Just what is it that makes today's homes so different?, 1993 (laser printing on paper)

Collection Exhibitions : Interior Lives : Object Label : P.1993.128 Hamilton's print is a witty update for the 1990s of his legendary collage representing a modern fantasy interior, made for the 1956 This is Tomorrow exhibition. The collage appears as a picture on the right hand wall of the room in the print on display. The print historian Pat Gilmour has written illuminatingly on both images:"[The earlier image] prophetically brought together images from the mass media of 'things significant to the life we now lead' that later became the subject matter of Pop art - man, woman, food, history, newspapers, cinema, TV, domestic appliances, cars, space, comics, telephones, information...Most of the original categories reappear in the [later] print, but are given a new twist - sometimes wryly amusing, sometimes tragic.Hamilton established the scale and perspective of the [later] image by borrowing the clean lines of a hotel room in Valencia from a postcard, and later papering it with a pattern scanned from a circuit board. The muscle-man of the 1950s is replaced by muscle-woman - Miss Universe 1992 - who holds a 'Stop - Children' traffic indicator. Man, now a commodities dealer, crouches in front of a computer screen, with the German Mark dominating his field of vision. Mrs. Thatcher, not the artist's favourite politician, is relegated to history as a squeaky latex bust set on a column signed 'Jeff Koons'. On the up-to-the minute television set is Lawnmower Man in a synthetic embrace, taken from a film dealing with Virtual Reality. In front of the microwave lie two very orange fishfingers, to replace the tinned ham of the 1950s. Through the windows are images brought to us nightly by satellite television - Africans still starving ... tanks rolling across yet another embattled terrain ... Inside, Jupiter as a light globe reasserts space as one ongoing concern, while Indiana's famous poster LOVE, updated by General Idea to read AIDS, establishes another".