ART ABOUT TOWN
MUSEUM VIEWS ORANGE COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART, NEWPORT BEACH Pop Art Design (January 7-April 2, 2017) Words Peter Frank
Pop Art raised the vernacular to the level of fine art – and the vernacular returned the favor. Seeing their language and their thinking recapitulated in new stuff the art world was all agog about, the commercial and utilitarian arts reabsorbed the lessons they already knew, or thought they knew, about image and meaning. Irony, metamorphosis and recontextualization were employed as much for their wit as for their ability to disorient. To the casual grace of mid-century design, the Pop soupçon added the element of fun. What Pop Art Design teaches us is not simply that the high and low arts locked themselves in an unyielding embrace as the modern era wound down, but that this embrace had as profound an effect on the low arts as they did on the high. The exhibition documents, among other things, how the lessons of Pop Art prompted designers in widely disparate fields – architecture, advertising, furniture, books, clothing – to look over one another’s shoulders, and to borrow ideas and icons laterally, as well as from Pop Art itself. Pop Art Design originated at Germany’s Vitra Design Museum and traveled mostly in Europe. Thus it is not only free of American bias – we forget so easily that Pop was an international movement birthed in England – but puts emphasis on phenomena such as the Italian design explosion of the 1960s and ’70s, a Pop-fueled efflorescence if ever there were one. Some of the funniest and most daring and surprising items in the show – a couch with an embedded American flag motif, a light the shape of its own power cord – come out of the free-wheeling studios cranking away in places like Turin and Milan. Some French and Swiss design experiments also figure in the mix; Scandinavian work, surprisingly less so. (South America and the Far East are given short shrift, betraying bias of the curators’ own.) The home team was represented, of course, by the bulk of the “actual” art in the show. After all, it was American Pop, with its loud and lucid simplicity (and concomitant pretense at simple-mindedness), that most inspired European design. After Oldenburg, after Lichtenstein, everyone knew what to do. But proper homage is paid two of America’s most important architecture-and-design couples, Charles and Ray Eames and Robert and Denise Scott Venturi; both their concepts and their 96