by Greil Marcus
“I think we were actually fundamentally anti-pop,” the architect Peter Smithson of the Independent Group said in 1976. “That is,” he said, “the interest in current phenomena, current imagery—imagery that was thrown up by production, by advertising and so on, that was studied by the Independent Group—each person in the group was studying it for his own reasons. One emerges from it as one went into it, with more information, with one’s lines established. But certainly, those who used the information directly—isn’t that a handsome picture or a handsome layout which I could parody for a fine art picture?—I really think that is a completely meaningless activity.”
It’s no fun to read this argument today—“one emerges from it” as if from a swamp, from the modern market in which people actually live, “as one went into it,” confirmed in one’s conviction that one cannot be changed by the market, that one is immune to it, superior to it. “One’s lines” are “established”—that is, one’s distance from the world in which people actually live is plotted on a map.
But you don’t feel any of this coming out of Paolozzi’s work. You feel that thrill of mechanical reproduction—the collage maker, the person who saw Intimate Confessions on the newsstand and said, I have to have that, who then brought it home and said, Now, what am I going to do with this?
This is someone who liked to argue with what wasn’t yet called pop culture—the cheap, fast sounds and images that in the years immediately after the Second World War seemed to be coming together everywhere, the sounds and images connecting to each other in ways that seemed at once natural and inexplicable, the artifacts of this emerging folk culture of the modern market speaking in code, speaking a secret language. Cutting and pasting, Paolozzi is someone who is trying to learn that language and speak it himself. You can sense someone saying, This stuff is out there, everyone is seeing it, everyone is responding to it, I am responding to it. I’m turned on by the woman on the cover of this month’s Intimate Confessions, but I’ll bet someone else is much more excited by a Coca-Cola bottle—and not in a different way. I’ve got to do something with my reaction—I’ve got to make it into my own language. I’ve got to tell people about this. I’ve got to make this into something so I don’t forget it—not the magazine, I can keep that, but the feeling I had when I saw it on the newsstand this morning.
“I don’t make the mistake that high culture mongers do of assuming that because people like cheap art, their feelings are cheap, too,” the late filmmaker Dennis Potter once said, explaining why pop songs were so important in his work, from Pennies from Heaven to The Singing Detective to Lipstick on Your Collar, his paean to the 1950s, the time he shared with the Independent Group—and Potter was also defining a pop ethos, defining what I think is happening in Paolozzi’s collage.
“When people say, ‘Oh, listen, they’re playing our song,’” Potter said, “they don’t mean, ‘Our song, this little cheap, tinkling, syncopated piece of rubbish is what we felt when we met.’ What they’re saying is, ‘That song reminds me of the tremendous feeling we had when we met.’ Some of the songs I use are great anyway, but the cheaper songs are still in the direct line of descent from David’s Psalms. They’re saying, ‘Listen, the world isn’t quite like this, the world is better than this, there is love in it,’ ‘There’s you and me in it,’ or ‘The sun is shining in it.’ So-called dumb people, simple people, uneducated people, have as authentic and profound depth of feeling as the most educated on earth. And anyone who says different is a fascist.”
Chuck Berry’s “No Money Down” is as much a fantasy, a montage of advertisements and commercial slogans, as I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything. It was a follow-up to Berry’s first hit, the 1955 “Maybellene.” In that first song the singer is chasing Maybellene’s Cadillac in his beat-up Ford—he catches her, but the chase draws the Ford’s last breath. So now he’s down at the dealer’s, buying his own Cadillac. The use of a melodramatic, stop-time beat later used for the theme of the Pink Panther movies, with Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau—da dadada da da . . . da . . .—lets Berry open the story in the slyest, most confiding voice, as if a crime is about to be committed. This is a great story, he’s whispering. This is much too good to tell out loud. You won’t believe what I got away with.
The car salesman tells Berry he can have whatever he wants—in an hour. Berry starts off demanding a yellow convertible. He wants a big motor—with “jet off-take.” The salesman doesn’t blink; Berry doesn’t slow down. In fact he picks up the pace, and now you can see everyone in the bar, on the street, wherever it is that he’s telling this story, gathering around to hear what happens next, what’s at stake, who wins, who loses. Now the storyteller is practically a preacher, offering salvation: what it is—how to get it.
I told the car dealer, Berry says, that I wanted a complete fold-out bed in my back seat—and before he could get a word out I told him what else I wanted. It was 1955, but I could see the future, and I wasn’t going to wait: short-wave radio, a telephone and a television. He looked like his hair was going to catch fire, but he said yes, and I didn’t stop. Four carburetors, straight exhaust—I said, “I’m burning aviation fuel, no matter what the cost.” Air horns. A spotlight that would scatter crowds like cockroaches. He was turning green when we sat down in the office, and I wrote it down: five-year guarantee. I made his head spin with deductibles, notes, liability, and then I pulled the ace: no money down. Anything, he said. He blinked twice and gave me the pen. I put down my John Hancock; he wrote John Smith.
If Eduardo Paolozzi and Chuck Berry aren’t speaking exactly the same language, though they probably are, they can certainly talk to each other, each telling the other stories he’d want to hear, and pass on. But the kind of apology, explanation, and rescue job one has to perform on Paolozzi—rescuing him from the doubts and fears of those around him—would be completely meaningless with “No Money Down.”
It would be ridiculous. In terms of detail, layering, recoloring, collage, glamour, and speed, with “No Money Down”—or Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” or “No Particular Place to Go,” or for that matter K. C. Douglas’s “Mercury Blues,” or the Beach Boys’ “409” or “Fun, Fun, Fun”—there’s no apparent distance at all.
Whatever distance or irony there might have been in anyone’s intention—Chuck Berry’s, K. C. Douglas’s, Brian Wilson’s—is long gone before the song ever gets out into the world, to the public, into the market, where people will start talking about it. After all, in the terms of the market, car songs are part car, and cars are part car songs. You hear them in the car.
Peter Smithson’s questions of aesthetics—his speaking of establishing one’s lines, of “isn’t that a handsome picture or a handsome layout which I could parody for a fine art picture”—are really questions of ethics: how one remains clean. Such a question can hardly come up in pop music, which when it began, in the 1950s, was not only part car. With payola—with small, regional, independent record labels like Berry’s Chess in Chicago or the Penguins’ Dootone in Los Angeles paying disc jockeys to play their records, the only way they could get their records on a radio dominated by huge New York corporations like Columbia and RCA—with bribery, lies, manipulation, and even extortion, pop music was part used car salesman. But there are all kinds of salesmen.
In 1990, the late Kirk Varnedoe, then curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, published a book called A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern. The title—and the theory it spoke for—came from a stone marker that stands at the gates of the Rugby School in England, one of the most elite, exclusive, and aristocratic schools in the world. Varnedoe rests all of modern art on this stone, which commemorates the exploits of one William Ellis Webb, who, in 1823, “with” the stone says, “a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the rugby game.”
It seems to me that the determinant
word here is less disregard—for rules, expectations, and so on—than fine. That is, we are being reassured that modern art remains art—and we are being reassured that it remains the province of the sort of people who for centuries have attended the Rugby School, or who sit on the boards of art museums. We are being told modern art will not go too far—say disregard without a modifier, after all, and you have no idea what kind of riffraff you might have to let in next.
We are being told that we can keep one sort of art here and another sort of art over there, based on class, intent, and attitude—the class, intent, and attitude of the audience as well as the artist. A fine disregard—art remains the province of those fine enough to appreciate it on the terms on which it should be appreciated, not to mention those in a position to disregard the rules, as opposed to those who aren’t.
It’s because of this idea of what art is, and what it is for—and I am singling out Kirk Varnedoe only because he gave such a precise voice to what is, in fact, a vast chorus—that there is, I think, really very little true pop visual art. There’s very little that actually tells stories of and in the modern market, that does not keep its distance: its distance from the images it seizes, its distance from the noise it seeks to replicate, its distance from the speed, flash, and glamour it wishes to capture and contain—its distance from itself.
The 1990 show High and Low, curated by Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, exhibited works of pop art alongside their “handsome picture or a handsome layout which I could parody for a fine art picture” sources. I was curious to go, because I had never understood why George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strips, or Steve Canyon and True Romance comic books, were lesser art—or, rather, why they were not greater art—than the pop art classics Philip Guston and Roy Lichtenstein had made of them.
Displayed together, there was one undeniable difference: the Guston and Lichtenstein pictures were bigger. I remembered the late San Francisco painter, filmmaker, and assemblage artist Bruce Conner once saying he had to leave New York because he liked to work on what he called real scale—and because of the cost of living in New York when he left in the 1950s, Conner said, he would have had to work on Roy Lichtenstein scale. Here it was.
I looked at the huge pictures, still baffled. What was added, or for that matter taken away? Where was the critical vision—or any vision, beyond that of the original artists? There’s no equivalent in Lichtenstein’s remakes of Steve Canyon and True Romance panels to what members of the Situationist International were doing with them in Paris at the same time.
The Situationist International was a tiny, revolutionary circle of critics, so extreme they celebrated the 1965 Watts riots as “a critique of urban planning.” They had a sense of humor. They photocopied favorite comics panels and put new words in the speech balloons, thus forcing square-jawed Steve and teary Priscilla to speak of alienation and the Paris Commune as if people actually cared about such things. By contrast, what Lichtenstein offered was not rewriting but, in that word utterly loaded with elitism, privilege, entitlement—with droit du seigneur—appropriation. The artist is saying, I myself have found this image strangely appealing, powerful, odd, perverse, charming, amusing. Now I’ll translate it—or, really give it voice, let it speak to the audience that matters, because on its own terms, and our terms, it is mute. I will give it the imprimatur of art—otherwise, it will pass as if it had never been. You can imagine the Doors a few years down the line, a year or two after being dropped by their label, singing “Twentieth Century Fox,” or even “Break on Through (To the Other Side)” in just this way: We always knew there wasn’t any other side—we wrote this song with a raised eyebrow at people who thought there was!
This is not pop art—art that wants to, that can, that does tell stories about the modern market of which it is a part, or that, in whatever manner, it wishes to join—and it’s not art that can really hear the stories the market is telling. This art—like Robert Rauschenberg’s collages, the lifeless Retroactive 1, from 1964, with John F. Kennedy pointing a finger at the center and an astronaut in the top left corner, though even Rauschenberg’s much better work, such as the 1963 Kite, is not really different, or James Rosenquist’s collage murals, such as his 1960–61 President Elect, unless it was 1964, which is even more cynical, even more a matter of an artist superior to the subject: Kennedy smile, chocolate cake, Chevrolet—is all distance.
You can see, and feel, this distance dissolve when what’s before you is a kind of frenzy of recombination, of translation, of an artist diving all the way into his or her material, certain there is a secret in the noise and speed and promises of post-war life, certain that the artist can find the secret and make it into a story anyone can understand.
A few—not many—did their work here. As opposed to Rauschenberg’s this-stuff-in-our-cultural-atmosphere-is-sort-of-weird-to-me-it-ought-to-be-sort-of-weird-to-you, Richard Hamilton’s unmatched House Beautiful collage—his famous Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? —which is a much better way of asking the question “What makes modern art modern?”—is almost real life. You can’t look at this and just get it, mentally write it up, which is to say write it off: establish your own distance from it.
In 1956, the year Hamilton made his collage, my family moved into a new, modest, but absolutely modern house in Menlo Park, California, just down from San Francisco. It was an Eichler house, built on the model of Rudolf Schindler’s experimental Kings Road House, which the Austrian modernist constructed in West Hollywood in 1922 and occupied until his death in 1953.
The Schindler-Eichler designs were all flat planes and flat roofs, sliding glass doors instead of ordinary external walls, rooms open to the outside and to each other rather than protected, segmented areas drawing lines between construction and nature, between kitchen and conversation. Whether built as a single work of art after the First World War by Schindler or mass-produced after the Second World War by Joseph Eichler, these were utopian houses. They were designed to affirm a connection between the people in the houses and the world in which they lived, and to bring the people who lived in the houses closer to each other.
If I’d seen Richard Hamilton’s Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? in 1956, when we crossed the threshold of our piece of modernism, I would have been scared to death—as scared, and as thrilled, as I was when, in the same house, at the same time, I first heard Elvis Presley and Little Richard.
Just What Is It—in the picture you see the ancestor portrait on the wall next to the gigantic, framed Young Romance comic book cover, the nearly naked Charles Atlas muscleman and the even more naked wife with a party-animal lampshade on her head and one hand cupped under her huge, tinfoil-nippled, torpedo-shaped left breast. You see the Ford logo, the movie playing just outside the enormous picture window—Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, as if a harbinger of the blackface pop that culture would wear across the coming decade. You see the tape recorder running on the floor, the TV on, the Hormel ham displayed as an art object on the coffee table, which actually has coffee on it—when I look at the picture today I think I can see what I would have seen in 1956, but wouldn’t have been able to put into words.
I see a world where everything is of equal value, but where everything is valuable: where, therefore, cultural distinctions are meaningless, and impossible to make even if they are meaningful.
I see sexual anarchy: precisely the sort of suburban sexual anarchy—from Playboy to wife-swapping to the 1950s epidemic of adultery and divorce—that would sell American magazines across the coming decade, until the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s made it all seem redundant and quaint. In documentaries about the time, you can see a teenage Marianne Faithfull speak in grainy footage, from a long-forgotten British interview show; it’s about 1965. “If everyone did what you seem to be advocating,” an overstuffed man says to Mick Jagger’s then-girlfriend, future heroin addict, and punk avenger,
the harrumphing man speaking to the thin blonde girl with the angel’s face and convent voice, “do you not agree that the whole structure of society would just collapse?” “Yes,” she says with a gay smile, her tone summoning up a kingdom of indulgence her interrogator will never know, “wouldn’t it be lovely? I think I’m really powerful. They could—they’ll smash me, probably. But I want to try.”
That was the future contained in Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? Looking into Hamilton’s picture I see a beckoning into a dangerous funhouse—not all that different from the beckoning of the witch who lures the children she eats into her oven by means of a house made of candy.
The piece is not very big: twelve inches by eighteen and a half inches. It is balanced and elegant. You can sense the fun Hamilton had making it, and you can sense his nervousness—Have I said enough, have I said too much, is this what makes today’s homes so different, so appealing, so diabolical?
There is an unlocking going on here—the creation of a bizarre but nevertheless obvious tableau in order to get behind the mask pop culture was already placing over the face of modernism, modern living, modern life. Comparing Hamilton’s collage to most of what has gone down in history as pop art is like comparing a polite cocktail party to a drunk backing you into a corner and ranting about the price of gas, his whore of a wife, and how the Jews rule the world.
