high weirdness, the occult, sex, drugs, liberty, mad science, cults, fringe culture

Interview with Pop Surrealism editor Kirsten Anderson

September 30th, 2005 by Klintron

Traffic magazine has an interview with Technoccult pal Kirsten Anderson about the “pop surrealism” movement.

Now Pop Surrealism - did I explain to you why the book is called Pop Surrealism? When I decided that I wanted to do a survey of this art genre, a big chunk of the artists didn’t want to be in a book called Lowbrow Art because they felt it was it would be misconstrued as being insulting, and that it implied a lack of sophistication or skill. . . . They thought it just sort of sounded like a downgrade term, and that it didn’t really capture the spirit of the work anymore.

So that meant that I had to come up with another title for the book, which was incredibly stressful because who am I to say what this is genre is going be called?

[…]

So I spent six months talking with everybody from Robert Williams to Billy Shire (who owns the La Luz De Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles) . . . and asked them what they thought it should be called. No one really wanted to go there. And I wrote up lists of, you know, fake movement names. Something that could encapsulate everything. And I couldn’t come up with anything. But there had been this term floating around called Pop Surrealism [and] . . . that . . . was the one term that everyone felt okay about. And I notice it’s being used pretty extensively.

Traffic Magazine.

Tags: ·

0 responses so far ↓

  • There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.

Leave a Comment