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THE ART OF MEL RAMOS
Robin Skelton
Much so-called "Pop Art," while using the pictorial vocabulary of advertisements, newspapers, pin-ups, and street signs, does not do much more than enlarge and reproduce familiar images. Tom Wesselmann's American Nudes are "blow-ups" of pictorial cliches. Allen Jones produces variations upon the leg-magazine cartoon. Andy Warhol's early work involved gigantic Campbell's Soup tins and reproductions of newspics, and Roy Lichtenstein gained a measure of notoriety by his enlargements of comic-book heroines. John Wesley has ventured closer to surrealism, and further away from dadaism with his juxtapositions of rhinoceri and bathing belles, and with his use of Gauginesque females placed in a context of decorative symbols. His Bird Lady, for example, shows one of these girls together with a bird in whose beak is an egg, the upper margin of the print being decorated with a frieze of down-hanging birds' heads. Others, like Allan D'Arcangelo and James Rosenquist use familiar forms of highways and industrial machinery to create beautifully modulated near-abstract compositions. Gerald Laing's work only alludes ill general terms to "Pop" imagery, though its colouring is usually what we associate with the vivid commercial hoarding rather than with the more muted tones of other realities.
Mel Ramos is unlike many of these artists in that his work is almost always based upon a carefully controlled dialogue of forms, and is presented with a subtle awareness of textures that reminds one more of the brushwork of Dali or Tanguy than of the photographic screens of advertisements. He deals in total clarity. Every element is in sharp focus, and thus he suggests a supernormal precision of vision, and a hallucinatory intensity of regard. His nudes are posed with the elegance and nonchalance of a Vargas drawing in Playboy, and, while there is no verbal accompaniment to underline the ideal (and, ill one sense of the term, idyllic) sexual candour of the display, the textures used are themselves so decorously smooth and the limbs so pristine, that one is immediately aware that one is surveying the houri of fantasy, the perpetual virgin of the Mohammedan Paradise, the contemporary emanation of Paphian Aphrodite, rather than the girl next door.
This image is, in most of Mel Ramos's work, placed in close juxtaposition with another which is handled with precisely the same clarity and elegance, and given the same pristine appearance. In the work which first brought Ramos international recognition this second image was most usually one from the world of consumer goods. The girl would appear emerging, not, like Aphrodite, from the foam, but from a pack of cigarettes or a container of candy. She would be poised, not upon the cushions of oriental fantasy, but upon a hamburger bun or the cap of a Coca-Cola bottle. At first sight these pictures simply suggest a sardonic reference to the decadence of goddess-worship in our times. We no longer think of our ideal woman in a context of eternity, but in a context of perishable appetites. We no longer associate her with the archetypal images of heroic poetry. but with the ephemeral glorifications and hyperboles of the ad-man.
Such an interpretation would, however, be far too much of a simplification. The two images are given precisely the same amount of loving attention-, their appearance emphasizes the vast amount of laborious care that has been lavished upon them. If there is here a dialogue between the "Sacred and the Profane" as Ramos himself has suggested, it is left to the spectator to decide which is which. Are we to gather that the "sacred" goddess of love, inspiration, beauty, and ideal sexuality is to be found, nowadays, in decadent agreement with the profane materialism of commercially exploited appetites? Are we to think that the toothpaste tube or the Cola bottle are, equally with the goddess, objects of our desire and reverence? Are we, indeed, required to see this juxtaposition as an act of social criticism, or as an act of life-acceptan ce? Is it not, perhaps, true that the ideal cigarette packet is as much an aesthetic achievement as ideal human beauty? If we delight in our appetites, should we not find the candy bar as admirable as Candy? If we answer "yes" to this question we are, of course, immediately faced with discussing whether or not there can be (outside that Mohammedan Paradise or the spaces between the lines in Playboy) purely sexual satisfaction without the smallest admixture of other emotional experiences, and without any awareness of the richness and complexity of the human personality.
These questions do clearly arise both from Mel Ramos's paintings and from any survey of television commercials, glamour magazines, and Hollywood charm schools. Ramos would earn our gratitude for posing these questions for us so delicately and wittily, had he done nothing else at all. Ramos, however, has chosen to bring the question of scale into his dialogue also. Looking at the girl on the Coca-Cola bottle-cap, are we to think the cap to be gigantic or the girl minute? It is interesting to note that most observers assume the cap to be large; they have been conditioned to do so by the human habit of j udging scale entirely in human terms, and by many gigantic images upon hoardings. Nevertheless, if we are here in a world of ideal fantasy, we must remember that in Alice-land there are two sides to the mushroom. Is the tube of toothpaste five foot three, or is the girl eleven inches tall? Has humanity dwindled, or have the new gods of Hamburger, Detergent, and King-Size Cigarette simply grown to dominate the old anthropomorphic deities?
When Ramos moved on from his "Hamburger Bun" period, he did not change his basic strategy, but he did change his symbolism. The new paintings and drawings of 1967-68 present a different dialogue. Now, instead of consumer goods, the Ramos nude confronts and is confronted by animals. In some cases the girl dominates the animal. She straddles the walrus and the zebra, for example. In others, however, she is possessed by the animals, and, while retaining her poise, is involved in sexual acts with them. She lies back, her legs elegantly afloat in air, experiencing the oral ministrations of the leopard; she reclines at ease, the nose of the deer in her groin. Or she is being straightforwardly embraced by an ape or a panda.
The drawings of these events are as meticulously crafted as ever. Indeed, the delicacy and sharpness of the pencil lines is such as to remind one of the most meticulous drawings of the past. Of recent artists only the engraver, Stephen Gooden, comes to my mind as having the same extraordinarily precise control of the smallest hairline. Several of these drawings have already led to paintings in which the girl and beast are placed against a flat decorative background that adds to the impression of other-worldliness which the encounter itself provides. Moreover, the detailed handling of the animals is now so impressive as to add to the hallucinatory intensity of the whole. The walrus displays his every wrinkle, and the ape his every hair.
This new set of dialogues differs from the earlier in that the beast-image is, itself, as archetypal as that of the naked goddess. The activities of Zeus in his various disguises must be remembered, and the story of Beauty and the Beast has many versions before Perrault. To suggest an interpretation of this new series of symbols would involve us in a good deal of complexity. It is, however, worth noting that Ramos is not alone in his use of animal imagery these days. Graham Sutherland's most recent exhibition was entitled a "bestiary." I commented in the last issue of this review upon the animal imagery of Jack Coughlin. Poets are also turning their attention to the symbolic possibilities of animals. Sometimes, as in Robert Lowell's Skunk Hour, the animals are only briefly alluded to, though central to the poem. Sometimes, as in several poems in Ted Hughes's recent collection Wodwo, the animals are the main subject and appear to dominate mankind. It is interesting to note that Hughes, in a recent issue of The Listener, published three poems under the general heading Crow Lore in which he made use of the animal fable, and that of recent years the increased interest in folklore has resulted in the publication of many animal fables from the native folklore of Africa and North America.
This may seem a digression, but it is my conviction that, although Ramos may appear to have diverged from true "Pop," by using imagery which is no longer immediately recognizable as related to that of the magazines and hoardings, he has, in fact, now latched on to equally pervasive imagery, though not equally brash. One must remember that our television screen, the image-maker for so much of our culture, is not exactly averse to using animal themes. After Lassie, and Gentle Ben, we can turn not only to Daktari, but to Cowboy in Africa, which, in effect, fuses the safari-myth with the western-myth, and thus provides a popular parallel to Ramos's fusion of the Vargas world with that of the forest and jungle.
The beast-woman conjunction is, however, just as ambiguous as the earlier juxtapositions. These erotic subjects are handled with so delicate and ironic a control that they are about as pornographic as an Elgin marble; therefore we find ourselves noting yet again a "dialogue" not only between the related forms, but between the imagery and its handling. The imagery may suggest a gross lasciviousness only appropriate to the pages of Krafft-Ebbing or "hardcore" pornography; the artistry, however, indicates a delicacy of mind, a restraint and a discipline, that more than counters this. When can we discard the erotic as "pornographic"? My own answer is that the erotic becomes pornographic when there is not the slightest doubt that the sole intention and effect of the piece is sexual stimulation and titillation. )nether or not the pornographic, thus defined, should be condemned, is another matter entirely. It is hard for me, personally, to believe that it is more vicious to excite sexual passions than it is to excite passions of hatred and bigotry. It is far better, as the button tells us, to make love than to make war.
Censorship is, therefore, if only by the way, another implied theme of these new works, as it is the theme of any work dealing with subject matter that many people find offensive. The drawings are, from one point of view, a bait for bigots. From another point of view, however, they are archetypal, showing us a commerce between the animal appetite and the idealizing imagination, admiring both and seeing them in relationship of mutual, even symbiotic dependence. Can we, perhaps, envisage from these drawings, a world in which people have come completely to terms with their instincts and appetites and can exist in mutual affection? Can we envisage an Eden where, as the lion may lie down with the lamb, so the woman may lie down with the beast that, in another world, she might well choose to have hunted for her food or shot for her protection?
The world of Mel Ramos's work is much more than a distorted reflection of the popular images of our culture. It is not social comment in the way that Warhol's soup cans and newspics are social comment. It is not the simple recognition of popular mythology as are the comic-book blow-ups of Lichtenstein. It is a world of clear vision, clear questioning, and moral candour. That the drawings and paintings themselves are beautifully made and superbly composed is almost too evident to require comment. That they are, however, intellectually as well as visually pleasing, does require some argument, for Ramos has chosen, with wit and with cunning, to present his dialogues to us in such a way as to both imitate and undermine the hedonistic fantasies of our culture.
Arts, January 1966: 56
The Malahat Review October 1969: 60-67
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