Deviations from Pop Art by Amanda Cornwell

Pop Art is the term which describes the artistic investigations of seriality, consumer culture, mass production, and idealization of national icons. It explores not only how products become appropriated through advertisement but also how human beings in the media become these very products-a lifestyle bought and sold. As close to fame in a bottle as most of us will ever get. The difference say between Warhol's 32 Campbell Soup Cans and Gold Marilyn Monroe is the microcosm and the macrocosm of media power to influence and sell. Pop Art opened the door to exploring relationships between media and daily life. It brought attention to a growing power in the lives of our post-industrial society: the after effects of the industrialization of food, clothing, lifestyle, and finally self-perception. This opening was much needed, but failed to investigate how other ethnic groups are effected by western cultural colonization. This colonization effects people of different ethnicity within the United States and also outside of the western physical sphere. And if cultural colonization through advertisement comodifies our very lifestyles what does this say for the groups that aren't represented in the media? The Pop Art of the 1960's does not answer these questions.

Later variations and explorations of Pop Art by Faith Ringgold and Jerry Kearn open the dialogue concerning the exclusion of different ethnic groups from the canon of Pop Art and their exclusion from the dominate media. Coincidentally, both pieces use an image of Marilyn Monroe as a base to the artistic argument. In Faith Ringgold's piece, Marilyn, she takes the image of Monroe and gives her dark skin. At first glance you know that Ringgold is directly forcing the viewer to think about the domination of white culture's beauty paradigm over anyone who is not of anglo background. Ringgold takes Pop Art into a deeper investigation of the power of mass media and its connection with a kind of white supremacy that doesn't allow for people of different ethnic backgrounds to be represented. Interestingly, the only thing that changes about Marilyn in Ringgold's painting is her skin color. Her hair stays blond, her features don't deviate. She is still caught within the Caucasian beauty paradigm. There is representation but it is forced into the media's canon. There is no creation of a separate mode of representation. Ringgold makes the problem visible, but doesn't attempt to solve it. She focuses more on inviting the viewer to consider the beauty paradigm for her/himself.
Jerry Kearn also explores issues of race in the mass media and therefore in Pop Art. His piece Madonna and Child uses another Po

p Art type image of Marilyn Monroe, playing off Andy Warhol. Kearn's painting is more esoteric than Ringgold's Marilyn. It is a larger, more overwhelming painting. At first glance it is more difficult to understand what Kearn is going for. The image of a child is fused into Monroe's face. The child's body becomes Monroe's features. And then the title, Madonna and Child. The child portrayed seems to be of African descent, or at least not Caucasian. Suddenly, the subject matter of the painting doesn't seem to far away from Ringgold's work. The child looks thin, somewhat emaciated. Yet is supplanted from Marilyn's face. Kearn is going for a kind of irony in his work, a satirical perspective on the dichotomy between the idealization in western media, the superficiality of it, and the reality of the rest of the world, especially outside of developed nations. Kearn is exploring white priviledge in a similar way as Ringgold, but he is showing us the a symbolic take: Monroe's face encapsulating the child's body, and the child's body as the infrastructure of Monroe's image-the very image that is idealized and romanticized by popular culture, a culture that does not represent a large portion of the people who absorb it. The title also provides an interesting twist, Madonna and Child gives the piece a religious context demonstrating modern culture's elevation of pop icons to religious status. Monroe has status that competes with the Madonna-she becomes a false god, an object of a lesser type worship. Perhaps Monroe gives children of all places some kind of hope-but it is a false hope that offers nothing more than a false shell to believe. The power of image appears to be infinite but it is only skin deep and cannot help people with life's trials. Yet the idea of Monroe's existence, the life of the rich and famous, somehow makes it easier for people to handle their own mediocrity and limitations.

Both Ringgold's Marilyn and Kearn's Madonna and Child take the cultural dialogue that occurs in Pop Art to a deeper socio-economic position. Ringgold enriches the viewers understanding of the beauty paradigm by demonstrating the domination of Caucasian standards in media representation. And Kearn explores issues of white privilege and influence as well as cultivating a dialogue concerning the religious, cult aspects of popular culture icons. The Pop Art variations of Ringgold and Kearn successfully bring to light issues of race and ethnicity as well as demonstrating the cultural power of the mass media.