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ART - AVANT-GARDE REVOLT Brian O'Doherty
It's mad, mad, wonderfully mad. It's also (at different times) glad, bad and sad, and it may be a fad. But it's welcome. It is called "New Realists," and it opens today at 4 P.m. in the Sidney Janis Gallery at 15 East 57th Street.
The occasion is a rearguard action by the advance guard against mass culture - the mass culture that pushes the individual below the line into the lowest common denominator. In fact, it might be called an artful attempt to enrich spiritual poverty.
Included are advertisements, cutouts, garden tools, a lawn mower, newspapers, toothy Madison Avenue smiles, a refrigerator, cosmetics, plaster pastries - almost everything to assuage all appetites and nothing that you wouldn't see if you watched television commercials from 7 A.M. to 3 A.M.
All these defenseless objects are isolated, surrounded, manipulated in attempts to divert them from their everyday function to esthetic ends. Here form follows malfunction.
To turn these numb and blunted weapons of industry back on their source, the exhibitors (the word "artist" would require redefinition for use here) make use of the standard ploys of an educated minority against a majority they indulgently despise - wit, satire, irony, parody, all the divisions of humor. The exhibitors have a great advantage: the target is known to them and to their audience. The target is so big that it's hard to miss.
The general tone is zippingly humorous, audaciously brash, making use of the industrial products of conformity in order to nonconform. Behind this satiric attack on Madison Avenue there stands the injured shadow of the Common Man, sadly using after-shave lotion and brushing his teeth after every meal.
Although the standard vocabulary of such antique art movements as surrealism and dada is used, the intent is entirely different; a fresh wind is blowing across the vast billboard wasteland, and anarchy is out.
In Mr. Janis's definition of the "new realist" art, the touchstone is the "daily object" so manipulated that esthetic emotion is allowed to replace functional usage.
Although he does not keep strictly to his own definition (anyway it doesn't seem necessary to establish rigid cut-off points here) he has provided what must be the year's most entertaining show. "Entertaining" is the right word, for the show does not often transcend visual social comment: a sort of red, blue and yellow journalism.
This is one of the most interesting developments in the galleries, for it marks the entrance of artists into social criticism with ephemeral works that can be thrown away when circumstance has changed enough to remove their relevance. America has been a pioneer in throwaway cups and saucers, milk containers and tablecloths. Now it is a pioneer in throwaway art.
It might be added here that the catalogue articles take this development very seriously. "Pop" art, a very good name, becomes "new realism." Since the very essence of the movement is compounded of lightness, irreverence and wit, it would be ridiculous to take it with deep philosophical seriousness. This would perform the nice trick of making mass culture esoteric.
Not all the show is lightweight, just as not all the show is American. There is good work from Britain and the Continent. But the clever things hook the eye. A dancing board shows the steps of a foxtrot. A rack of supermarket supplies is carefully compartmented. A la billboard hoardings, there is a vast, painted eye. There's also the old package trick: a package bound up with cord, with the permanent promise of unopened goods. There are papier-maché pastries. All these are smart one-shot rockets that have no second stage.
What is welcome is a higher sense of esthetic responsibility among a few whose work has been turning up this year. Andy Warhol (despite his "Fox Trot"); Jim Dine, who goes past banality to produce some strange, seriously disturbing pieces, including a dislocating bathroom board with mirror, toothbrush and soap dish; Tom Wesselmann, who parodies bright advertisements until they become slightly cuckoo; and of course Wayne Thiebaud.
There is also excellent work by foreign artists, but it is more traditional in style. The main interest is the American satire of America's mass market. This is new.
The find of the exhibition is George Segal. His white life-size figures set up in hollow tableaus are as memorable and upsetting as stumbling into a ghost town dusted with fallout.
With this show, "pop" art is officially here. It is, of course, founded on the premise that mass culture is bad, an expression of spiritual poverty. So perhaps this is the old story of the avant-garde given the opportunity to seize on the bourgeois again, this time through its packaged products. Or, more amusingly, things may have reversed themselves, and now it may be the bourgeois that shocks the avant-garde.
