Lowbrow & Pop Surrealism

Quinn: Hello, and welcome back to Pictorial on Relay FM. I'm Quinn Rose, and I didn't go to art school, but that doesn't stop me from learning about art of all kinds.

Betty: And I'm Betty. I'm also someone who didn't go to art school and this episode, or this topic we have today, is actually perfect for people who are not professional about art in any way.

Quinn: I am so curious about this. The topic of today is called lowbrow art. I don't know anything about it, this is Betty’s topic. And I'm going to let you take it away, but I just have to start by saying I'm so curious about it because based on the little I know, and the name of it, the idea of it is that it's quote unquote lowbrow, but also isn't it an entire art movement? So isn't that by definition highbrow? Very excited to learn more.

Betty: I think you totally have it right, Quinn. So this art movement, lowbrow art, is actually something I didn't know very much about either. I had kind of heard of it, and so I did some research. So even though this is my topic, I'm going to try to explain it in a way that makes sense, but we'll, we'll see. It was actually suggested by this person called Brad Dowdy, who is one of the hosts of the Pen Addict podcast, also on Relay FM. And he had heard of our podcast—I don't even remember actually how it was mentioned. I think they mentioned us anyway, on the Pen Addict and Brad had just kind of thrown out there, hey I would love it if on Pictorial they could talk about lowbrow art. So here we are, talking about lowbrow art.

Quinn: We’re amenable to our audience.

Betty: Yeah. So we do, we do take audience suggestion. And so now we are going to talk about it. Lowbrow art, it basically it's, it actually is exactly as it sounds, it’s—like we've talked about kind of high art and low art before—I don't even remember in what episodes, but basically there's art that is accepted by the quote unquote art establishment. So like galleries and art institutions and academics and—or people who buy art, who pay lots of money for art, and then there is like low art or there is every day, average citizen art, which is—

Quinn: Art of the peasants.

Betty: So yeah, kind of like art that's basically not super like accepted by the establishment. And here we, we don't actually just want to talk about stuff that's in art galleries and you know, things that people pay millions of dollars for, even though that's what often does make the news and what's often, what's often there's enough information for us to do research on, obviously. But lowbrow art is this interesting movement where it is this, the second thing that I mentioned where it’s kind of like the art of the peasants quote unquote. But there is a movement and it's also known as, the other name is known by is Pop Surrealism, which I think describes what the movement is better. And we can talk a little bit about it later, but I think if you open up the link, one of the links that I put in the show notes, I think it's the Wide Walls one. It's the one that says “from pop surrealism to low brow, something got lost in translation.” I just want you to look at the first picture that's on there and give me your first impressions.

Quinn: All right. So I just opened an image and… the very first thing that draws my eye is this exaggerated drawing of a person. So it looks like it's a woman who's lounging on some kind of like nature platform. Like she's lounging on a rock basically. She, her head is really big for her body and her eyes are very big for her face. So she's like a very exaggerated kind of doll-like figure. She’s got blue hair with flowers in it, long blue hair. And her dress is basically plants. It's not like she's wearing a dress and there's flowers on it. It's like her dress just is all of this like green plants, but also flowers. There's a bee pollinating one of the flowers. And then all around her are these other rocks. There's like a waterfall that's coming down across them and she has other animals. There's like a little—I don't even know what that is. Is it like a chinchilla that's next to her? There's a deer in the background and then there's a scorpion, there's a bowl of fruit. There's a bust of a nude woman just from her boobs up. Sort of like a, you know, an ancient statue style. And then in the background there's kind of like a gazebo kind of shape up on a raised platform of these rocks. There's a couple of trees. There is a kind of grumpy looking… groundhog, maybe? And then they all seem to be also on a beach because you can see what appears to be a lake in the background and mountains even farther back. I just described a lot of things. There is a lot happening in this picture and it seems to be a very interesting mix of both the natural and the surreal. I think we're going to be talking about surrealism a lot. But you have this, a lot of what appears to be very natural and even cutesy, but then there's these notes of dangerous nature with like the scorpion and then there's completely manmade things such as this bust. And all of the colors… there’s a lot of different colors in it, but it's all quite muted, I will say.

Betty: I would just have to say, this is probably the longest description we've had to describe, which is entirely amazing. This is exactly the type of description we need. Not only for the audience who can't like, look at it on YouTube or like pull over and click on the show notes to look at the picture. But also like, I do just want to emphasize like these drawings are highly detailed and you can look at them for like an hour and you can discover something new. And I think we don't even have to talk about a whole bunch and we can just talk about a few and we could, we could probably go on, but let's not with just one painting, but I do just want to tell you that the name of this painting is called Katy Perry. It is by an artist named Mark Ryden.

Quinn: You know, I can kind of see that. Katy Perry had like a blue hair thing for awhile. 

Betty: It is definitely like, like a caricature of Katy Perry, is what this artist seems to be drawing or at least for, for a part of the picture. And like, we don't have to go into too much about like the meaning of this particular picture, but this one is kind of exemplifies what a lot of these paintings or drawings are like. But basically lowbrow art—it came out of this underground culture and underground movement in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s. And it's like artists who are a part of this, who are a part of the scene. They draw inspirations from like street art, skateboarding culture, like DIY comics and people who make like fanzines, like fan magazines or magazines that are not like officially published, but like drawn by people. And so, yeah, they're inspired by like, we'll talk about surrealism soon, but like the surrealist art movement, as well as like cartoons, like punk rock, psychedelic rock, a lot of things that were like underground movements. But later some of these movements kind of became more mainstream, like I guess, psychedelic rock became a thing that was popular at a certain point and things like skateboarding culture, and comics like comic books and cartoons. There are things that like may have originated as something where it's just like an independent artists making it, but some of these people do go—did go on to become like famous and well-known. So that kind of gives you an idea of lowbrow art slash pop surrealism, of like why you see these types of things that you would allude to when it comes to like comics and cartoons and exaggerated features of faces and animals and stuff. But it also gives you an idea of how an underground movement becomes mainstream. 

Quinn: Yeah. So if this is a bunch of different artists pulling inspiration from all these different places, how does this become a cohesive art style or something that's described as a cohesive art style from the outside?

Betty: That is an excellent question. A lot of these movements, they do originate from a place, but then they don't necessarily, like, whether it's like Impressionism that started in France or like Dadaism that started in like, I don't know, Switzerland, or I don't even know exactly, but basically neutral war areas. Like in, during the war, they, they ended up going other places and other people ended up adopting it. But this probably became a quote unquote “cohesive art movement” because of a zine. Because of a zine that became a famous magazine. So in 1979, I believe, this person named Robert Williams, who's a painter and a cartoonist, I think coined the term lowbrow art, first of all. And then started a magazine called Juxtapoz. It's spelled J U X T A P O Zed. I'm Canadian, I say zed. So he started this magazine and I think it’s since—like, I’ve never heard of it, but I apparently it's super, super famous. And in this magazine is where he published a lot, a lot of lowbrow art. I'm assuming some of it is like by him, but a lot of it is by other artists and… so many art movements it's because it there's like a collection of the work. And I think through these zines—and so later it wasn't just Robert Williams, it wasn't just this one magazine, other magazines also became really famous and then distributed across I'm assuming America and other places internationally. And people heard about this and other people started kind of copying the style or, or maybe like using this style as an inspiration and then that's kind of how you, like when you look at a lot of these other paintings, like on these, some of these other websites that I left in the show notes as well. Like you do see there is this kind of distinctive, like comic looking exaggerated features with lots of detail, surreal type of visual that make this yeah, like a pretty cohesive art movement.

Quinn: I’m very interested to hear about like what the artists in this movement think of the way that it's been interpreted and covered by sort of the mainstream art establishment.

Betty: I think parts of the art movements themselves is when these artists get together and they're publishing their own magazines and can sort of have their own way of presenting who they are. And then later they get interest from the mainstream and then it's then presented maybe in—probably usually differently or taken differently by others. And there, there is an interesting dynamic in that, or at least I think there is. I would say by the 90s, this had become kind of like mainstream that a lot of people knew about it, whether it's through these magazines and then through interests of people who are somewhat wealthy, who are paying more and more for these artworks and then galleries like professional high-end galleries becoming, becoming interested in works like these, some of the websites or some of the research I was doing say like by the mid nineties, this has just basically become a huge thing. So pop surrealism, I couldn't figure out where this, where and who coined this, but maybe it wasn't just one person, but pop surrealism describes it better because like, in terms of the visuals, is that it basically combines pop art and surrealism. I’m not sure if we talked too much about pop art on Pictorial before, but I do have a YouTube video about pop art. So if you go to ARTiculations and watch that video you will find out more about it, but I'll, I'll give a gist of it right now. But basically, but like pop art was also a movement in the 1960s-ish where artists were purposely painting and drawing things in popular culture, instead of these esoteric abstract art works that a lot of galleries were, you know, like things Quinn and I really like, just like a square. They’re more likely to be interested in, in like popular culture and popular art rather than something that seemed like a high end art gallery. So pop artists were really trying to exploit that by painting—like Andy Warhol, for example, painted like soup cans. Or there's like artists who just painted like commercial stuff, like you know, gas stations or Coca Cola and things like that. So pop surrealism is like combining that like pop culture aspect with these surreal type of visuals, which is why I think for me, like I wanted to show you that Katy Perry art, because it's like a lot of people know who Katy Perry is. So like, this is attractive to kind of like… I would say like a lot of everyday people, but then a lot of people also do like these cute cartoon surreal looks. So then like I, in a way I feel like, of course this art movement was going to eventually become big because there are just a lot of like actual, attractive, visually nice looking elements as a part of it.

Quinn: So for lowbrow, is most of them like very similar to this kind of style that I'm seeing in this picture right here, where it's like the muted colors, like exaggerated features almost like a doll-like human figure, or there different stylistic elements that are binding these?

Betty: So I would say the answer is yes and no.

Quinn: Of course it is.

Betty: So, so if you I think if you go to, or even just seeing the same article, like if you scroll down, there's you know, there's a painting where there is, it looks kind of horrifying. Like there's like a furry looking human with no eyes, but then there's like eyes in the background and like, again, it's surreal and it looks like it's underwater, but this one has—definitely doesn't have like this, like Katy Perry cartoonish feature, but it is still super highly detailed. I would say the highly detailed aspect is probably one of the only real consistency. And then also, and then also the surrealism. But other than that, I would say like, again, if you if you scroll further down, there's a work by Todd Schorr Five o'clock Shadows, which does have this, these like character looking heads. But again, it looks more horrifying and it looks more like some sort of Dada surreal work, but also a part of a horror movie. And then there are ones that look like, if you scroll further down, Ray Caesar, Tea With Me and He, and this looks more like something out of a fairy tale with, you know, these child looking character and a fox having tea.

Quinn: I like that one.

Betty: Yeah, that one's pretty cute. So yeah, some of them are like horrifying in my opinion. And some of them are really cute and some of them are somewhere in between. So definitely it is, it is a diverse art movement because again, like it, it kind of has to be, if it came out of the kind of these like grassroots, these like people who are non-professional. And one thing that is also true is I, I did read essentially all of these artists are self-taught like, they didn't go to an art school—like you and I—and they, they did, they didn't have formal training. They, whether it's like formal training and like how to draw and how to paint or how to like judge and critique art as well. So these people are—almost all of these artists, probably, at least initially are the type of people who would have completely rejected like art institutions or galleries and would have been rejected by like institutions as oh, this is literally lowbrow art. Like this is just like populism. This is not something that is like worthy of an art gallery or like academic study, until later they became popular and then people started paying attention, of course.

Quinn: So, are there museum exhibits of lowbrow art?

Betty: There are, or at least as from what I have read, there are at least galleries that now collect this type of work. So there's these galleries in New York, one is called Oh One Gallery and another gallery is LA’s Psychedelic Solutions Gallery. And those are just some of the ones that I've come across. So these are, as far as I know, like well known and established art galleries that are collecting these works. I'm not sure if like MoMA or a place like that have done a pop surrealism or lowbrow art exhibition. I don't think so, cause I feel like I would have come across it in my research, but I can see that this being some sort of exhibition one day, cause again, it's still kind of a movement that's still going on and it became popular in the 90s and is still kind of popular now. And maybe it's just starting to get accepted in the mainstream in terms of, or it's just starting to get accepted in the wider art world. 

Quinn: The mainstream art world comes for us all eventually.

Betty: Yeah. And so more recently, I think, so Mark Ryden, as well as a couple of the artists, I mentioned previously, Ray Caesar and Jeff Soto, their works have sold in the six figures.

Quinn: Oh wow.

Betty: US dollar, six figures. And then another artist Yoshimoto Nara, his work ranged from 1 million to 5 million when being sold at auction in 2015. So again, this is, this is now like, or at least some of these artists are now famous, well-known and wealthy. As far as like, if you're selling, even if the gallery is taking a huge commission, if you sold your artwork for 5 million, you have money or at least you have made some money.

Quinn: Yeah, I would say so.

Betty: I haven't actually read like interviews with these artists or anything yet of how they feel about being like well-known and famous, but… it would be interesting to know about it, but again, like, because this is still kind of a semi underground art movement, or at least, you know, that's kind of how it started. There isn't that much information except for in these zines, which I don't own. So I'll have to try to find some of these so that I so that I can kind of read what these artists themselves are saying. Oh, one of the magazines is called Pork. Another one is called Tokeon. So this is a Japanese, so this is a magazine with both Japanese and US editions. I think this is huge in Japan, because again, this whole like cartoon thing being inspired by like large characters with exaggerated eyes. I feel like this probably has to do with anime to an extent. I, and I, and as a person who really likes anime, I feel like I should know more about this, but I don’t. And another really well-known magazine is called High Fructose.

Quinn: That’s a fun name.

Betty: Yeah. So this is not like, this is not the only movement where, you know, it was seen as not real art or like not high art in the beginning, because impressionism had kind of a similar history I would say where, when they first started, it was just a bunch of artists who got together and they weren't really accepted by the wider art world. And then lots of everyday average people maybe got interested and then they started publishing their own writings and stuff as well. And then eventually they became popular and it became accepted as like, a quote unquote real art movement. And there's lots of other art movements like surrealism, as well as pop art and Dada that went through a similar transformation. It's just that I think right now we're still seeing the transformation part of this art movement. So it's not like we can go to an established art museum and see a lot of this work yet.

Quinn: This is a really cynical thought, but I am just going to say it, is when we look at these patterns over and over again of innovations in art not being taken seriously. And we've gotten to this point now where people are even like positioning their art is deliberately like lowbrow and not, they like rejecting the idea of even being less quote, unquote, high brow art that's taken seriously by mainstream art museums. But then, you know, as time goes on, like these movements do get accepted and revered as these groundbreaking things and all that. And here's where the cynical part comes in. We all know that the monetary value that is placed on artworks goes up after an artists dies because then they automatically become more limited because then there is a finite number of them in the world. And this feels like an extension of that where I know you've, we've talked about like some of these people like are making money off of their art, great and everything, but it does feel almost like the system is just avoiding paying artist as much as possible, because it's almost like, you know, once all of these artists in the movement have died, then we can start like really ramping up these prices and trading these paintings around and building these exhibits because now, first of all, they seem more important because like it's no longer active and happening right now. And also like we don't have to pay any of these pesky artists. 

Betty: Cause they're dead! Or either they're dead or they're not dead yet, so it's not worth as much so that we're not paying them. It is kind of, it always is just does seem gross and it, or it seemed like I don't know of any other better ways to put it every time we talk about art and money, but I mean, it doesn't obviously doesn't have to be that way. There, I think, I at least try to actively support artists and pay them. And I know there are a lot, lots of other people who do. And I personally, I think most artists think this type of system is not sustainable, the gallery system and the way art auction happens and things like that. And… but that's, that's a topic for another time, but, but I do think that movements like these do challenge these systems, and there are artists who like actively again make their own circles and make their own exhibitions and own galleries and own ways of distributing art such as through the zines to try to get around these systems. And now again, with the internet and with like other methods of distribution, this does become easier. And this does become, I think, more possible, but again, like who, who knows. It’s still, it is still a lot of these artists still probably really aren't getting paid or aren't getting paid what they deserve in my opinion anyway.

Quinn: Yeah, it’s really cool to look at these pieces and to talk about a movement that is still actively happening and is actively going to develop and change. I mean, people are building on all art all the time. That's kind of the thing of it, but like still being within something that's identifiable as extremely contemporary is very cool. And it does like make these pieces accessible to a lot more people, which is very fun too. As we're wrapping up here, we wanted to tell you about another show on Relay FM you might like, and that is Rocket. Rocket is a tech show that covers all the hard tech news of the week, but they take the most fun approach possible. It is hosted by Brianna Wu, Christina Warren, and Simone de Rochefort and every episode, they highlight a couple of really important tech stories from the week, as well as their dessert topic in which they just have fun talking about something that has come out this week, for example, like, I don't know, scams with fake blood testing.

Betty: Yeah, if you’re looking for an episode to start with, I would try episode 300, which is actually named Dessert. It's where Bri, Simone and Christina found turkey dinner flavored candy corn on the internet and they try it on air. And apparently it doesn't go very well.

Quinn: As you might imagine. You can find that show at relay.fm/rocket, or just search for Rocket in whatever app you're listening to this right now in. Thank you for listening to this episode of Pictorial, you can find our show notes at relay.fm/pictorial. Or you can follow us on Twitter or Instagram @PictorialPod. You can also find me on Instagram @aspiringrobotfm.

Betty: And you can find me on Twitter or Instagram @articulationsv. And I'm also on YouTube as ARTiculations. And speaking of YouTube, we also upload these episodes to YouTube, usually a few weeks after the audio version is out. So if you are catching the episode a little while later, you should be able to go on YouTube and look at these lovely works of art as we talk about them, go by on the screen. 

Quinn: Thanks for listening, art enthusiasts!