Page 29 - Studio International - November 1967

such a relation with works of art—or rather, non-relation- larly their now embarrassing vulgarity, have been so
ship—is passive. repressed in the grown-up that he resists their incursion
And surely, it is no accident that the most immediate into a way of life jelled by the reality principle. But the
public success of any recent pictorial tendency has been answer to the problem posed by Pop art is not simply to
that of retinal art, or 'op', as they call it—precisely that slough off all the intervening psychic development
form of aesthetic experience in which the painting is equip- accrued between the time one was reading comic books,
ped to transmit stimuli so reliably that the spectator can and the time one has begun to function as an adult. This,
happily forgo any initiative of his own in receiving them. in any event, would be extremely hard to do. Much more
He degenerates merely into a fleshy scoreboard of optical exciting is it to perceive that the socialization process, the
after-images, pops, and blips. The joys of knowing that inevitable conformities to which we have all had to
the object is working upon you, and yet, of having no knuckle under in one fashion or another in the operation
responsibility of entering into any dialogue with it. of maturity, can only produce a very ambivalent re-
These joys are golden—and juvenile. action to Pop art. We catch and recall the thrills of the
In comparison, the repressive look of current abstrac- comic strip or mail order arcadia only intermittently,
tion (e.g. Frank Stella), offers remarkably uningratiating only imperfectly—and this is as it should be. To deny the
visual material. But the active and analytic encounter fact that we have almost out-grown these things, is to
which it demands engages the mind in such a way that deny something extremely important about ourselves.
the spectator can no longer remain isolated, but rather (Which is a way of saying, not that we have dispensed
invests himself, his intellectual apparatus, into the experi- with a fantasy life, but rather, with one that can be
ence. Whatever headway he then makes, gets reflected shamelessly and coarsely appealed to.) The main objection
back as an image of his own penetrative powers—which against the premature apotheosis of Pop art by a pseudo-
is a very adult kind of joy. It can be put in other words sophisticated audience, is that it is self-alienating. In
order for a person unconditionally to endorse this move-
ment, to fuse himself with its supposed spirit, he has to
overlook or ignore a vital aspect of his own social make-
up, and perhaps, special motivation. For surely, one of
John Chamberlain
his motivations, even if it is unconscious, may be the urge
Sweet William 1962
metal to be 'with it', to be liberal and stylish, despite a super-
60x46 x62 in. ficiality of comprehension.
Los Angeles County The argument here comes upon a startling turn. If it
Museum of Art is granted that the avant-garde work of art is consecrated
to a sensuously or conceptually self-involved pleasure—
that is, that it upholds what I call the virtues of decadence
—then the only way that work can truly enter our
spiritual current, by implication, is by a rather anti-
decadent process. I mean to say that we first have to
appreciate in current works of art their divergences from
our own thought structures, their apartness and opacity—
and that this is an appraisal which is not immediately
gratifying. The very equipment of tolerance and know-
ledge necessary to the assimilation of the work seems to
stand in some opposition to its message of spontaneity
and immediate feeling. I say 'seems', for the opposition
is only piece-meal. Just as the artist overcomes his con-
ceptual and sensory sluggishness in the keening desire for
realization, so the spectator, reiterating a creative process
of his own, senses through, rather than despite, the dim-
ness of his mental patterns, a suddenly 'happy' vision.
In both instances, only an enormous amount of non-
verbalized preliminary work will elicit that final playful-
ness between stimuli and response which we dignify by
saying that we have been moved. The apparent dis-
sonance in the experience of new art is only a paving of
the way for a higher consonance. If this sounds like the
Puritan ethic applied to a kind of pagan Latinism, of
self-disciplined means working towards self-liberating
by saying that he finds himself able, by some unexpected ends, then this is an incontrovertible and often rather
integer of thought transformed into feeling, to dissolve marvelous aspect of recent American art.
certain of his own repressions. But perhaps it should be said, before going any further,
Particularly would this apply to Pop art, for many have that all modern art is decadent, at least in its premise.
noted a curious belligerence in its effect. The specific That is, it wants to make permanent some intensely felt
pleasures which its imagery invoked in youth, particu- aspect of experience by sensuous means that are eventually
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