Pop Gun Art- Niki de Saint Phalle

My favorite work of art in the MoMA was Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Pop Gun Art”. In the era when Pop Art was at it’s highest, I thought it was phenomenally clever and innovative for her to offer a feminist critique on the state of art in her time. In addition, she combines performance art with physical art. She would fill balloons with paint and enter the art space with a rifle and shoot the balloons, allowing the paint to splatter in a way that was similar to that of Jackson Pollock’s. Her work was a feminist statement challenging Pollock’s overt masculinity. She wanted to top the drama of Pollock’s art events, and she actually valued her performance art more than the end result. Though I couldn’t get all of this from looking at the painting and had to attend the talk with the MoMA employees to learn about the history behind the painting, having all of this background knowledge gave me a sense of who Niki de Saint Phalle was, and what she was like. I would like to think that if I was young in the 60s I would be part of her radical feminist art group, as those are the people who interest me most.