Collections Database

Label Text:
2012 Curatorial Fellowship Exhibition: The Domestic Sphere Goes Pop
A sandwich cut into two triangles, a soda, and two straws carefully arranged on an oval platter. The soda just poured and the straws just opened. The bubbles rise to the top as condensation falls down the side; the stage is set for lunch. A lunch for two? The focus is on the ready to eat meal, not on the person who made it. But of course this is a representation of a meal, which is made all too clear by the absence of actual food, the large-scale, contrasting, non-naturalistic colors, and the lack of illusionistic modeling and three-dimensional space. Indeed, for Sandwich and Soda, Roy Lichtenstein borrows these formal techniques from the mass media and the marketplace – as well as appropriating the still life from the realm of fine art – to create more of an advertisement for lunch than an artwork.
By including objects like a soda glass and a pedestrian setting like a kitchen countertop in the space of a consumption. Lichtenstein’s Sandwich and Soda offers the viewer no other option than to gaze upon the prepared lunch, overlooking the labor behind it. In the 1960s and 1970s this absent lunch maker would have been understood as an absent female homemaker. Her labor is invisible in this presentation and her invisibility allows the viewer to consume with little conscience. This exhibition pops the illusion that labor is absent – including the artist’s labor - and that things appear fully formed for the taking.
Kristen Rudy and Rebecca Bernard

Tags:
food; drinks; red; blue; portfolios

Subjects:
Red; Blue; Food; screen prints

Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=UM+1965.7.7

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