by Gary Indiana
By mid-1960, however, Warhol had decisively abandoned—either on advice from Ivan Karp or Emile de Antonio or on his own, depending on whose version you read—any gratuitously “painterly” mannerisms from his work. Victor Bockris’s remarkable biography, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, quotes de Antonio thus: “[Andy] had painted two pictures of Coke bottles about six feet tall. One was just a pristine black-and-white Coke bottle. The other had a lot of abstract expressionist marks on it. I said, ‘Come on, Andy, the abstract one is a piece of shit, the other one is remarkable. It’s our society, it’s who we are, it’s absolutely beautiful and naked, and you ought to destroy the first one and show the other.’”8
chapter three
POP ART: SURF’S UP!
ONE
FROM ABOUT 1955 ON, THE CRITICAL SUPPORT STRUCtures of the New York School became increasingly irrelevant to what was going on. Even Abstract Expressionism’s champions conceded that its thematic concerns, if not its technical strategies, had had their day. Fluxus, Funk Art, “happenings,” performance art, hybrid combinations of painting, sculpture, body art, music, dance, so-called underground film and theater, were steadily emerging among the cognoscenti as playful yet powerful alternatives to the staunch seriousness of the art being featured in upscale galleries and acquired by museums. These new, outrageous forms of expression erased rigid boundaries between popular and elitist art. The influence of rock and roll, African American blues and jazz, and electronic music had a direct impact on the other arts: if you were listening to Robert Johnson or John Coltrane or Elvis Presley, or Stockhausen or Lucio Berio, what “higher” pleasure did a Barnett Newman zip painting give you? Inevitably, the meshing of “high” and “low” aesthetic expression prevailing in the alternative art scene found champions in new critics; establishment galleries scrambled to acquire these new kinds of art; and collectors followed suit.
To understand the shock that Andy Warhol and Pop Art inflicted on AbEx, one need only look to the pyramid structure that had been imposed on the fine art world. The rationale for a hierarchy of aesthetic pleasures was that some art was ennobling and other art coarsening. The designation of sensuously immediate art as “kitsch” invited its own obsolescence in a culture increasingly dominated by young people, a culture indifferent to the stuffy categories of “serious” or “frivolous” or “ephemeral” or “commercial.”
The affluent society that depended on social repression as its guiding principle spawned a generation that took affluence for granted and Dionysian hedonism as an ideal. The ideologically gridlocked 1950s fairly begged for a thoroughgoing cultural high colonic. The new generation had a long agenda of pleasures and criticalities, a fresh constellation of culture heroes, and, in the universities, its own self-critique as the Society of the Spectacle and commodity-centered capitalism produced a bedazzling richness of contradictions.
The short version of the Abstract Expressionist finale runs that transitional artists like Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, while sensitive to the atmospheric changes in American society, stressed figurative content at a time when the strategies of AbEx were losing their purchase on public attention. The public for art has always been relatively small, even when the publicity promoting art has been big.
Jasper Johns’s 1964 sculpmetal work The Critic Sees, in which human mouths appear behind a pair of eyeglass lenses, can be read as a commentary on the dominating role of formalist critics in the artmaking of the previous generation. This jarring piece of bronzed sculpture, showing lips and teeth where one expects to see eyeballs, suggests rather unequivocally that the formalist critics who had supported Abstract Expressionism saw with their mouths and judged works of art on the basis of their own critical pronouncements rather than the intrinsic qualities of the works themselves.
As discussed earlier, the major power brokers Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, as well as other critics, advocated nonfigurative, “spontaneously” generated painting and highly schematized, geometrically precise-looking abstraction; such art supposedly emanated subjectivity, soulfulness, the heroically turbulent interiority of the artist, and made vivid the implicit mysticism in the painter’s relationship to painting that connected with archetypes, mythology, “the eternal.” The artists they celebrated were besotted by their own importance and as vigilant as raptors about maintaining their status.
The audacious, contemplative, iconographic, outward-looking, but still very painterly work of Johns and Rauschenberg, which often included—spectacularly, in Rauschenberg’s case—elements of sculpture and “found” objects gussied up with smears and splashes of paint (a stuffed goat girdled with a car tire, a mattress and bed used as a canvas, and so on), achieved some respectful acknowledgment from the Abstract Expressionists. In one well-known nod, de Kooning gave his consent to Rauschenberg’s erasure of a de Kooning drawing as a conceptual foray. The superannuating Pop Art wave that Johns and Rauschenberg enabled before the end of the ’50s served to demoralize the macho mandarins of the Cedar Tavern. They had been confident as they surveyed their swaggering ownership of Art Beach even as the sand was being swept from under their feet. The high tide of artistic anarchy was upon them before they really understood what had occurred. Therefore, to say that Pop Art represented everything they hated would be a gross understatement. And for many years no Pop artist was more despised by the AbEx men’s club than Andy Warhol, whose work brazenly excluded the whole idea of artistic subjectivity, “self-expression,” and the painting as a sacrosanct, unique object and whose personality similarly refuted the idea of the artist as someone with an urgent personal stake in what he committed to a painting or wrought in other media.
Warhol infuriated de Kooning, among others, by claiming only to paint ordinary things that he happened to like, and by painting them in the starkest, most personally uninflected manner, by making art in the easiest way he possibly could: he wasn’t struggling with inner demons, or wresting from paint any sort of transcendental truth, and his work seemed to lampoon the whole idea of artmaking as something intrinsically difficult that carried any risk of failure. For Warhol, the art object didn’t even have to be made by the artist—he just had to attach his signature to it after it came off the assembly line. Warhol did, in fact, put immense labor into his own work and, generally speaking, made most of it himself (with physical help from assistants), but he tauntingly denied doing so whenever he was interviewed. That he intensely cared about what he was doing was a fact he would almost never admit, and certainly never in public; such an admission would have betrayed that he had any emotions about anything, which would have compromised the public image he carefully crafted, for self-protection as well as to stoke its immense fascination for the art press, the mass media, and the elite that would buy his work. Other Pop artists were more than happy to explain themselves and what they were trying to do. By withholding such explanations—or, more accurately, emitting clipped, comical, epigrammatic, and contradictory substitutes for more highfalutin pronouncements—Warhol became the most rarefied and famed exemplar of Pop Art and its only real national, finally international, celebrity.
TWO
One artist who brought a jazz-inflected dissonance into the precincts of the New York School and its polemics has been underrated in histories of the era. Viva once dubbed Larry Rivers “the gag man of modern art,” and besides being a virtuoso painter, he was: in the Cedar Tavern bust-up-the-bar crowd, Rivers was the least swaggering, least didactic of artists, with broad interests in far-out departures from established artistic practices. If the formerly non-objective painters looked to “neo” figurative painting with the surface tropes of AbEx, Rivers’s “history paintings”—among them Washington Crossing the Delaware, Friendship of America and France (Kennedy and de Gaulle), The History of the Russian Revolution, and Dutch Masters—were not what they had in mind.
In his broad parodies of the “history paintings” of the academic past, Rivers used the gestural, painterly techn
iques of the New York School, whose solemnity he treated as an irresistible target for deflating visual jokes, saturated with uninhibited Jewish humor (Lenny Bruce humor), told on canvases more expansive and less portentously ironic than the “serious” productions of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
While Johns and Rauschenberg were prime movers away from AbEx, Rivers was the only talent who comfortably navigated the yawning gap between the New York School and the realm of Pop, socially as well as aesthetically. His antic personality and his finesse at avoiding scraps over other people’s hobbyhorses made him welcome everywhere. While de Kooning once screamed into Warhol’s face that Andy had “destroyed art,” Rivers partied with Warhol and paid appreciative attention to his work.
Rivers was candidly perverse, radically open-minded. His background as a jazz musician, his service in the army, his exposure to the New York social strata alien to the Cedar Tavern crowd, his polymorphic openness to new experiences, gave him something of Duchamp’s detachment from what came and went in art fashion; regardless of Rivers’s skills as draftsman, painter, and sculptor of objects, he never took himself too seriously. When Pop Art popped onto the scene, Rivers had already “gotten the joke” long before the art establishment.
THREE
The myth of Pop Art runs that isolated, disparately spread-about artists in New York, working in isolation from each other, suddenly began producing recognizably related works, and Pop “just sort of happened.” Johns and Rauschenberg had made the world safe for Pop by incorporating mass media images, bits of stray effluvia from the American junk heap. The subversive depictions of targets, maps, flags, sculpted body parts, a goat with an auto tire around its midsection, and other combine paintings, incorporating silkscreened repros from magazines and newspapers, blended with emphatic “evidence of the hand” in the application of paint and encaustic, provided an essential transition between abstraction and Pop.
This is both true and false. Johns and Rauschenberg were forerunners of Pop Art in New York, and some histories refer to them as Pop artists. They made much of the work of the New York School appear stale, self-important, humorless, and boring, but it was anyway.
Johns’s work was austerely controlled, and Rauschenberg’s baroque in its combinatory audacity. Both were cerebral, aloof, reluctant to prescribe or endorse any particular method of reading their works. But both were forthcoming about their unwillingness to get “lost in the painting,” to relinquish control of its elements. The “look” of gestural accident was simply a visual ingredient in a work rather than unplanned discovery. In other words, everything about the work was calculated, however spontaneous it might appear at first glance.
While Johns’s encaustic brushwork looked the way the surfaces of AbEx paintings were supposed to look, its execution was a calculated mimesis, producing the opposite of a projected inner world: Johns inventoried what the eye encountered “out there,” including the techniques of non-objective paintings.
For Rauschenberg, Abstract Expressionism’s spontaneous slathers and drips could be appropriated as mannerisms, combined with commercial paint color samples, bits of found detritus, and silkscreened details from historical fine art paintings and newspaper photographs; he transformed the overheated rhetorical visuals of AbEx into visual pastiche and assemblage; his work was cool, distanced from the emotional associations of its imagery, droll in an assertively outlandish way. Nevertheless, the couple (they were a couple) paid obeisance to their predecessors and thus were assimilated into the canonical hierarchy—certainly more quickly than Larry Rivers, though some early Rivers works were purchased by museums.
One explanation of Pop’s earliest influences can be found in scattered writings of the artist and filmmaker Jack Smith, whose almost secret public performances and pioneering film Flaming Creatures had a powerful influence on Robert Wilson, Andy Warhol, the Theater of the Ridiculous, and other theatrical and visual innovators. Noting that Americans expected art to be “heavy,” ponderous, and solemn, Smith argued that, on the contrary, the most delightful and profound art was “light,” capricious, improvisational, saturated with illogic, chaos, and humor, and that it freely employed the most flamboyant kitsch pop culture had to offer. Smith’s theory seems to be supported by the ease with which ponderous art was accepted by critics and audiences and by the automatic dismissal of works containing irony, humor, and a sense of the ephemeral. The art establishment had been locked into Greenburg’s opinions regarding high culture and taste. Smith sought to pick the lock.
FOUR
Pop Art didn’t spring from the brow of anyone and splash down as ceiling leaks in scattered coldwater studios all over Manhattan. Pop had its own extensive pedigree, dating from the predominantly European phenomena of the early twentieth century, Cubist collages and Dada. Its first cousins were Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Morton Livingston Schamberg, John Heartfield, Sophie Taeuber, Emmy Hemmings, Hugo Ball, Marcel Janco, and Viking Eggeling—a lineage into which Johns and Rauschenberg, Pop or not, can be fitted. Like the Dadaists, Pop artists appropriated familiar bits of “found reality,” including advertisements, commercial lettering, product logos, newspaper headlines, train tickets, and other flotsam and jetsam of mass culture. It is possible that these references were not as well understood by postwar American art audiences, at least not at first.
It happened that many artists whose works had obvious affinities were discovered by art dealers in search of the new between 1955 and 1965—Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Edward Kienholz, Tom Wesselmann, Ray Johnson, Mel Ramos, Ed Ruscha, Marisol, Joe Goode, Robert Indiana, John Chamberlain, George Segal, and Roy Lichtenstein. These artists could be readily linked to new developments in European painting and sculpture, to work by Martial Raysse, Arman, Alain Jacquet, Wolf Vostell, Michaelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, and the British Pop artists. This critical mass could be attributed to the artists’ responses not only to AbEx but to each other’s incorporation of mass media content and materials like neon and billboard advertising into their artwork and to political and cultural shifts in the society at large. A public mystified by abstract painting viscerally responded to imagery and materials familiar from the wider world around them, even when that same public felt unqualified to judge whether this new wave of iconography was truly “art” in an acceptable sense, or merely the activity of a surpassingly large number of eccentric pranksters. When the elite that decided such things began attaching large cultural meaning and, more importantly, cash value to these works, however, the general public—never much concerned about art in the first place—learned to accept the idea that “high art” had shifted into an altogether less intimidating, more instantly understood mode.
It isn’t clear who coined the term, but “Pop” as a specific type of new art most likely acquired its name from critic Lawrence Alloway. Its point was first made by a 1956 collage by British artist Richard Hamilton entitled Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? Hamilton’s zany, overstuffed travesty depicts a basement apartment living room, its interior replete with a woman in pearls on a TV screen chatting on the phone, while a “real” woman in nipple pasties and a lampshade on her head strikes a semirecumbent pose on a sofa; another woman, culled from an ad, in a red dress, vacuum-cleans the upper reaches of a gold-carpeted entrance staircase. Another lampshade incorporates the hood emblem of a Ford automobile. A canned ham stands totemlike on a coffee table. A black-and-white, reel-to-reel tape recorder rests on the floor. A Formica sheet that resembles a black-and-white Jackson Pollock leans at a precarious angle against one wall, mysteriously supporting the legs of a second sofa and an end table. The framed cover of a “Young Romance” comic hangs on the wall; through what look like sliding glass windows revealing the street above, a Warners’ Theater features Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer.
The most instantly attention-grabbing image in Hamilton’s collage is that of a Mr. Universe-type body
builder in a jock strap, his right hand gripping an enormous, phallic Tootsie Pop stick, the round candy end enclosed in red-and-yellow wrapping. The word pop on the candy wrapper pops out from the center of the picture.
Hamilton’s Just what is it . . . has the jumbled horror vacuui effect, stuffed with iconography that Pop artists would adopt as singular, hyperinflated subjects: comics, including dialogue balloons, candies and sweets, parodistic nudes, evocations of early Hollywood, Abstract Expressionist devices detached from their “sincere” contexts, ad design, a clash of sign systems.
Rauschenberg, Rivers, Edward Kienholtz, and Jim Dine mined much of the same territory that Hamilton and other British artists (Eduardo Paolozzi, R. J. Kitaj, David Hockney, Peter Blake) did at roughly the same time. If Hamilton’s collage seems originary, it’s because of the strategic placement of the Tootsie Pop wrapper, which seems to protrude from the bodybuilder’s groin. This is conscious high camp, recalling the embrace by many art movements of the negatively aimed words and phrases that hostile critics used to dismiss them. It seems natural, if not factual, that Hamilton’s outrageous positioning of pop in Just what is it . . . decided the new art’s lasting appellation.
PART TWO
Figment
