Pop Art

Pop art is a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in parallel in the late 1950s in the United States. The coinage of the term Pop Art is often credited to British art critic/curator, Lawrence Alloway in an essay titled The Arts and the Mass Media, but this is false - the term that he uses is "popular mass culture" Nevertheless, Alloway was one of the leading critics to defend mass culture and Pop Art as a legitimate art form. Pop art is one of the major art movements of the twentieth century. Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books, pop art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. Pop art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture. Pop art at times targeted a broad audience, and often claimed to do so.
Much of pop art is considered very academic, as the unconventional organizational practices used often make it difficult for some to comprehend. Pop art and minimalism are considered to be the last modern art movements and thus the precursors to postmodern art, or some of the earliest examples of postmodern art themselves.[

Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg (born January 28, 1929) is a sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of normally hard objects.
Oldenburg was born in Stockholm, Sweden, the son of a Swedish diplomat. As a child he and his family moved to America in 1936, first to New York then, later, to Chicago where he graduated from the Latin School of Chicago. He studied at Yale University from 1946 to 1950, then returned to Chicago where he studied under the direction of Paul Wieghardt at the Art Institute of Chicago until 1954.
While further developing his craft, he worked as a cub reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He also opened his own studio and, in 1953, became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He moved back to New York City in 1956. There he met a number of artists, including Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Allan Kaprow, whose Happenings incorporated theatrical aspects and provided an alternative to the abstract expressionism that had come to dominate much of the art scene.
The most memorable aspects of Oldenburg's works are perhaps, the colossal sculptures that he has made. Sculptures, though quite large, often have interactive capabilities. One such interactive early sculpture was a soft sculpture of a tube of lipstick which would deflate unless a participant re-pumped air into it. In 1974, this sculpture, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, was redesigned in a sturdier aluminum form, the giant lipstick being placed vertically atop tank treads. Originally installed in Beinecke Plaza at Yale, it now resides in the Morse College courtyard.
Many of Oldenburg's giant sculptures of mundane objects elicited public ridicule before being embraced as whimsical, insightful, and fun additions to public outdoor art. In the 1960s he became associated with the Pop Art movement and attended many so-called happenings, which were performance art related productions of that time. This brash, often humorous approach to art, was at great odds with the prevailing sensibility that, by its nature, art dealt with "profound" expressions or ideas. But Oldenburg's spirited art found first a niche then a great popularity that endures to this day.
He has collaborated since 1976 with Dutch/American pop sculptor Coosje van Bruggen. They were married in 1977.
In addition to freestanding projects, he occasionally contributes to architectural projects, most notably the Chiat/Day advertising agency headquarters in the Venice district of Los Angeles, California -- the main entrance is a pair of giant black binoculars.

The picture above is ClothespinClaes OldenburgCor-Ten steel with stainless steel base1976 (Pop Art

Title of Exhibition

As of now, we have come up with a very clever name and theme for our exhibition. We started thinking of a name by shouting out words that related to our individual projects. A lof of these words were unsteady emotions such as "confusion", "anger", "love", "optimism", etc. None of them really had a solid relationship to one another.
Still in the thinking process, we pointed out that we were 10 girls in the class, and that maybe we should take advantage of that. We began blurting out words that were girlly and suddenly as a joke, somebody said "PMS!" Our initial reaction was to laugh, but when we thought about it.. the name fit perfectly! The words we were stating in the begining of the class all fit with the symptoms of PMS and the fact that it is very unsteady and changing. A girls personality is very sensitive during this phase. PMS also fits with the fact that we are 10 girls in the class. From this, we decided that our theme for the exhibition would be about feminism, specifically, 10 AUD female students displaying their art work.
The letters "P", "'M", and "S" have not been given a name yet. We are still unsure of wether to make each an adjective describing our work, or have 2 adjectives for the letters "P" and "M" that describe "S - syndrome."