On Saturday, I went to see the Pop Life exhibit at the National Art Gallery in Ottawa. It’s fun and zippy, like some arty reinterpretation of an amusement park fun house. The work is instantly familiar, even iconic, and walking through it was a nostalgic stroll through memory lane, kind of like flipping through somebody’s collection of old vinyl or looking at bad haircuts from a 1980’s era high school yearbook.
The unabashedly commercial Andy Warhol was the gravitational center of the exhibit, and it was astonishing to see just how prolific and relentlessly present he was in our cultural landscape. His work bled into everything, and wherever you looked, (be it an episode of The Love Boat, a print ad in a magazine or a postcard) Andy Warhol was looking back at you. However, in spite of his ubiquity, there still seemed to be nothing of him in the world, and so he just floated about, the specter of celebrity haunting our days.
Many of the other artists whose work appeared in the show (Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst) had a similar familiarity. Mass marketed and ceaselessly recycled, the themes and images these artists created were inescapably present in our lives. They were the oxygen we breathed, and as such there was nothing particularly surprising or dislocating about the work. I mean, if you switched on Entertainment Tonight, you’d see a segment on Jeff Koons right after the one on Bob Sagat.
The Pop Life show exited this familiar context in the final room of the exhibit and showcased some contemporary Japanese Pop Art. Exuberant and bursting with colour, this room was fun and playful, and a smile immediately appeared on my face when I stepped into it.
Dominating the space on a giant screen was a Takashi Murakami produced video starring Kirsten Dunst. Portraying a Magical Princess, Dunst sang the 1980 hit Turning Japanese while kittenishly parading about an idiomatically Japanese world. It was an expert and dislocating mash of popular cultures, fusing the actress from Spiderman and a classic pop song with the weirdo edges of Japanese subculture, but more importantly, (much more importantly), it was sexy and fun.
www.twitvid.com/4E77A
I think that the pieces I liked the most in the show were two sculptures—just huge figurines, really—by Murakami. In one, a female anime character with exaggerated breasts, smiled brightly as milk spouted from her nipples. From the milky liquid she’d encircled herself with a kind of fecund skipping rope. Facing her was a male anime character with ejaculate streaming from his penis, which he held above his head like a potent lasso of lightning. Subversive yet cute, it was startling and funny, presenting a fresh and alien twist on the Pop Art most of us grew up wearing like a second skin.
I thought them brilliant bookends, and if the gift shop sold them as miniature souvenirs, well, I would have bought them in a second—which would have been the realized ambition of every pop artist in the show.