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Max Kozloff
So many people have been bewildered by Pop art, or have been content to revile it, that
its qualities and development have been quite obscured. One knows that the highly cen-
tralized Abstract Expressionism, after a vital period, began to choke on its own virtuosity around the middle fifties, and that the ideas which it originated had come to seem quite simply worked out. There appeared a moment ripe for change. We are now witnessing another such moment, but in today's polycentric situation ideas have barely begun to be explored. Never a movement, and never cohesive, but rather a sensibility, Pop art is slowly evaporating, as we are finally beginning to see, into a venturesome and incestuous mélange of styles that questions the very mechanics of vision and thought. To be sure, one still meets a strategy of resistance, which thwarts or postpones the perception of content, but now it is gotten up in the new guise of an entente cordiale harder and harder to label journalistically. By displacement, or magnification or discontinuity, what we called Pop art is sliding into a larger inquiry of self-concern in which the strictly kitsch element fades away, or becomes more transparent.
In fact, because their first line of defense - commercial imagery - is becoming more penetrable (if only through overexposure) various artists are falling back on schemata whose implications are essentially abstract. It would be as irrelevant now to identify Pop art by its subject, as it would current abstraction by a contained formal structure. Acting as conventions which may lock into place some equivocation between object and canvas, or some imbalance of color or illusion that overwhelms the senses, subjects and structure in recent works of art have been subverted by their own self-contradictions. That is, we do not approach the significance of the work by means of its conventions, but rather through those conventions, or despite them. As in Oldenburg's vinyl telephones or French fries, the quality of the material is simultaneously denied - in its familiarity - and affirmed by its unexpectedness in its new circumstances. If you cannot distinguish between the conventional and the explorative in such artifacts, it is because the process of displacement keeps them both openended. Under such conditions, in which the identities of the work of art are refashioned before one's very eyes, social commentary becomes by comparison a trivial by-product.
Magnification has been another catalyst in this aesthetic reaction, though in one sense to aggrandize the scale of things and images is another way of displacing them. By such means, the idea was to make everything in the real world quite out of the ordinary by radically disturbing the size relationships between object and viewer, or at least the context in which they were understood. In Rosenquist and Wesselmann, art has the quality of gigantic still life. But in fact the larger you expand the image, the less does it seem commensurable and objectlike, and the more it takes on the accouterments of an environment. Here, a distinction has to be made between the older and more familiar happenings and environments - which consisted of agglomerations of smallish objects - and a new development which inflates only two or three painted images to such a scale as to insinuate a landscape feeling into the underlying still-life orientation. I am not, of course, speaking about traditional genres, but about modes of visual statement, whose dynamics have much to do with the way we interpret and accommodate works of art to our experience. The point of interest about the superimposition of landscape upon still life in Pop art is not merely that the integrity of signs and objects is diminished, but that such diminution registers a greater quotient of abstraction.
Something of the kind must be said to have taken place in the work of Roy Lichtenstein, whose present show at the Castelli is an eye opener on several points. This perpetrator of snarling pilots, lachrymose girls from True Romance, household appliances and six-shooters, all portrayed through the lineaments of elephantine comic strips, has changed his art literally, as well as psychologically, to the transcription of landscape.
To be sure, one sees certain continuities between the old and the new Lichtenstein. The same detached, almost anesthetized psychological tone rules both phases of his work, just as the simulated photoengraving dots and hard outlines of the earlier world have not been abandoned in the later. And, if anything, the change in theme only underscores this artist's fundamentally static conceptual approach, in which ultra-corny motifs (here they are blood-red sunsets and stratified light rays) are played off against his insistence that the fiercely mechanized and amplified components of the style afford new sensations in their own right. Still and all, one cannot shift or rearrange the pressure of previously given conventions as radically as here without affecting content, and Lichtenstein seems poised for some drastically new pictorial embarkation.
When it first came to notice, this art was like a depilatory agent for Abstract Expressionism, expunging brushiness as tonically and painfully as a quick rip of a bandage off human flesh. Now, however, a stubble has come up and Lichtenstein is oddly cultivating it. The tonal passages of his compositions have been gradually accentuated so that the pictures almost come to have a matter and opacity and a tactile variety which they previously lacked. But this impression is misleading, if a glance, say, at his "Impressionist Landscape" is any indication. One seems to be looking here through the physical interference of some back-door screen at a lake vista with distant shore. But the actual landscape is pressed onto the forming dots - is, in fact, indissoluble from them, which makes the canvas ground behind an illimitable blank space. Because one expects some form of illusion in a landscape subject, Lichtenstein's refusal to use his pointillism metaphorically, as would a Neo-Impressionist, for example, catches the spectator short. Here is an instance in which one has to override the pictorial context. Then, too, puzzlement is all the more elicited by the fluctuation of dots (single blue points on white ground or round clusters of blue disks with white holes) which suggests the way photoengraving reconstitutes illusionist renditions, but which in this work is merely a neutral spread - flat and surface-affirming.
The Castelli show, therefore, reveals an abrasive moment of tension in the career of Pop art. The demands of light, nuance, atmosphere - which are the properties of landscape - are put in opposition to the mechanical codes of commercial reproduction enlarged so as to lose a great deal of their specificity. (It is another form of displacement, bracketed by the larger principle of Lichtenstein's art.) If the artist were to go forward, he would lose the intractable, schematic consistency which made his art so uncompromising. But he would gain a chromatic and spatial richness that would conceivably be more accessible as a visual experience. If, however, he retains his basically simplistic armature, the opportunities present in landscape will not be availed of and the whole motif will seem increasingly gratuitous or arbitrary. Lichtenstein is not the kind of artist who can make an explicitly ironic foil between form and subject. As can be seen, his is a choice of reformulating conventions: in this case of swinging the focus of attention from contour to center, and from rigidity to flexibility.
For myself, the preference is clear. Confronted by those heartless and florid re-creations of comics, those evenly stressed, armor-plated figurations, I have never been able to deny enough of my manipulative will to make them mean anything in human terms. It is not so much that they were without humor or affect, but that they demanded an intellectual and emotional submission which, however pliable modern art has made me, were not within reach. In short, Lichtenstein needs viewers who can minimize their ego. (This is, of course, not to deny the cultural fact that literary parallels to Lichtenstein's art, such as the cult of the object in the new French novel, or the "Theatre of the Absurd," make him seem very contemporary.) But now, a tentative loosening-up, in which his previously separate bald reds and yellows and blues are coming together more intimately, suggests a certain kind of moiré porosity which will allow the eye to wander and to shape optical relations, despite being a little bruised in the process. In his future, one can almost see an interesting harsh refinement.
Something, perhaps, of the opposite impulse is happening to the work of Jim Dine, whose show at the Janis Gallery is concurrent with Lichtenstein's. Dine has never been exactly aligned with the Pop artists, yet it has also not been possible to dissociate him from them too easily. His pastose paintings have always owed a frank debt, or, more likely, have paid outright homage to, Abstract Expressionism - all the while parading themselves in the simulacra of bathroom walls, tool chests, or wardrobes. In his vision, every inch of canvas has to "be" or mean something other than itself. Considering his sources, such peccadilloes have seemed a bit childish, and for this I don't think he has generally been forgiven, either by those who consider his work a belated retention of an outmoded style, or a disrespectful mimicry of a great one. Yet Dine's caricatural relation to action painting had been the most enduring Pop element in his work, in no way less honorable than Lichtenstein's primitivizing way with comic strips. It has just taken people a little longer to realize the subtle idea that brush strokes can be just as deceiving a convention to mask out a concern for the identity of the work of art as billboard or mail-order illustrations. This, at any rate, was the base upon which Dine had ordered his art, up to his recent palette series. But these nostalgic, lushly made gestures have suddenly been over-shadowed in turn by sharply drawn and flatly colored renderings of bathrobes or strange gridded compositions of colored squares. By this incorporation of vocabulary from present abstraction, Dine in his own manner symptomizes the unmooring of Pop art, even if he is moving toward the physical idiom from which Lichtenstein himself is slowly inching away.
Stylistically, then, there is no consensus; but conceptually, one feels a greater rapport among the artists, if only in their chafing agreement to pry apart the causal processes of their art. Dine, for instance, has ventured out on ice as thin as Lichtenstein's by his highly compressive and schematic new imagery which risks being taken for what it seems to be: illustrations from a cut-out book which have been blown up and ornamented with adjacent logs, axes, strings and hooks. He had been much safer, but also more obvious, in his earlier mimetic quotes from a dozen differing visual presentations, ranging from Abstract Expressionism to graffiti to textbook diagrams. Both artists, in fact, had been shameless paraphrasers: an activity which is no longer as literally attractive or as useful as it once was. But Dine, the more excitable and changeable figure, was so much more able to inject a personal, emotional element into his works (e.g., affectionately viewed household objects), that his metaphors could be more farfetched and philosophical. Thus, for example, a razor cuts a swath of paint, a drawing of a clenched hand emerges behind a metal rod standing for a cane (whose real shadow conflicts with a false painted shadow) and painted polka dots (cf., Lichtenstein) are found next to a polka-dotted dress which makes them look like snow flakes falling in the night. In one poetic stroke, Dine shows that natural deductions and visual similarities, when encouraged, are entirely deceiving. Where Lichtenstein switches circuits on only one or two levels, Dine dances over every conceivable simile, evokes ever more fallacious connections, and forces one to judge relations between objects and paint strokes in ways that totally befuddle or reverse the notion of movement and matter in the worlds of art and life.
Not merely because such devices camouflage the rational, but because they are so transparent about it, do they become Dine's equivalent of conventions. No one is more double-faced, casuist, ironic or more normative in all these things than this artist. He is at once a landscape and still-life painter, as well as inseparably spontaneous and mechanistic as a paint handler. In fact, what is most intractable about this wily creature is his refusal to stay at any one point, and his irremediable fusions of opposites.
In his view of 20th-century art - and it extends all the way back to synthetic Cubism creation is a process of recombining functions and packaging knowledge in ever denser, more economical units. The show at the Janis Gallery, in this respect, is entirely transistorized. Even when Dine has hardened his manner of seeing, as most recently, he is incorrigibly metaphorical. Irate color-field abstraction or optical art enters his work implausibly in the form of a bathrobe or Red Devil color chart. It is typical of him that be tones down a physical belligerence in order to emphasize a conceptual provocation. Sometimes he will even juxtapose two of his highly summarized motifs, as in the color chart through which a ghostly palette form is partially visible. He diminishes his cues, and yet relies all the more strongly on them for recollection.
I can work with all these conflicts, even though I realize that they advertise themselves as snares for credulity, and that they constantly demand ever more information to be legible. As Lichtenstein moves toward sensibility and feeling, Dine approaches a kind of history-laden form of expression. In fact, the symbolical and associational structure of his works (as distinct from their unassuming formal presence) is so complex, that the experience of the overall show is nervous and burdensome as much as it is exhilarating. But, above all, I'll remember this exhibition thankfully for the way it deflates good intentions and teaches in its spirit of mockery that high seriousness is perhaps not all that appi-opriate as a judge of art. At least, it would be pleasurable to think so.
The Nation, November 30, 1964: 417-19
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