TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102290/1022400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.7 KB | 185 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 94

Upstairs and Downstairs at MOMA


A survey of the intersection of art and popular culture gets
gridlocked

By ROBERT HUGHES


    Not in a long time, perhaps never, has a major show at New
York City's Museum of Modern Art started with such awful press
as "High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture," which kicks
off MOMA's 1990-91 season. For the past few months one has
heard the baying of critics as they hurled themselves against
the turkey wire, eager to fix their fangs in it. Old-style
formalities like seeing the exhibition or reading its catalog
were dropped as writers like Barbara Rose in the Journal of Art
expressed their proleptic disapproval of what the show would
be and do. And when at last it opened, Roberta Smith in the New
York Times denounced it as "a disaster . . . arbitrary,
peculiar and maligning." More maligned than maligning, one might
think.

    There have been two lines of attack. The first: by putting
"low" culture -- graffiti, mass print, caricature, comic strips
and so forth -- in the museum along with "high," MOMA, under
the new curatorial leadership of Kirk Varnedoe, has abandoned
its sacred mission of cultural discrimination. The second, and
more hip, version: MOMA is too hidebound and elitist an
institution to deal with popular culture, or with the recent
"high" culture of the '80s, at all. As the clippings pile up,
one may expect to see many variations on these themes. One,
common to both, is that the show has too many familiar works
-- as though there were a slew of undiscovered Cubist,
Surrealist or Pop masterpieces lurking out there, miraculously
ignored by the world's museums.

    It has been the unlucky fate of "High and Low" to attract
more than the usual dose of the New York art world's
free-floating anxiety. Art-world anxiety is not like real-world
anxiety: it is even more paranoid. What the art world frets
about is how Varnedoe, whose appointment as director of
painting and sculpture at MOMA has made him America's most
powerful museum figure in the modern and contemporary field,
will represent all its factional interests. Hence his every
action is scrutinized and picked to bits, as Etruscan
haruspices once examined sacrificial livers for a sign of the
future.

    Varnedoe and the show's co-curator, Adam Gopnik (art critic
of the New Yorker), have taken on a sprawling, slippery,
tangled theme -- a survey of the transactions between fine art
and popular culture over three-quarters of a century, from
Cubism to the '80s. They set out to show how some "high"
artists raided "low" (popular and mass) culture for their own
purposes. Not all of them, needless to say, did. You won't find
the visual argot of advertising, news photography, graffiti or
comic strips in the work of the great Apollonians of the past
hundred years, from Monet and Matisse to Richard Diebenkorn.
But this vernacular, Gopnik and Varnedoe rightly argue, is
essential to a grasp of Cubism, Dada, Russian Constructivism,
Surrealism and their European offshoots, along with a great
deal of American art produced after 1950.

    Artists have always been much less snobbish about their
sources than the idealizing critics who erect value systems on
the back of their work. The process came to a climax in the
'60s with Pop art. Moreover, since "low" sources cycle into
"high" products that are then cycled back, as style, into "low"
areas again, the supposedly rigid divisions between fine and
popular art are more like a maze of mirrors, one reflecting the
other ad infinitum.

    The idea that "low" sources somehow debase the integrity of
"high" art is moonshine, of course. It always has been: Goya's
Caprichos, for instance, draw heavily on folk proverbs, crude
popular drama and 18th century (mainly English) caricature.
Miro was inspired by comic strips and folk scatology. And
Philip Guston in the 1970s was able to attain his measure of
greatness as a tragic painter only through a free,
uncondescending use of motifs from George Herriman's great
strip Krazy Kat and the underground comics of Robert Crumb. Nor
can MOMA be accused of pandering to mass taste by exhibiting
old comic strips, since what mass taste really likes these days
is Van Gogh and Picasso.

    The show's problems lie elsewhere. The first is the
subject's diffuseness, its almost limitless size. Gopnik and
Varnedoe have taken four categories to look at: graffiti,
caricature, advertising and the comics. But what about the
movies, TV or photography? One can sympathize with the
curators' problem: any story must have a narrative core, and to
secure one this account has been heavily edited. Nevertheless
one misses references to these forms -- even though, if
exhibited with any density, they would have made the show
unendurably prolix.

    The size of the subject virtually ensures that the kind of
narrative Gopnik and Varnedoe present works better in the
catalog than on the walls. In fact, it is hard to see how any
museum installation -- linear and one-track by nature -- could
convey a real sense of the peculiar eddies of cultural flux and
reflux that they have set out to describe. Abstract
Expressionism, for instance, tended to set itself above popular
culture -- yet one of its true icons, De Kooning's 1950 study
for Woman, had a smile cut from an ad for Camel cigarettes. The
work does not appear in the show. There are shallow passages:
the bay devoted to Russian Constructivism, Futurism and the
Bauhaus, for instance, is mingy. Yet many excellent works of
art proliferate, from Cubist collages to exquisite, large-scale
paintings by Cy Twombly and some of Robert Rauschenberg's early
combines, like Rebus, 1955; from James Rosenquist's room-size
F-111, 1964-65, and a reassembly of some of the passionate,
gaudy fragments from Claes Oldenburg's Store of 1961-62 to
Brancusi's phallic bronze, Princess X, 1916, and one of the
greatest of all Legers, The City, 1919.

    Nevertheless, though the show affords plenty of opportunity
for aesthetic enjoyment, it is about argument, and works of art
don't "argue" in a discursive way. Meanwhile the lost
environment of popular culture to which they relate can only
get into the museum as emblematic snippets, without the casual
encircling power it once had. To popular culture the '70s are
already medieval and the century's teens virtually Pleistocene.
The curators do their best with this, reprinting front pages
of Parisian newspapers that Picasso, Braque and Gris cut their
collage materials from, or hanging photographs of the kinds of
shopwindow display that, they persuasively argue, reinforced
the cult of the Surrealist object in the '20s. But the effort
to put long-gone popular culture in a museum is like trying to
resurrect an old perfume in a room.

    Consequently, the show reads as a set of illustrations to
the book, for only in the book can the comparison of demotic
source with final object be done with the necessary detail.
Varnedoe and Gopnik have gone into their subject with vast
scholarly elan, mining arcana from the areas where art and
life, under the impulse of a modernism striving to refresh
itself, are layered. If you want to know what was the catalog
model of Marcel Duchamp's urinal, which nursery book Max Ernst
got a particular collage element from, or which frame panels
from 1962 war comics drawn by Russ Heath were conflated by Roy
Lichtenstein to produce Okay, Hot-Shot, 1963, you need look no
further.

    But the catalog is not a mass of fanzine trivia. It is the
indispensable text on its subject, whose every page vibrates
with the authors' enthusiasm for the "high," their curiosity
about the "low" and their richly inflected sense of the complex
traffic between the two. Gopnik and Varnedoe write better than
their critics. The next-to-last essay ("Contemporary
Reflections," by Gopnik, covering a wide swath from David Salle
and Cindy Sherman to the short-lived graffiti movement) is, on
its own, the best summary yet written of American art in the
'80s.

    Yet the art the essay covers is scarcely represented on the
walls. Why should these artists be considered worth writing
about but not worth showing? You can see why MOMA might object
on grounds of quality, since so much of the work was so poor.
And you can't put lost subway graffiti in a museum anyway. But
to restrict one's coverage of the '80s to Jeff Koons, Jenny
Holzer and the admirable Elizabeth Murray is tokenism. If the
media-obsessed art of the '80s was worth putting in the catalog
it should have been on the walls, if only to illustrate how
mass media became gradually exhausted as a topic of fine-art
reflection.