by Greil Marcus
You can see the same divide between the 1960s pop art appropriations of comic strip characters by Andy Warhol and Lichtenstein—their paintings of Dick Tracy and the like—and the Dick Tracy rewrites practiced by the late San Francisco collage artist Jess. Jess’s Dick Tracy is in his Tricky Cad casebooks, a vast, obsessive project he pursued from 1954 to 1958 by means of the full-color front page of the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle comics section. This is not appropriation. As Jess cut up Dick Tracy strips every weekend, pasting pieces of the images back in the wrong places, tricking the characters into speaking a gibberish that was at once blank and threatening, paranoid and superrational, gibberish you can now just barely translate, he was engaged in a wrestling match, or declaring war.
First appearing in 1931 as a call to clean up police forces corrupted by Prohibition, by 1954 Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy had become the comic strip version of McCarthyism, the Red Scare, the search for the Enemy Within—but in Jess’s hands, the great crusade to cleanse the country turns dyslexic. DICK TRACY—the words lose their gravity, tumbling into ICK TRA, TRICKD, DICK RACY, TICK R—titles Jess ran across his first Tricky Cad. DIRAC, they go on, KID RAT, ICKY TAR, ICKIART, TRACKY DIRT.
Only barely leaving out the real name hiding in the anagrams—which would have been TRICKY DICK, in the 1950s the liberal’s nickname for Red Hunter Richard Nixon—Jess called his work “a demon-stration of the hermetic critique lockt up in Art.” He was going to provide the key, unlock the art, expose the critique: the story Dick Tracy was telling in spite of itself.
A lot was at stake. This was a time when every form of media carried the message that Your Neighbor Could Be a Communist—or a homosexual, as Jess was. With Tricky Cad as his foil, Jess let the hermetic critique out of its cage: he diffused suspicion throughout the whole of society. “You haven’t given us a naïve answer,” says a policewoman to an old woman in custody. “Lock her up, Murphy.”
“As you know,” says a judge to another woman, stylishly dressed except for her head, which has been replaced by what looks like an upside-down typewriter, “you’ve been found guilty of jail abandonment, and living at home!” “I need no baby,” says the woman in the next panel, suddenly with a head again, taking her stand against everything the American 1950s demanded of her. “Take her away for one year!” says the judge, and we never see her again.
Richard Hamilton joined in this sort of obsessive creation, the nervous exhilaration of collage at its most intense—but he too fell victim to the anxiety of identification and self-affirmation, the anxiety of the dissolution of the artist into his or her material, the anxiety that kept the hands of so many other artists cleaner than his. “Is there anything,” he said in 1976, remembering the question he had asked himself twenty years before, “is there any ingredient which these pop art phenomena have which is incompatible with fine art? I said, is big business incompatible with fine art? No. And I went through a long list of all the things I associated with the art of the mass media and the only element which I thought was not compatible was expendability.
“. . . When Elvis Presley produced a record, you didn’t get the feeling he was making it for next year, he was making it for this week and it really didn’t matter very much when it sold the first four million whether the thing was ever heard again. And I thought, this is something the fine artist cannot stomach, he cannot enter the creative process of making a work of art with an understanding that it’s not going to last until next year or for very much longer than that. He has to approach it with the idea that it has some qualities which are enduring.”
Now, never mind the ignorance here—the blindness to the fact that as part of a tradition, Elvis Presley’s reimaginings of blues and country forms implied a future as well as a past, that just as Elvis Presley’s performance changed the way people looked at their culture and themselves in the present, it changed the demands people would make on the future, and changed the way they understood the past. Never mind that the Los Angeles rock ’n’ roll vocal group the Medallions put out a record called “Buick ’59,” in 1954—because they hoped that post-dating it by five years might keep it on the radio at least that long. Never mind that the Doors saw themselves as much in the tradition of fine art—a tradition within the tradition, the stream of art maudit that carried Blake, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Jarry, Buñuel, Artaud, and Céline to their doorsteps—as in the tradition of rock ’n’ roll, or that for them rock ’n’ roll itself was already a tradition, as full of heroes and martyrs as any Hamilton might appeal to. What’s really interesting is this: if a pop artist as complete as Richard Hamilton can talk like this, did pop art—as a form, as a school, as opposed to those places and moments where it appeared without need of a name, as with “Twentieth Century Fox,” or, four years later, in a stranger, far more shifting shape, with “L.A. Woman,” which is a pop art map of a city, not a person—even exist?
Pop—the sound describes what, in the hermetic critique locked up in the art, the art might have wanted to be. Pop—it’s a balloon, any color you like. It makes an image, then it makes a noise, then it’s gone. All that’s left are shreds of rubber, modern pottery shards, junk you could, if you wanted to, paste into another picture instead of throwing it away. The joke culture has played on certified pop artists is that what they thought was transient, ephemeral, certain to disappear—comic books, 45s, LPs, advertisements—have all lasted. They are stored in expensive art books and CD boxed sets; they are immediately accessible online anywhere in the world.
They cast spells now just as they did thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years ago—and perhaps the purest, the simplest, and most complete of all pop art works are about this casting of spells. These are the untitled Verifax collages the California assemblage artist Wallace Berman made from the mid-1960s to his death in 1976: sheets of images, like sheets of stamps, sometimes twelve, sometimes dozens, each image that of a hand holding up a tiny transistor radio, sometimes five radios at a time, spread out in a crescent like a poker hand.
Every picture was that of the same hand, the same radio—but for every replicated picture there was a different image where the radio speaker should have been. You spot a nude couple; you see Charlie Watts and Mick Jagger, a key, a motorcycle, a football player, a gun and an iron cross, a Hebrew letter, a hospital bed that looks like someone just died in it, a still from a porn movie, an astronaut, leaves, a rose, a spider, Kenneth Anger as a teenage actor, a clock, an ear, Allen Ginsberg, James Brown, fancy people emerging from a restaurant, Bob Dylan, a torn concert ticket. The Doors weren’t there— Berman was not a fan9—but it didn’t matter: the form Berman created included them even in their formal absence. As he worked, they were on the radio, and the kind of music they made raised Berman’s hand, holding the radio, to the ear, to a friend’s ear, even a passerby’s, to the air. Except that, in the greater game of appropriation that is advertising, finally the Doors were there. In 2011, an iPhone/iTunes commercial showed various albums popping up on the iPhone screen. Visually it was precisely a new version of Berman’s transistor, and as clear a transposition as could be: one modern moment after another, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Justin Bieber’s My Worlds Acoustic, PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake, the Clash’s London Calling, Bright Eyes’ The People’s Key, Au Revoir Simone’s Still Night, Still Light, Hayes Carll’s KMAG YOYO, a score more albums against a bright white background, ending, in the border of a glowing black iPhone, with a visual gong, like an anchor dropped in time, with The Doors.10
Berman’s gesture, the way the radio was held, turned the sets of pictures into an incantation—and turned every variation into a talisman. Taken together, the little pictures made a field of images, a force field; the field vibrated. It was the most casual sort of creation, made of the most ephemeral materials—the radios no longer exist, the pop culture references were supposed to be yesterday’s news a week later, no one knows anymore what the photocopying trademark Verifax signifies, but the embrace of everyday cultur
e as a lost mine, as a repository of secrets, as an open-air museum filled with clues hidden in plain sight, was absolute.
With this cheap, easy to make, infinitely copyable art, Berman did everything pop ever implied. And he caught its theory, which is really just a dare. What is certain to disappear is certain to last, the pop dare says to whoever is afraid of pop—but what is certain is that the standard of value, on which the presupposition that certain things were made to endure and others were made to be forgotten, will change. Don’t worry about what will last, and what won’t; don’t flatter yourself that your intent, your commitment to the enduring, is anything but vanity. What lasts for a decade is no more than a conspiracy of taste. What lasts for a century is an accident.
In 1986 the punk artist Shawn Kerri talked about her 1980 work in Los Angeles, her handbills and posters for local punk bands like the Circle Jerks or the Germs—work that not so many years later was being included in an expensive art book. “There are a lot of my handbills that became classics in their day,” she said. “Like the one with the mohawked skull breaking through the Germs’ ‘coat of arms’—a blue circle, either worn on a black armband or spray-painted wherever you found a flat surface. The true initiates had a cigarette burn on their left wrist, and quite a few people had it tattooed on themselves. The ‘Germs Return’ flier had quite an impact on people. It was done for the show they performed shortly before Darby Crash, their lead singer, killed himself with an overdose.” Crash had shot up before going on stage; the idea was to die on stage, in the middle of a song. It didn’t work; by the time he died the band had run out of songs and the performance was over.
“He didn’t know what I was going to do,” Kerri said. “He didn’t tell me what he wanted—he only said, ‘do a flier.’ I did it, and when I showed him the art, he was strangely excited by it. It was like a pre-post-mortem. I wondered later if he liked the Death’s Head motif (the skull and hairdo are undoubtedly him) because he had suicide on his mind at the time.”
“I was proud as hell of my handbills,” Kerri said, summing up, looking for what made her work a thing in itself, what made it art, a step back from life, a look right into it, a picture of what life would be if life could see itself as the woman looking saw it. “I’d see them all over the place. And you know, I’ve never gotten the same thrill out of having one of my cartoons printed in a magazine as much as seeing one of my old fliers—something I did for a gig the week before—laying in the gutter. Seeing it all mashed and dirty thrilled me, because that was how I was living, too. It looked exactly like my life.”
Art doesn’t have to imitate life to be art—certainly the Doors’ music never did. But art may have to translate life, lift it up, cast it down, take it elsewhere, bring it back from the dead, pronounce the funeral oration, again and again. For a time, at the beginning and the end, no artists faced that glamorous void with more flair, curiosity, and heedlessness than a group that, with their faces on their own billboard looking down from one end of Sunset Strip, with “Twentieth Century Fox” defaced and rewrote the billboards that were already there.
“Twentieth Century Fox,” The Doors (Elektra, 1967).
Les années pop, 1956–1968, ed. Mark Francis (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2001).
Tornados, “Telstar,” (Decca, UK, #1, London, US, #1).
Lawrence Alloway quoted in The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1990), 43.
Eduardo Paolozzi, I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything (1947). Included in The Independent Group, 97. See also The Jet Age Compendium: Paolozzi at Ambit, ed. David Brittain (London: Four Corners Books, 2009), a collection of Paolozzi’s 1967–79 contributions to the galvanic avant-garde quarterly: a chronicle of pinups and Vietnam, as if both are at war over the artist’s mind, with Vietnam winning. “The strongest doors in the world are those that guard the treasures in the great banks, insurance offices, and safe deposits,” Paolozzi wrote in Ambit 33 in 1967, tracing a theme he would return to over the years. “They are massive pieces of steel, weighing several tons, and boasting a formidable array of bolts, combination locks and placement. The sacrifice of many measures to one, also is often the wisest disposition of forces. Upon the stage, spectacular arrangement is constructed almost entirely on this principle. The greater the number of figures supporting, or wizards. One came to me not long ago with a brainstorm. At that particular time, we had among our clients a large manufacturer of chewing gum and also one of the leading makers of toothpaste. Our boy had an idea for two new products destined for the large Italian population of the States: garlic-flavored chewing gum and garlic toothpaste. After all these years, I am still wondering did we pass up a million?”
Peter Smithson quoted in The Independent Group, 43.
Dennis Potter quoted in Michael Sragow, “BBC Pro Shows ABC’s of Dream Writing,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, March 29, 1987.
Chuck Berry, “No Money Down” (Chess, 1955).
Kirk Varnedoe, A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern (New York: Abrams, 1990).
Marianne Faithfull quoted in Behind the Music: Marianne Faithfull (VH1, 1999).
Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956). Included in The Independent Group, 69. See also GM, “The Vortex of Gracious Living,” in Richard Hamilton, ed. Hal Foster (Cambridge MA: October/ MIT, 2010).
———, On expendability. See The Independent Group, 40. Jim Morrison had his own argument. “That’s what I love about films—they’re so perishable,” he said in 1969. “One big atomic explosion and all the celluloid melts. There’d be no film. There’s a beautiful scene in a book called Only Lovers Left Alive . . . this guy’s making a foray into enemy territory—the kids have inherited the earth; all the adults have committed suicide—and at night he stumbles into this abandoned building and he hears a strange noise. What it is is a gang of little kids between six and twelve years old, huddled around a dead television set, and one of them is imitating the television shows of old. I think that’s beautiful. And that’s why poetry appeals to me so much—because it’s eternal. As long as there are people, they can remember words and combinations of words. Nothing else can survive a holocaust, but poetry and songs. No one can remember an entire novel. No one can describe a film, a piece of sculpture, a painting. But so long as there are human beings, songs and poetry can continue.” From Jerry Hopkins, “The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, July 26, 1969, collected in The Rolling Stone Interviews (New York: Paperback Library, 1971), 212.
Medallions, “Buick ’59” (Dootone, 1954).
Jess, Tricky Cad. See Jess, A Grand Collage, 1951–1993, ed. Robert J. Berthof (Buffalo NY: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1993), and Made in U.S.A.: An Americanization in Modern Art, The ’50s and ’60s, ed. Sidra Stich (Berkeley: California, 1987).
———, “demon-stration” (1969). Quoted in Rebecca Solnit, Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era (San Francisco, City Lights 1990), 38.
Wallace Berman, Support the Revolution (Amsterdam: Institute for Contemporary Art, 1992). Includes many Verifax collages, some in color. See also Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle, ed. Kristine McKenna (New York/Santa Monica: D.A.P./ Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2005).
Shawn Kerri quoted in Paul D. Grushkin, The Art of Rock: Posters from Presley to Punk (New York: Abbeville, 1987), 442 (interview), 443 (art).
Wallace Berman, untitled¸ 1964
End of the Night
THE APPEARANCE OF the Doors marked a verge in the history of Los Angeles rock ’n’ roll, of Los Angeles, and of the United States. That is because in their music you could hear a portent that the future, the near future, contained stories no one imagined they would want to hear, that people would not be able to turn away from, that would keep people awake, worried at the slightest anomalous sound, terrified and disgusted by their own fantasies. After Charles Manson, people could look back at “The End,” “Strange Days,
” “People Are Strange,” and “End of the Night” and hear what Manson had done as if it had yet to happen, as if they should have known, as if, in the deep textures of the music, they had.
As it was published for the first time, in 1971, before it was censored, Ed Sanders’s The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion portrayed a Los Angeles that in its secret dreams imagined itself swimming in its own blood. He described a city full of people who, when they awoke on the morning of August 9, 1969, to learn that at 10050 Cielo Drive, Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Voytek Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and Steven Parent had been slaughtered at the house that Tate, almost nine months pregnant, had shared with her husband, Roman Polanski—slaughtered, it would turn out, at Manson’s direction by members of his band, Parent shot, the rest together stabbed more than a hundred times, the bodies left in cryptic postures suggesting the rituals of an unknown church—all but ran to their bathrooms to wash their hands. It didn’t matter that early in the morning of the next day, the cult leader along with his followers chose at random the wealthy couple Rosemary and Leno LaBianca to kill, and smeared HEALTER SKELTER, after the Beatles song Manson had deciphered as a call to apocalypse, on their walls, or that earlier in 1969, on their album 20/20, the Beach Boys had included “Never Learn Not to Love,” credited to D. Wilson/Charles Manson, or that the tune, one of many Manson had attempted to have recorded, was originally titled “Cease to Exist.” The exact details of the crimes were so specifically insistent on a separate reality that people seized on them as if they were proof that, in a social sense, the crimes were not real; the desperation with which people fetishized the facts of the horror gave the denial that it had anything to do with them the lie.
