Plop art

Plop art (or plonk art) is a pejorative slang term for public art (usually large, abstract, modernist or contemporary sculpture) made for government or corporate plazas, spaces in front of office buildings, skyscraper atriums, parks, and other public venues.

New York City Police Department Headquarters with 5 in 1, a sculpture that art critic Blake Gopnik has described as a piece of "plop art"[1]

The term is a form of wordplay from the term pop art and connotes that the work is unattractive or inappropriate to its surroundings – that it has been thoughtlessly "plopped" where it lies. The term "plop" suggests the sound of something falling heavily and suddenly. It also holds connotations to excrement.[2][3][4][5]

Some defenders of public art funding have tried to reappropreate the term. The book; Plop: Recent Projects of the Public Art Fund celebrates the success of the Public Art Fund in financing many publicly placed works of art over the last few decades, many of which are now beloved, though they may at first have been derided positively as "ploppings".[6]

Origins

The term was coined by architect James Wines in a 1970 essay, Public Art–Private Art, published in Art in America.[7][8] The term has been taken up by others, including British sculptor Rachel Whiteread and art historian Miwon Kwon[9][10]

"Right now architecture and sculpture are calling to each other, and calling for responses that's intelligent, not for more ghastly lumps of sculpture ... which have no sense of scale and are just plonked down in public places." — Anthony Caro (1924–2013), English sculptor.[11]

See also

References
  1. Gopnik, Blake (6 September 2012). "5-in-1 by Tony Rosenthal is the Daily Pic by Blake Gopnik". The Daily Beast.
  2. Avramidis, Konstantinos; Tsilimpounidi, Myrto (8 December 2016). Graffiti and Street Art: Reading, Writing and Representing the City. Taylor & Francis. p. 109. ISBN 978-1-317-12505-1.
  3. Zebracki, Martin; Palmer, Joni M. (5 September 2017). Public Art Encounters: Art, Space and Identity. Routledge. p. 85. ISBN 978-1-317-07383-3.
  4. Freedman, Susan K.; Cameron, Dan; Kastner, Jeffrey; Siegel, Katy (2004). Plop: Recent Projects of the Public Art Fund. Merrell Publishers. p. 8. ISBN 978-1-85894-247-6.
  5. "Plop art - The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia". www.artandpopularculture.com. Retrieved 2023-08-22.
  6. Plop: Recent projects of the Public Art Fund. Merrell Publishers in association with Public Art Fund, New York. 2004. ISBN 9781858942483, 9781858942476.
  7. "James Wines: The Architect Who Turned Buildings into Art". 2015-07-08.
  8. Wines, James (2005). Site: Identity in Density. Images Publishing. p. 965. ISBN 978-1-920744-21-2.
  9. "Rachel Whiteread: Turner prize winner criticises 'plop art'". The Guardian. 2017-09-11.
  10. Alfrey, Samantha L. (2013-06-28). Occupy Plop Art: Public Sculpture as Site of Antagonism (thesis thesis). University of Illinois at Chicago.
  11. From an interview with Tim Marlowe for Tate: The Art Magazine, 1994.
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