Robert Cottingham, The Spot, 1982, lithograph, dimensions unknown
Robert Cottingham worked as the art director at a major New York advertising firm in the early 1960s when both Pop art and photorealistic painting were attracting attention. After relocating to Los Angeles, Cottingham refocused his career on becoming a fine artist. It was there that, like artists such as Ed Ruscha, Cottingham became interested in the way that advertising signage defined a distinctive consumerist identity in American culture. It was, however, his childhood visits to Times Square where, as the artist describes it, “the seed was planted, when I saw the kind of activity going on above ground level.” His work is most often associated now with his 1960s and '70s realist contemporaries such as painters Richard Estes and Chuck Close, and sculptor Duane Hanson. Accordingly, Cottingham was granted a major retrospective at the Smithsonian Museum of American art in 1998.
During his travels, Cottingham photographs advertising signs and translates them, as whole signs or as individual letters, into painting and lithographs. In lithographs such as The Spot, the artist seeks to preserve the unique appearance of mid-20th century signage, much of which has now disappeared, that defined thriving downtowns across the nation.
Gift of Vicki Vanderslice
Fine Art Center: The Spot
Cottinghams work is described as photorealistic. Smithsonian American Art Museum Online defines photorealism as “a style of painting and printmaking popular in the late 1960s and 1970s that featured detailed representational subjects (cityscapes, still-lifes, motor vehicles, portraits) based on photo images. More generally, it can refer to any photo-based, sharp-focused, highly detailed style” (Serwer).
The Pop art style of The Spot, although reminiscent of Cottingham's influential contemporary and fellow advertiser Warhol, is signed in the year 1982 which falls outside of the artist's apex during the '60s and '70s. Ideology of consumerism, commercialism, capitalism are all explored by the aesthetics of The Spot.
Cottingham's lithograph captures a and preserves a moment in time. The exact meaning and context are unclear and left open to interpretation. Personal desires are then inserted such as glamour and envy. Cottingham's image acts as a shape-shifter mimicking the viewer's internal affinities. The same is true of space and purpose of the sign–where was this sign originally located and what was The Spot? The carefully chosen ambiguity of the sign lends to its appeal. The Spot makes a wonderfully nonspecific promise best described when Berger states, “All hopes are gathered together, made homogeneous, simplified, so that they become the intense yet vague, magical yet repeatable promise offered in every purchase” (153). Another part of the magic that is implied is that of the responsibility of the viewer to fill in the missing gaps using their own imagination.
The Spot clearly conjures an infinite intriguing and stylized narrative that offers a glimpse into the human condition as well as human consumption. Finally, The Spot truly reflects Berger's synthesis of the singularity that “Publicity is the life of this culture–in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive–and at the same time publicity is its dream” (154).
Works Cited
Berger,
John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting. 1972. Print.
Smithsonian American Art Museum. Web. 11 Jul. 2013
<http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/cottingham/essay-index.html>
very well done
ReplyDelete