POP : SEX : WAR : UFO : LSD : ETC
2016, Magazín o umení 365°, #2, published by Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava
Abstract
https://issuu.com/sng.sk/docs/365_2_web This essay explored the global phenomenon of Pop as an expanded cultural, artistic, and political condition rather than a narrowly defined Anglo-American movement. Drawing on recent international exhibitions (International Pop, The World Goes Pop*, Ludwig Goes Pop + The East Side Story), the text situates Pop within the turbulent geopolitics of the 1960s and early 1970s, tracing its reverberations across Western Europe, Latin America, Japan, and Central and Eastern Europe. Framing Pop as the "birth of today," the essay reflects on its rebellious embrace of consumer imagery, popular culture, psychedelia, sexuality, science fiction, and spiritual hybridity. Special attention is paid to the Slovak and Czechoslovak neo-avant-garde, including artists such as Július Koller, Stano Filko, Jana Želibská, Peter Bartoš, and Alex Mlynárčik. These artists engaged with Pop’s visual strategies to express both personal mythologies and socio-political critique within socialist conditions. The text highlights how feminist, conceptual, and anti-establishment currents intersected with Pop aesthetics, particularly through Želibská’s gender-conscious environments and Koller's “sci-fi” material realism. Drawing connections to surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme, capitalist realism, and Fluxus, the essay proposes a more layered, transnational, and politically nuanced understanding of Pop—one that includes its global counter-histories, critical reappropriations, and local utopias. It argues for Pop not just as an art movement, but as a mode of seeing, archiving, and performing contemporary life.