Pop and neo-pop/post-pop

Jeff Koons’ work is classified as neo-pop or post-pop, as part of a 1980s movement that opposed the pared-down art of minimalism and conceptualism in the previous decade. The original pop art (1955–70) represented the spectacular crossover between art and life, between high and low culture, between the gallery and the streets. Slowly the barrier of privilege that high art hoped would keep it separate from fashion, entertainment and everything else art flirts with was giving way.

Traditionally, art belonged in palaces and churches. Access to it was the domain of merchant princes and cardinals. The very fact of a ‘museum’ was an introduction of the idea of democracy. But even into the 19th century, culture was seen as a secular space for improvement. It was a place apart from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. It was meant to be civilising and uplifting. And so a wedge had been emphatically established between how people lived and what they learned. Pop culture, meanwhile, in the form of newspapers, comics, advertising, even movies, started to emerge from cities in the late 19th century when people started to have more leisure time. Artists, who up till then had elitist audiences, started to put mass-media references in their work – Picasso and Braque, for example, put cut-up newspapers into their paintings. By the mid 20th century, the industrialising effects of modernity and the marketplace changed everything.

By the 1960s, mass forms of communication (movies, pop music etc) were so pervasive it was impossible for you to insulate yourself against the flood. TV, less a medium than an environment, saturated homes, bars, motel rooms. High art was for individual appreciation, popular culture was into mass release (screaming, crying, laughing). It also dissolved the values of the dominant interest group with its trademark features of one race, one class, one gender (ie white, male, middle class).

The term ‘pop art’ was coined by art critic and curator Lawrence Alloway in the late 1950s to indicate that art has a basis in the popular culture of its day and takes from it a faith in the power of images. It was about looking cool but cheap (as in kitsch), and it resembled something you could find mass-produced in the supermarket. Pop art valued the short-lived and disposable. Though it was not a structured movement in the sense of a group putting on collective shows, it did have a certain coherence. The strategy was to hijack the ‘bad new things’ rather than genuflect towards the ‘good old things’ (Bertolt Brecht). But while pop art quotes from a culture specific to the consumer society, it does so in ironic mode, as inferred from the British painter Richard Hamilton’s definition of his artistic output: ‘Popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business’.

Perhaps the defining artist of pop art was Andy Warhol. His evolution from smart commercial illustrator to paradigm maker of the future of Western art parallels the social shift from the 1950s to ’60s. People still have mixed feelings about whether he was a great artist or a great phoney. Warhol was, on the one hand, an unabashed entrepreneur who used art to further his fortune, a genius manipulator and public relations guru; and on the other hand, he was an astute analyst of commodity culture who helped revolutionise the process of art-making, rendering it more democratic and accessible to the masses. A celebrant of society’s obsessions with money, sex and celebrity, Warhol was also perhaps one of the first to intuit that the core cultural experience of our age is the echo chamber effect of reproductions of reproductions.

After Warhol walked into the supermarket and signed Campbell soup tins for a fantastic mark up, post-pop culture has had to learn How to Stop Worrying and Love the Commodity. Like Taiwanese copies of designer labels, forms in America were being grasped at once, while content and its attendant mysteries ceased to be of interest except as a commentary on the capture of form. Through the magic of media overexposure Andy could see that nobodies could be turned into celebrity superstars, and second-hand experience, second-hand identities and second-hand feelings had paradoxically become the jackpot, rather than the consolation prize.

Within this more savvy commercial terrain, planning a career was like planning the digital circuitry of a new all-purpose module that could make anything more or less on dealer deadline. Enter Jeff Koons. Like Warhol, people have never been sure whether Koons is a superficial scammer or a wry prophet. Both share a cultivated shallowness, a cagey dumbness. But while Warhol’s statements had a camp irony about them (‘I like boring things. I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.’), Koons’ statements are delivered with all the earnestness of the motivational seminar. With eyes wide open and embracing all of American culture, he has appropriated everything from advertisements and vacuum cleaners to cartoon characters, collectibles and plastic toys.

In this new culture of manufactured fictions, images are all that matter: how you shape them, layer them, solve their problems. Beyond just the radical switch of original and copy, the person becomes the ‘buy-product’ of representation. The dislocations in art and society that this leads to probably defines 1980s neo-pop: with the ancient contours of things fading, there was a vanishing line between the real and everything else.

Within the post-pop Warholian universe – a pure plastic environment of images and signs, whether peopled by Michael Jackson or Barbie or Britney Spears – the stage was set for a new species of artist – including Koons, Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney, Yasumasa Morimura, Charles Ray and Vanessa Beecroft – whose works played perfectly in this parallel universe that was quickly replacing those old-fashioned things called nature and the real.