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Thomas B. Hess
Pop artists, the only group of recent painters that approves its nickname, remain an issue. This is despite the spate of words and reproductions that have been spent on their promotion and defamation by epigoni, dealers, curators (pro and con - the new-type curator, bored by conservation, dreams of making the scene) and other vested interests.
The books must be kept open on this most successful of Neo-Isms, not only because it is a mere three years old (a similar lapse of time was amply sufficient to bankrupt the "New West Coast Figure Painting" and the "Chicago 'Monster' School") - but also the Pop artists themselves have kept strangely mute about aims, about their sense of identification and identity, attitudes towards subject matter and content, techniques and style. No accurate phrases have been shaken loose from their images. To establish a documentary basis for discussion, the first part of a two-part series of interviews with Pop painters is published in this number of ART NEWS.
Meanwhile the phenomenon continues hyperactive. New surveys of Pop Art are at the Oakland and University of Michigan museums; a Toronto gallery has finished plans for its anthology; the Guggenheim Museum announces a series of Sunday lectures to focus on this subject. All sorts of other institutions are getting into the act - including the New York State Building at the World's Fair.
In last Summer's ART NEWS, an attempt was made at a sociological comment on Pop Art. It was pointed out that a new, over-eager audience of communicators, museum officials and collectors, all of whom want to be in on the artists' undress-rehearsals, identifies itself with vanguard styles. And from their craving for modish discoveries, they produced the "phony crisis" in American art by claiming that all the issues posed by Abstract-Expressionism have been resolved, that it is finished as a living idiom; the Action Painters have had it. The new is Pop, and only the new deserves the fare. Their vulgar audience-reaction, it was noted, may harm the younger artists they push, by obscuring the nature of the real crisis which every painter must face in our society if he is to find his identity.
The misunderstanding of the crucial role which the audience plays in Pop Art has confused most commentators, including Erle Loran who, in an article in the September issue of ART NEWS, attacked the vapid praise a number of critics have lavished on the Pop painters. "Transformation," Loran noted, "is the miracle invoked by the vanguard audience to establish an esthetic for Pop." And he proved that, if you accept the Pop critics' terms, no transformation exists. But on the Pop artists' terms, there is a transformation, which both Loran and the vanguard audience, equally stuck in formalist analyses, fail to see. It has nothing to do with pictorial details or with changes of scale (most Pop Art has no scale). It is a theatrical and, in a sense, political action. It takes place when a "copied" textbook diagram or Campbell Soup advertisement or pastiche of billboards is framed and hung in a museum or gallery or collector's duplex.
Anyone who looks at a Pop Art exhibition senses the strange, often amusing switch of contexts and the tensions set up between the referent and the relatum (to use the language of freshman Logic) - for example, the billboard on the noisy parkway and its simu lacrum in the hushed museum, or the soup ad in Life magazine and the painted soup ad in drawing-room life over a modern mantelpiece. It is something like the feeling you get from the "alienation effect" of Brecht's theater, in which the actor simultaneously plays his role and remains himself, where the stage set must be a specific place and still a recognizable bit of theatrical canvas, and the music does not lull you into the mood of the play, but alerts you to pay attention outside it. For Brecht, the alienation effect was a dialectical tool with which to educate the public. The edge of his irony cut in one direction (if never in one way).
In Pop Art, both ends of the ironic simile are kept in optimistic balance, Thus the painting of a soup ad comments on a detail of ugly Americana, but also implies that ugly Americana is very beautiful, too. The Brechtean dialectic has been dissolved in a glow of ambiguous satisfaction (isn't it great how automobile w-reeks are horrible!). Pop Art is political in that it keeps urging the belief that everything is pretty rosy; even our ignominy, the electric chair, gets a quaint cosmetic look.
The presence of a big audience is essential to complete a theatrical transformation. It is impossible to conceive of a Pop painting being produced until some plans are laid for its exhibition. Without its public reaction, the art object remains a fragment. (Thus neither Rauschenberg nor Johns fits the category.) Here Pop relates directly to Happenings. And the quality of a Happening is seriously affected by the quality of its audience. What was a poetic transaction among a group of artists and poets in a converted loft, for example, will be a repulsive demonstration of snobbery when it is moved into a consumers' milieu. And this suggests that the vanguard audience, as it embraces Pop Art, not only hides from the artist the true nature of his crisis, but can infect the art with its own demoralization.
If the only transformation that takes place in Pop Art is theatrical (i.e., non-pictorial), is it Art?
Today, the sole requirement of a work of art is intent; what the artist says, goes. But after accepting his declaration that whatever he wants to label art is art, we can still discuss the entry and illuminate our responses to it by examining the quality of its connections with other art.
All great modern painting develops in a father-to-son descent. Art does not proceed by revolutions and reactions to the past, but by passionate emulation (Matisse's devotion to Cézanne comes to mind, Renoir's for Delacroix, Gorky's for Picasso). Pop Art developed with clockwork logic from the assumptions of Abstract-Expressionism (i.e., Art can be Anything), but the quality of its connections to the older generations is artificial and eclectic. Influences are picked with the nonchalance of punching a button oil a jukebox.
Great painters are chosen by their ancestors. Their commitments to history have the strength of the inevitable. Pop artists pick up a background as if they were gourmets of ideas. They make a trivial contact with the past.
In its cool attitude towards tradition, Pop Art reminds us of a unique and wrongly overlooked episode in art history: the immensely successful French Salon painting that dominated the official art world from about 1860 until the turn of the century.
Like Pop Art, Salon painting is a function of a new audience's demands. The artists reverse the historical formula of creation. It used to be:
GOD - to - ARTIST - to - PUBLIC
(for the Romantics, instead of God, read Inspiration; for the Realists, read Spirit of History; for the moderns, read Subconscious or Libido).
In Pop and Salon art, the energy runs from the audience to the painter to the seat of form-making. (Is it possible, if unlikely, that Salon and Pop artists revert to the medieval Christian role of the Artist-as-Saint, modestly avoiding the Renaissance concept of Artist-as-Hero? When they keep "cool," should we infer "abnegation"?)
Both Pop and Salon artists work against, and by opposition stimulate, the strongest, most vital pictorial traditions of their time. Constantly distracted from the content of their art by the psychological implications of its subject matter, Pop and Salon artists memorialize the everyday, middle-class moment and underline its suggestions of fetishism or sado-masochistic behavior. They have a fondness for jokes, visual (trompel'oeil, parody, multiple images) and verbal (caricature, puns, intriguing titles). They are sentimental about the contemporary past - the good old 1830s or 1930s - and about popular chauvinism (Napoleonic legends for the Salon; the Great American Scene for Pop artists).
Both rely heavily on public acceptance of their subject matter. It is significant that there is no Pop Art in Paris. For a Frenchman, modern industrial design (a Coke bottle, a comic strip, a movie star) is still an exotic novelty, charged with romance and mystery. In Italy, where Americanization has met with less resistance from native customers, Pop is beginning to flourish. And in Southern California where the whole landscape is magnificently "pop" (a restaurant is shaped like a giant potato; freeways offer such inventive signs as "SMORSGABURGER"), the idiom has a power which makes the young East Coast pioneers seem a bit bookish (British Pop not only looks bookish, but as if made by librarians). Who will care about Lichtenstein's poignant 1935 ice-cream-soda glass when he can have a neoplastic surfboard? While Andy Warhol listens to rock-and-roll in New York, Billy "Al" Bengston goes motorcycle racing in a Los Angeles suburb near Muscle Beach. The future of Pop Art seems drawn to an irresistible mingling with the inspired faddism of Hollywood.
The problems of its immediate past and happy present, however, remain a challenge to criticism.
Art News, November 1963: 23 ff.
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