|
Galería Colibrí catalogue 20, May 1966 11 Pop Artists notes on american pop art ERNESTO J. RUIZ DE LA MATA San Juan, Puerto Rico November 1965
While the loosely termed "Abstract Expressionist" movement which erupted during the early fifties in America is at the present a long defunct style, superceded by multiple "deviationist" trends and in some cases openly radical opposition, we cannot deny that it was the movement which placed America, in spite of the virulent criticisms it aroused, on the artistic world map. "Action-painters", to use the term coined by critic Harold Rosenberg, or Abstract Expressionists included in the heyday of the movement Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Clifford Still, Adolph Gottlieb, James Brooks, Theodoros Stamos, Barnett Newman, William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, Jimmy Ernst, Hans Hoffmann, and a coterie of minor followers. The exhibit sponsored and financed by the International Council at the Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, which circled various European capitals during the summer of 1958 under the banner of "The New American Painting", drew as many negative comments, though, as the award of the Venice Biennale prize to Robert Motherwell in 1964. While in Milan a critic complained about the 1958 show: "It is not new. It is not painting. It is not America... Droppings of paint, sprayings, burstings, lumps, squirts, whirls, rubs and marks, erasures, scrawls, doodles and kaleidoscope backgrounds. When will they send us a real American show?". 1 A couple of years ago, a prominent American critic, Max Kozloff, termed "Pop Art" mere "Kitsch", and said that "the truth is that the art galleries are being invaded by the pinheaded and contemptible style of gum chewers, bobby soxers and worse, delinquents" 2, in what equated to the recognizal of a national catastrophe due to the fatal influence of Pop in American society.
Pop has certainly revolutionized the Art World, and I daresay that its impact has been more shocking than that of the Abstract Expressionist movement.
It was in 1954 that Lawrence Alloway, 3 present Curator of the Guggenheim Museum, coined the phrase "Pop Art", and, although some of the artists considered as being "Pop" reject it, like Tom Wesselmann, Jasper Johns or Jim Dine do, we will stick to this label in preference to other.
For those who refer to the movement as "New Dada", the victory of the Surrealists over subject-matter and that of the Abstract Expressionists over technique paved the way for this rejuvenation of the "iconoclastic" Dada spirit, although to critics like Barbara Rose, 4 "while Dada was ANTI-ART, ANTI-WAR and ANTI-MATERIALISM", being "the art of the politically and socially engaged", now the artist "is no longer actor nor participator but detached spectator who reports in an uneditorialized fashion on what he sees." To Barbara Rose this generation (of artists in their twenties and early forties) called "beat", "silent" or "uncommitted" has as its subject matter "THE AMERICAN DREAM": ROSENQUIST's billboard phantasies, LICHTENSTEIN's cartoons, INDIANA's pinball machines, WESSELMANN's nostalgic collages, RAUSCHENBERG's Coke bottles, JOHN's American flags and maps."
Among other Pop Art precursors we should, of course, refer to German-born Kurt Schwitters' "Merz Collages" and "Merzbou Constructions". While working in England he made a series of collages drawing upon comic strip sources as "The Phantom" and "Prince Valiant". Gerald Murphy, an expatriate American living in Europe during the twenties, consecrated by Fernand Léger as "the only American painter living in Paris", did only ten works in his seven year stretch as an artist, but they were most significantly both huge in proportions, one 18 feet high, and inspired by common place objects. Needless to say, Stuart Davis' images of urban landscapes were crucially decisive. Certainly, Marcel Duchamp's objet-trouvés and ready-mades, as well as Man Ray's collages and assemblages of ready-mades have had a decisive influence in some of the pop artists, notably the object makers or assemblagists, like Rauschenberg and Jim Dine, derogatively called, along with other followers, like the French Arman, Belgium's Vic Gentils, German-born Mary Bauermeister and French Niki de Saint-Phalle, "The Box, Glue and Nail Set". 5 "But is it music? Say what you like, people go nuts not being able to name and categorize it. Always fear, always panic, in face of the new. Do we not hear the same cry with regard to the other arts? But is it literature? But is it sculpture? But is it painting? Evidently it is and it isn't. Certainly it's not plumbing, nor railway engineering, nor hockey, nor tiddleywinks. If you catalogue all the things which a new work of art or a new art form is not you finally get pretty close to something which is either music, painting, sculpture or literature, as the case may be". 6 Henry Geldzahler, Associate Curator of American Art of the Metropolitan Museum, expressed the same feeling in a Symposium on Pop Art sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art on December 13, 1962: "I have heard it said that Pop Art is not art, and this by a Museum curator. My feeling is that it is the artist who defines the limit of art, not the critic or the curator. It is perhaps necessary for the art historian, who deals with closed issues, to have a definition of art. It is dangerous for the critic of contemporary art to have such a definition. Just so there is no unsuitable subject for art. Marcel Duchamp and Jasper Johns have taught us that it is the artist who decides what is art, and they have been convincing philosophically and aesthetically." 7
It was Duchamp who once suggested that Rembrandt's paintings be used as ironing boards and Rauschenberg, when he was asked to do a portrait of Iris Clert, the Parisian art dealer, sent a telegram saying:
Andy Warhol pushed back the line even further when, interviewed by Art News' G.R. Swenson he declares: "I think everybody should be a machine... I'm using silk-screens now. I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me. I haven't been able to make every image clear and simple and the same as the first one. I think it would be so great if more people took up silk-screen so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else's... The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do". Asked why he started painting soup cans he answered: "Because I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again. Someone said my life has dominated me; I liked that idea.” 8 This was in November 1963. A couple of years later, in August 1965, visited at his "Factory", as he calls his aluminum foil wrapped workshop (he likes the feeling of being inside a huge Hershey bar) he says: "anyone could do the things I am doing and I don't believe they should be signed" and even more: "If I do start painting again someone else will do it all, I won't touch anything." 9 Certain of the so-called Pop artists derive their subject matter from everyday American life, notably, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Mel Ramos, Wayne Thiebaud, James Rosenquist, Robert Indiana, Thomas Wesselmann and Jasper Johns, to name the more prominent among them. However, the fifty odd years that have elapsed between the New York show of The Eight and present day "Americana" are to be taken into account.
It is what Thomas B. Hess himself has called the "Ugly Americana", and a very modern view of it, I daresay.
To choose but two examples we could remember Time Magazine's feature story on "Advertising: The Visible Persuaders" 11 commenting upon the massive program launched by Madison Avenue and involving a yearly multi billion investment of persuasion, hidden or open, going from subliminal images designed to provide direct responses on the percipient to more frank manners of labeling and advertisement which clot our retina with their repetitious insistence.
It is also the "America the Ugly" of which Peter Blake, managing editor of Architectural Forum talks about in his book "God's Own Junkyard", where "all over the land ugliness flourishes and tastelessness prospers. People drive from cemetery-neat housing projects down billboard alleys to the glass boxes in which they work, rarely noticing the garishness of their surroundings. Either they are too inured or callous to care, or they may even have grown to like the tawdry world around them." 12
It is true as Mr. Geldzahler points out that: "We live in an urban society, ceaselessly exposed to mass media. Our primary visual data are for the most part secondhand. Is it not then logical that art be made out of what we see? Has it not been true in the past? There is an Ogden Nash Quatrain - says Mr. Geldzahler - that I feel is apposite: A billboard lovely as a tree Perhaps unless the billboards fall I'll never see a tree at all."
Hence the reference to some of the Pop artists as "the so-called sign painters", namely Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist, (who did come upon the art scene straight from billboard painting, as Warhol did from the field of commercial design), Andy Warhol, and Wayne Thiebaud. 14 Both Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg did window displays for Tiffany and Bonwitt Teller before going "serious". Some artists, like Lichtenstein and Indiana, have further expounded upon the roots of their Pop creations as to the relationship with America. In fact, the phrase "The American Dream”, recalls a composition by Indiana called "The Demuth American Dream" (1963, Stable Gallery), inspired in Charles Demuth's 1928 homage to the poet William Carlos Williams: "I Saw the Figure Five in Gold". To the question "Is Pop America?" Indiana has anwered: "Yes, America is very much at the core of every Pop work. British Pop, the first-born, came about due to the influence of America. The generating issue is Americasm (sic), that phenomenon that is sweeping every continent. French Pop is only slightly Frenchified; Asian Pop is sure to come (remember Hong Kong). The pattern will not be far from the Coke, the car, the hamburger, the jukebox. It is the American Myth. For this is the best of all possible worlds." Lichtenstein, upon being asked practically the same question: "Is Pop American?" said: "Everybody has called Pop Art American painting. America was hit by industrialism and capitalism harder and sooner and its values seem more askew... I think the meaning of my work is that it's industrial, it's what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, so it won't be American; it will be universal". 15 It is significant to note that the Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, when interviewed by French "Nouvelle Vogue" director Jean-Luc Godard about the recent movie of the former, "Deserto Rosso", declared: "I am now concerned with the individual in respect to his surroundings, which means that I have a very different approach to the story. It is too easy to say, as some critics have, that I am accusing the world of industry, factories, etc. of turning the people who live there into neurotics. My intention was to point out the beauty in this world, where even the factories have an extraordinary aesthetic beauty. A line of factories, with their chimneys silhouetted on the skyline, seem to me much more beautiful than a line of trees which one has seen so often that it has become monotonous, to such an extent that we don't look any more. This is a beautiful world, rich, alive, and more important, useful. I feel that neuroses are not a product simply of the environment, but the result of a lack of adaptation." Further on, Antonioni specifically refers to Pop saying that "Pop art is one aspect of the search for something new, which shouldn't be underestimated. It's an ironical movement, and this conscious irony is extremely important, Pop Art painters are quite aware that the aesthetic value of their work is not fully developed - apart from Rauschenberg, who is more of an artist than the others. Basically, I think that it's a good thing that all this should come out; it will help speed up the process of transformation." 16
Truly enough the process of transformation, which is the direct result of a rapidly changing technocratical society, is not a private phenomena of America. It is however interesting to point out that, in Barbara Rose's words, "the sign-painters are in reality Icon painters, if we consider the figures in our pantheon to be empty Coke bottles and soup cans"... and that "they are exhalting into Icons the consumer goods, what Rilke called the 'Life-decoy of America'". 17
It is strange, though, that this generation of Pop painters characterizes itself by a passive acceptance of the values incarnated in present day society. The repetition of Leibnitz famous statement that "we live in the best of all possible worlds" made into a specific reference to American society by Indiana strikes us as a somewhat unsophisticated position, to say the least, in reference to a quite controversial reality.
The spirit of militancy, which imbued both the “beat generation” in America and the “angry young men” in Great Britain, is totally lacking in the most prominent members of the Pop movement. We are of course not referring in this context to the "beatnik pose" assumed by all sorts of phonies and hanger-ons at college campuses and coffee shops, or the discotheques a go-go, but to the positive element which pervaded these generations and which was in essence a species of encounter with reality highly reminiscent of the French existentialist philosophy and perhaps its contemporary echo.
If we try to find a correspondence with the Pop Art movement in American literature, curiously enough we find its formal equivalent in John Dos Passos well-known trilogy "U.S.A.", an opus of the early thirties and its more recent continuation "Mid-Century U.S.A.". Dos Passos' vignettes, called by him "newsreels" and "the camera eye", constitute technical innovations in literature which have their counterpart in the plastic techniques of the collage, the assemblage, or the combine. His introduction at regular intervals in the course of the narration of the profiles of significant contemporary personalities as well as what amount to apparently banal references to newspaper headlines, lyrics of popular songs, fragments of advertisements or of journalistic reports of actual and immediate events remain up to the present time as revolutionary a technique in literary formal means as it was in the decade of the thirties. Yet, along with Jack London, Dos Passos represents in American letters one of the foremost representatives of socialist thought, and we cannot divest of its message his works and allude only to their formal aspect. Form and content are perfectly complemented in his "U.S.A." works.
Going further along in the comparison between Pop Art and literature we might establish some sort of link between Alain Robbe-Grillet's "objective narration technique" and the detached view of the Pop artists towards the commonplace objects, their concern with the dismal urban panorama or "junk-culture", as some critics have referred to their representational sources.
Apart from the aforementioned precedents brought to our attention, like Marcel Duchamp's found objects and ready-mades, we should also recall the importance of the found image.
In 1890 the photographer Eugene Ajet pictures the banal urban image and three decades later, Stieglitz in 1920 is preoccupied with this same subject matter. In the Symposium previously referred to, its organizer, Peter Selz, of New York's Museum of Modern Art, introduced the evening showing photographs of window displays and billboards taken by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration in the thirties saying that, "these, although documentary in purpose, were similar to some of the new work when presented in (that) new context." 18
Robbe-Grillet focuses his attention, in a fashion derived from the cinematographic close-up technique, on the objects in a manner in which the character in the novel, always using the first person singular, turns itself into a minutely attentive eye that proceeds to describe everything around him with the exactness and precision of a phenomenological analysis of an object.
This results in a stark narrative style that relies entirely on descriptions and which conscientiously eliminates all metaphorical imagery and is solely concerned with the physical properties of the objects perceived. Such is also the case with certain of the Pop artists. When Andy Warhol represents a six foot high Coca-Cola bottle or a Chicken Noodle Campbell soup can or aligns 200 soup cans in a single picture, or for that matter thirty reproductions of Leonardo's Giaconda, the effect is equal to that of Robbe-Grillet's depiction of objects.
The result of these agglomerations or of the disproportionate with reality blown-up images presented by Warhol is the alienation of the depicted object in regard to its real-life image, and this in turn creates the same sort of alienating effect in the spectator. It is the same case with a Lichtenstein painted reproduction of a square from a comic strip blown-up to a height of 68 inches. The result is practically the same. The artist's product acquires a totally new significance. That is what I recently tried to explain when I spoke of the schizophrenic quality of certain Pop artist creations. In that instance I was referring to Jim Dine saying that "when he places a real wash basin against a six by six feet canvas background with just a few black Kline-like oil strokes in the otherwise virgin setting and scribbles on it "Black Bathroom No. 2", creating one of his combines, the original object has been divested of its original purpose and imbued with a new and totally different sense, an artistic meaning". 19
We might thus conclude by saying that while the militantly nihilistic attitudes evidenced both by Dadaists and Surrealist artists expressed a neurotic attempt towards the negation and destruction of the values with which the world around them was invested, Pop Art succeeds in a complete rejection by creating a total reversal of values and therefore a new reality.
Electronic
and even more so Concrete
Music, the culmination of
the Theater of the Absurd
with "Happenings", "Events", "Performances", or "Ballets" (like
Rauschenberg and John Cage's),
some "new
wave" films,
like Richard Lester's "The
Knack" or Resnais' "Marienbad",
Robbe-Grillet's novels, or "LSD's" self-induced
mystical experiences, all
are similarly oriented. Where
to? That remains to be seen. Perhaps
we should recall the lyrics
with which "Doctor
Strangelove or How I Learned
to Stop Worrying About the
Bomb" ended: "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when..."
1. Time Magazine, August 4, 1958, p. 24. 2. Kozloff, Art International, v. VII, number 1, January 1963, p. 36; see also "Pop Culture and the New Vulgarians," Art International, Vol. VI, number 2, March 1962, pp. 34-6. 3. John Coplans, "The New Painting of Common Objects", Art Forum, v. I, number 6, p. 29. 4. Barbara Rose, "Dada Then and Now", Art International, v. VII, number 1, Jan. 1963. 5. Time Magazine, May 14, 1965. 6. Henry Miller, The air Conditioned Nightmare, N.Y., Avon Books 1945, p. 150. 7. Geldzahler, "A Symposium on Pop Art", Arts Magazine,Special Supplement, April 1963, p. 37. 8. G. R. Swenson, "Waht is Pop Art", Art News, v. 62, number 7, November 1963, p. 26. 9. "Superpop or A Night at the Factory", by Roger Vaughan, N. Y. Herald Tribune, August 8,, 1965, p. 7. 10. Life magazine, Winter, 1958. 11. Time Magazine, October 2, 1962 12. "America the Ugly", Art Section, Newsweek, January 13, 1964, p. 50. 13. Geldzahler, loc. cit. 14. Peter Seltz, ibid., p. 36. 15. G. R. Swenson, loc. cit., p. 63-4. 16. Movie, Summer Issue, 1965. 17. Barbara Rose, loc. cit. 18. Peter Selz, loc. cit., p. 36 19. "Art", The San Juan Review, August 1965, p. 45.
works in the exhibition Allan D'Arcangelo Landscape I Landscape II Landscape III Jim Dine Awl Throat Calico Allen Jones Miss America Pour les Levres "Janet is Wearing..." Gerald Laing Compact Slide Triple Roy Lichtenstein Moonscape Reverie "Sweet dreams, Baby!" Peter Phillips Custom Print I Custom Print II Custom Print III Mel Ramos Chic Tobacco Rose Miss comfort creme James Rosenquist Circles of Confusion Whipped Butter for Eugen Ruchin For Love Andy Warhol Jacqueline Kennedy I Jacqueline Kennedy II Jacqueline Kennedy III
John Wesley Maiden Bird Lady Dream of Unicorns Tom Wesselmann Cut-out Nude Nude TV Still Life
|
|||
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
Library |
In The Collection |
