Pop Art, as it is usually thought of, gets defined as Anglo-American, male and concerned above all with consumerist society.That is not the version of Pop being presented at Tate Modern.“The World Goes Pop” shows the style as global, with a large group of female practitioners and concerned with politics, protest and subversion.While both versions share the same raw materials – the glossy world of lifestyle magazines and advertising, celebrity and the gaudiness of modern life – global Pop used them to highlight civil rights, attack censorship, condemn militarism and campaign for women.There are none of the big names on display, no Warhol or Lichtenstein for example, but rather some 60 artists hailing from outside the comfortable and liberal world of America.The span takes in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Communist bloc Europe – the places where many of the battles of the 1960s had real resonance. This takes in the period of Vietnam, women's lib, and military dictatorship. Artists used bright and often witty Pop to address these real world issues.In 1968, for example, the Icelandic artist Erró painted magazine-style interiors of American homes but put a Vietcong guerrilla planting a bomb in the bathroom or Red Army soldiers outside the picture windows – two worlds colliding.The Austrian Kiki Kogelnik's anti-war message was expressed in 1962 in “Bombs in Love,” a pair of brightly colored real bombs, propped on the tails and lightly touching. In Spain, Joan Rabascall painted a red-lipsticked mouth with an atomic explosion emerging from its pout.If the target of such works was ultimately America, other artists took aim at their own national regimes.When in 1974 the Polish government used three Xs to symbolize the 30-year anniversary of the state, Jerzy Zielinski reimagined them as stitches sealing up a mouth and censoring all dissent.A trio of Spanish artists calling themselves Equipo Crónica painted a nine-part image of a crowd gradually growing from four figures to hundreds, and in doing so becoming a threat to Franco’s authority.Elsewhere, artists from America’s Judy Chicago to Poland’s Maria Pininska-Beres treated their bodies from the female perspective and turned parts into near abstract decorations or strange kinetic machines. The Czech artist Jana Zelibska meanwhile made silhouettes of women’s bodies and replaced the pudenda with mirrors so that the viewer's simultaneous role as voyeur was made inescapable.And, in a nod to Pop’s origins, there is consumerist art too. The Croatian Boris Bucan’s adaptation of corporate logos, from PanAm to Agfa Film, to say the word “art” and the German Thomas Bayrle’s wallpaper with a pattern made from the cow from the La Vache Qui Rit processed cheese are droll examples.While this exhibition does not introduce great artists or indeed great art it is full of surprises and shows Pop to be a surprisingly adaptable and potent style. “The World Goes Pop” runs at Tate Modern London through January 24 2016. Information: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/ey-exhibition-world-goes-pop
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