POP ART

A post-war cultural movement started in America and quickly spread to the United Kingdom and it was called POP ART. And why would it be called POP ART? The name says it all! This kind of expression movement is directed to the masses, the whole population, it consists in turning the everyday objects into art, it can be a painting, a sculpture or an installation, the newest type of art in the 60s decade.

This artistic flow was characterized by being simple, original, concrete and having low-cost prices, which brought the attention of a big portion of people. POP ART soon expanded and became a mass hit in the cultural industry.


We’ll show you a short list of the main POP ART boosters…

Andy Warhol

Campbell's soup

Aloha

Roy Lichtenstein

Jasper Johns 

The Seasons (Summer) 

Just what is it that makes today's 

homes so different, so appealing?

Richard Hamilton

Robert Rauschenberg

Combine

Claes Oldenburg

Spoonbridge and Cherry

This week our task was to choose a piece of POP ART (painting, sculpture, collage, installation) and the one that we chose was “Binoculars” by Claes Oldenburg.

Claes Oldenburg was born in Stockholm (Sweden) in 1929 but he and his family moved to Chicago (USA) seven years later. He took classes in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and started to make his own art works, initially sculptures of ordinary objects and after he added to his art range the installations. Many of his pieces were made with is soul mate, Coosje van Bruggen who died three years ago.

“Binoculars”, an installation is one of his most known works. This work had the collaboration of his wife and was made with the purpose of becoming a commercial office building – initially called the Chiat/Day Building, since the company that occupies it at the time was TBWA\Chiat\Day (a division of an advertising agency responsible for the advertising campaign of Apple Inc.); nowadays is called Binoculars Building and it’s occupied by Google.

As we can see by the pictures it’s a very innovative building even to nowadays. The structure of the binoculars is accompanied by two other constructions also with a very suggestive design – on the its left there is building with similarities with a boat and on the right a building similar to a tree. Unlike almost all works of art of his time, Binoculars, are also an architectural structure, since it has "activity" inside it:

Two tall unusually shaped rooms, created by following the curves of the binoculars, opened onto a conference room, the ceiling of which was covered with a version of Gehry's signature snake form. The two curved rooms were intended to serve as places of retreat. Each was furnished with a huge elongated lightbulb of resined cloth, suspended from the ceiling, softly glowing, as in comic-strip representations, the sign of a luminous idea.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen

Like the companies that have become lodge in this building, Binoculars represents the turning point in art – turning towards the future, being associated with this installation two works from what come to be  modern architecture in which ends up entering the structure of Binoculars. So, like his piece, Oldenburg is visionary, easily interpreted by the function of binoculars – to see beyond what is possible with the naked eye.

Transporting this interpretation to our blog, this piece applies flawlessly. Claes Oldenburg with his work conveys the idea that sees beyond what is visible to the naked eye. In our blog we try to make all posts to be visible from a historical perspective. And in order to achieve this we try to expose as much the contemporaneity of the topics that we address. And for that we do not just look with the naked eye, we need to go further... So, every week we write something, we do not just write something, we spend a few hours looking through binoculars!

Bibliography:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_art
http://oldenburgvanbruggen.com/largescaleprojects/binoculars.htm
http://oldenburgvanbruggen.com/largescaleprojects/lsp.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claes_Oldenburg
http://www.ocaiw.com/galleria_maestri/gallery.php?lang=pt&id=702
http://www.ocaiw.com/galleria_maestri/image.php?id=505&id_img=553&catalog=pitt&lang=pt&letter=&start=&name=
http://www.ocaiw.com/galleria_maestri/image.php?id=459&id_img=507&catalog=pitt&lang=pt&letter=&start=&name=
http://pt.scribd.com/doc/33517072/Richard-Hamilton-Pop-Art
http://www.ocaiw.com/galleria_maestri/image.php?id=1479&id_img=1501&catalog=pitt&lang=pt&letter=&start=&name=

Text written by the authors of the blog:

Cristiana & Margarida