This is Pop (yeah yeah-ah)!

A couple days ago, Photoshop Disasters posted this image under the title "B&Q: With appologies to Richard Hamilton" with the caption Just What Is It That Makes Today's Sheds So Different, So Appealing? I quite enjoyed the image and the reference and it got me thinking about not only the original Just what is it that makes today’s home so different, so appealing? (1956)

The B&Q image is to illustrate the Lads Shed, a smaller sized shed that is meant to give your child a place to play that simulates the parent's work shed. The great thing about the image is that, in the context of Richard Hamilton's original Pop collage, it takes on new meaning and significance.


Richard Hamilton is among the fathers of British Pop art. He joined a group of artists called the Independent Group and together celebrated American (consumer) culture, looking to create a cultural theory that could reconcile art and popular culture. The belief was that “mass-produced urban culture” could be positive rather than destructive and it was just a matter of analyzing American media as a visual language to become “knowing consumers” (a consumer that can read and understand the imagery of their culture and thus liberate themselves from capitalist manipulation). Just what is it … ? is a poster image of what was necessary to achieve tomorrow, and it is it's artifice as a collage of disparate images that force us to recognize the objecthood of the image itself (as a scene of the ideal future) and the objects themselves (needed to achieve this ideal future).

So what does this mean for the B&Q image, well, first of all, as the product website points out, Lads shed supplied only. That is, the rest of the image which includes the adult male and the large "grown-up" shed are not included (I guess if I put things this way, the kid isn't included either, but whatever), they are only part of the desired outcome of having the Lads Shed installed: to achieve this vision of tomorrow, you need the shed; Buy the kit to make this scene come true, buy the kit so that the child can achieve their desired future (to be like you). Because the image is essentially a collage, it has a very artificial air about it, so we are aware that this isn't reality, or more importantly, that this isn't somebody else's reality. Instead, this is a made up generic reality and is therefore that much more achievable. The objectness of this reality allows the consumer to recognize the image as an icon for a potential individual reality, we are urged to become the "knowing consumer."

I'm probably reading too far into the B&Q image, the graphic artist probably saw an opportunity to do a sweet collage, because the effect, I must say, is pretty sweet. And with all the net-art coming about that goes for this aesthetic, advertising images like this can't be looked at simply as advertisements. So I guess the point of all of this is that social issues and methods of communication go around and come back around. We're still dealing with the same issues, but this time in the digital medium.

* A great article that worth reading if you're interested in consumer culture and art in the Pop era is Toward a Throw-Away Culture. Consumerism, 'Style Obsolescence' and Cultural Theory in the 1950s and 1960s by Nigel Whiteley in the Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2, The 60s (1987). *