 James Rosenquist AREA CODE 1970 (Installation View) collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis gift of The T.B. Walker Foundation, 1971 |
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 Claes Oldenburg SHOESTRING POTATOES SPILLING FROM A BAG 1966 collection Walker Art Center, gift of The T.B. Walker Foundation, 1966 |
This spring, the Walker explored
aspects of Minimalism in the exhibition Elemental, drawn from its
permanent collection. Now, Pop3 will survey some of
the Walker's Pop masterpieces by focusing on three key artists: Claes
Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol. While Minimalism was allied
with logic, seriality, and material elegance, Pop was more interested
in a world filled with nonstop advertising, comics, magazines, billboards,
television, movies, wearables, and edibles. It also managed to embrace
the most reassuring elements of art--the figurative, narrative, and pictorial--but
in a cheerfully subversive way. The works on view include a city tumbling
from the sky by Oldenburg, soup cans and electric chairs by Warhol, and
a rarely seen, heroically scaled explosion of a painting by Rosenquist.
An important exhibition sidebar is devoted to the Velvet Underground,
the legendary house band that came together in Warhol's "Factory" studio.
Dominated by John Cale and Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground was the quintessential
"in" band that also produced a string of essential rock classics like
"Sweet Jane" and "I'm Waiting for the Man." The group was captured on
film in its Exploding Plastic Inevitable concert (on view). Talking about
the Velvet Underground's audience, Warhol remarked, "If they can take
it for ten minutes, then we play for fifteen. . . . That's our policy.
Always leave them wanting less."