Pop Art, Appropriation, and Subversion

The investigation of the Pop Art movement brought a lot of discussion of object relations and the real to mind. While the Test Subject’s description was a laudably enjoyable description of the glorification of the commodity common to Warhol’s icon prints, I am more interested in the intersection between the theory behind Pop Art and that of Appropriation art. I was originally confused as to whether ‘supperealism’ as mentioned in Return of the Real was alluding to the pop art movement or another branch of postmodern art. I found the argument relating pop art to surrealism through traumatic realism especially interesting in light of Adorno’s argument that the emergence of the American pop art and its cultural phenomenon to be the axe on the head of surrealism.

It is interesting to regard Andy Warhol’s celebration of the emptiness of the image as a conclusively representational object in light of what his work helped to suppress, the postmodern notion of art’s ability to free the commodified object from its material constraints. This celebration of total emptiness and glorification of the complete compliance with the economy of the commodity-sign is referred to by the authors mourning the surrealist movement’s ultimate failure. Warhol’s employment of the shocked subject characteristic to traumatic realism seems to petrify the relation between subject and apparatus, suspending the subject as inept of holding its own in face of technology. The repetition of the soup can image is an obsessive fixation on this reiteration of the devoid subject. Separate from the surrealist notion that the object should be liberated from this state of confinement to the economic system and liberate the viewer in the process.

I found the Return of the Real’s description of the punctum as “a confusion of subject and world, inside and outside,” to be one of the clearest ways to explain the what is occurring differentially in the images of the movements described in the article. The pacification of this questioning of what is real and what is not in the art of the Pop movement seemed appropriate to its falsification and superficial nature. While the surrealist movement seeks to embed the mannequins of its images with the power to disrupt what binds the mind to the symbolic order, the concretization of the image as a commodity occurs through the repetition and coercion of the viewer into seeing the object of the art as boring (suffocating the traumatic nature of the image sought in the surreal).

I am curious as to where Cindy Sherman’s images fit in this spectrum in the way she manages to capture the gaze and reflect it back upon the viewer. The impulse to erode the subject and tear at the screen covering the trauma common to Sherman’s work seems closer to surrealism and rather unnatural of the pop art movement. I would like to hear more on the broader question posed towards the end of the reading asking whether trauma can regarded outside of its situated elements. I also think discussion of Empire’s subjectivity would have been more captivating than the excerpts themselves.

The erosion of the subject within the artistic work also seemed to be an important theme in this weeks readings. Comparing Warhol's subject's inability to maintain their own personas in front of the apparatus to the emblem of transience common to the allegorical site-specific works, there appears to be a trend where the subject is ultimately unable to sustain life in the face of the apparatus.