'International Pop' shows the global influence of pop art

Anyone who walks through the International Pop show at the Walker Art Center will come to a large white canvas marked with a number of black splotches.

It's not an ink blot test, but a portrait of President John F. Kennedy that demonstrates the power of pop art.

"There's no face," Walker Curator Bart Ryan said. "It's just a black silhouette with a tie and a finger pointing."

Yet, with the shape of the hair, and the set of the shoulders it's definitely the iconic president. The portrait by Italian artist Sergio Lombardo is classic pop art, an artistic image drawn from popular culture to pack a punch.

The pop art of the 1960s — big, bright and brash work often based on popular culture — typically is identified with the United States and Britain. But the movement appeared in many countries around the world.

Global art from that era will be in the spotlight during "International Pop," a new show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis that runs through Sept. 6.

"All of the artists have in common an engagement with mass taste and mass culture," said Darsie Alexander, lead curator for the show.

The Walker galleries are filled with examples. There's an early comic book work by Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol's screen prints of Jackie Kennedy. There's a fruit stand that could be part of any grocery store — except the apples and pears are brightly plastic or metallic. There are collages of '60s film stars, and portraits of politicians. Also, the galleries ring to the sound of experimental movies made at the time

As Alexander and Ryan researched pop art and its legacy they found vibrant off-shoots in Germany, Japan and South America. Alexander said the pop art explosion in the United States created a challenge for artists elsewhere.

"One of the German artists in the show said the American artists like Warhol hit like a tank, and there was just no avoiding them," she said.

But the curators quickly realized that anti-American attitudes found in many countries in the '60s meant artists took the pop art themes and turned them inside out. Bart Ryan points to Brazil, then ruled by a U.S.-supported military dictatorship at the time.

"So when U.S. pop comes to Brazil, which already has this incredible set of artistic movements in the '60s, they are impressed by it, but they are also, like, very suspicious," he said.

So the Brazilians created their own form of pop.

"It was basically like 'Look, the only way we can become Brazilians is to take on the fact that we are always going to be influenced by these outside sources and just eat them up — and produce something that absorbs them but is entirely our own,'" he said.

Ryan describes it as the "cannibalist manifesto." As an example he points to some innocuous looking objects in a display case.

"As you can see there are three Coca Cola bottles," he said. "Two of them are empty and one of them is full."

They are real Coke bottles, designed to be returned to the factory and refilled. But Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles carefully added clear plastic stickers with white text which are difficult to read until the bottle is refilled.

"Then when they would go back to the factory and filled with Coca Cola again, and recirculated back into the world, now it says 'Yankees go home,'" Ryan said with a laugh.

Such regional re-invention, Ryan and Alexander say, makes pop art hard to define. They are reluctant to even call it a movement. But there were common threads, Ryan said, and while Pop is a thing of the past, the young culturally-obsessed change-hungry artists of that time introduced sensibilities which are very much part of life today.

"We see them as anticipating something that is second nature to all of us now — really jamming with the media, interrupting it, self-broadcasting it, introducing themselves into it, being obsessed with celebrity," he said. "All of these strategies that we have just become so used to as human beings, they innovated them."

As to why artists around the world produced similar art at the same time, Ryan said, "It was in the air."

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