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ART: "POP" SHOW BY TOM WESSELMANN IS REVISITED
Brian O'Doherty
How do you criticize an exhibition? In other words, how do you tell the truth about it? For frontline work (which this is) I think you take the implicit standard in the picture and take it from there. Does the work do what it sets out to do? And of course, is what it sets out to do clear?
At first and second glance, Tom Wesselmann's exhibition at the Green Gallery, 15 West 57th Street, is a "pop" art show - the best one-man pop I've seen, and I've seen about seven. The work is bright and brash, shuffling together magazine blow-ups and cut-outs, fine art reproductions, a bit of hand-painting, and incorporating things such as a television set (in excellent working order), a radio (tuned in too), and a sink unit (unconnected to a water source). All are put together with a blank, dead-pan air, and all of them traffic in double-takes in that everyman's land between illusion and reality.
Mr. Wesselmann was among those represented at the big pop orgy that closed at Janis recently. After being complimented in this column on a "higher sense of esthetic responsibility" for his pop performances there, Mr. Wesselmann wrote saying he had no interest in social comment or pop art, a label be detested. The esthetic aspect of his work was primary and he wished to be judged by that.
That makes things difficult. Since Mr. Wesselmann's raw materials run from svelte magazine nudes to canned goods, his subject matter cannot be unconsidered - it is the petty coinage of our daily lives. Mr. Wesselmann seems to be asking the critic to perform a highly interesting trick - to consider the forms of transposed banality, but not their content; to concentrate on a soup can in a new esthetic environment, but not to read the label.
At this stage a critic in New York begins to feel a little like Alice in Wonderland. For the artist's intention is often at variance with his performance. Many artists seem to think the critic should play the game by their mysterious rules, not by the rules his eye tells him - the eye that separates the successful from the unsuccessful, good from bad.
This brings one to something else that needs saying, and has nothing to do with Mr. Wesselmann. The divisions of "good art" and "bad art" are considered in some quarters (what a murky phrase!) as not being what is called "valid." If you say you are for "good art" you are merely avoiding the great division of our time between abstract and nonabstract art - as wide a gulf, the implication goes, as that between East and West at this political moment. Fundamentally both divisions are artificial; one forsakes the common estate of the artist, the other forsakes the common estate of humankind.
Such sophistry is compounded by accusations of "conservative" or "reactionary" directed at the critic, in a sort of esthetic McCarthyism. But these names are so debased that they are now entirely relative terms. Reactionary compared to what? To the namecallers? If so a critic can feel justified in calling himself a liberal, which is I suppose what most critics who like labels would like to be called. But then giving names to people and things is a form of swift dismissal that removes the necessity for thought, and the New York art scene is above all the locus of the no-think.
Thus when Mr. Wesselmann intelligently objects to the label pop he deserves the compliment of being re-examined on his own terms. Removing the pop label and taking another look, he turns out to be a fine Buster Keaton type of entertainer, who takes the produce of his society and turns it into blankly empty, fascinating non-statements. At the same time he smartly pulls all sorts of switches between the real and the illusory. And his visual methods show a good understanding of shallow pictorial space.
But judged from the highest standard, this would be a one-word column composed mostly of "no." His ambitions for consideration on the same basis as, say, Matisse, are contradicted by his highly literary content. His work, which I still find wildly witty and madly hip, has, if I understand him correctly, no witty intent, which tends to put the joke on him. Although he has the last laugh, 18 out of 20 are sold.
The New York Times, November 28, 1968: 36
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