“POP and the Consequences, or The Art, to find Art in the Streets. Visualized by Vostell”. Published by Droste Verlag, 1971 (1968). 8vo. Stiff wraps as issued. 216 pp. Printed in several colors, richly illustrated by Wolf Vostell. Well preserved, clean copy with only minor edgewear

OHFF, Heinz & Wolf Vostell: . Pop und die Folgen oder die Kunst, Kunst auf der Strasse zu finden. Visualisiert von Wolf Vostell (‘POP and the Consequences, or The Art, to find Art in the Streets. Visualized by Vostell’)

. Heinz Ohff (1922 – 2006) was editor and author and part of the experimental German art scene in the 60’s and 70’s. His book “Pop-Art und die Folgen!!!” (Pop Art and the Consequences, 1968), which Wolf Vostell “visualised”, developed cult character. “ow is this unusual intellectual and literary turn toward “pop” to be explained? In Germany, the reason lies quite unambiguously in the fact that “pop” was momentarily equated with “counter-culture” and “underground” by a great number of artists, literary columnists, politicized students and younger theorists. A starting-point for this had already been delivered by the acceptance of Pop Art among some young German artists such as Wolf Vostell. They were seeing American Pop Art in constant connection with Fluxus actions and provocative Happenings. The question: Whether the pictures and objects of Pop Art—which portrayed in part well-known consumer-objects from the American supermarket or the stars of Hollywood and Rock ’n’ Roll—were intended to be affirmative, critical or indifferent, can thereby be unambiguously answered at least in one facet: They were completely an expression of criticism to the extent that they formed an affront compared to the artistic taste of the cultured bourgeois elite (‘Bildungsbürgertum’). Even if these German artists were by no means engaged in drawing comics, manufacturing designs for cardboard detergent-boxes (and probably still preferred compositions by Stockhausen rather than listening to Brian Wilson), their mere commitment to these forms of pop culture was at that time an avant-garde act in itself. The alienating effect of Pop Art consists in taking popular objects, pictures and signs out of their usual context, in most cases slightly altering them. However, this demonstrative confession that objects of popular culture are to be valued estranges the prevailing majority of educated art lovers. Thus, the alienating effect here simply consists of artists or intellectuals positively confessing to the phenomena of ‘mass culture’ (Thomas Hecken, 2013)