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Pop Art's technicolour spawn

Roy Lichtenstein's In The Car, 1963, oil and magna on canvas (detail).

From the gleaming chrome entrance sign to the candy-coloured souvenirs as you exit through the gift shop, the latest Sydney blockbuster is as big, brash and attention-grabbing as its host city.

More than 200 artworks explode into a technicolour carnival of collage, paint, plastic, polished steel, photography and even punching bags (by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol) that sprawl across an entire floor at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Pop to Popism, the biggest Australian survey of Pop Art, spans three decades of the movement that responded to the excesses and opportunities of postwar consumerism, political and social upheavals and global celebrity culture.

There are the iconic usual suspects led by Pop pioneers Eduardo Paolozzi, Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton and David Hockney. Other big names include Tom Wesselmann, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Gilbert and George, Jasper Johns and Gerhard Richter.

But curator Wayne Tunnecliffe's broadbrush approach paints a wider picture of Pop to highlight Oz Pop's larrikin energy (Martin Sharp, Richard Larter, Mike Brown) and the role of women (Rosalyn Drexler, Martha Rosler, Marisol, Vivienne Binns, Bridgid McLean, Evelyne Axell) beyond being stereotyped and objectified as subjects in pin-ups, advertising and much of Pop Art.

"It was really deliberate to expand the whole dialogue around Pop Art because the iconic works are so well known," Tunnecliffe says. "We need those works as linchpins in the exhibition but we wanted to tell a much more complex and nuanced story about Pop Art and show how widespread it actually was, and show how different artists approached popular culture."

Pop was not a movement conducive to women, Tunnecliffe says. "We were determined to expand that conversation more broadly. The female Pop art is strong and it is tough."

Marisol's 1963 mixed-media totemic sculpture of cowboy actor John Wayne astride a carousel horse speaks to the myth-making symbolism of celebrity and macho culture as a rebuke to the female imagery used by many of the male artists whose works adorn the walls around it.

McLean, an Australian artist working in a testosterone-fuelled field, merged man and machine in her 1968-74 series of paintings of racing cars and drivers, a refreshing antidote to the men painting pin-up girls, Tunnecliffe says.

Pop to Popism sweeps through the rise, fall, revival and legacy of Pop Art, taking its title from Andy Warhol's 1980 Popism memoir of the 1960s and the name of a 1982 Melbourne exhibition curated by Paul Taylor, who also conducted the last interview with Warhol in 1987.

In a culture that worships at the altar of consumerism and celebrity, famous brands and famous faces are appropriated in echoes of the religious iconography of Medieval and Renaissance art. (Warhol gave The Mona Lisa the same treatment in a 1979 screen-print.)

Screen bombshell Marilyn Monroe pops up throughout the exhibition in various guises, from the screen-prints of Warhol and Hamilton to the role-play self-portraits of Sherman, the Marilyn-Van Gogh Sunflowers of Sharp and Tim Lewis, and the lurid comic-strip art of Juan Davila.

"That combination of celebrity and tragedy is really compelling," Tunnecliffe says of the gap between the projected image and the reality behind it that was an undercurrent in much Pop Art.

"It's the manufacturing of an image and how that goes out to the world and what lies underneath it but it is also that exploration of how someone has been consumed by that image, and how that become destructive."

Riding the tide of mass media, Pop was a global tsunami and Sydney was the shore on which it smashed most spectacularly in Australia.

"Most Australian Pop artists were living and working in Sydney," Tunnecliffe says. "Sydney in the early 60s had a strong commercial culture. It was the gateway to the world in many ways, so it had a strong encounter with international commercial culture and that comes through in the art."

Many of the Australian works of the mid-60s were politically aggressive and highly sexualised, running into trouble with the repressive Menzies-era censorship laws and leading to some high-profile prosecutions.

Brown was sentenced to three months in jail with hard labour in 1965 (reduced on appeal to a fine after two years of legal wrangling) for the obscene text and imagery in his work Hallelujah! The case came hot on the heels of the prosecution of Sharp, Garry Sheed and editor Richard Neville for cartoons in Oz Magazine.

The Oz protagonists soon went on to make waves in the UK, with many other Australian expatriates who helped shape "swinging London" as it was called in Time magazine in 1966.

Another artist who left Australia on the outgoing tide was Brett Whiteley, whose massive multi-panel The American Dream (1968-69) spans 22m around two walls as the biggest work in the exhibition.

On loan from the Art Gallery of WA, where it has undergone recent conservation work, the work is on show for the first time in a decade. It derives from Whiteley's time on an art scholarship in New York, where he witnessed firsthand the fear and loathing of the collapse of The American Dream into the seismic fissures of 1968. "He was there when Martin Luther King was assassinated, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, when the Vietnam War and student protests were in full swing," Tunnecliffe says.

The result is a dystopian pastiche of paint and found-object collage - fibreglass, perspex, radio parts, a siren and stuffed birds - to issue what Whiteley called a clarion call to a society in which he saw "ribbons of violence squealing from the TV (and) the dying capitalism of Bull America debowelling itself".

'''Pop to Popism: Sydney International Art Series runs at the Art Gallery of NSW until March 1.

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