Pop Parody: Ron English at Varnish Fine Art
Inspired by this weekend's hijinks, we tracked down Ron English's latest show, Son of Pop, which opens at Varnish Fine Art tonight, June 2, from 7-11 pm. Though fascinated with the same sorts of pop-culture subjects as Andy Warhol, he treats them with a different, more overtly subversive aesthetic.
Known as the father of "agit-pop," English juxtaposes a highly critical political sensibility with modern advertising techniques, using his message to alter their meaning. Aided by an extended family of subverts, the artist has been known to alter large-scale billboard advertisements by pasting over them, replacing text and image with his own designs.
A 2004 documentary about English, Popaganda: The Art and Crimes of Ron English (watch the trailer!), was recently screened at the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, and will run once more at Varnish on June 11th, at 8 pm. Director Pedro Carvajal chronicles English's long history of culture-jamming; though his solo work began in 1983 with his first billboard hijackings in Austin, Texas, his work with collectives such as San Francisco's Billboard Liberation Front goes back to 1979.
SFist Sarah, contributing.
More recent examples include English's 2002 installation on East 14th Street, a billboard exclaiming "JIHAD IS OVER! (IF YOU WANT IT)." A direct riff on the "War is Over! (If You Want It)" Times Square billboard sponsored by John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their 1969 peace campaign, its presence baffled everyone—including the New York Times, who later covered his particularly controversial anti-war paste ups in New Jersey.
English's innovations have spawned generations of billboard artists; Popaganda highlights the collaboration between English and Los Angelino Shepard Fairey, an obvious evolution given each artist's distinct mastery of media appropriation and subversion.
Son of Pop features English's take on some of Andy Warhol's most iconographic images—Marilyn, Mickey Mouse, and the cow, for instance—and resulted from a collaboration with master printer Alexander Henrici, who worked with Warhol on his Campbell Soup Can series. Each piece was build from the canvas up, with English's painted layers topped by Henrici's screens. The resulting prints have slight slippages, imperfections in the registration similar to those found in Warhol's prints and paintings. Such "flaws" lend interest to English's work, and have actually increased the post-mortem face value of some Warhol works, incidentally.
Marilyn, Little Andy, and Cowgirl, all original works by Ron English, have been duplicated through his work with Henrici, and hang in large scale grids on the free-hanging walls that cover the brick walls of the main gallery space. Whereas Warhol's pop appropriations remained rather oblique in their social commentary, English's parodies don't mix their messages.
Little Andy is just that: a boyhood portrait of the young Andrew Warhola wearing a man-sized wig, appearing even more awkward as a child than he did as a famously pasty-faced artist and socialite. The grinning face of Mickey Mouse cups Marilyn's buxom breasts in a bullet bra grip, his nose sitting in for the nipple.
Cowgirl strays furthest away from Warhol's image, as a cow's sits atop the elongated neck of a woman, with multiple nipples adding to the humanoid effect. Just as in his previous alterations of pop icons (Once employed by the Camel cigarette company, English was fired for embedding skulls into the images), he has tweaked and twisted figures synonymous with twentieth-century American art and culture, infusing them with his own very particular brand of parody. Visit Son of Pop: Ron English at Varnish Fine Art, 77 Natoma Street, until July 2nd.