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From LOS ANGELES LETTER
Jules Langsner
This critic finds himself in the unfamiliar (and vaguely uneasy) position of being cantankerously at odds with a serious effort to fashion a new mode of vision in the pictorial arts. That effort is the attempt to invest commonplace objects with a hitherto unsuspected significance, usually in painting with a straightforward presentation, on a magnified scale, of things characteristic of our machine way of life. To be sure, this tendency, variously described as New Social Realism, Common Object Painting, and Commonism, currently is receiving the endorsement of the more zealous enthusiasts of "Pop" Culture as well as the shrill acclaim of the more chic circles of the art world. The latter group can be dismissed out-of-hand. Artists, unlike politicians, cannot be held accountable for their fanatical supporters. On the other hand, the partisanship of certain reputable critics and curators cannot be waved aside with cavalier insouciance. Something is going on worth notice, whatever judgement one finally renders.
The Pasadena Art Museum's current exhibition - New Paintings of Common Objects -
has brought this emerging tendency into sharp focus, including, as it does, works by such members of the school as Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Edward Ruscha, Robert Dowd, Phillip Hefferton, Joe Goode, and Wayne Thiebaud, the last five of whom are Californians. A can of Campbell Soup by Andy Warhol, or a Travel Check by Dowd, initially rivets the viewer's attention by the simple expedient of removing the mundane object from its ordinary surroundings and enormously increasing its scale. The initial shock, however, wears off in a matter of seconds, leaving one as bored with the painting as with the object it presents. It is not the ordinariness of the object that induces boredom. After all, a loaf of bread and a jug of wine by Chardin are equally banal. The lack of interest generated by these works resides in the poverty of visual invention. It is not the eye that is engaged but rather the play of ideas this genre generates whether one is looking at the work or not. Indeed, it's not necessary to see the pictures at all in order to embellish psychological and metaphysical notions to one's heart's content. The paintings are made to order for "word people." They make excellent conversation pieces for dinner parties and graduate courses in esthetics.
It becomes quickly apparent at Pasadena that the Common Object painters are split with regard to literalness of presentation. It seems there are painterly commonists and meticulous copyists. Thus Warhol and Lichtenstein adhere strictly to accuracy of reproduction, while Dowd, Hefferton, and Thiebaud use the common object as a point of departure for painterly treatment. A hot dog or slice of cream pie by Thiebaud bursts with juicy pigment, a succulence that brings out the properties of paint more than it does the food he is obsessed with. The travel checks by Dowd, and the five and twenty dollar bills by Hefferton, are not presented straight, but positioned on a pictorial surface, often consisting of stars and stripes of the American flag. Both artists blur the insignia, letters, numbers and faces on the financial certificates with which enthralled, thereby adding a pictorial interest otherwise absent in their work.
The celebration of common objects particular to our mechanized civilization represents a Jean-Jacques Rousseau primitivism in reverse. The impulse is the same, merely turned around, so that revulsion with the technological age has prompted the advocates of the genre to delight in what the custodians of culture are supposed to despise as ordinary and unworthy of attention. Instead of the happy care-free Noble Savage in a state of nature, the artist turns to despised objects in his everyday surroundings. Unhappily, while the motive sprung for the effort is commendable, the works resulting from the impulse are insufficient esthetically. So far as this viewer is concerned, unless the eye is engaged in a kind of sight experience that cannot be delegated to some other order of being, the enterprise may have significance, but not as painting or sculpture....
Excerpt, Art International, September 1962: 49
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