1. “Popular, transient,
expendable, low cost,
mass produced, young,
witty, sexy, gimmicky,
glamorous and big
business.”

2. The Roots of Pop - Social, Political and economic changes
Post War Britain America

3. The Roots of Pop - Social, Political and Economic changes
Festival of Britain 1951
I remember that the whole
experience was like being on
another planet, in a Sci-Fi way. The
modernity of the Festival was a
wonderland to us all, coming as we
did from a very poor background
around the bombed sites of the area
around the Festival grounds.
(David Nissen, aged 9 in 1951)

4. The Roots of Pop - Social, Political and Economic changes
The Birth of Mass Consumerism

5. The Roots of Pop - Social, Political and Economic changes
The Birth of the Teenager - baby boomers come of age
“in the 1950’s we were living
under the mythology of the
American film”
Jean Luc Godard

6. The Roots of Pop - Social, Political and economic changes
Q: Are you a mod or a rocker?
Ringo Starr: Errr I’m a mocker...

7. The Roots of Pop - Social, Political and Economic changes
The White Heat of Technology and the Welfare State
• The post-war establishment of the
Welfare State, and the economic
and technological advances of the
1960s, led to a building boom.
The period from the late 1950s to
the end of the 1960s saw
unprecedented growth in new
public housing, educational
facilities, motorways and entire
city centres.

8. The Roots of Pop - Social, Political and economic changes
Education expansion 1950s - 1960’s
By 1969 there were three times as
many universities as there had been
thirty years before – while state
contribution to education rose form
7million in 1947 to 157 million in 1966 –
the number of students in the sixties
doubled form 7 to 14% of the
population.
“Britain had by accident bred a class of
young people from ordinary homes who
now had some idea of the privileges
previously enjoyed only by boys from
upper-class families.”
Shawn Levy
‘Ready Steady Go:Swinging London and the Invention of
Cool (london 2002), pg. 66

9. The Roots of Pop - Social, Political and economic changes
Cold war and the Atomic Bomb

10. The Roots of Pop - Social, Political and Economic changes
New Stories for New Times

11. The Roots of Pop - Social, Political and Economic changes
The Assault on Culture with a Capital C - The Barbarians are at the Door

12. The Roots of Pop - Social, Political and Economic changes
Responses - The Culture Industry
• Culture industry is a term coined by
Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Max
Horkheimer (1895-1973).
• The idea that the factory style production
of popular culture produces standardised
products that manipulate and seduce the
consumer (or masses) with quick,easy
gratification that leaves the consumer
passive and ultimately unhappy.
• A central idea in Adorno and Horkheimer
critique of mass culture is that it creates
false needs - needs which are
manufactured and of course satisfied by
capitalism

13. The Roots of Pop - Social, Political and Economic changes
Responses to
“The effectiveness of the
culture industry depends
not on its parading of an
ideology, on disguising the
true nature of things, but
on removing the thought
that there is an alternative
to the status quo. “
Theodore Adorno
The Culture Industry

14. The Roots of Pop - Social, Political and Economic changes
Responses to - A Cultural Cold War? High versus Low
“Our culture, on its lower and
popular levels, has plumbed
abysses of vulgarity and
falsehood unknown in the
discoverable past; not in Rome,
not in the Far east or anywhere
has daily life undergone such
rapid and radical change as it
has in the West in the last
century and half”
Clement Greenberg ‘The Plight of Culture’

15. The Roots of Pop - Social, Political and Economic changes
Responses to -
“Art could only
survive by
disengaging itself
from ideological
confusion and
violence”
Jackson Pollock. (American, 1912-1956). One:
Number 31, 1950. 1950. Oil and enamel on
Clement Greenberg
unprimed canvas, 8' 10" x 17' 5 5/8" (269.5 x
530.8 cm). MOMA

16. The Birth of Pop - Independent Group
• Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, John
Mchale, Eduardo Paolozzi, Reyner Banham
(architectural critic), Lawrence Alloway (art
critic) -closely connected with the I.C.A
London. (1952-56)
• Principle aims: to create cross discipline
discussion, research ‘mass culture’, the impact
of new technology, the possibilities of new
forms of display and design. ‘Culutral
Collage’
• Reacted against the perceived elitism and
parochialism of the British establishments
attitude towards the new forms of mass or
popular culture. A non -hierarchal conception
of culture.
• An ambivalent, paradoxical infatuation with
the glamour, techno futurism of Americana as
opposed to the austerity of post war Britain.
• Key exhibition “This is Tomorrow’

17. The Birth of Pop - British Pop’s Ambivalent Populism
“The definition of culture is changing as a result of the
pressure of the great audience, which is no longer new
but experienced in the consumption of its arts.
Therefore, it is no longer sufficient to define culture
solely as something that a minority guards for the few
and the future (though such art is uniquely valuable and
as precious as ever). Our definition of culture is being
stretched beyond the fine art limits imposed on it by
Renaissance theory refers now, increasingly, to the
whole complex of human activities. Within this
definition, rejection of the mass produced arts is not, as
critics think, a defence of culture, but an attack on it.”
Lawrence Alloway “The Arts and the Mass Media”

18. The Birth of Pop - British Pop’s Ambivalent Populism

19. The Birth of Pop - British Pop’s Ambivalent Populism
It were grim in Britain….
“The American magazine
represented a catalogue of
an exotic society, bountiful
and generous, where the
event of selling tinned
pears was transformed into
multi coloured dreams,
where sensuality and
virility combined to form, in
our view , an art far more
subtle and fulfilling than
the orthodox choice either
the Tate or the Royal
academy”
Eduardo Paolozzi

20. The Birth of Pop - British Pop’s Ambivalent Populism
Marcel Duchamp/Richard
Hamilton The Bride Stripped Bare
by her Bachelors, Even
[The Large Glass] (1915-1923;

21. The Birth of Pop - British Pop’s Ambivalent Populism
“Popular,
transient,
expendable, low
cost, mass
produced,
young, witty,
sexy, gimmicky,
glamorous and
big business.”
Richard Hamilton

22. The Birth of Pop - British Pop’s Ambivalent Populism
You’ve never had it so good - 60’s Pop
• The use of pre existing, ready
made, mass media imagery
within ‘fine art’. The conflation of
the ‘low’ with the ‘high’. British
pop is often hand painted pop.
• Often expresses a paradoxical
relationship with the pleasures,
materials and forms of post war
consumerism - simultaneously
attracted and skeptical..looks
forward and back…
• This commitment to using
popular imagery has broader
connotations -it signals a desire • Peter Phillips
• The Entertainment Machine 1961
for a transformed cultural
landscape -one where the old
hierarchies of taste and value
are questioned.

23. The Birth of Pop - British Pop’s Ambivalent Populism
Derek Boshier
The Identi-Kit Man 1962

24. The Birth of Pop - British Pop’s Ambivalent Populism
Pauline Boty “The Only Blonde in the World” 1963

25. The Birth of Pop - British Pop’s Ambivalent Populism
Joe Tilson Peter Phillips
Vox Box 1963 Custom Print No. 1 1965

26. The Birth of Pop - British Pop’s Ambivalent Populism
Patrick Caulfield
Patrick Caulfield
Black and White Flower Piece 1963 After Lunch 1975

27. The Birth of Pop - British Pop’s Ambivalent Populism
Allen jones
Table 1969

28. The Birth of Pop - British Pop’s Ambivalent Populism
Richard Hamilton
Towards a Definitive Statement on the Coming Trends in Men's Wear and
Accessories (a) Together Let Us Explore the Stars 1962

29. The Birth of Pop - British Pop’s Ambivalent Populism
Colin Self
Leopardskin Nuclear Bomber No. 2 1963

30. Peter the Painter - Artist as Fan

31. Peter the Painter - Artist as Fan

32. Peter the Painter - Artist as Fan
There was always an interesting
dimension in Blake’s work with
regards to how the American
dream of freedom, fast cars,
shiny surfaces got somewhat
tarnished and spoiled by the
drizzle and parochialism of
Britain – the culture clash and
glaring gap between the allure
and sexiness of his heroes and
his picturing and sense of his
own self, as in this self portrait
imbue his work with a pathos
and wry humour. It also of
course gets to the heart of part
of the desperate attraction
towards American glamour and
sparkle prominent in Britain at
the time – the rather desperate
desire for escapism.

33. THE
YANKS

34. American Pop - ‘Modern’ Hard Edged Pop
• While sharing British artists
fascination with the ephemera
of the mass media, American
pop was formally far more
progressive / avant garde - not
least in its use of commercial, Edward Ruscha. (American, born
1937). Standard Station. 1966.
mechanical techniques (silk- Screenprint, composition: 19 5/8
screening, acrylic etc.) x 36 15/16" (49.6 x 93.8 cm);
• Taking ‘sides’ with the popular
against the idea of ‘elite’ culture
still has the socially
revolutionary inflection of British
Pop, but in America , this spirit
fo democratizing culture is more
pronounced.

35. American Pop - ‘Modern’ Pop
“I am for an art that is
political-erotical-mystical, that
does something other than sit
on its ass in a museum.
I am for an art that embroils
itself with the everyday crap
and still comes out on top. “
Claes Oldenburg

36. Roots of American Pop
• Dada’s use of ready made
material - Duchamp's urinal -
Hannah Hoch’s collages
• Neo Dada (Jasper Johns
and Robert Rauschenberg's)
updated use of ready-
mades..

38. American Pop - ‘Modern’ Pop
Andy Warhol’s Factory - Artist as Pop Producer

39. American Pop - ‘Modern’ Pop
A New Kind of Artist? The anti modern hero

40. “I never fall apart because I never fall together”
Andy Warhol in the Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)

41. Jackson Pollock Andy Warhol

42. “the work of these artists “comprise[s] a
very different modality of self
expression from that of the abstract
expressionists - one that queers the
ways in which a (homosexual) self
might find expression in art.The self in
the work of these artists is one that -
perversely and paradoxically - emerges
hardly as a self at all:it is one that
speaks through silence ; that appears
through disappearing; and that makes
its presence felt precisely through the
forms of solicitous and affecting
absence.”
Gavin Butt
“How New York queered the idea of Modern
Art” in
Varieties of Modernism edited by Paul Wood

46. “The thesis of the present essay is
that Warhol, though he grounded his
art in the ubiquity of the packaged
commodity, produced his most
powerful work by dramatizing the
breakdown of commodity exchange.
These were instances in which the
mass-produced image as the
bearer of desires was exposed in its
inadequacy by the reality Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych (1962)
of suffering and death.”
Thomas Crow
‘Saturday Disasters:Trace and
Reference in Early Warhol’ in
‘Modern Art in the Common Culture
Andy Warhol, Elvis I & II , 1963
Silkscreen ink and spray paint on linen
(silver and blue canvas) 82 x 82 in. (208.3 x 208.3)

52. “If you can’t beat it, Warhol
suggests, join it. More, if
you enter it totally, you
might expose it you might
reveal its automatism,
even its autism, through
your own excessive
example. Deployed first by
Dada, this strategic
nihilism was performed
ambiguously by Warhol,
and artists such as Jeff
Koons have played it out
since.”
Art Since 1900

56. The Birth of Pop - British Pop’s Ambivalent Populism