‘Is that what Pop Art is all about?’ Visual Ambiguities in Pop Art Collage

In the conditions when generic borders were blurred and significant cultural codes were almost exploited, the technique of collage became a universal substitute for artistic forms and their visual language. Without a doubt, this artistic expression was a remedy for conventional aesthetics and a way to stave off meanings accepted and fixed by society. The infinite number of discursive negations, contradictions, ambiguities, incoherence and lack of unified representation, deconstruction, intertextuality, textual and visual plurisignation, mingled with one another to reflect limitless heterogeneity and relativity of consumer society.The aim of this paper is to explore selected works by British pop artists (Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake and Eduardo Paollozi) in which unified representation of the outside reality was replaced by a multimodal reconstruction of meanings. Words, objects and variable materials presented in Pop Art works gained a new signification thanks to the replacement of their prime context with the images produced by the mass media. The semantic shift in pop representations showed the way in which signs were coming to be regarded by a society exposed to a multitude of visual data. In such conditions, the categories of ‘real’ and ‘artificial’ became fluid notions. As there is no longer any division between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ arts, pop artists’ visual imagery is an attempt to accentuate and comment on the presence of simulacrum formed by the consumer industry.