Pop Art Remixed

The artist Gavin Turk explores how, for all its glossy associations with repetitive soup cans, Hollywood icons and US comic strips, the roots of Pop Art are to be found closer to home, in Britain.

In 1956, British Pop Art found its voice at the 'This Is Tomorrow' exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and the term ‘Pop Art’ was used in print for the first time. Emerging from a Britain still recovering from the devastation of the Second World War and the austerity that followed, British artists looked both longingly and critically towards America’s burgeoning consumer culture, advertising and mass media.

Artists including Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton and, later, David Hockney, Pauline Boty, Jann Haworth and Peter Blake borrowed from the visual landscape of post-war Americana, experimenting with collage, screen printing and ‘soft sculpture’ to challenge the boundaries between art and design, ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, mass production and individuality.

But Britain’s relationship with American consumerism was necessarily at one remove. The shiny new world of the so-called ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’ remained, for many Britons, a distant dream. British Pop Art therefore developed a distinctive character: celebratory and satirical, fascinated and sceptical, witty and critical. It reflected a society shaped by class distinctions and complicated attitudes towards capitalism, consumerism and the rapidly changing media landscape.

The foundations laid by British Pop Art have had a profound influence on successive generations of artists. Turk explores his own relationship with Pop Art, particularly in Pop (1993), in which he reimagines Andy Warhol’s iconic Elvis as a waxwork of himself dressed as Sid Vicious in a cowboy pose. Elsewhere, his bronze cast of a black bin bag, painted to look completely real, plays with the distinction between the everyday object and the precious work of art. Both ask us to reconsider what we see, what we value, and what are prepared to call ‘art’.

British society has changed radically since the 1950s, but the questions that preoccupied the original Pop artists remain strikingly familiar. Turk explores how Pop Art anticipated many of the phenomena that define the contemporary world: celebrity culture, advertising, popular and elite culture, and the increasingly unstable relationship between the original and the copy. In the age of AI, deepfakes and endless digital reproduction, the questions British Pop artist posed about identity, authenticity and the status of the image feel remarkably prophetic.

In conversation with artists Jann Haworth, Michael Craig-Martin and Rachel Maclean, and art historians Flavia Frigeri at the National Portrait Gallery, Louisa Buck, Lisa Mullen and Simon Martin at Pallant House Gallery, Gavin Turk explores how British Pop artists responded to their changing world, and where Pop Art’s legacy can be found today.

Produced by Melissa FitzGerald

A Zinc Audio Production for BBC Radio 4