Problem Pop
Could there be a more vague, more abused, more assumed concept than “pop”? Sure, any single term or label behaves similarly, like a squirming worm impaled on a taxonomic hook, fishing for meaning in the Arts. Yet my reading of pop defaults to its negative origins, wherein lie both its cultural separation from the Arts, and its contextual importation by the Arts. I would argue that little has changed in the Arts in the past half century in terms of pop developing or transforming beyond those post-war battles staged between high and low cultures.
Exclusive to the Magazine
Problem Pop by Philip Brophy is featured in full in Issue 3 of Memo magazine.
Get your hands on the print edition through our online shop or save up to 20% and get free domestic shipping with a subscription.
Related
Tim Burns’s art blurs fiction and reality, often staging disasters before they happen. His 1972 Ghost Train redesign eerily foreshadowed the 1979 Luna Park fire, just as his 1977 film Why Cars? uncannily prefigured 9/11. Through rupture, collision, and shock, Burns’s work remains less prophetic than provocatively attuned to history’s unfolding disasters.
A little over a decade after Brenda Ann Spencer’s 1979 school shooting at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, Karen Kilimnik used the crime as the premise for an artwork.
“It is no longer my face (identification), but the face that has somehow been given to me (circumstantial possession) as stage property.” — Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Delirium
