Pop Art and the Redefinition of American Culture 4219-SD0097-OG

This course explores how artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Claes Oldenburg destabilized boundaries between “high” art and popular culture by appropriating the visual lexicon of consumer capitalism; including advertising, comics, celebrity iconography, and industrial design. Through strategies of irony, repetition, detachment, and appropriation, Pop Art both celebrated and critiqued the mechanisms of commodification, spectacle, and mass media that defined postwar America. The course further examines the complex intersections of conceptual art, mass culture, and late capitalist aesthetics through a critical focus on American Pop Art as situated at the nexus of art, media, and ideology.

Students will engage with Pop Art not only as a stylistic phenomenon but as a form of conceptual inquiry into the constructed reality of the image, the circulation of signs, and the construction of identity. The course further situates Pop Art within the broader historical and technological transformations of the 1960s, tracing its influence on subsequent conceptual and postmodern art practices that continue to blur the boundaries between art, consumerism, and everyday life.

Course Outline:
- Historiography, definitions, and critical debates of Pop Art, and the construction of Pop within art criticism. Introduction to the concept of the *Ready-Made* and Marcel Duchamp’s pioneering work in transforming everyday objects into art.
- From Abstract Expressionism to Proto-Pop, including Neo-Dada transitions and the practices of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg
- Semiotics and visual theory in Pop Art, covering sign systems, structuralism, and thinkers such as Roland Barthes and Ferdinand de Saussure in relation to image, text, and meaning.
- Consumer culture, advertising, and postwar capitalism, including spectacle theory and mass media ideology through Guy Debord and commodity aesthetics.
- Andy Warhol, seriality, celebrity culture, mechanical reproduction, and theories of the aura via Walter Benjamin.
- Roy Lichtenstein, mediation, Ben-Day dots, irony, appropriation, and high/low cultural translation.
- Sculpture, objecthood, and the everyday in Pop Art, including Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, and embodied/material transformations of banal objects.
- Photography, media circulation, and image reproduction, engaging Susan Sontag and Barthes on visual saturation, and photographic ethics.
- Gender and feminist interventions in Pop, including Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory and artists such as Marisol Escobar and Evelyne Axell in relation to representation and embodiment.
- Race, visibility, and counter-narratives in Pop Art; Faith Ringgold, Barkley L. Hendricks.
- Pop Art and Conceptual Art, focusing on dematerialization, language-based practices.
- Pop across media - music, film, fashion, and collaboration - featuring The Velvet Underground, David Bowie, and cross-media cultural production.
- Neo-Pop, globalization, and postmodern legacies, including Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, and theoretical frameworks of Baudrillard’s simulation and hyperreality.
- Research presentations, and final project critique, emphasizing visual analysis, and peer review.  

Course coordinators

Patricia McQueen

Type of course

elective courses

Mode

Classroom

Prerequisites (description)

This course is intended for students with basic knowledge in art history, visual culture, media studies, cultural theory, or related fields in the humanities and arts. Students are expected to possess critical reading and writing skills, as well as the ability to analyze visual and cultural texts within broader historical, social, and theoretical contexts. An interest in interdisciplinary approaches to art, mass media, popular culture, and the politics of representation is highly encouraged.

Learning outcomes

Knowledge:
Identify and explain key concepts, movements, and critical theories associated with American Pop Art, including ideas of appropriation, commodification, mass culture, and spectacle.
Describe the historical, political, and technological contexts that shaped Pop Art in postwar America, particularly during the 1950s–1970s.
Analyze how artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Claes Oldenburg challenged distinctions between “high” art and popular culture.
Differentiate between various artistic strategies and media employed within Pop Art, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, assemblage, installation, and multimedia practices.
Evaluate the relationship between Pop Art, consumer capitalism, celebrity culture, advertising, industrial design, and the circulation of images in mass media.
Examine the influence of Pop Art on later conceptual, postmodern, and contemporary artistic practices that interrogate identity, representation, and consumer culture.

Skills:
Critically analyze artworks using appropriate art historical, theoretical, and cultural studies frameworks.
Apply interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Pop Art by integrating perspectives from media theory, cultural studies, sociology, philosophy, and visual studies.
Interpret the symbolic, political, and ideological dimensions of images, objects, and consumer aesthetics in American art and popular culture.
Synthesize scholarly sources into coherent written, visual, and/or multimedia analyses.
Develop and present a final project (analytical, curatorial, or creative) demonstrating originality, critical engagement, and conceptual depth.

Social and Interpersonal Skills:
Engage in informed discussions about the cultural, political, and ethical implications of consumerism, media representation, and mass culture.
Collaborate effectively in group discussions, peer critiques, and collaborative research or presentation activities.
Demonstrate cultural awareness and critical sensitivity when examining issues of identity, celebrity, gender, class, and commercialization in visual culture.
Articulate informed perspectives on the ethical dimensions of appropriation, authorship, reproduction, and artistic representation.
Contribute thoughtfully to collective inquiry through class discussions, visual analyses, and project presentations.

Assessment criteria

• Class participation and discussion (20)
• Presentation on chosen topic (30)
• Final Creative Project with conceptualized explanation or Analytic Paper (40)
• Attendance (10)

Bibliography

Alberro, A. (2006) Art After Conceptual Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Alloway, L. (1974) American Pop Art. New York: Macmillan. Bader, G. (2002) Hall of Mirrors: Roy Lichtenstein and the Politics of Images. New York: MIT Press. Barthes, R. (1957) Mythologies. Paris: Seuil. (Eng. trans. 1972, London: Jonathan Cape). 
Barthes, R. (1977) Image–Music–Text. London: Fontana. 
Barthes, R. (1980) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang. 
Baudrillard, J. (1981) Simulacres et Simulation. Paris: Éditions Galilée. (Eng. trans. 1994, Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Benjamin, W. (1968) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Arendt, H. (ed.) Illuminations. London: Fontana. 
Crow, T. (1996) Modern Art in the Common Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press. 
Debord, G. (1967) The Society of the Spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chastel. 
Dyer, R. (1979) Stars. London: British Film Institute. 
Foster, H. (1996) The Return of the Real. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Foster, H. (2012) The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter and Ruscha. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 
Harrison, C. (2001) Pop Art and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Huyssen, A. (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 
Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 
Krauss, R. (1985) The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 Lippard, L.R. (1973) Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York: Praeger. 
Lobel, M. (2002) Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art. New Haven: Yale University Press. 
McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.
 Mercer, K. (1994) Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. 
O’Doherty, B. (1976) Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. San Francisco: Lapis Press. 
Pollock, G. (1988) Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art. London: Routledge. 
Sekula, A. (1984) Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983. Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. 
Tagg, J. (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 
Tomkins, C. (1980) Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time. London: Allen Lane. 
Wallis, B. (1987) Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writing by Contemporary Artists. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Recommended readings, music, videos, podcasts and articles will be available after course will commence.

Additional information

Information on level of this course, year of study and semester when the course unit is delivered, types and amount of class hours - can be found in course structure diagrams of apropriate study programmes. This course is related to the following study programmes: