From MONTH IN REVIEW: NEW YORK EXHIBITIONS
Sidney Tillim
In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics,
a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel
clock with a luminous
dial, a ring with real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high
shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent rain
coat, sunglasses, some more garments - swooners, shorts, all kinds of summer
frocks.
Vladimir
Nabokov, in Lolita
QUESTION: Subject:
ANSWER: [in part] ... The TILT of all those millions of
Pin Ball Machines and Juke Boxes in all those hundreds of thousands of grubby
bars and roadside cafes,
alternate spiritual Homes of the American; and star-studded Take All, well-established
American ethic in all realms - spiritual, economic, political, social, sexual
and cultural. Full Stop.
QUESTION: What in your ancestry, nationality or background
do you consider relevant to an understanding of your art?
ANSWER: Only that
I am American. Only that I am of my generation, too young for regional realism,
surrealism, magic realism and abstract expressionism
and too
old to return to the figure ... I propose to be an American painter, not an
internationalist speaking some glib visual Esperanto; possibly I intend to
be a Yankee. (Cuba
or no Cuba.)
Replies by Robert
Indiana, painter, to questions put by the Museum
of Modern Art, which last year acquired Indiana's The American Dream
Rising to the challenges of continual change, American art has been a running
accompaniment to the nation's history. For change and progress are the stuff
of life, especially in America. And life itself, especially in America, is
the heart and soul of painting.
Alexander Eliot,
in 300 Years of American Painting It is both a tribute to and a criticism of
the perverse genius of the "beatniks" that
they have been able to exploit Walt Whitman as if he were Alfred
Jarry. But
it helps to
explain why America's rediscovery of America, a preoccupation with our own
past which overtook us during the 1950s (climaxing I think in the election
of President
Kennedy, who, as a writer and a devotee of touch football plus proof-positive
wealth, reconciles the internal conflicts of the all but discredited American
Dream, since renamed the National Purpose), has been slow in revealing itself
in modern American art for what it really is. For now we can find in a new
generation of artists increasing evidence
that not only is the American Dream not dead, but that it is also avant-garde.
Obviously this is not the dream of the Founding Fathers, plucked from the
deep freeze of history. It is an exalted but ambivalent hot rod version
of it, substituting philosophy for polity, yet trying at the same time to "existentialize" the
American experience. It is in his search for (an) experience that this
new artist has come via a long route back to America as a new kind of primitivism.
In mass man and his artifacts, his cigarettes and beer cans and the library
of refuse scattered along the highways of the land with their signs, supermarkets
and drive-in motels the New American Dreamer - let us call him - finds
the
content that at once refreshes his visual experience and opens paths beyond
the seemingly exhausted alternatives of abstraction - without returning
to the 'figure." The New American Dreamer sees this new America, however,
much like a foreigner. It has the same nearly morbid fascination for him
as it does for Nabokov's Old World emigre, Humbert
Humbert, who is secretly
thrilled by the inventory of anesthetic items he has purchased for his "ultraviolet
darling," Lolita. This "foreign" perspective in turn emphasizes
the dreamer's link with the avant-garde traditions of Europe. He has never
known, or at least never tried to know, art in any spirit but that of disaffiliation
- the tradition of Bohemia. But where the disgusted European intellectual
sees only the Indian - or the Negro - as the transcendent symbol of America's
regenerative powers (the habit of condescension is hard to shake, even
if you are nauseated by Europe; Sartre saw the prairies beginning at the
outskirts
of New York), the ostensibly disaffiliated American has discovered Mass
Man, a sort of Paul
Bunyan made over by the Industrial
Revolution. He is
mediocre,
but he is honest - or at least himself What's more, he has no taste. At
any rate, the effect is the same as if the dreamer had slipped back into
the
(old) American Dream, blocking out his nostalgic sentimentality (for what
else is it, really?) by taking refuge in his tradition of disaffiliation.
In Robert
Indiana's statement, for instance, the prodigal's return is concealed
in the radical but pat language of protest.
I think that much of what has
been called neo-Dadaism is but a form of this new dream, representing a
subversive form of reconciliation with society
on
the one hand, with subject matter on the other, or at least indicating a
repressed desire for both. The New American Dreamers are, in fact, realists
of a sort,
whose techniques have been wrongly interpreted, whose motives have been misunderstood,
whose art has been simultaneously over and underrated, frequently by themselves.
It is only because it is, aesthetically, an extension of avant-garde premises
that it has received the lion's share of attention at the expense of a broad
front of reaction which includes both the rhetorical provincialism and unabashed
hero worship of the likes of Alexander Eliot, and all that is implied by
the "new
realism." At bottom the New American Dreamers remain sophisticates,
as aware of style as their patrons (new dreamers produce new patrons). For
these
patrons, the adoption of traditional kitsch by the modern artist provides
a vindication of the original American Dream.
It is hard to establish the
charter membership of this phenomenon, but certainly Jasper
Johns is somewhere
near the top of the list, if not at the beginning,
even if he has only brought a rare refinement to what was implicit in some
of the cruder combines of Robert
Rauschenberg. Though I have only read about
them, the "happenings" (a sort of ultimate psychodrama theater
in the round) put on by Allan
Kaprow and his friends strike me as expressions
of a longing for a childlike sense of participation in a total social experience
- which is merely a corollary of the innocence projected by the very phrase"
The American Dream." And soon we shall be seeing more of artists like
Indiana, James
Rosenquist, Roy
Lichtenstein and Peter
Saul (Frumkin
Gallery,
January 9-February 4), portraitists of the banal, of the billboard, the automobile
and the comic strip. (See also my review in this issue of Larry Rivers' new
work.) If all this is merely neo-Dadaism, then the parent form itself has
all this time been interpreted wrongly, probably to be consistent with the
view
of Western culture entertained by intellectuals and critics of a liberal
or even further Left - persuasion.
So much said, I have to and I willingly admit
that - to me - the New American Dream in art is not entirely suspect. Given
the development of art since
the original avantgarde, I do not necessarily find it unnatural for one to
be torn
between a tradition of disaffiliation and a desire to reform. What at I find
suspect is work that does not transcend its own rationalizations such as
Indiana's painting which lets the subject do the work of the imagination. Jasper
Johns's
sculpture, especially, does transcend these rationalizations. I also consider
it highly revealing that Kaprow (for instance), an especially noisy American
Dreamer, launched until recently his love-hate assaults on the squares from
the Halls of Ivy, specifically, Rutgers
University, where he taught. Similarly,
I suspect that the sympathy I felt for Claes
Oldenburg's The Store when I
visited his studio, which had once really been a store, will at least partially
evaporate
when The Store's contents are shown at Green
Gallery in the near future.
Oldenburg
is the proprietor of the Ray Gun Manufacturing Co., a pseudonymous front for
a talent (one I respect) which has so far conceived Ray Gun Comics,
Ray Gun Mottoes, Ray Gun Theater and once even instigated a campaign to change
the name of New York City to Ray Gun. (His participation in and creation
of "happenings" only
demonstrate to me that he too is, on occasion, a victim of the pressures
of perpetual avantgardism.) In May, 1960, Oldenburg installed within the
now defunct
Reuben Gallery a microcosmic city, built of cardboard, papier-machZ¹ and
stuffed burlap. If The Store, which opened and ran for the entire month of
December
(in co-operation with the Green Gallery), came closer to obviously embracing
that which it presumably deplored, it was partly because Oldenburg no longer
depends on Dubuffet for what was both aesthetically and sociologically misleading.
Dubuffet's basal and reflexive sophistication contradicted Oldenburg's very
real infatuation with the tawdriness of specifically American kitsch. The
Store captured that and more.
It was the very simulacrum of the ultimate in
American variety stores, a combination of neighborhood free enterprise and
Sears
and Roebuck. Its inventory
included
candy bars and wedding gowns, pastries and men's suits, bread, corsets, bacon
and eggs, sandwiches, cards (typique!) of bow ties, carrots, a corsage and
an airmail letter. Oldenburg had even had printed up for himself a business
card and, not incidentally, had the posters announcing the event printed
in Spanish Harlem by a man who improvises magnificent circus-type primitive
typographical
layouts. But the clothes were unwearable and the food inedible because they
were all made of plaster and chicken wire and coated with dripping enamels
- bright, gaudy, festive, vulgar, lugubrious, sloppy. The Store was a substitute
for the real thing. Indeed, if its aggravated humor finally settled within
an aura of faint melancholy - possibly my own - it was because it was all
so hopelessly nostalgic. For each item and finally The Store itself embodied
a
special emotion, one which had compared the way things were (have Mary Janes
gone up?) with the way things are, and found the latter a possibly appalling
inevitability. Only a kind of mockery could make it all desirable again.
Meanwhile the avant-garde would still receive the indigent.
It was a pleasure,
and then it became disturbing, and I fell into the critic's habit - or was
it the consumer's? - of examining individual items. I began, in other words,
to
draw away from the experience via the aesthetic outlet that had
been so
carefully provided. I found the candy sticks too unformed, mere varied blobs
of plaster and color. The wedding gown on a cadaverous mannikin was more
lumpish than lumpen, undecided as to how serious it should be as sculpture.
The pastries
were especially attractive, and the airmail letter I craved as I might a
bit of eighteenth-century porcelain which I saw here in its demotic transformation.
(The melting pot, of course!) Oldenburg made no effort to reproduce each
item
faithfully. The likenesses varied, for on the principle of caricature the
color and tactile properties of each object were exaggerated, though usually
natural
scale was retained. But the degree to which Oldenburg caught the memorial
character of the real thing, the way he invoked, for instance, the feel of
an air-mail
letter largely through color, the gelatinous and crumbly texture of a pastry,
the ready-to-wear but ready-toshrink visage of a mail-order shirt, the way,
in other words, he evoked the attitudes invested in these material things,
and even defined their class (no higher than middle), was really quite overwhelming.
Still,
one must find a form for these things, and sometimes Oldenburg is seduced by
his technique, permitting it and the subject, that is, its shock
value,
to take over - at which time the forms become unnecessarily gross and the
perfection of approximation is lost as the paint drips back into the tradition
of the
new. In the end, The Store was more than the sum of its many wonderful parts.
It epitomized, artistically, an unconscious effort to draw everyday America
into art which is desperate for substance and communicable experience, yet
is unable to surrender the aestheticism it believes it is thus shedding.
It also is something of an answer to Coolidge's simplistic notion that "the
business of America is business," but in its crazy mixed-up way doesn't
know whether to laugh or cry. And it will be suspended over this chasm of
indecision as long as it regards the banality of the American experience
as a form of
primitivism - and as kicks - rather than what it is America itself, take
it or leave it....
Excerpt, Arts Magazine, February 1962: 34-37, © Sidney
Tillim
