have brought question to the institutions which define cultured art in our society and have stayed at arms length from it.
Like the pop artists, my art has continuously spoken of specific situation in which I have found myself. My earlier work contained excessive mask imagery which spoke of the very specific struggles I had with the social masks worn by those within the religious atmosphere I was in at the time those works were produced. After the mask imagery, my work took a very narrative focus, relaying the courting relationship between myself and my wife. Today, the work is a series of portraits which denotes a series of very specific relationships which I have had and which have defined me.
|
|
|
Like the pop artists, my art has increasingly sought to speak the vernacular of the public. Over time, my work has moved from an obscure symbolism (masks) through a period of more complicated abstraction (the cubist-like angular imagery) to a more realist expression (the Exclusion & Embrace project). My most recent pieces (one of which is on this page) even uses photographs of a very close friend, which could be understood as "ultra real" and immediate to my exact situation. It event makes outright reference to the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. All this represents my desire to produce a Neo-Pop Art which is increasingly immediate and less distanced from the viewer - something that is known and familiar. I want the work to speak a language which resonates with the viewer.
Increasingly, I want to make a form of art which speaks primarily to the people who immediately surround me - that speaks to my friends and closest confidants. Increasingly, my audience is becoming less universal and more local, less abstract and more concrete, less elite and more every day. |
|
|
|
|