Pop and Consumerism in the Art of Richard Hamilton Essay Example

of the moment, make it democratic and linked to the new technology. Pop Art erased the border between the commercial arts and the fine arts. However, Hamilton had some hesitations about the seriousness of this new art trend. “This is just the beginning - he said. - Perhaps the first part of our task is the analysis of the Pop Art and the production of a table. I find I am not yet sure about the ‘sincerity’ of Pop Art”.

Although he capitalized “pop art”, making it into a big title and so recognizing mass-produced goods as a well definable phenomenon, he was still unconvinced that these objects were worthy of serious attention. Hamilton hesitated because, although the Independent Group had been examining popular goods for some time, he was still unsure if they were no more than just short-lived fads. Crosby, the editor of the journal “Architectural Digest”, published articles on mass culture by various members of the Independent Group, including Hemilton.

By the mid-1950 the Independent Group and Crosby had found that it was no longer possible to dismiss mass-produced merchandise designed for leisure consumption as so much kitsch. Thanks to the postwar wellbeing, the British economy had shifted. With the improved standard of living and the growth in both free time and disposable income, consumer products flooded the market. Mass produced amusement was everywhere and it became as unavoidable part of everyday life. Lawrence Alloway, art critic and Independent Group member, described the time as “edenic for theconsumer of popular culture”.

Technical improvements in magazine color photographs, big screen cinemas, and the emergence of new products such as a television and long-playing records had all

recently available in England, and Independent Group set out to examine these items. In the fall of 1952 the subject matter of the Independent group turned to popular culture in general and American popular culture in particular. Inspired by pop goods that artist John McHale brought form his trip to the USA, their discussions ranged from Elvis to automobile styling.

Hamilton contributed a lecture on how “white goods” such as washing machines, refrigerators and dishwashers were presented in American advertisings. With their examination of these products, the Independent Group set out to reform culture. They had found that the vertical pyramid of bourgeois culture, with high culture on the top and low on the bottom, was becoming horizontalized, flattened out by mass commodification. In horizontal culture as in general culture, no one form of cultural production was intrinsically more valuable than other.

Each product would have to be judged on its own merits, each as potentially valuable as the next in terms of interest or as a point of critical reflection. For the “This Is Tomorrow” exhibition catalog, Hamilton created the collage “Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? ”. Before constructing the collage, he had written down all the areas of popular culture that would contain it: “man, woman, humanity, history, food, newspapers, cinema, TV, telephone, comics (picture information), world (textual information), tape recording (aural information), cars, domestic appliances, space.

He gave this list to his wife and family friend, who spent days cutting out magazine images that matched these categories. Then Hamilton made a selection from these clippings and used them to create the final collage. Beneath his list he added:

“the image should, therefore, be thought of as tabular as well as pictorial. ” As much as collage hangs together as a picture, it is also a tabulation of horizontal culture. In linking “Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? ” to the criteria that he had defined for making collage.

Hamilton’s tabular image graphed his predetermined list onto a final representation consisting of units subsumed by it. The collage holds in suspension both a picture of the modern man and woman at home in the house of tomorrow, surrounded by latest consumer goods and scientific gadgets and, at the same time, it is the separate units chosen from the mass media and used to create the image. On his list of goods Hamilton wrote: “TV is ndeither less nor more legitimate an influence than, for example, is New York Abstract Expressionism.

The wide range of these preoccupations (eclectic and catholic as they were) led to a willful acceptance of pastiche as a keystone of the approach – anything wich moves the mind through the visual sense is as gristto the mill but the mill must not grind so small that the ingredients lose their flavor in the world”. After “Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? ”, Hamilton returned to planning, adapting his collage tabulation and continuing his examination of the effects of consumer culture on subjectivity. He created painted collages that depict the results of mass culture on the horizontal subject.

His subject was the product of commodification. In the horizontal culture that Hamilton and the Independent Group defined, advertising and leisure goods were quickly coming

to dominate the archive of forms through which the subject entered society. In his first painted tabular work, “Hommage a Chrysler Corp. ” (1958), car parts – a bumper, a headlight, a tail-fin – are decomposed, fragmented and hybridized, dissolved into lines and washes of chrome, red, and sooty black. The vaguest outline of a salesgirl stands behind the car parts, only part of her breast and lips visible.

Each separate element of Hamilton’s image is distinctly visible, scatteres around the field of the painting. While they exist together on the plain of the picture, each retains its individual identity as much as it makes up the total image. In creating the tabular image, Hamilton hoped to upend the long-standing tradition in Western art that “a painting is to be experienced as a totally seen and understood all at once before its components are examined. ” “Hommage a Chrysler Corp. ” consists of separate marks of images, each presented side by side on the canvas and the final image never quite comes together.

Like “Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? ” , the image has a clear overall reference – auto advertising tin this case, but unlike the collage, this painting does not cohere in perspective space. The separate units need to be read and understood both as individual units and over-all image. Over the next ten years, Hamilton pursued the tabular image through several series of paintings, each centered on the different theme: fashion, cinema, architecture, and , in the series “Swingeing London” , the news.

In 1967 Robert Fraser, Hamilton’s art dealer, was arrested along with two of the Rolling

Stones for drug possession. The trial was public since the rock stars were involved. Fraser’s gallery hired a press agency to bring together all the trial reports. Hamilton took the clippings and turned them into the collage of headlines and photographs. Among the clipping, he distributed various images related to the trail all of which were accented with small spots of watercolor. Hamilton made a poster out of his collage and named it “Swinging London 67”. By playing one report of the trial next to the other, artist presented slightly different truths.

Truth is revealed as a constellation of multiple truths. Hamilton was shoosing the clippings according to the colors of the defendant’s clothes and the colors of the various pieces of the evidence. He selected color as the basis of his tabulation because its description is always imperfect. In his earlier work Hamilton revealed the construction of subjectivity through his manipulation of the images of horizon culture. In “Swinging London 67” he goes deeper, pointing toward the emergence of horizontalization within the subject’s inception, where subjectivity emerges as a construction of the mass media.