Pop Art and Comics - Proposal: Introduction
Pop Art is a style in the field of art where the material aspects or realities of everyday life are highlighted through art pieces. Pop is the term that refers to popular culture. So the art form derives visual pleasured of people as in television, comics and magazines. Pop artists are supposedly flexible like their subjects which keep changing with time. The character of Batman has undergone several modifications with use of pop art as per medium of depiction. Yet there are critics like Townshend who mentions, “quality leads to being static”(Standfield, 12). The paper attempts to show that although pop art brings positive interpretation to comic, it sacrifices the sophistication of the meaning and the message of the comic to ingratiate fast consumerism culture.
Rationale Comic books help a person relive his childhood. The child’s innocence is linked with the creation of comic series. They would seem to understand a story better when they see more natural elements with more sequences and pages to follow (Peeters, 1). The adult oriented comic strips of pop art could therefore lead to children losing their innocence too early than necessary. When items like electronic gadgets and fashion accessories are highlighted in the comic books, children reading them need to be closely associated with the adult world. The thin protective barrier between the childhood innocence and adulthood seems to be lost too early therefore. Children reading these books are likely to find themselves attracted more towards the consumer goods like tablets and laptops rather than gardens and butterflies (natural elements). Also the value of art is lost as the readers would now identify art with such commercial lines and sketches that lack the sophistication of an artist with a free mind.
Literature Review:
The movement of pop art came up in Britain during mid 1950s. This art form developed to challenge the conventional art form and use of mass-media by the artist. Visual elements belong to popular culture refers to pop art. The concept actually addresses the attitudes leading to art. Eduardo Paolozzi composed collages called Bunk! And these were characters from comic books, advertising, magazines and different graphic pieces which was representative of the culture of USA. In one of his collages called I was a Rich Man’s Plaything, a bunch of smoke was found coming out of revolver. This was the first work of art including the word pop. This was a way of abstract expression (McNamara, 273). Pop art became popular in the 60s when Life Magazine mentioned pop art as defiant reproduction of human gadgets of daily life. Lichtenstein enjoyed worldwide praises for his works of pop art in comic books. He was criticized for plagiarism. This was because the artist reproduced the original comic strips by introducing pop art. Comics artist Dave Gibbons criticized his work by saying that it was not actually art but it was kind of parody of original works. However the fact remained that while the original comic artists like Russ Heath lived on earnings from charity, Roy Lichenstein earned millions for his pop art introduced in comic. This shows how pop art addressed the rising consumerism and this brought about popularity of pop artists. The original comic books with sophisticated paintings lost their essence.
Research Approach. In my paper I would analyze Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes to understand how pop art features different text, aesthetics, symbolism and metaphorical alliances in his work. In one case the character of Calvin identifies himself with a postmodern artist and says, “The hard part for us avant-garde postmodern artists is deciding whether or not to embrace commercialism. Do we allow our work to be hyped and exploited by a market that’s simply hungry for the next new thing? Do we participate in a system that turns high art into low art so it’s better suited for mass consumption? Of course, when an artist goes commercial, he makes a mockery of his status as an outsider and free thinker. He buys into the crass and shallow values art should transcend. He trades integrity of his art for riches and fame. (Magnussen, La Cour and Cortsen, 13)”. This message created by the pop artist itself shows how an artist has to trade the sophistication of art and values for the popular culture of consumerism. I would like to use some of the strips to show how an innocent child would look at it and could possibly interpret the same. I would like to analyze how a young reader could associate the symbols and aesthetics used as a form of pop art in this comic series with the real world. For this purpose I would like to carry out a survey of 20 young children who read this comic series and try to extract their viewpoints on specific imageries and texts. So by carrying out a qualitative interview based study, I can gain first hand insight into the way the introduction of pop art in the world of comics affect children and the essence of art while embracing consumerism.
References
Magnussen, Anne, Cour, Erin La and Rikke Platz Cortsen, Comics and power, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, Print
McNamara, Philip Anthony. “The Influence of Art History on Modern Design – Pop Art”, University of Western Australia
Peeters, Benoit, “How comic books help us to relive our childhood”, The Conversation, Web. <https://theconversation.com/how-comic-books-help-us-to-relive-our-childhood-52716>
Stanfield, Peter. The Who and Pop Art: The simple things you see are all complicated, Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2017, Vol 29, No. 1, pp.1-27, Print.
