Page 45 - Studio International - July-August 1969

Wayne, Millionaire Sportsman and Playboy tion to multi-levelled signs. In London the remains that Pop Art is the art of industrialism
(Batman), and his young ward Dick Grayson first number of First delved into the photo- and not of America as such. It is the maximum
(Robin), attend a sensational "Pop" art show.' graphic-texture-as-truth paradox, following development of its communications and the
On the walls are full-length, fine art portraits up Paolozzi's and Hamilton's photographic proliferation of messages that give America its
that resemble the paintings of Mel Ramos. research in the fifties. The theme is still viable centrality in pop culture. Its dominance in
Here is a feedback circuit that goes from as is shown by a non-verbal, untitled, anony- Pop Art is something else and here we must
comics to artist and back to comics. mous and hand-distributed publication that concede the responsibility is in ourselves.
Linkages between art and pop culture and has just started in New York; its best pictures Pop Art developed independently in England
between one part of pop culture and another are straight photographs, highly specific as to and in America or, more accurately, in
are not confined to the comics. In fashion, for subject, but uninterpretable in the absence of London and New York, and its name is
example, Yves St Laurent discovered Mon- cues. Such solidity and mystery, such as we British in origin. The artists who contributed
drian through an art book his mother gave would get if we turned out a stranger's pockets to its development in England, Paolozzi and
him and Courrèges' earlier designs had a or ransacked an immigrant's only suitcase, is Hamilton especially, are still going strong,
science fiction potential realized in the movie comparable to Pop Art's literalness of objects working in forms that are cogent extrapola-
The 10th Victim and in Harpers Bazaar photo- that resist interpretation. tions of their early ideas. They have, however,
graphs. Harpers' space phase influenced two Perhaps enough has been said to indicate that less company than they had a few years back.
Argentine painters, Delia Cancela and Pablo Pop Art is not the same as popular culture, A second generation of Pop artists and Pop-
Mesejean, who built an environment of astro- though it draws from it, and the point may affiliated artists came on the scene with the
nauts and bouquets. have been made that Pop Art is art. In the sixties and the best of this group are clearly,
A unifying thread in recent art, present in ten years since the term began to be used in Richard Smith, Peter Phillips and Peter Blake.
Pop Art, can be described as process abbrevi- London in 1957-8, its meaning has shifted in English pop culture has prospered (music and
ation. In the past an ambitious painting re- a way that indicates resistance to an anthro- clothes) but English Pop Art has not. The
quired a series of steps by the artist, from a pological definition of culture. As we saw, the painters, aside from the exceptions noted, have
conceptual stage, though preliminary sketches term was, in the first place, part of an ex- not been able to take advantage of getting, for
to drawing, to underpainting, to glazing and, pansionist aesthetics, a way of relating art to once, an early start. New York, on the other
maybe, to varnishing. These discrete steps the environment. In place of an hierarchic hand, which seemed a bit slow to me compared
were not experienced in isolation by the artist, aesthetics keyed to define greatness, and to to London at first, has produced a vast body
of course, but such basically was the sequence separate high from low art, a continuum was of work, and so have Los Angeles and Chicago.
of his operations. In one way and another, assumed which could accommodate all forms The reason for the disappointing record in
modern art has abbreviated this process. For of art, permanent and expendable, personal England may, perhaps, be found in the par-
instance, Pop artists have used physical ob- and collective, autographic and anonymous. ticular character of artists as a group in
jects as part of their work or rendered familiar From about 1961 to 1964 Pop Art was nar- London.
articles with a high degree of literalness. rowed to mean paintings that included a Here there is almost no professionalism among
Though Lichtenstein works in stages himself reference to a mass medium source. As the the artists, by which I mean a level of inter-
he stimulates an all-at-once, mechanical look term became attached purely to art, its diffu- personal contact which is sustained and open
in his hand-done painting. The finished work sion accelerated. to newcomers. In London no artist seems to
of art is thus separated from traces of its long The Random House Dictionary defines Pop Art know enough other artists; there will be a few
involvement in planning and realizing, at least as follows : others, of his own generation probably, and
in appearance and sometimes in fact. Warhol's `A style esp. of figurative painting, developed some of these will probably teach in the same
silk screen paintings achieve a hand-done look in the US and current in the early 60s, art school with him. The art scene is broken
from the haste and roughness with which the characterized chiefly by magnified forms and into small groups who have only occasional
identical images are printed. Photographs, images derived from such commercial art and suspicious contact with each other. An
printed or stencilled in the work of art give the genres as comic strips and advertising posters.' artist's best audience is other artists who know,
most literal definition available in flat signs to In 1965-6 the meaning of the term shifted from the inside, what he is doing while it is
the artist. It was the same in the nineteenth again, away from the second phase of its use, new, and this is the best function of the pro-
century when the Daguerrotype was described which is what the dictionary recorded. It was fessional art world in New York. In London,
as a means 'by which objects may be made to returned to the continuous and non-exclusive on the other hand, artists work with an
delineate themselves'. culture which it was originally supposed to audience that is usually too small and either
Where process abbreviation is found in Pop cover. The term leaked back to the environ- too friendly or too hostile to provide coherent
Art it reduces personal nuances of handling by ment, much as Allan Kaprow's term Happen- reactions to current work. One needs more
the artist in favour of deadpan or passive ings spread to apply to everything and any- than friends and rivals.
images. This deceptive impersonality amounts thing. Both words were taken up by so many What has happened since the late nineteenth
to a game with anonymity, a minimizing of people and used so promiscuously that Pop century is that many English artists have been
invention, so that the work is free to support Art was de-aestheticized and re-anthropolo- terribly short-winded. It is not that they are
its interconnections with popular culture, and gized. The dictionary I quoted stressed Pop not talented or intelligent; the trouble is that
with the shared world of the spectator. Photo- Art's American-ness. It is true that English most are not tough enough to go it alone. The
graphs appear as unmediated records of ob- Pop artists used to be accused of pro-Ameri- typical pattern for an English artist is early
jects and events, as the real world's most canism, but the nature of their interest can be energy followed by prolonged and obscure
iconic sign system. In addition to this property, defined more sharply than that. American pop frustration or by sustained energy but at an
which Rauschenberg and others have ex- culture was valued because it was the product idiosyncratic or complacent level. It is the
ploited, photographs have a materiality of of an economy more fully industrialized than fault of the English artist as audience (its
their own, a kind of visual texture which is Europe's. We looked at the United States as failure to provide feedback) that most of the
generated mechanically but which we read as our expected future form, the country at a younger English Pop artists have already dis-
the skin of reality, of self-delineated rather level of industrialism to which all countries appointed. It seems that they are going the
than of interpreted objects. This zone of gritty were headed, though at various speeds. This way of the neo-romantic artists of World War
immediacy, of artificial accuracies, has been outlook had a mood of optimism that is not in II, or of Paul and John Nash, or of Wilson
explored by Pop artists as part of their atten- accord with present feelings, but the point Steer, etc. q