|
|
Harold Rosenberg
Pop Art is thought to be the art of everyday things and banal images - bathroom fixtures, Dick Tracy - but its essential character consists in redoing works of art. Its scope extends from Warhol's rows of Coca-Cola bottles to supplying the "Mona Lisa" with a mustache. All art is based on earlier art, either consciously or by absorption, but no movement has ever exceeded Pop in alertness to aesthetic cues. Some of the works reproduced in the just-issued "Pop Art Redefined," by Suzi Gablik and John Russell (Praeger), evoke the following: Leonardo, Duchamp, de Kooning, Mondrian, Manet, Monet, Matisse, Picasso, Delacroix, Magritte, Demuth, Pollock. In addition, a section of more than twenty paintings and sculptures by a dozen artists includes pictures of the word "ART" in block letters, depictions of art materials, and portraits of earlier artists, contemporaries, art dealers, and curators. If we count as art the comic strips, lettering, posters, sign paintings, and industrial designs adapted by Pop artists, the Pop movement takes on the character of an exhibition in an art school that combines courses in fine art and applied design. In Pop, America's two cultures, highbrow and popular, meet on the neutral ground of technique. The Pop mode came into prominence around the beginning of the nineteen-sixties, when the American art world had commenced to consolidate itself on a mass-audience basis, and it inaugurated a decade of pedagogy. From the start, the leading Pops declared that their primary interest was in formal qualities and that their representations of pinups and hamburgers were a diversion to get the crowd moving into the lecture hall. "Artists," said Lichtenstein, "have never worked with the model - just with the painting."
Now, at the close of the decade, the underlying abstractness or formalism of Pop is being passionately urged upon the attention of the art world. In the view of art historians and critics, and some of the artists, too, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Warhol, Tom Wesselmann have been engaged in much the same enterprise as the painters of color areas and bands, such as Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland. Popeye, Marilyn Monroe (I almost said "Marilyn Mondrian"), and "Red, Blue, Yellow" are equally valid occasions for advaiiced exercises in line, color, and form. "Our intention," writes Miss Gablik, is to "redefine Pop Art as having a more direct relation to Minimal and hard-edged abstract art than is frequently admitted." Alas, others have got there first; the relationship of Pop to late-sixties abstraction has been most enthusiastically "admitted" by Professor Robert Rosenblum and echoed by Professor Barbara Rose and by Miss Diane Waldman, associate curator of the Guggenheim Museum and director of its current Lichtenstein retrospective, and it is a safe bet that the word has been received in Los Angeles and Pasadena. "Lichtenstein," declares Miss Waldman, "has dematerialized the object and effected a new reconciliation with the picture plane." Comic-strip and advertising-agency artists have done pretty well in dematerializing objects, but it takes an authentic fine-arts artist of the nineteen-sixties to effect reconciliations with the picture plane. What Miss Waldman is saying (and her observation has been confirmed by Lichtenstein himself) is that, vis-a-vis the original Donald Duck, the function of Lichtenstein is to shift the image from the realm of the Sunday comics to the world of art - a shift comparable to the one carried out by the Navajos when they adopted the dollar bills and soup-can labels of the first Yankees in the Southwest as designs for blankets. With Pop, the tribe of the art galleries and museums "acculturate s " the artifacts of the supermarkets, billboards, and women's magazines by passing them through an art-historical filter. The tool is the pedagogy of the picture plane, today in full swing in assimilating, by reinterpretation and trimming, all art into what Professor Rosenblum calls "the formalist experience of our century."
The aestheticism of Pop, its fixation on art-world devices and art-world reputations, has been obscured by the common misconception that, as Miss Gablik has it, Pop is "based upon real things which are part of everybody's world, and not just a private world of the artist's." This roughly describes the aims of Pop in the heroic days of Oldenburg's "Store" on East Second Street and the exhibitions and Happenings at the Reuben Gallery - the period when young artists in New York felt obliged to break out of the grip of art history as represented by Abstract Expressionism. Unfortunately, there is no such thing in art as "everybody's world," just as, despite the easy formulas of art historians, there was no "private world" for Abstract Expressionists. The issue was, and is, style and creative method - and the adoption by some Pop artists of a set of mannerisms that were the opposite of the mannerisms of Abstract Expressionism was insufficient to exorcise art history and gain contact with real things. Bathrooms by Oldenburg, Segal, Lichtenstein, and Wesselmann, reproduced in "Pop Art Redefined," lack the shared characteristics of the products of Kohler or Crane; they are individual restylizations of the art of the designers of plumbing fixtures. Oldenburg messes up a corrugated paper toilet and washstand with drips of paint and stands his bathtub on end, evoking simultaneously Abstract Expressionist painting and the atmosphere of the slums and loft-building studios. Segal and Wesselmann incorporate sections of brand-new tile walls and chromiumplated fixtures into stage sets that feature nudes reminiscent of Courbet and Matisse; Lichtenstein supplants the physical bathroom with a linear mail-order-catalogue illustration of it.
As for the motif itself, the bathroom comes close to meeting the test of being, at least in America, "part of everybody's world," but a nude stepping out of a bathtub is hardly "everybody's" except in French paintings, and her in compatibility with bathrooms in slums caused Oldenburg to leave her out. In art, "everybody's" world is a style that is opposed to minority styles, and Pop cannibalizes both majority and minority art for its own aesthetic purposes. In the social ambience of the gallery-goer, the "Mona Lisa" is almost as much everybody's as the bathroom, and Duchamp's and Warhol's "Mona Lisa"s are today almost as much public property as Leonardo's. But the "everybody" narrows considerably when it reaches Demuth's "I Saw the Number Figure 5 ill Gold" as re-created by Robert Indiana and the drawing by de Kooning that Rauschenberg partly erased. Taking into account such Pop staples as repaintings of Ingres, Delacroix, Rembrandt, and Picasso, a textbook analysis of Cézanne, and a chromium-plated version of Magritte's boots that turn into feet, as well as paintings that refer to art dealers and curators (e.g., Walter Hopps wearing a miniature de Kooning Linder his coat), one is forced to conclude that ill Pop not everybody's world but the enlarged, self-conscious art world of the decade now closing has replaced the Abstract Expressionists' world of artists.
Pop Art reached out not to real things but to pictures of things, and its aesthetic discipline has consisted in seeing objects as pictures or sculptures, so that the Bowery or the suburban kitchen becomes for the Pop artist an art exhibition ready for shipment to the international chain of art showcases. Basically, Pop Art is "found" art- its most potent effect is the hallucination of mistaking the street for a museum or the astonishment of Moliere's character at learning that he has been speaking aloud. In becoming art, objects separate themselves from their functional reality and are changed into thing-like equivatents of themselves - a condition best symbolized by George Segal's solid white plaster ghosts. The inherent detachment of Pop's aestheticized banalities prefigures the "pure" objects of Minimal sculpture and the "reduced" compositions of the color-field painters, misnamed "the art of the real." The extinction of content in Pop Art enabled it to treat in equal fashion a sunset by Turner and a Shell Oil sign, and thus to serve as a bridge between the art of latecomers to Action painting - to whom a de Kooning or a Pollock represented not a new psychic realization but a way of applying paint to a surface - and the varieties of abstract modes that emphasize areas of color disposed on materials of a given size and shape. It might be added that the rising curve of aestheticism in the sixties, with its concept of the world as a museum, represents a withdrawal by the art world from the intensifying politico-social crisis and intellectual confusion in the United States.
The commercial artist or designer who has provided the bulk of "nature" for the Pop artist is an aesthete, too. Like the Pop painter, he converts all styles to his needs, and in illustrating an ad for ice cream he does not forget to shape the drop of chocolate on the sphere of vanilla into the perfect outline of a tear. In appreciating the Lichtensteins now on view (through Sunday. November 9) at the Guggenheim, one is obliged to keep in mind that the comic strips on which they are based were created not by forces of nature, or by children drawing on sidewalks, but by artists who, as Larry Rivers pointed out near the inception of Pop, "went to art schools, traditional & bohemian & ... admired the Old Masters & still tell you about Picasso or perhaps Klee & they made lots of drawings.... When you meet them you are not in the presence of a brute." Craftsmen of the commercial workshops are, one might say, the avant-garde of art among the great public, as Lichtenstein and Warhol are the avant-garde of applied aesthetics in the art world. It is the overlay of "high" and "low" aspects of contemporary art practice that characterizes Pop Art as a movement; "real things" have nothing to do with it. As the embodiment of classroom aesthetic dogmas of the sixties, Pop is, as Miss Gablik and the formalists maintain, linked with Minimalism and color-field painting. But it is linked equally with the commercial-crafts spirit of America's newly expanded art world.
The artist who best represents the basic motives of Pop Art is Roy Lichtenstein, an ex-Abstract Expressionist who has been both a commercial artist and a university art instructor. His more than a hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, and ceramics at the Guggenheim are dated from 1961 to 1969, and though the works directly based on comicstrip images belong to less than half of this period (roughly, up through 1964) and constitute less than half of the show, they dominate the exhibition. The recomposition of a comic-strip "box" dissociated from the strip - the face of the blonde in the window saying, "I know how you must feel, Brad" - into a large-scale oil painting was Lichtenstein's primordial idea, the discovery that gave birth to him as a painter, and all his works look back to that exciting vision. Many of his paintings of the last five years - landscapes with temples, restyled Mondrians and Picassos, cloud formations that are exercises in spatial ambiguity - seem like random demonstrations of how pictures can be turned into Lichtenstein by the introduction of his comics-derived thick outlines, swimming masses of black, bright colors, and Ben Day dots (a result comparable to the one achieved by Yves Klein through covering canvases and objects with his "International Klein Blue"). Lichtenstein's "Modern Painting with Division" (11967) and "4 Panel Modular 4" (1969) keep abreast of serial pattern painting and Frank Stella's late use of arched elements but retain identification with Lichtenstein through heavy black contours, primary colors, and fillers of Ben Day dots. His sculptures of the last three years, however, which abandon his cartoon ingredients in favor of thirties-style "modernistic" metal coat hangers and theatre-lobby stanchions in polished brass, glass, and aluminum, seem to be searching helplessly about for art-world references. Perhaps the disc of David Smith will come to the rescue.
In formal terms, Lichtenstein is nothing if not consistent; his aesthetic reprocessing, which homogenizes "vulgar" art with high-art forms and high art with formal derivatives from the mass media, cancels the content of both and leaves only design. Formalist criticism, as represented in this instance by Miss Waldman, finds his work to be all of a piece. Comparing Lichtenstein to Ingres, she writes that "Lichtenstein is able to present us with a new vision, not one based on the comic strip but more probably based oil his Linderstanding of modern art. Starting with a specific subject matter, he arrives at a general or ideal image." Miss Waldman seems unaware that in attributing to Lichtenstein an art that is based on understanding art and that achieves the "ideal," she has conceived of him as the typical modernist academician. No doubt Lichtenstein understands modern art, at least as it has been discussed in the United States during the past twenty years, but his aestheticized comics, far from arriving at an ideal image, are extremely uneven in the quality of their design. "Drowning Girt" and "Hopeless" are interesting Art Nouveau rhythmic compositions; "Takka Takka" and "O.K. Hot Shot" are so cluttered that the eye cannot rephrase them into satisfactory patterns; "Preparedness," a huge three-sectioned canvas done this year, is simply dull, in the manner of the poorer government murals of the thirties - the period with which Lichtenstein is at present engaged in his sculpture.
Apart from keeping up with art history and subsuming the comic-strip craftsman under the system of contemporary art ideas, Lichtenstein's paintings tend to reflect a gentle, professorial humor and a sincere liking for corny themes, colors, and postures. "Mr. Bellamy," not at the Guggenheim, is the cartoon of a resolute American naval officer who reflects, in a comic-strip balloon, "I am supposed to report to a Mr. Bellamy. I wonder what he's like." Done in 1961, the year Richard Bellamy assembled a squad of Pop artists at the Green Gallery, the painting is an excellent In joke. The 1965-66 "Brushstroke" paintings, with their traces of drip and exposed (but Bell Day-dotted) canvas, are my favorite Lichtensteins, because of their wit in isolating and reducing to a "thing" the trademark of Action painting, and Lichtenstein's impeccable handling relates the Action brushstroke to Oriental calligraphy. The balloon of "Image Duplicator," a closeup of the eyes of the Mad Scientist, amusingly sums up Lichtenstein's relation to his public: " What? Why did you ask that? What do you know about my image duplicator?"
The comics are a path back to childhood. A prevailing mood of Lichtenstein, as of Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, and the majority of the Pop artists, is nostalgia, ill their scheme, childhood represents reality before it became totally absorbed into art. Lichtenstein's "Composition I," a six-foot-high reproduction of the cover of a schoolboy's copybook, with a rectangular label in the center headed "COMPOSITIONS," and decorated with an all over design of random black-on-white shapes vaguely reminiscent of Pollock, and bordered on the left by a vertical black band a la Newman, is a brilliant synthesis of the artist's past innocence and present professionalism. Parodying the comics enabled Lichtenstein to reintroduce into painting heroic and romantic subjects - air pilots, cops, George Washington, drowning maidens. Though presented under the cover of aestheticism and Camp, the melodrama of such paintings as "Drowning Girl" ("I don't care! I'd rather sink - than call Brad for help!") and "The Kiss" (with an outline of the departing lover's plane in the background) helps, together with such gags as the "Image Duplicator," to save the Guggenheim exhibition from monotony - contradicting the formalist edict that subject matter is to be played down.
Nominally, Claes Oldenburg is a Pop artist, too - one of the earliest and most forceful, who went through the Pop mill of Happenings, environments, and prop-making. The subjects of his sculptures, constructions, and drawings are taken from the common sources of Pop: packagings (7-Up bottles), art lectures ("Henry [no doubt Geldzahler, now a curator at the Metropolitan Museum] pulls out a rubber lecture"), ready-to-eat items, advertisements, cosmetics, kitchen equipment, tools. With Oldenburg, as with Lichtenstein, stereotypes in and out of art are equalized, and Lichtenstein's coolly conceived brushstroke is matched by Oldenburg's dripping paint pile turned into a plaster mass.
Oldenburg's practice of art and his attitude toward it are, however, radically different from those of Lichtenstein and the typical Pop artist, and to apply the Pop label to him tends to obscure the nature of his work. For Oldenburg, ex-reporter, poet, solitary walker in the city, and introspectionist, art has psychological and social objectives, and the aestheticism of the revisers of clichés is as alien to him as the aestheticism of the Minimalists and color-fielders. If Lichtenstein's accomplishment is confined to nuances of "the formalist experience of our century," Oldenburg has educated himself in the strategies of modernism in order to animate (in the phrase of his "Store Days") "a theatre of action or of things." Oldenburg, too, is absorbed in form - what artist isn't? - but he finds his forms in concrete objects and situations rather than by imposing on art a set of procedures derived from currently acceptable modes. Like de Kooning, though with essential differences, he is a "transformalist" - that is, one who uses the freedom won through modernist experimentation to cut across the history of styles by means of the unique creative act. His opposition to the ersatz Action painting that dominated New York art upon his arrival in it, in the mid-fifties, expressed itself not in submission to a system of antithetical recipes - impersonality, smooth surfaces, preconceived composition - but in slowly unearthing the creative principles of the pioneers. "Lately," he said in "Store Days," "I have begun to understand Action painting that old thing in a new vital and peculiar sense as corny as the scratches on a NY wall and by parodying its corn I have (miracle) come back to its authenticity! I feet as if Pollock is sitting on my shoulder, or rather crouching in my pants! " An artist who has the feeling of being " occupied" by a predecessor is able to extend the past through his imagination and can dispense with the formalists' chain of rational derivations.
The Oldenburg retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which, like the Lichtenstein exhibition, covers the current decade (with the addition of a few earlier drawings), is the most inventive - in concept and in use of scale and materials - of any group of works by an American of the post-Abstract Expressionist generation, and its presentation by Miss Alicia Legg, an associate curator at the Museum, is one of the most satisfying installations in recent years. The more than two hundred and twenty items, assembled with the collaboration of the artist, cover every phase of his career except his Happenings, dramas, and environments: the early East Side sculptures of food, clothing, and women's legs, all made out of newspaper soaked in paste, and the latter ones of plastersaturated muslin painted with enamel-, the "flags" concocted in Provincetovm out of driftwood and bits of rubbish; the giant "soft" sculptures of toothpaste tubes, telephones, typewriters, electric mixers, fans, and models of the Chrysler Airflow, circa 1935 (the nostalgic element), made of stuffed canvas and vinyl; and a large miscellany, done in the past three years, from the "Giant Soft Drum Set" to the shining 1969 "Giant Saw," which flows from the wall on the floor in hinged segments. Most of these pieces are extremely amusing in an eye-opening way; in them the familiar and manmade pass over into the natural, the absurd, and the abstract, as in the assemblage of cylindrical forms that turn out to be simulations of enlarged cigarette butts, and the row of pendulous organs that identify themselves, with some difficulty, as four Dormeyer mixers. Oldenburg has the offside mind and deadpan of the comedian-visionary. (Physically, he reminds me of Arp, who half a century ago unveiled the sculptural possibilities of an eggcup.) His natural attitude is anti-social, his theatre is "a poor man's theatre." His attacks on society are potshots, as befits an artist; the forms he finds inhering in objects may "of themselves" become grotesque or savagely satirical.
That Oldenburg achieves his formal disclosures through a Swiftian isolation and blowup of detail inevitably associates his constructions with fun-house novelties and Hollywood dream carpentry, and this association is encouraged by his lapses into literalism, as in the huge light switches, mammoth shirts, and period-style West Coast motel bedroom. For those who know his work largely through his oversized tea bag and twentyfour-foot lipstick designed as a monument, Oldenburg has probably defined himself as a maker of visual gags. I can think of no better way to correct this impression than to start the tour of his Museum of Modern Art retrospective with the drawings and water-color sketches on the third floor. There the ideas of the artist appear in their inception, when the qualities of his draftsmanship and his thinking contend on equal terms with his subject matter, so that the study of Good Humor as a monument, or a pack of cigarettes as a museum, is no more distracting than the drawing of an obelisk or a figure on horseback. Throughout his career, Oldenburg's object-making, like his experiments with theatre and environments, has been accompanied by tireless sketchbook drawing and writing. The pencil, crayon, and water-color drawings, in their sensitivity of line and compositional clarity, put his poetry and his tactile imagination in first place, and relieve him of debt to either prevailing art concepts or the Pop ace-in-the-hole of aesthetic incongruity.
The New Yorker, November 8, 1969: 167-176
|
|
|
|
|
|
