POP ART AND AFTER
Jasia Reichardt
In England the interest in "pop
art," as it has been called during
the past year, has been quite unprecedented. In view of the fact that its exponents
are very young, i.e. in their early twenties, the general enthusiasm for their
work has been something of an event. Today when we speak of "pop art," we
don't think of the original meaning implied when the term was first invented
nearly ten years ago.
Contrary to general belief, pop art did not come from
the U.S.A., it was born in England. Lawrence
Alloway first coined the phrase "pop
art" in 1954,
and his exact definition of what it meant was very different from the meaning
ascribed to it now. When Alloway spoke of "pop art" he meant: advertisements
in glossy magazines, posters outside cinemas, leaflets, pamphlets, all give-away
literature forcefully communicating a single message. He meant, in fact, the
whole paraphernalia of public art - art made by the few for the many, not for
its own sake but for the sake of what seems to be naively speaking, an ulterior
motive. Thus, pop art accompanied one during breakfast, on the way to work,
during one's leisure hours and it infiltrated its way into one's dreams, forcibly
and
inevitably. Had Alloway, instead of using the term "pop art" coined
another phrase, say, "visual pop kicks," or "mass pop samples," the
controversy which involves the use of the word "art" with veneration
for traditional meaning, instead of assigning to it a completely new significance,
the current revival of figurative painting in England would have been called
something else. Perhaps it would have been called "big city folk art."
In
1952 in London, a group of young artists, writers and architects used to meet
at the Institute
of Contemporary Arts for discussions and lectures. In
order to stress their affiliation with the avant garde, and with history in
the making
rather than with that already set down in books, they called themselves the
Independent Group. Among them were Peter
Reyner Banham, Richard
Hamilton, Lawrence Alloway,
Eduardo Paolozzi, William
Turnbull, Nigel Henderson, Sandy
Wilson, Edward Wright,
Toni del Renzio,
John McHale, Theo Crosby,
Alison and Peter Smithson, John Voelcke,
Jim Stirling, and others. The subjects discussed by the group included
philosophy,
science, and later, cyber netics, information theory, communications, mass
media, fashion, "pop" music and industrial design. The first convenor
of the group, 1952/53, was Reyner Banham. In 1954 Alloway and McHale became
joint convenors,
and by 1955 the talks included such subjects as violence in the cinema, by
Alloway, and American automobile styling, by Reyner Banham; ensuing discussions
took place
in 1952, when Eduardo Paolozzi showed what he then called "found images," projected
on a screen. The "found images" consisted mostly of advertising material
which, when isolated and enlarged, seemed to acquire a new meaning and a new
significance. Later the architect Peter Smithson also organised a similar evening
using publicity material. The first exhibition to make use of this sort of
subject matter took place in 1953 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts under
the title "Parallel
of Life and Art," and was organised by Paolozzi and Smithson.
The preoccupation
of the group with mass media was a socially significant sign. A new sort of
respectability descended on such lightweight and intellectually
undemanding material as science fiction and cowboy movies. The very notion
of culture changed before one's eyes, and time hitherto afforded for the discussion
of a "Western." The unlimited communication assailing one in the
form of radio, television, reading matter, had forced its way into one's consciousness
and could not be ignored. In 1955, John McHale went to the U.S.A. and when
he
came back some months later he brought with him a trunk full of glossy magazines:
Esquire, Mad, Playboy, etc. These provided much material for discussion. At
the time the group looked to America as the source of a new and unexpected
inspiration,
as a romantic land with an up-to-date culture, a hotbed of new sensibility
in art.
One person on whom the glossy American literature made
a tremendous impact was Richard Hamilton, who later became the initiator
of "pop art" in
England. Hamilton's definition of pop art was rather different from Alloway's.
Whereas
Alloway did not envisage pop art as fine art at all, nor as anything that called
upon one's really creative instincts. Hamilton used the term to describe the
sort of source material the artist was drawing on in making his own imagery,
which was creative in every sense of the word.
The first piece of work in pop
art idiom (according to Hamilton's definition) was shown in 1956 at the Whitechapel
Art Gallery in London in an exhibition
called "This
is Tomorrow." The exhibition set out to show the possibilities of collaboration
between an architect, a painter and a sculptor in making a visually meaningful
environment. The exhibition included twelve sections designed and prepared
by twelve different teams which included three or four people each. It was
an attempt
to draw the viewer into a work of art as an environment, rather than to show
him an objet de virtu on the mantelpiece. The exhibition aimed at destroying
the notion that art is precious and sacrosanct, and set out to present it as
a space in which the viewer becomes involved and implicated. Accompanied by
complicated and longwinded statements, pronouncements, and all the other items
that traditionally
go with the making of manifestos, the exhibition made its point that art was
an integral part of life. As an art event, "This is Tomorrow" was
a real shot in the arm, but the stand which was long remembered as the most
extraordinary
and strange was designed by Richard Hamilton, John McHale, and John Voelcke
(architect). Hamilton wrote in the catalogue: "We resist the kind of activity
which is primarily concerned with the creation of style. We reject the notion
that
'tomorrow'
can be expressed through the presentation of rigid formal concepts. Tomorrow
can only extend the range of the present body of visual experience. What is
needed is not a definition of meaningful imagery but the development of our
perceptive
potentialities to accept and utilise the continual enrichment of visual material."
Hamilton
contributed a pop art collage of which a very large photostatted version dominated
the entrance to the exhibition. The items in the collage included
cut-outs of glamour girls, a strip cartoon, tape recorder, vacuum cleaner,
tinned food,
television, advertisements, furniture, and a muscle-man in the centre holding
an object in the shape of a lolly-pop with "pop" written on it in
large letters.
Courbet said a hundred years ago that "an artist must concern
himself with his own time." When Hamilton on January 16th, 1957 wrote
down a definition of what pop art is and what it can contain, he was following
Courbet's dictum.
Hamilton wrote:
pop art is -popular (designed for a mass audience)
transient (short term solution)
expendable (easily forgotten)
low cost
mass produced
young (aimed at youth)
witty
sexy
gimmicky
glamorous
big business
In his own work Hamilton combined the formal cliches of glamour
anthology (be it feminine, masculine, appertaining to a city or a motorbike)
with abstract
considerations of pictorial structure. Typical of his early and recent work
is that nothing happens in his painting-collages without a clearly defined
reason
or a discernible source. For instance, if one may wonder about the significance
of a row of dotted lines appearing in the picture it is certain that their
presence is not incidental or of a purely pictorial function, but that they
had appeared
in some other form in an advertisement or a poster from which some other section
of the painting had originated. In a strange sort of way one could assign to
Hamilton the function of an editor who collects material and quotations and
later transforms them into something else, without ever forgetting their original
source
or function. Basically all his elements, however disparate they may seem, are
related at source. His paintings have always been characterised by exactitude
and precision, and the only ambiguity from advertising and publicity material
to Hamilton's paintings is never explicit.
One might ask: what has Chrysler
Corporation to do with an artist living and working in London who has, moreover,
never been to the States? When Hamilton
painted his Hommage a Chrysler Corp., which was, in fact, his second pop art
painting, he had simply made a statement about the presence of new demi-gods
that the post-war generation of artists had elected. If Hamilton was living
in Yugoslavia he might have painted an homage to Ford. However, living in England
where Ford is a common commodity, he chose as the subject for his homage a
car
manufacturing corporation that epitomised the ethos of a country he had never
visited. He was painting an imaginary representation of something that was
essentially an unknown quantity and that carried the romantic associations
of a materialistic
heaven.
In 1960, at the annual Young
Contemporaries exhibition
held in London - which contains the work of art students submitted from the
whole of Great
Britain
- a group of young painters who were at that time students at the Royal College
of Art showed a number of works which included allusions to pop art imagery.
Their preoccupation with figuration was a violent departure from the abstract
tendencies of the generation immediately before them. The three most important
influences evident in the work of these young artists were R.
B. Kitaj (an
older
student at the Royal College who was preoccupied with historical and social
events as sources for his imagery), Richard Hamilton, and Peter
Blake (an ex-College
student who had created a personal, romantic art form in which he incorporated
Victorian valentines, dolls, mementos of the music hall and likenesses of popular
vocalists). The group of young painters asserted their position firmly within
one year, and at the end of 1961 their work created a considerable amount of
interest in the John Moores Liverpool biennial. The "pop art" title
was bandied about in connection with these young painters, although it soon
became quite clear that they resented it. Among those working in this new figurative
idiom who had so quickly distinguished themselves were:
Derek Boshier,
David Hockney, Brian Wright,
Anna Teasdale, Allen Jones,
Peter Phillips, Howard Hodgkin,
Norman Toynton,
Pauline Boty,
John Bostead, and others.
There are several reasons
why the title pop art is a misnomer when applied to them collectively. First
of all, their social consciousness is fairly dormant
- that is, with the exception of Boshier - and if they incorporate such pop
art
elements
into their work as advertisements, pin-ups, targets, toothpaste, bikinis,
motorbikes and newspapers, their treatment of these elements is almost purely
romantic.
Yet, to present these artists collectively as the new English romantic movement
would be equally erroneous, for the name does not take into account the spirit
of whimsy with which so much of the work is imbued. In a recent exhibition
in which six of the above mentioned painters took part at the Grabowski Gallery,
their statements (which appeared in the catalogue) clearly indicated that
the paintings were based on personal experiences translated in a very obvious
and
direct way. The intellectual process which transposes events into symbols,
metaphors,
or geometry is totally absent. Instead, the emotional response to environment
takes over, magnifying those elements which have had the greatest impact
on the artist, and ignoring others which, incidentally, may have a greater
universal
significance. A modern fable has emerged which has been endorsed by these
young artists. A myth in which the real princess is not discovered as in Andersen's
tale by her sensitivity to a dried pea that was placed under the tenth mattress,
but by her ability to answer the question why one should use toothpaste brand
A rather than brand B, without actually believing in her reply. Glamour,
advertising,
a certain amount of cynicism, are all public commodities which have been
turned into private dreams and fantasies.
In one sense, one could refer to the
work produced by these artists as urban folk art. And indeed the essential
quality of folk art is often persistent,
but whereas folk art is made by the many for the many, the elements of
pop art (such
as publicity material) are made for mass consumption by the few. The artist
too is a consumer. The consumer of brand goods as well as of easily obtained
and
cheap entertainment, which allow him to enter into the spirit of the time
without involving such issues as politics, economics, social problems,
and religion.
With the exception of Boshier, who has painted very few pictures that did
not bear references to the space race, the others have solely made use
of entertainment-industry
topics, or of such pedestrian articles as playing cards, newspapers, disc
sleeves, games, etc., which are then imbued with that particular spirit
of irreverence
characteristic of all these paintings.
Derek Boshier with his rainbows,
pin ball machines, guns, and little pink figures inevitably turning into
inanimate objects and shapes, has been
concerned more
with the social significance of events, and for this reason his work
is concerned with rather more serious issues than that of the others. Amna
Teasdale in
her fragmented paintings with references to an industrial city life has
quoted visual images from reality, which like pieces of jig-saw puzzle
fit into
a
routine of
somebody's life. In her subject matter she comes closest to the preoccupation
with social realism of painters like John
Bratby and Jack
Smith some
six years ago. Peter Philips has taken the whole gamut of the colours and symbols
of
the fair; from its pot-luck and brashness be has created fantasies that
are now rather
distant from the themes which first inspired them. Howard Hodgkin has
presented
modern man with Victorian pomposity. He has made a melodrama out of nothing,
conveying the ridicule of a man who despite the number of layers of clothing
he wears is always naked inside and always vulnerable. Specialising in
the literary translation of imaginary events which are usually triggered
off
by some personal
escapade is David Hockney, who has already had a considerable amount
of success in London. His paintings have the irresistibility of allusions
to passion
in the form of small tokens and shared secrets.
Nothing very dangerous,
but just
sufficiently naughty for the viewer to get the feeling of conspiracy.
Hockney's special kind of whimsy presents the fears and hopes that most people
have but lack either the language or the coherence to voice. With a certain
amount
of self-indulgence, Hockney has touched our sensibilities with
strange accuracy.
Allen Jones's allusions to real events are very tenuous. In the painting
entitled The Battle of Hastings he makes reference, through symbols,
to a state of tension.
The title refers simply to the preoccupation of his students at the
time he was painting the picture with that particular historical event. In
his Bikini
Baby
the process of fragmentation has left only a suggestion of what might
or could have happened to the theme. This is a good example of literary
theme
being
lost through the process of pictorial presentation. Norman Toynton
has
translated such symbolic events as The Temptation of St. Anthony into
purely personal
and
subjective experiences. Often the events in the story are presented
simultaneously within one canvas and occasionally supplemented by written
comments.
Brian Wright's paintings have contained rather more cryptic references
to outside
happenings.
One of his best works was based on the theme of a recurrent nightmare
in which two elements, a flower and a rock, became the symbols of menace.
What
is interesting about these young artists, who lack neither courage nor eloquence,
is that they say neither No or Yes to the world. They
don't accept
things as
they are, they make fun of them, they make use of them out of context,
but they don't rebel against anything. They have made use of every
scrap of information,
news, emotion, publicity, bad luck, etc., that comes their way. Like
hungry animals
they have swallowed the world wholesale, and quickly forgetting its
meaning they continue to lead their own lives and to play their own
games.
This art must be taken at its face value, because a search
for deeper meaning would be fruitless at the moment. So far, the contribution
of these artists
is a sly irony, well-aimed whimsy, and some individual talent.
The new figuration movement which has captured the public eye to such
an extent
is still in
the embryo stage. Only the next ten years will tell whether something
exceptional can emerge from art under this much used and misused
heading, pop art.
Art International, February 1963: 42-47
