Доклад: POP ART

Доклад: POP ART

Селеменева А. ММА-91

US Style and design (20th century) –

Pop Art, Commercial Photography

The twentieth century is the first century of self-conscious, total design at

every level of our living and environment. Care and vision in application of

design have come to be demanded in every aspect of modern life – from our

kitchens and bathrooms, to our factories and workshops, from our clothes and

domestic objects, to the packaging of pocket calculators or the structuring

of plastic dining chairs.

Although the word has been used since at least the fifteenth century, when

Italian writers spoke of 'disegno' in describing the quality of line

possessed by an image or artifact, in all essentials 'design' is an

industrial or post-industrial concept. With the introduction of mass-

production, the people who invented ideas for objects became separated from

the people who made them who, again, were separated from the people who sold

them. The industrial revolution also created the concept of the market.

Personal need, or the whims of a patron, were replaced by a more abstract

demand: the tastes of a large, amorphous body of consumers.

The modern designer came into being as an intermediary between industry and

the consumer. His role was to adapt the products of industry to the mass

market, to make them more useful and durable, perhaps, but to make them more

appeal­ing and commercially successful, certainly. Com­mercial success is the

touchstone of achievement in design, although designers in different cultures

have often taken different views as to how the achievement is measured or the

success validated.

So, design in business and advertisement means much. The story of style in

the applied arts since the mid-to late fifties has been dominated by various

new forces, including social and economic factors and certain aspects of

technical and scientific progress. Now we have computer design, web design,

advertisement design ( for example consumer-product branding design) and the

whole fashion of different types of ad, colors and so on.

The late fifties saw the birth of advertising as we know it today, a high-

powered business dedicated to the development effective marketing techniques;

it involved new design concepts and a whole new professional jargon of

product packaging, market research, corporate images and house style.

The POP Art movement embraced the work of a new generation of artists of

late fifties and early sixties of both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, in

addition to the Independent Group, there were Peter Blake, Allen Jones. In USA

Jasper Johns, Tom Wesselman, Claes Oldenburg and other formalized the language

of product packaging, from beer cans to Campbell's Soup tins of strip cartoons,

fast food, advertising hoardings and pin-ups.

Pop Art at once reflected and glorified mass-market culture and injected a

new vigour into the applied arts. Pop and the art styles which were its

natural successors, notably American Hard-Edge Abstraction and the Hyper- or

Photo-realist school of around 1970, suggested a new palette o colours and

gave a fresh, ironical edge to the imagery of popular culture. The Pop ethic

posi lively encouraged designers to exploit vulgarity brashness and bright

colour, and to use synthetic or disposable materials in contexts in which

they would formerly have been unacceptable. Pop has had a lasting effect on

design in a wide variety of media, including interiors, graphics and fashion.

Pop has spawned furniture in bright, primary-coloured plastics and in boldly

printed fold-away cardboard; it has inspired, notably in Britain and Italy,

witty sculptural furniture in brash, synthetic materials reminiscent of the

sculptures of Claes Oldenburg. The fashion and furniture shop Mr Freedom,

opened in London in 1969 by Tommy Roberts, was a veritable shrine to the Pop

cult, with lively furniture designs by Jon Weallans. Italian Pop furniture

was one aspect of the Italian design community's wide-ranging intellectual

ap­proach which, since the sixties, has made Italy the most progressive

country in many areas of the applied arts.

The influence of Pop can be seen in graphic design in the sixties in the work

of the American Pushpin Studios, founded by Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast.

Pop and the Hyper-Realists also inspired the slick airbrush work of a number

of graphic artists working in the seventies and eighties, notably the British

artists Philip Castle and Michael English. Pop imagery is still, today, a

part of the staple diet of graphic design.

Pop's most notable impact on the world of fashion was in London in the late

sixties and early seventies, and in Italy in the achievements of Elio

Fiorucciin the seventies. Fiorucci brought fun into fashion, and his shops,

first in Milan and then internationally, became known for their Pop-inspired

clothes and graphics.

And it's influence can be seen also and on a graphic design in USA. POP is

everywhere, we see everyday objects and images of American popular culture –

Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans, sigarette packages and comic strips.

Commercial photography

Commercial photographic images are a major ingredient of our visual life,

assimilated from magazines, hoardings and such contexts as brochures,

catalogues, calendars, packaging and point-of-sale promotional material.

Commercial photography thrives as a means of creating highly polished images

of a stylized, glamourized and idealized view of the World in order to sell a

product or a service.

The major categories of commercial photogra­phy are advertising in its

countless guises, includ­ing product photography and photo-illustration,

fashion, beauty and certain categories of photogra­phy which are neither

reportage nor aspire to be fine art, yet which can be fascinating social

docu­ments of considerable aesthetic quality.

Irving Penn has continued to be a master in each of these genres and has set

standards to which many aspire. His career has spanned forty years, during

which his work, from his early fashion and still-life compositions to current

still-life product studies such as his series for the cosmetics

manu­facturers Clinique, has shown an inimitable vision and consistent

aesthetic rigour.

Ben Stern, though far from being Penn's artistic equal, became the archetypal

commercial photo­grapher in the fifties and sixties, running a vast studio in

New York and showing considerable skill and versatility in interpreting the

briefs of art directors and clients.

In the sixties the profession of commercial and, in particular, fashion

photography became greatly glamourized: the successful young photographer

became a popular folk hero, as if the camera were a passport to the illusory

world which it could depict—Antonioni's film Blow-Up (1966-7)

defined the role model. Among the most interest­ing magazines to be launched in

the sixties, the photography of which captured the youthful ex­citement of that

period, were the British Nova, which commissioned some of the best

fashion photography of its day, and the German Twen, brilliantly art

directed by Willy Fleckhaus.

In the sixties advertising played a secondary role to editorial photography

in magazines. Today the reverse seems true, for the character of many

magazines is dictated by the market needs of advertisers and many

photographers bemoan the greater restrictions this imposes. The seventies and

eighties have, nonetheless, brought forth a new roll-call of talent.

Outstanding contemporary figures include Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, who

have dominated the field of fashion photogra­phy; Hans Feurer, Arthur Elgort,

Denis Piel and others, a few of the less celebrated but talented fashion

photographers; advertising and glamour photographers such as Francis

Giacobetti, James Baes.

Commercial photographers play a great role in our consumer society, creating

the images of a life-style to which we are constantly encouraged to aspire.

They create glamourized images of women and give a heightened visual appeal

to the products which are economic mainstay of our society, be it a

hamburger, a perfume or an automobile.