TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102891/1028400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.4 KB | 174 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 102

Wallowing in the Mass Media Sea


Brash and accessible, the Pop style revolutionized the art world,
for better or worse -- but what was its lasting value? A big
London show suggests some answers.

By ROBERT HUGHES


    How you feel about Pop art depends, to some extent, on
how old you are. Nobody who was born around 1940 and came of
age as a "consumer of images" in the 1960s is likely to react
to the big Pop art survey now at the Royal Academy of Arts in
London (through Dec. 15) in the same way as someone born after
1960. The oldie remembers the exuberant optimism of art's
embrace of the mass media that lay at the core of Pop:
superficial, maybe, but promising a fresh world of demotic
feeling. The younger visitor, whose baby sitter was a TV set,
is more likely to wonder what the fuss was about. Haven't we
always been denizens of the electronic empire -- fixated but
skeptical, knowing how it cons us, yet unable to jump clear of
the game of image manipulation?

    Where did the Arcadian side of Pop go? Down the memory
hole, into the unrecoverable past, along with the America it
represented. The crass, brash commercial imagery that the Pop
artists seized on is still there, looming even larger than it
did 30 years ago, but it no longer offers art the same
possibilities. The optimism of '60s Pop makes it look more
romantic than it used to. Having been propaganda for its own
culture, some of it has turned into history painting of a quite
poignant sort. Robert Rauschenberg's Retroactive II, 1964, with
its spaceman and its young, glamorous, dead J.F.K., might well
be the last affectionate tribute to a political figure produced
by a major American artist -- you can't imagine an intelligent
person feeling the same hero worship for Kennedy today, let
alone for Reagan or Bush. Much of one's re-encounter with Pop
is colored by the pathos of lost illusions.

    Pop art, as Andy Warhol said, was "about liking things."
Around 1960 -- actually a few years before that, if you date it
from the early combine-paintings of Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns'
flags and targets and, earlier in the '50s still, the work of
Larry Rivers -- a number of young artists emerged in New York
City, Paris and London who had little in common beyond their
curiosity about the largely disparaged sea of mass media and
commercial persuasion: ads, billboards, newsprint, TV montage
and all kinds of kitsch. In the '20s Dadaists and Surrealists
had been fascinated by this too, but Pop art dived into it with
a kind of wallowing abandon.

    The show firmly reminds us that although America was where
the culture of Pop art triumphed, London was actually where the
term originated. Its very first visual use was in a 1956
collage by the British artist Richard Hamilton, Just what is it
that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, in which
a body-builder hero is holding an enormous phallic sucker
labeled POP, and a blown-up frame from a romance comic -- a
prediction of the as yet undone work of Roy Lichtenstein --
hangs on the wall. Nor, just for the record, was this the only
time the Brits were ahead of the Yanks. The chrome-plated
whiskey bottles and other bibelots that New York's Jeff Koons
was doing a few years ago were, as they politely say,
"anticipated" in 1966 in a chrome-plated steel cast of a peasant
chair by London's Clive Barker.

    Pop art was the first accessible style of international
Modernism; it dissolved the tensions that had existed, in Europe
as in America, between avant-garde art and the general public.
Consequently it set in motion enormous changes in the art market
and in public attitudes toward the new. It was art about
consumption, and it sat up and begged to be consumed. It also
fed back, with incredible speed, into the domain of popular
culture -- partly because it was so easily, and at times
misleadingly, reproducible. (An early Lichtenstein like
Masterpiece, 1962, inflates with complications when liberated
from a comic-strip frame; reproduced in print, it collapses back
into one again.)

    This meant that Pop could flood the culture, especially in
America, with an ease that Abstract Expressionism could not
possibly rival. The collectors, to quote the English dealer John
Kasmin, "found it immediately easy and accessible. Everything
added up for them: you make money out of soap flakes, and buy
art based on soap-flake advertisements." The difficulties were
invented later, mainly by critics who wanted to claim for Pop
the depth and resonance of "classical" Modernism. You can't read
what some of them wrote about the supposed profundities of
Warhol's alienation without wanting to laugh out loud.

    Is it an accident that the aspects of Pop that seem to
have lasted best are the very characteristics of a work of art
that Pop was supposed to have expelled -- namely, metaphor and
a certain mystery? Hardly, and this only underscores the
dangers of treating Pop art as though it were a homogeneous
movement. Mel Ramos' waxen cutie leaning on a tire looks boring
today, and the footnotes to Duchamp spun out by French Pop
artists and members of the Fluxus group seem inert when they are
not merely silly.

    But on the other hand, the early work of James Rosenquist
and Claes Oldenburg has lost none of its power. With Oldenburg
the vitality comes from his wild metaphors of the world as body
-- hard things drooping into softness, small things turning
mountainous, a vision that seems to reach back to Bruegel and
can make a crude enlarged plaque of some cuts of supermarket
meat look like the site of a massacre. With Rosenquist, it is
the crude oppositions, engrossing in their pure Americanness.
The woman's face rising out of an orange swamp of spaghetti in
I Love You with My Ford, 1961, remains one of the great dream
images of that vanished world in which cars had fins and people
read the Saturday Evening Post.

    Some artists don't seem to belong in the show at all, or
only do so by force of custom. It's a toss-up whether you want
to see George Segal's once white, now gray, plaster-cast
figures in relation to mass culture; today they seem even more
attached to solitude and individual grittiness than they did in
the '60s, sculptural materializations of the urban mood of
Hopper. You could make some kind of case for that excellent
California painter Wayne Thiebaud as a Pop artist because he
painted hot dogs and angel-food cakes; but artists have always
put the food of their time in their still lifes, whether a jamon
serrano by Velazquez or a baguette by Manet, and with Thiebaud
the formal qualities of the paint now seem far more engaging
than its reference to serial production.

    Does Pop still live? Marco Livingstone, who organized the
show, believes so. "Pop has lasted," he writes in the catalog,
"because of its radical redefinition of the attributes of the
work of art . . . In assaulting conventions of taste by
subjecting their own sensibility to that of their sources, [Pop
artists] have in turn modified our own perceptions and created
an indelible record of the spirit of our time." It's hard to
believe that anyone in 1991 could still speak of "assaulting
conventions of taste," since Pop's media-fixated gaze has
actually become the main convention of taste in the aesthetic
debris left in the '80s' wake. The galleries of Europe and
America are stuffed with inert, overconceptualized boilerplate,
from Koons to Haim Steinbach, that gets praised for its
"criticality" but, as a footnote exhibition at London's
Serpentine Gallery shows, is complacent and dull beyond belief.
It "addresses" mass media and mass taste, but with a mincing
snootiness unknown to Pop in the '60s.

    The original Popsters may not have been great artists or
even uniformly good ones, but they were Rubens and Poussin
compared with these Derrida-spouting midgets. And if the graft
of Conceptualism onto Pop has produced so little, it is only
because the landscape of mass media presents no challenges to
the artist: it is sterile now and incapable of a fresh thought
or an authentic feeling. Better real ads and comics than
exhausted "fine" art about them. That is one reason why our
fin-de-siecle, at least in the domain of the visual arts, is
turning into such a cultural fiasco.