Global Pop Art, or how to rewrite / reinscribe the canon: A case study based on the exhibitions International Pop and The World Goes Pop

Author(s)

Alexandre Pedro de Medeiros

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
• Defense date: 2024-12-02

Examining board members

Nelson Aguilar; Carlos Zibel Costa; Maria de Fatima Morethy Couto; Miguel Wady Chaia; Renata Cristina de Oliveira Maia Zago

• Advisor: Gabriel Ferreira Zacarias; Nelson Aguilar

Abstract

The exhibitions International Pop (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2015-2016) and The World Goes Pop (Tate Modern, London, 2015-2016) reopened the debate on pop art, presenting it as a global phenomenon. Featuring around 300 works by artists from over 30 countries, including Brazil and Argentina, these exhibitions aimed to introduce audiences to the production of artists previously excluded from the pop canon, fostering dialogues from a shared experience that involved a "return" to figuration—especially in painting—the appropriation of images via visual ready-mades, the use of techniques and materials from mass media, as well as everyday objects. This doctoral thesis critically analyzes these exhibitions as centers radiating theoretical, historical, and critical questions related to the artistic production of Brazilian and Argentine artists from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, generally interpreted through a pop lens, with special focus on works that participated in these exhibitions. The curatorial approach of these events is situated within the context of global art studies, whose main objective is to question and displace the Western art canon. We observe that the notion of "global" has often been adopted by institutions, particularly European and North American museums, as a structural idea in exhibitions aiming to incorporate artistic productions from the Global South into a so-called global art history, though it still maintains a Euro-Anglocentric genealogy. Thus, we examine this "global rhetoric" as a potential renovator of artistic hegemonic dynamics. This qualification work analyzes the complex discursive webs of International Pop and The World Goes Pop as operations for rewriting and expanding the pop art canon. It seeks to investigate these events as spaces of circulation and production of discourses on art, functioning as mediation devices that, through the exhibition histories, enable contact between artistic production and the public. In this context, the spatial configurations that facilitate this contact are addressed, considering the curatorial discourse that guides them. Both global pop art exhibitions sought to respect the local specificities of the works selected by their curators, yet at times we observe a gap between what they intended to be (curatorial thesis) and what they were in practice (aesthetic experience) (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 17/23149-0 - From new figurations to expanded pop: the dialogue between brazilian and argentinian artists in global art pop exhibitions
• Grantee: Alexandre Pedro de Medeiros
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate