POP / MASS-CULTURE ART
The rise of popular mass-culture was historically inevitable, as was the advent of an eventual response to it in art. We are still living through the modern technological and democratic epoch that began with the British Industrial Revolution and the American and French Revolutions of the late-eighteenth century. As industrialisation and democratisation have spread, increasing numbers of people have gradually come to share in their benefits: political participation, rewarding labour, heightened individualism, and better housing, health, literacy, and social and physical mobility. Yet at the same time a high price has frequently been paid for these advances: a political manipulation often rooted in profound cynicism and self-interest; vast economic exploitation; globalisation and the diminution of national, regional or local identity; meaningless and unfulfilling labour for large numbers; growing urbanisation; the industrialisation of rural areas, which has grossly impinged upon the natural world; industrial pollution; and the widespread loss of spiritual certainty which has engendered a compensatory explosion of irrationalism, superstition, religious fanaticism and fringe cults, hyper-nationalism, quasi-political romanticism and primitive or industrialised mass-murder, as well as materialism, consumerism, conspicuous consumption and media hero-worship. All of these and manifold other developments have necessarily involved the institutions, industrial processes and artefacts created during this epoch, although not until the emergence of Pop/Mass-Culture Art in the late-1950s did artists focus exclusively upon the cultural tendencies, processes and artefacts of the era.
When Lawrence Alloway wrote of ‘Pop’ in 1958, he belonged to a circle within the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London called the Independent Group. Its members were artists, designers, architects and critics who had come to recognise that by the mid-twentieth century the enormous growth of popular mass-culture and its characteristic forms of communication needed to be addressed – it was not enough snobbishly to consign such matters to the dustbin of lowbrow taste. Naturally, it is only in the modern technological epoch that those wishing to appeal to the growing numbers of consumers of the products of industrialisation have increasingly possessed the large-scale means of doing so. The newspaper printing press, the camera, the radio, celluloid and the film projector, the television set and other mass-communicative technologies right down to those of our own time that make their predecessors look exceedingly primitive (and which supplant their forerunners with increasing rapidity), have each produced fresh types of responses and thus new kinds of visual imagery, all of which obviously constitute highly fertile ground for the artist and designer to explore. Moreover, popular mass-culture possesses energy and potency, and very often its means of transmission such as the cinematic or televisual image, the advertisement, and the poster and magazine illustration, enjoys an immediacy of communication that is not shared by works of greater intellectual complexity: you have to labour a little harder to appreciate, say, the plays of Shakespeare, the symphonies of Beethoven and the canvases of Rembrandt than you do the average Hollywood movie, pop record or billboard poster. So in the 1950s, a decade which saw recovery from war and a growing sense of materialistic well-being in the western world, the Independent Group’s suggestion that artists and designers should draw upon the energy, potency and immediacy of mass-culture proved most timely. Indeed, the very relevance of their notions explains why so many other creative figures further afield soon arrived at exactly the same conclusions independently of the British group and, indeed, even of each other.
Because of this unconnected arrival at the same conclusions, in the main Pop/Mass-Culture Art was never a movement as such, for although in Britain some of the artists who followed its ethos exchanged ideas during the period of its inception, that was not the case in the United States where very few of the participatory artists were ever in close contact with one another. It is therefore perhaps more accurate to describe Pop/Mass-Culture Art as a cultural dynamic rather than a movement. Certainly it was one made ready by historical factors to be born in the late-1950s, although it had been preceded by many forerunners.
Edward Hopper, People in the Sun, 1960. Oil on canvas, 102.6 x 153.4 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Grant Wood, Daughters of Revolution, 1932. Oil on masonite, 58.8 x 101.6 cm. Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio. Art © 2006 Estate of Grant Wood/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Forerunners of Pop/Mass-Culture Art
Naturally, large numbers of artists, right up to the mid-twentieth century, had dealt with humanity en masse. Among those who did so most memorably were the eighteenth to nineteenth-century painters Francisco de Goya, J.M.W. Turner and David Wilkie, all three of whom often depicted ordinary people at work and play. The latter two also created consciously ‘low-life’ subjects by representing the common people in their humble dwellings, pubs and at village fairs, thereby revitalising a tradition going back to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Adrian van Ostade and David Teniers the Younger. Later in the nineteenth century Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas, among others, also looked to the life of common humanity for inspiration, as in the latter artist’s superb study of alienation, In a café of around 1876. This depicts a seemingly hard-hearted man and brutalised woman mentally isolated from one another and spatially separated from us. And Degas was a major influence upon two important painters who addressed popular culture directly: Walter Sickert and Edward Hopper.
Sickert openly followed in the footsteps of Degas the painter of mass-entertainments such as café-concerts and circus life by portraying music-hall scenes and pier-side amusements; later in life he developed scores of canvases from newspaper photos in which he emulated the blurring and graininess of the newsprint almost as much as he represented the images it originally projected. Hopper was inspired by Degas (especially In a Café, which he knew through a 1924 book reproduction) to open up the entire subject of urban loneliness, anomie and alienation, those negative effects of mass-society and mass-culture. Towards the end of his life, in People in the Sun, he even addressed the hedonistic mass sun-worship that has become such a central feature of modern existence.
In People in the Sun Hopper’s sunbathers typify a cultural trend. Another artist to create such typifications, but much earlier and with far more satirical bite, was Grant Wood who in 1930 created arguably his most renowned image, American Gothic (see opposite). Here an apparently typical mid-western farmer dressed in denim stands alongside his wife clad in homespun. Behind them is their simple dwelling, with its gothic-inspired arched window. Together they embody the God-fearing, puritanical values of Middle America. Similarly, in 1932 Wood gave us Daughters of Revolution (see above) in which three daunting matrons doubtless belonging to a neo-conservative organisation, the Daughters of the American Revolution, stand before a revered icon of their nationalism, Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 canvas, Washington Crossing the Delaware.
Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930. Oil on board, 73.6 x 60.5 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. American Gothic, 1930 by Grant Wood. All rights reserved by the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Pablo Picasso, Guitar, sheet-music and glass, 1912. Pasted papers, gouache and charcoal on paper, 48 x 36.5 cm. Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, San Antonio, Texas.
Like earlier painters of ‘low’ humanity such as Wilkie, Degas and Hopper, Wood represented ordinary life as it is lived, rather than as it is indirectly reflected through the prism of the mass-communications media. Undoubtedly the first artists to treat of the associations of those media and of the popular mass-culture they served were Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. In 1911 Braque started imitating stencilled lettering in his paintings. This necessarily invokes associations of mass-production, for stencilled lettering is very ‘low culture’ indeed, being primarily found on the sides of packing crates and the like where identifications need to be effected quickly and without any aesthetic refinement whatsoever. By pasting newspapers and the sheet-music of popular songs into his images around 1912-13, Picasso not only virtually invented collage as a new creative vehicle but necessarily opened up the links between art and the mass-communications media.
Picasso’s new artistic channel, as illustrated in Guitar, Sheet-music and Glass (see opposite), prompted large numbers of other artists such as Georg Grosz, Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters to incorporate photographs, scientific diagrams, maps and the like into their images. One or two of these works, such as a Schwitters collage of 1947, would even include comic-strip images. Another German artist, John Heartfield, invented a new art form, the photo-collage, in which much of the material was taken from newspapers. As a result it necessarily included humanity en masse.
Heartfield began to open up this new visual territory using pre-existent material from the early-1920s onwards, and by that time a French-born painter resident in the United States since 1915, Marcel Duchamp, had already created a number of ‘ready-mades’ or sculptures that appropriated industrially mass-produced objects. Whether used alone or in amalgamation with each other, such artefacts not only created new overall forms but simultaneously typified aspects of industrialised society. Perhaps the most notorious of these ‘ready-mades’ was Fountain of 1917, which was simply a ceramic urinal purchased from a hardware store. Duchamp intended to exhibit the work in a vast New York exhibition he had been instrumental in setting up in 1917. A major motivation underlying this show was democratic access (all the thousands of works submitted to it were automatically displayed), and this at a time when democracy was very much in the news because of impending American entry into the First World War. Ultimately Duchamp’s wittily-titled pisspot made a wholly valid point about shared human activity, for all people everywhere have need of urinals from time-to-time. Democracy indeed.
According to Duchamp (or initially at least), a major reason he had chosen to exhibit such an article was to raise it to the status of an art-object by forcing us to recognise the inherent beauty of a mass-produced artefact which normally provokes no aesthetic response whatsoever. This was a doubly clever ploy, for although Fountain was probably destroyed in the early 1920s because Duchamp set no value upon it, the piece certainly got him talked about, an increasingly vital requirement for any artist in the age of mass-communications. (Later, in the 1950s, Duchamp denied he had wanted his objet trouvé to give pleasure to the eye, while simultaneously he created a number of replicas of the artefact to sell to museums clamouring to own such an infamous attack upon art. Like many a creative figure before and since, he therefore had his cake and ate it). Ultimately Duchamp’s Fountain, like his other ‘ready-mades’, completely broke down the distinction between the work of art as crafted object and the work of art as mass-produced artefact. In doing so it necessarily democratised the entire notion of being an artist, for by means of the selfsame process by which a urinal became Fountain – ‘it is a work of art simply because I proclaim it to be such’ – thereafter anyone could become an artist (and quite a few have followed that course ever since). For better or for worse, but mainly for the latter, the democratisation that stands at the very heart of the modern technological, mass-cultural epoch perhaps inevitably began to flood into the field of the visual arts on a massive scale with Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’, and especially with Fountain.
Apart from any aesthetic thinking, sensory pleasures and moral outrage Duchamp’s object undeniably sparked in 1917 (and still generates by means of its museum replicas), the manner in which it had originally come into being made it automatically act as a signifier of mass-production more generally. Such a process of objects functioning as signifiers would become central to Pop/Mass-Culture Art, as we shall see. But Fountain was not the only precursor in this sphere. From the mid-1910s onwards, and directly as a result of the influence of Picasso’s Cubist explorations, artists often depicted objects taken from mass-culture, not to demonstrate their cleverness in emulating the appearances of things, but instead to draw upon the familiarity of the objects they represented as national or cultural signifiers.
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. Photograph by Alfred Steiglitz from The Blind Man, May 1917. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg collection.
To take national signification first, in 1914-15 (and thus during the First World War) the American painter Marsden Hartley employed flags in several of his canvases, while in oils like his Portrait of a German Officer he did so to denote a military personage, as his title informs us. Cultural signification is especially apparent in early works by the American painter Stuart Davis, who around 1924 created pictures depicting or incorporating Lucky Strike cigarette packs and the Evening Journal sports or the Odol bathroom disinfectant. As with Picasso’s earlier incorporations of cigarette packs and wine-bottle labels, Davis’s imagery hints at a throwaway culture. In the early-1950s the painter would return to mass-communications imagery, fusing abstractive and highly colourful patterning that derived stylistically from late Matisse, with slogans and phrases taken from advertising, supermarket signs and retail exhortations to consume (see opposite). Such images certainly put Davis in the forefront of the growing wave of artists who would prove responsive to mass-culture.
Another painter who had grown increasingly aware of mass-culture was the Surrealist painter, Salvador Dalí. The invasion of France in 1940 had forced him to flee to the United States, and the eight years he lived there affected him deeply, for he was thoroughly exposed to American mass-culture. Not least of all he came into contact with the Hollywood movie industry, designing a film sequence for Alfred Hitchcock and developing a cartoon for Walt Disney (although that short would not be completed and shown until 2003, more than thirteen years after the painter’s death). Dalí especially wanted to create cartoons because he felt they articulated the psychology of the masses. Dalí’s American years undoubtedly made him more populist, more aware of the ability of the media to communicate on a vast scale, and more conscious of the power of money. He returned there most years after 1948, in the mid-1960s not only becoming friendly with Andy Warhol but even undertaking a screen test for him. Slightly later he created a very witty image that stands at the frontier between Surrealism and Pop/Mass-Culture Art. This is a fusion of two faces, one of which had already figured importantly in Warhol’s work, while the other was just about to do so.
Early Pop/Mass-Culture Art in Britain
During the late-1940s a further artist deeply influenced by Surrealism strongly anticipated Pop/Mass-Culture Art. This was the British sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, who would subsequently become a key member of the Independent Group. In 1949 Paolozzi embarked upon a set of highly inventive and witty collages bringing together popular magazine covers, adverts, ‘cheesecake’ photos and the like. Everywhere the banality of the imagery interested him, although in 1971 he was careful to point out that “It’s easier for me to identify with [the tradition of Surrealism] than to allow myself to be described by some term, invented by others, called ‘Pop’, which immediately means that you dive into a barrel of Coca-Cola bottles. What I like to think I’m doing is an extension of radical surrealism.” Surrealism was an exploration of the subconscious and clearly, by the late-1940s that part of Paolozzi’s mind readily absorbed the imagery of popular culture. Subsequently, in the mid-1950s, he would make inventive collages incorporating diagrammatic machine images that would again clearly point to things-to-come.
Paolozzi was not the only artist working in Britain who intuited the future. In 1956 the painter Richard Hamilton created a poster-design collage bearing the ironic title Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, which brings together many of the images and objects soon to be explored by others. They include household artefacts in abundance, such as a television set supposedly projecting the image of a stereotypically ‘perfect’ face; banal ‘cheesecake’ and ‘beefsteak’ nudes or semi-nudes; a trite Young Romance comic-strip image, apparently enlarged in relationship to its surroundings and framed to hang on the wall; a traditional portrait accompanying it on the wall; a corporate logo adorning a lampshade; and an image of a superstar, in this case Al Jolson seen in the distance. A paddle carried by the Charles Atlas figure bears the word ‘POP’.
Stuart Davis, Premiere, 1957. Oil on canvas, 147 x 127 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California.
Stuart Davis, Lucky Strike, 1924. Oil on paperboard, 45.7 x 60.9 cm. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Salvador Dalí, Mao/Marilyn, cover design, December 1971-January 1972 issue of French edition of Vogue magazine, Condé Nast publication, Paris. Photo: Philippe Halsman.
Usefully, in the year after Hamilton created Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? he listed the qualities a new ‘Pop Art’ would need to possess for it to appeal to a mass-audience; it must be:
Popular (designed for a mass audience)
Transient (short-term solution)
Expendable (easily forgotten)
Low cost
Mass produced
Young (aimed at youth)
Witty
Sexy
Gimmicky
Glamorous
Big Business
It might be thought that this constitutes a good, working definition of ‘Pop Art’ but a number of factors demonstrate the need for caution. Firstly, the list was written in a private letter that was not made public until well after the large-scale advent of Pop/Mass-Culture Art, and so it could never act as some kind of manifesto. Secondly, Hamilton was outlining the needs of the mass-audience for so-called ‘Pop Art’ and only therefore implying the needs of its creators, which would not necessarily be the same thing at all. Thirdly, and most importantly, the subject-matter that would be dealt with by artists contributing to the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition would quickly range far beyond the parameters Hamilton listed. To take but one example, Andy Warhol would certainly create an art that was popular, mass-produced, aimed at youth, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous and Big Business, but he would also deal with hero-worship, religious hogwash, the banality inherent to modern materialism, world-weariness, nihilism and death, all matters that certainly did not figure in Hamilton’s shopping list. So does that mean that Warhol should not be linked to Pop/Mass-Culture Art, or does it suggest that Hamilton’s notion of what would constitute ‘Pop Art’ is unnecessarily limiting and inexact? Surely it is the latter. Moreover, much of the art to come would prove to be anything but transient, easily forgotten, cheaply priced or mass-produced.
Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer, 1914. Oil on canvas, 173.3 x 105 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Richard Hamilton, Hers Is a Lush Situation, 1958. Oil, cellulose, metal sheet, collage on panel, 84 x 122 cm. Colin St John Wilson, London.
Hamilton followed up his 1956 collage by producing paintings such as Hommage à Chrysler Corp of 1957, in which he abstracted car body parts; Hers is a Lush Situation of 1958 (see above), in which sections of a 1957 Cadillac are linked to a photo of the glass facade of a building; and $he of 1959-60, in which he brought together areas of a female body, a refrigerator, a toilet seat and a toaster. However, Hamilton would never be a painter interested in churning out long series of works exploring any particular area of mass-culture, and consequently he has never enjoyed the impact of artists such as Lichtenstein and Warhol who would later do so. Instead, he preferred to act more as an aesthetic explorer in the mould of Marcel Duchamp, whom he reveres, and whose damaged Large Glass he replicated in the early 1960s. For this reason the degree to which Hamilton was an aesthetic pioneer is certainly underestimated, especially in America.
A further British painter was also tapping into the mainstream of popular mass-culture from the mid-1950s onwards, albeit in a highly nostalgic way. This was Peter Blake (Children reading Comics, 1954; Couples, 1959; Got a Girl, 1960-61; Cover for the Beatles’ album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967; On the Balcony, 1955-57; Tattooed Lady, 1958; Self-Portrait with Badges, 1961; Love Wall, 1961; The Meeting or Have a Nice Day Mr Hockney, 1981-83). He would later state, “I started to become a pop artist from my interest in English folk art… Especially my interest in the visual art of the fairground, and barge painting too… Now I want to recapture and bring to life again something of this old-time popular art.” Additional stimulus was derived from an early art teacher who had been particularly interested not only in barge painting but also in tattoos, patchwork quilts, and painted and hand-written signs. Usually none of these types of images and patterns had been regarded as art, simply because most such work is naive and untutored (which is, of course, the source of its visual strength and communicative directness). Early in life Blake equally developed an unusually intense interest in collecting postcards, curios, knick-knacks, old tickets, fly posters, metalled advertisements, ‘primitive’ paintings, examples of child art and comic strips, all of which fed into the imagery of his work. The latter attractions are especially clear in Children reading Comics of 1954 (see above). Under such an influence, and armed with an awareness of the works of American painters and illustrators Ben Shahn, Saul Steinberg, Bernard Perlin and Honoré Sharrer (whose pictures he saw in London at a Tate Gallery show held in 1956), Blake also went on to create representations of circus folk, wrestlers and the like. This phase of his output came to a climax with On the Balcony of 1955-7 in which two simulated photos of members of the Royal Family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace are surrounded by five children, other images of people on balconies (including one by Manet), and a mass of small pictures taken from art and life, including the latter as represented by the mass-media Life magazine. By 1959, when Blake created Couples (see opposite), his interest in popular printed ephemera could form the stuff of art, by drawing our attention to cultural ubiquity and the narrow borderline between sentiment and sentimentality.
By the late-1950s Paolozzi, Hamilton and Blake were still unknown in the United States, and thus they could not contribute to the rise of Pop/Mass-Culture Art there. So what did propel the emergence of that creative dynamic on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean?
Sir Peter Blake, Children reading Comics, 1954. Oil on hardboard, 36.9 x 47 cm. Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, Cumbria, UK.
The Rise of Pop/Mass-Culture Art in America
Primarily an important artistic movement contributed towards the advent of Pop/Mass-Culture Art in America, albeit in an entirely antithetical way. This was the prevailing avant-garde tendency of the day, Abstract Expressionism (which was also termed ‘Action Painting’ and ‘New York School painting’). Such a movement had emerged in the mid-1940s and it flourished during the 1950s, in the process shifting the centre of art-world power from Paris to New York. American artists and émigrés to New York, who included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Helen Frankenthaler, all forged a completely innovative aesthetic by exploring new expressive, painterly, formal, colouristic and psychological dimensions to painting and drawing. For the most part theirs was an art committed to non-representation, although the imagery and scale of their works often addressed reality metaphorically (as with, say, the paintings of Motherwell dealing obliquely with the Spanish Civil War, and the canvases of Pollock which were openly intended to articulate his responses to the age of the radio, the automobile and the atomic bomb). Several members of the New York School, most notably Pollock, came close to fulfilling an automatism which was implicit in Surrealism but which had not been thoroughly explored by members of that earlier group, while most of the Abstract Expressionists carried through the gestural implications of earlier phases of Expressionism. But what connected all of these painters was a shared determination to create an art that would reach down through the subconscious to touch core values of spirituality, emotion, seriousness, intellectual complexity and authentic experience.
It is perhaps to be expected that such noble aspirations would engender a reaction, and certainly they did so amongst the next generation of artists who felt that the territory explored by the Abstract Expressionists had been thoroughly exhausted, leaving them nowhere to go. Undoubtedly these younger figures were creatively committed, but as they looked at the world of the late-1950s they gradually turned their backs on the goals so prized by their immediate forebears. After all, where were such lofty qualities to be readily found in an increasingly cynical, emotionally fearful, youth-orientated, irreligious and hedonistic society filled with the bogus posturing of advertising men and the materialistic emptiness of mass-consumption? If an artist holds a mirror to society, then surely he or she should be reflecting the emergence of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley around 1955, the advent of Disneyland and McDonalds that selfsame year, the automotive and aeronautical revolutions that really took off in the 1950s, the emergence of a new generation of teenagers around 1960 (the so-called ‘baby-boomers’ sired by military personnel returning from service in World War II some fifteen years earlier), the very moment when television began to outstrip cinema as the principal means of global visual communication, and the sexual revolution that began when the oral contraceptive pill became available in 1960-1. Accordingly, they ditched the values of Abstract Expressionism and instead adopted a ‘cool’ or emotionally distanced response to the world, an orientation towards youth and hedonism, and a witty irreverence about everything ranging from religion to art, if not even a cynicism regarding the world they had inherited. Such an attitude allowed them to comment ironically upon the false promises of admen and the vacuity of mass-consumption, as typified by its fetishes or objects of worship such as the Coca-Cola bottle, the hamburger, the comic-strip, the pop idol and the Hollywood superstar.
The rejection of the values of Abstract Expressionism can already be witnessed prior to the mid-1950s, for example, in Robert Rauschenberg’s total erasure of a drawing by Willem de Kooning in 1953. (This highly symbolic neo-Dadaist or anti-art gesture comprises a virtually blank sheet of paper that now sits in a frame and resides in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Originally, it may have equally demonstrated Rauschenberg’s complete disdain for the financial value invested in such an object but today, of course, it is worth a fortune.) In that same year Rauschenberg also made all-white paintings in which the shadows cast by the spectator generate the only visual dynamic in the works. Such a transfer took to its logical conclusion the notion of Duchamp and others that it is the viewer who completes the communicative circuit of any given work of art, and thereby creates its ultimate significance. This is certainly undeniable, if hardly profound.
Jasper Johns, Flag, 1955. Oil and collage on canvas, 107 x 153.8 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Art © 2006 Jasper Johns/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
No less importantly, in 1953 Larry Rivers broke with Abstract Expressionism by reworking the imagery of a hallowed representation of American history, Emanuel Leutze’s painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware river, which we have already seen indirectly because it appears in the background of Grant Wood’s Daughters of Revolution. Rivers gave the subject the full Abstract Expressionist treatment of heavily gestural brush marks, and by such messy means he attained his stated intention of communicating the true discomfort that George Washington and his fellow-revolutionaries must have felt when making a winter river-crossing, feelings that are not imparted by the absurdly heroic posturing of Leutze’s figures. As well as attacking the orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism by placing its painterly approach at the service of history painting, Rivers also used the re-working of the Leutze as a means of undermining the values of conservative America, which was then going through a period of extreme Cold War paranoia.
In 1954 a friend and neighbour of Rauschenberg’s in Manhattan, Jasper Johns, created a parallel to the Rivers image, and did so in iconic terms not unlike those of the latter, by beginning a series of paintings and drawings of the American flag (see above). Over the next four or so years he would give this most familiar and integral of all emblems of American culture an apparently gestural painterly treatment similar to that of Abstract Expressionism (although to perceive a subtle contradiction in his technical approach, see the commentary below the reproduction). In the process, he fused imagery that enjoys profound symbolic value with a conscious denotation of the act of painting, just as Rivers had done in 1953. However, the apparent energisation of the surfaces of the paintings and drawings does not break down the flag in any way, as Rivers had done with his representation of George Washington and others. This is because Johns was equally concerned to emphasise the purely formal and colouristic qualities of the symbol. In most of the works he furthered this aim by isolating the banner within the overall design, while in a number of the pictures (such as representations of the flag in white) he also made the emblem hard to see. In other Flag paintings he varied the colours of the sign, thereby subverting our notions of the real. Some of the images (such as the very first of the Flag paintings) are built up over layers of newsprint, and where these levels remain evident they necessarily introduce mass-media associations. As always, Johns emphasised the flatness of the flag by avoiding any notions of spatial recession – constantly it remains a frontal arrangement of shapes on a flat background. The end result of all these factors is to make the flags appear physically disembodied and drained of iconic, nationalistic purpose. Such disassociation would have an enormous impact upon Andy Warhol in particular when he saw the Flags pictures in Johns’s debut solo exhibition held at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in January 1958, as he would subtly make clear in paintings he would produce in the 1960s.
Just a couple of months after Leo Castelli had exhibited Johns’s Flag paintings early in 1958, the dealer displayed Robert Rauschenberg’s first Combine paintings, so-named because of their amalgamation of flat, painted surfaces with three-dimensional objects. The gesturality of Abstract Expressionist brushwork is still very much in evidence in these works and, indeed, it would never really disappear from Rauschenberg’s output thereafter, being a useful way of both imparting enormous energy to the images and necessarily making analogous points about the dynamism of the contemporary world. Additionally, Rauschenberg occasionally pasted newspaper photographs and comic-strip material into the Combines, thereby creating mass-media associations, while in some of the works he introduced a particular icon of popular culture, the Coke bottle, and did so in rows that ineluctably induce thoughts of both mass-production and mass-consumption. In yet other Combines Rauschenberg incorporated actual Coca-Cola signs, thus touching upon signification directly.
The 1958-61 period also saw the debut exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles of further artists who would soon be prominent in the Pop/Mass-Culture Art dynamic. They included Marisol, Allan D’Arcangelo, Ed Kienholz, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Smith and Tom Wesselmann, all of whom are discussed below. On the other side of the Atlantic, a number of emergent Pop/Mass-Culture Art painters came together in 1959 as post-graduate students at the Royal College of Art in London. They included David Hockney, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips who each receive further mention in this book.
The Triumph of Pop/Mass-Culture Art
The international emergence of Pop/Mass-Culture Art finally took place in 1961-2. In London the 1961 ‘Young Contemporaries’ exhibition served notice to the world that Hockney, Jones, Phillips, Patrick Caulfield and others were bringing a new ‘Pop’ sensibility into being. The following year saw shows in New York, Los Angeles and London of works by Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, Robert Indiana, Peter Blake, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and Wayne Thiebaud who all made the public more aware of mass-production and/or mass-culture. By the time these exhibitions were mounted, Leo Castelli had been followed by a growing number of dealers, such as Ivan Karp, Richard Bellamy, Sidney Janis, Martha Jackson, Eleanor Ward, Allan Stone and Irving Blum, who proved equally receptive to Pop/Mass-Culture Art. Naturally, they quickly realised the economic potential such work enjoyed, especially to those many collectors, museum directors, members of their boards and ordinary art-lovers who had never engaged with abstract art.
Amid all these debuts a particularly significant show was mounted by Claes Oldenburg outside the normal gallery system. This was the first of his two The Store exhibitions, which took place between December 1961 and January 1962. For this display Oldenburg rented a shop in a depressed, downtown part of Manhattan and filled it with pieces that emulated everyday consumer objects. These he nailed to the walls, hung from the ceilings and arranged on the floors. They all bore price tags and were surrounded by advertising signs that were intended to break down the barriers not only between art and reality but also between the art gallery and the shop, and between the artist and the dealer (for Oldenburg was constantly present to act in that capacity during the show). In September 1962, with his second The Store exhibition, held at the midtown Green Gallery, Oldenburg moved in the direction of greater refinement by making fewer but bigger emulations of consumer objects, such as a larger-than-life hamburger, a gigantic ice cream cone and a huge slice of chocolate cake. Again, and by dint of the physical augmentation of size that was already becoming his stock-in-trade, the objects and comestibles of everyday life were brought out from under the noses of a public that took them for granted and given a new measure of cultural life.
Another important group show opened in New York on the last day of October 1962 and it finally set the seal on the international emergence of Pop/Mass-Culture Art. The ‘New Realists’ exhibition mounted at the Sidney Janis Gallery brought together an international spectrum of artists ranging from the Americans Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, George Segal, Tom Wesselmann and Wayne Thiebaud, to the Europeans Peter Blake, Arman, Peter Phillips, Martial Raysse and Mimmo Rotella, all of whom are discussed below. Confronted with works that included Oldenburg’s assemblage The Stove, which featured a real stove topped by plaster food, Jim Dine canvases that incorporated real objects, a sculptural ensemble of a dinner table by George Segal, a James Rosenquist oil juxtaposing a car grill with a kissing couple and a tangle of spaghetti, an Arman accumulation of swords and rapiers, Roy Lichtenstein’s picture of an exploding MIG fighter, still-lifes of consumer objects and food by Tom Wesselmann and Wayne Thiebaud, and Andy Warhol’s paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans – both singly and in a group of 200 – the New York art world was hit “with the force of an earthquake”, to quote the critic Harold Rosenberg.
A particularly witty exhibit was one of Warhol’s Dance Diagram pictures (see above). This was displayed under thick glass on the floor, with a label attached inviting members of the public to remove their shoes and follow the dance steps across the painting itself. Not only was such behaviour unusual in the normally hallowed precincts of an art gallery, but the invitation was highly appropriate in a space owned by Sidney Janis, for the dealer was an enthusiastic dancer. With the exception of Willem de Kooning, all the Abstract Expressionists who had shown with Janis until then were so horrified by the dealer’s broadened taste that they fled to other galleries. De Kooning’s open-mindedness was unsurprising, for during the late-1940s he had happily incorporated into some of his paintings newspaper images that had been accidentally transferred there. Moreover, in 1950 he had pasted a woman’s smiling mouth from a Camel cigarette advertisement into a study for one of his Woman series of paintings. But his attitude towards Pop/Mass-Culture Art was singular among his peers, and his openness clearly reflected the fact that he was always ambivalent in his commitment to abstraction anyway.
Andy Warhol, Dance Diagram (Fox Trot), 1962. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 182.8 x 137.1 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main.
Some Individual Artists and their Creative Development
From this point onwards the history of Pop/Mass-Culture Art becomes too complex to recount chronologically; throughout the rest of the 1960s and ever since, all of the Pop/Mass-Culture Art painters and sculptors discussed above, as well as others we shall come to, held numerous one-person exhibitions and/or participated in group shows, and a listing of every one of those displays would become very tedious indeed. It will suffice to mention significant events within the larger cultural context of the developing Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition. Perhaps at this point, therefore, we can usefully switch to discussion of the creative development of a number of the artists who have contributed to the growth of that sensibility.
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns only dealt with mass-cultural imagery at the outset of his long career, in the years between 1954 and 1963. We have already discussed the Flags paintings which proved seminal to the development of Pop/Mass-Culture Art. By 1958, when that series was coming to an end, Johns also began producing sculptural representations of everyday household objects such as light-bulbs and flashlights. By casting them in bronze, he transformed the cultural status of those commonplace artefacts. In time Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and many others would similarly replicate the appearance of the most mundane of consumer items, and raise them to the level of art when doing so. Alternatively, others such as Ed Kienholz, Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach would simply alter the context within which we view real artefacts, as Duchamp had done, or even combine emulated objects with real objects, as Kienholz would do as well.
In his Targets pictures of the late 1950s, Johns made a subtle statement about his own homosexual orientation and the concealment this forced on him. He achieved this by employing roundels to signify his sense of being a potential target in a homophobic society, while across the tops of the canvases he ranged boxes containing various parts of the human body in order to allude to the compartmentalisation sexual secrecy engendered. A related work, the 1960 Painting with Two Balls, hints more obliquely at the same problems. His Numbers and Alphabets series pictures of the late-1950s and early-1960s incorporate familiar symbols both to act as pegs upon which to hang a highly energetic gestural painting and to make statements about primary elements of communication. In painted bronze sculptures of 1960, such as Two Beer Cans, Johns also made neo-Dadaist points about art, art capitalism and mass-culture. A subsequent group of pictures representing the map of the United States certainly comments upon mass-culture, if only by dint of its stencilled lettering. But in the main, after 1963 Johns began slowly turning away from popular culture and the mass-media, moving instead towards an exploration of abstract forms.
Robert Rauschenberg
Unlike Johns, down the years Robert Rauschenberg has engaged ever more closely with the mass-culture he had first dealt with obliquely in the 1950s. He was always profoundly involved with the supreme art of movement, namely dance, and no less important to him was chance and the accidental, an outlook reinforced by his close friendship with that master of musical radicalism and the aleatory, the composer John Cage. As a measure of Rauschenberg’s belief in chance operating as a guiding light for creativity, he would frequently incorporate into his works objects he had found quite by accident in Manhattan, even on occasion specifically setting out to walk around his city block picking up discarded objects and placing them on his canvases in the very same order he had originally encountered them. Such a process reflects life accurately, for invariably our lives are ruled by chance.
In 1959 Rauschenberg completed his sculpture, Monogram, in which the encirclement of a stuffed angora goat with a car tyre clearly suggests the way nature is increasingly being confined by man. Between the end of the 1950s and 1962 Rauschenberg continued to make complex Combine paintings, linking real objects with forceful paintwork to express the dynamism and changeability of existence in lower Manhattan, where he continued to live. In 1962 Rauschenberg found a technical way of harnessing reality even more directly. In July of that year Andy Warhol’s studio assistant had suggested that if his boss wished to avoid the laboriousness of painting repetitive images, he should use the photo-silkscreen printing technique instead. This process permits the transfer of photographic images onto a screen of sensitised silk stretched on a frame. The fine mesh of the silk allows ink or paint to pass through it onto a canvas or other support only where it is not prevented from doing so by a membrane of resistant gum. Soon after Warhol had taken up photo-silkscreen, Rauschenberg adopted the same process, not to utilise repetitious imagery but because he liked the freedom it allowed.
This technical breakthrough spurred Rauschenberg to an enormous productivity over the following years, during which he created many of his most memorable works. In canvases such as Kite and Estate of 1963, and Retroactive I of 1964, he purposefully used the reality projected by photographs, the dynamics of energy and tension released by emphatic brushwork, and the loose juxtaposition of images to create subtle meanings and embody the perceptual bombardment we all now experience. Such pictures appear increasingly relevant, not least of all because the grainy blurring of their photo-silkscreened areas induce all manner of associations with mass-produced imagery.
Dance is necessarily an exploration of space, and quite clearly Rauschenberg’s involvement with that art-form has generated the freewheeling spatiality apparent throughout his work. Yet this has not only resulted in pictorial enhancement; since the 1980s an involvement with real space has been evident in his work, for the artist has become utterly entranced by the excitement and beauty of the Space Age. The results have been works that have at their heart the technological complexities of rocketry, the implied movement of those giant machines and the human dimensions of space exploration. More recently still he has refined his art even further, moving away from his earlier gestural freedom to a far more controlled picture-making that is somewhat sculptural in form.
Claes Oldenburg, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpiller Tracks, 1969-74. Cor-Ten steel, steel, aluminium, cast resin, painted with polyurethane enamel, 7.2 x 7.6 x 3.3 metres. Samuel F.B. Morse College, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958. Encaustic on canvas, 76.5 x 116 x 12.7 cm, fiftieth anniversary gift of the Gilman Foundation, Inc., The Lauder Foundation, A. Alfred Taubman, an anonymous donor. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Art © 2006 Jasper Johns/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955. Combine painting: oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports, 191.1 x 80 x 20.3 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Leo Castelli in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Art © 2006 Robert Rauschenberg/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Claes Oldenburg, Floor Burger, 1962. Canvas filled with foam rubber and cardboard boxes, painted with latex and Liquitex, 132.1 x 213.4 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada.
Claes Oldenburg
Spatiality has always come naturally to Claes Oldenburg. He first moved towards Pop/Mass-Culture Art after experimenting in the late-1950s with Happenings and other live artistic events that already foreshadowed Performance Art. Usually such staged episodes were anarchic, neo-Dadaist affairs, attacks upon art and its conventions that echoed the uncertainty of the times in which they were created. Oldenburg’s first environmental work, The Street, was created in New York in 1960 and comprised an intentionally ragged, debris-strewn arena whose chaos was intended to parallel the confusion of the city in which it appeared. We have already touched upon Oldenburg’s two versions of The Store dating from 1961-2. As we have seen, with the second of these he discovered an important constituent of his metier, namely the enormous enlargement of everyday objects of mass-consumption whose size we invariably take for granted. Such enhancement not only cuts across normality but equally it comments upon the materialism of an age that assuredly puts a premium upon size and economic growth. (Unfortunately truth is always stranger than fiction; a sculpture of a hamburger more than two metres wide that Oldenburg created in 1962, is now almost in danger of being eclipsed in size by a new generation of real, fast-food chain ‘Monster Thickburgers’ exploding with calories and vast suppurations of fat.)
Oldenburg also found another, related way of interfering with our sense of the real: as well as using hard materials such as plaster and wire to imitate the appearance of fairly soft matter such as bread, meat and ice cream, he reversed the process and turned soft materials into very hard things indeed. A good example is his Soft Toilet of 1966. Down the years Oldenburg has created many other memorable and amusing pieces. One is the mock vehicle bearing a rising and falling lipstick which was destined for the Yale University campus in 1969 but which proved to be a little too challenging for the academic elders; first they had it removed and then they consigned it to a nearby museum. No less witty is the vast clothes-pin Oldenburg created for a public plaza in Philadelphia in 1976. Sadly or otherwise, many of Oldenburg’s projects have never come to fruition, such as his 1966 notion of replacing Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, London, with an equally high automotive gear stick, which would have proven a most apt symbol for a public space and a country soon to be overrun by cars. No less whimsical was his 1978-81 plan to create a bridge in Rotterdam, Holland, in the form of two huge screws bent to the shapes of arches; only from the 1980s onwards would ‘post-Modernist’ architects take such imaginative conceits seriously. Since 1976, in association with his wife and artistic collaborator, Coosje van Bruggen, Oldenburg has continued to produce large numbers of sculptures that vary the size and density of everyday objects around us. Many of these, such as a 1988 bridge in the form of a spoon and cherry resting on a small island in a pond at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, enjoy a beauty of line and colour that removes them far from the triviality of the everyday consumer objects and foodstuffs that inspired them.
Two of the most inevitably trivial everyday objects within modern mass-culture are the children’s comic and the adolescent romance magazine. Given the nature of modern society it is perhaps sad but inevitable that boys should find intellectual sustenance and imaginative empowerment in sequences of images recounting easily-assimilated tales of cowboys, soldiers, spacemen and the like, while the adjustment from childhood to the initial stages of womanhood readily compels many girls to resort to romanticised visual fiction, feminist protests notwithstanding. From the perspective of adulthood the imagery of the boys’ comic usually seems mock-heroic and banal, while that of the girls’ romance magazine appears hopelessly sentimental, gauche and banal. But comics and romance magazines are enormously popular, and thus industrialised. It was therefore unsurprising that artists would eventually turn their attention to such means of mass-communication.
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein was certainly not the first of them to do so but he was the first to realise that in order to enhance his statements about the way both comics and teenage romance magazines embody mass-culture, he needed to emulate the very processes by which they are printed. Most especially this concerned the method by which halftones – that is, the intermediate, light-to-dark shades of the various colours used – are arrived at in mass-printing. To such an end Lichtenstein began to emulate the Benday dot, a process of halftone printing first developed in New York in 1875 by the printer Benjamin Day. By the 1960s such a process was already being overtaken by automated photolitho techniques but this didn’t worry Lichtenstein, for his emulation of the method turned his paintings from simply being magnified copies of comic-strip images into comments about the nature of mechanical reproduction.
Like many other artists who contributed towards the Pop/Mass-Culture Art sensibility – Warhol and Hockney also immediately come to mind – Lichtenstein had first worked through Abstract Expressionism in an undistinguished and unsatisfied way. His epiphany occurred in June 1961 when he painted Look Mickey, a picture he developed from a Mickey Mouse cartoon. Not long afterwards he realised the potential for employing the imagery of war comics to comment obliquely upon contemporary political and military developments. This was extremely apposite, for the 1960s saw continuing American involvement in the Cold War and deepening entanglement in Vietnam. In works such as Blam of 1962 and Torpedo…Los! of 1963, Lichtenstein may have developed material that clearly dealt respectively with the Korean War and the Second World War but its relevance to contemporary America was surely obvious to all but the most obtuse.
Roy Lichtenstein, ART, 1962. Oil on canvas, 91 x 173 cm. Gordon Locksley and George T. Shea collection, USA.
Andy Warhol, 129 Die in Jet (Plane Crash), 1962. Acrylic paint on canvas, 254 x 183 cm. Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
The use of material drawn from teenage romance magazines, in paintings such as Hopeless of 1963 and We Rose Up Slowly of 1964, permitted Lichtenstein to comment sardonically upon immature perspectives regarding human relationships. Naturally, by enlarging the original images greatly, the painter necessarily amplifies the banality of the original material and thereby accentuates something of the falsity – of taste, imagery and even economic value – that lies at the very heart of the increasingly inauthentic global mass-culture that continues to expand and surround us. Moreover, the magnification of kitsch or laughable bad taste serves just as usefully as a distancing process, allowing both artist and viewer to look down upon the original imagery with cultural condescension, as though to say ‘such banality is only for lesser mortals – I’m not taken in by it’. We shall encounter exactly the same distancing process in the work of other Pop/Mass-Culture Art figures, most notably Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons.
From the start Lichtenstein also directed his shafts at ‘Art’. In Mr Bellamy, which he created in his breakthrough year of 1961, he wittily created an art world in-joke, while in the following year, with Masterpiece, he satirised the perpetual New York clamour for the fame that he was certainly seeking for himself. In 1962 too, Lichtenstein made the first of a set of images dealing with the single word ART. By the mid-1960s he began to apply his mechanical reproduction emulation technique to images by Monet, Cézanne, Picasso, Mondrian, Léger and a great many other masters. He did not do much (if anything) for the originals but he certainly made the point that a large amount of art is today disseminated through mechanical reproduction, although this hardly constitutes a profound insight. Yet in one series of works dealing with artistic matters he did crack an excellent visual joke. This was his set of gigantic emulations of what in reality would have been fairly small Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes; the witticism emerges from the disparity of size between what we know of the originals and what the imitations project, as well as the difference between the original, emotionally-charged brushstrokes and Lichtenstein’s utterly unemotional transformation of them.
Because Lichtenstein could not go on churning out comic-strip and reworked-art images forever, he was forced to expand his repertoire of subjects. As a result, he accorded the same Benday dot treatment to landscapes, interiors, architectural details, banal advertising images, household objects and a mass of other artefacts. He also juxtaposed images from a variety of sources, creating montages analogous to Cubist collages. Certainly his paintings and sculptures can look extremely seductive, and assuredly he never ran out of things to say, but eventually his output all became somewhat wearisome, for although the Benday dots assume a life of their own by contributing an abstractive air to the proceedings, they no longer seem pertinent when divorced from their comic-strip surroundings. (Moreover, in an age of electronically-created halftones they became totally irrelevant technologically). Like many creative figures before and since, Lichtenstein eventually ran his art into the quicksand of a particular style, ending up simply as a mannerist.
Andy Warhol
The same charge could justifiably be levelled at a good deal of the later work of Andy Warhol, for although he never restricted himself to a single style, he did eventually go through patches of having nothing to say, and consequently ended up producing wave after wave of images that are all style and no substance. Warhol was a top New York advertising illustrator in the 1950s, grossing hundreds of thousands of dollars annually and winning industry awards for his work. But after seeing the Johns and Rauschenberg shows in 1958 he became desperate to forge a new career for himself as a fine artist. In 1960 he took up painting seriously, understandably toying with Abstract Expressionism but to no avail; by then the style was passé. He also tried neo-Dadaism in the Rauschenberg manner, which got him nowhere fast. Then he painted Coke bottles and similar artefacts drawn from mass-culture but did so in a sloppy expressive manner that didn’t hit the visual spot either. Around the same time he explored comic-strip images, until he found out that Roy Lichtenstein had beaten him to the draw on that one too. So where could he go next, he asked himself with increasing desperation?
The answer came one evening in December 1961. An interior decorator friend claimed to know exactly what he should be painting and demanded fifty dollars for the idea. Warhol quickly paid up and was told he should be painting his two favourite things in the world: money and the canned soup he ate for lunch daily. He loved these suggestions and the very next day was seen in his local supermarket buying all forty varieties of Campbell’s Soup. He immediately set to work, and over the next six months or so produced a group of forty small, laboriously painted oils, each of which inexpressively portrayed a can containing a separate flavour of soup. While slaving over these works he kept his radio, television and record-player simultaneously going at full blast, just to purge his mind of all subjectivity; he wanted to be an automaton, and his paintings to look as utterly impersonal as possible. This was because, with an insight only given to genius, he had recognised three fundamental truths of mass-culture: that we live in a supreme age of impersonally-crafted, mass-produced objects; that those objects are usually only affordable because they are created in enormous quantities; and that repetitiousness and replication – of labour, production and marketing – are what makes and eventually sells them. All of this he wanted to parallel exactly in his art.
The first Campbell’s Soup Cans and Dollar Bills paintings were followed by pictures of teach-yourself-to-dance diagrams, paint-by-numbers images, and serried ranks of Coca-Cola bottles, S & H Green Stamps, airmail stamps and stickers, and ‘Glass – Handle with Care’ labels. Many of these were produced using hand-cut stencils or rubber stamps and woodblocks, devices Warhol had employed as an illustrator. But the gap between hand-made and machine-made images was truly closed in July 1962 when, as we have seen, Warhol’s attention was drawn to the photographic-silkscreen technique as an efficient, non-laborious means of making large numbers of repeated images. Soon these included pictures of baseball, pop music and movie stars, as well as of the Mona Lisa, many of which were represented as repetitiously as possible; this repetitiveness paralleled the way that images of such persona and icons of art are constantly being repeated by the mass-media. By the time he created these images Warhol had also begun to move in a different direction as well, for early that June an art-curator friend had told him to stop affirming life and instead portray the death that pervaded America. As a consequence, Warhol produced a picture of a newspaper front page which bore the headline ‘129 DIE IN JET!’. He followed it with a long sequence of Disaster pictures. Among other sources, these drew upon photos of car crash victims taken from police and newspaper files; an image of the electric chair whose use was a matter of heated debate in New York State at the time; and a photo of a newspaper report of botulism fatalities. He also produced a series of pictures of people committing suicide. In many of the Disaster pictures Warhol coupled each canvas with an identically-sized support painted all over with the same basic colour as its companion (see an example). He claimed to have done so in order to give his purchasers twice as much painting for their money, but that was a diversion; clearly his true intention was to complement each positive image with an utterly negative one. In the context of the tragic events depicted, the blank canvas can only signify the total void created by death.
After 6 August 1962, one of the suicides Warhol portrayed was Marilyn Monroe, who had killed herself the previous day. For her image Warhol arrived at yet another inventive way of dealing with things: he reproduced a photo of the dead star over areas of flat colour that suggest perfect skin, perfect hair, perfect eyeliner, perfect flesh and perfect lip colourings, thereby making Marilyn look as artificial and banal as possible. In one of the Marilyns Warhol even set the film star down on a field of gold, thus reminding us that the lady was at the cutting edge of a vast industrial apparatus for transforming her manifold attractions into gold. Arguably an even more inventive contribution to the Marilyns series is the Marilyn Diptych of 1962 in which Warhol contrasted the actress’s ‘perfect’ and colourful public persona with her messy, disintegrating, uncolourful and gradually fading private self. Any notion that Warhol was never a serious artist is completely confounded by this one picture alone.
Further Disaster images followed, notably race riot pictures and, following John F. Kennedy’s death on 22 November 1963, the ‘Jackie’ series which drew upon newspaper photos taken after the assassination. In 1964 Warhol turned his attention to art capitalism and to sculpture in equal measures. He had carpenters make 400 wooden boxes which he and his assistants then silk-screened so as to replicate the outer cardboard packing cases of Campbell’s Soup cans, Brillo Pads, Del Monte Peach Halves and similar consumer products which might be found in a supermarket stockroom. Subsequently, he exhibited these sculptures, filling the Stable Gallery in New York from floor to ceiling with the objects and thereby making the space look just like such a stockroom. This was his entire point, for commercial art galleries are never much more than that.
Protest and notoriety followed Warhol’s creation of a gigantic mural showing thirteen of the FBI’s Most Wanted Men on the New York State Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in April 1964; faced with demands for its removal because most of the suspects were Italian-Americans, Warhol simply obliterated the image with aluminium paint, a neo-Dadaist gesture that was surely appreciated by his friends Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg, among others. Later that summer Warhol turned away from destruction and criminality by creating flower pictures from photos of real flowers. By giving them exactly the same flat and separated colour treatment he had accorded to Marilyn Monroe, he made the flowers look extremely banal and artificial, thus driving a wedge between nature and art.
Andy Warhol, The Last Supper, 1986. Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen, 198.1 x 777.2 cm. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
James Rosenquist, The Friction Disappears, 1965. Oil on canvas, 122 x 112 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., gift of Container Corporation of America. Art © 2006 James Rosenquist/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
In April 1966 Warhol brought this burst of painterly creativity to an end with a show of Cow Wallpaper and floating helium balloons. The wallpaper was intended to summarise the pastoral tradition in western art; the balloons were very much part of the ‘Flower Power’ consciousness of the day. By now Warhol was utterly disenchanted with creating pictures and so he turned away from doing so for some time. Instead, he ran the Velvet Underground rock group and made films, none of which relate to the Pop/Mass-Culture Art sensibility. Not until 1971-72 would he return to form in the visual arts by creating 2000 images of the Chinese leader Chairman Mao Zedong, many of them in the form of a wallpaper; this lining would serve as the backdrop to an exhibition Warhol would mount of the Chairman Mao paintings and prints in 1974. The series constitutes a masterly piece of irony, for the communist politician represented everything that capitalistic purchasers of art despised, an antipathy that didn’t prevent them from buying the pictures. Naturally, the Chairman Mao series also made highly relevant points about the worship of politicians and the proliferation of idolising images of them.
In 1972 Warhol began a new career by turning into a society portraitist. This should not entirely surprise us; coming as he did from working-class Pittsburgh, where he had been born on the wrong side of the tracks, he was always in thrall of glitz and glamour, celebrity and the cult of personality. But his new direction didn’t do his art much good, for over the following years he produced vast numbers of commissioned portraits, many of which have an entirely vacuous visual appeal; probe the images and there is absolutely nothing behind them, which is certainly not the case with portraits by, say, Titian, Rembrandt or Degas. But in one way Warhol was again holding up an accurate mirror to society, for in most cases the people he painted were as superficial as their portraits. Once again he effected a complete congruence between subject and object.
More irony followed in 1976, the year in which Warhol made his last film. The Hammer and Sickle images follow in the footsteps of the Chairman Mao paintings and prints by presenting capitalist art buyers with symbols of communist revolution, which is just what they truly abhorred. Yet in a subsequent sequence of works, namely the Skulls series of paintings and prints also dating from 1976, Warhol did again become a serious artist, at least for a while. This is perhaps unsurprising, for in 1968 he had been shot by one of his followers, an attack that undoubtedly brought home to him his own mortality. The Skulls are not great paintings but they do enjoy a certain poetic resonance, and they undeniably add something to the long tradition of momento mori images in western art.
Over the rest of his career until his untimely death in 1987, Warhol’s work was highly variable in quality. He made large numbers of very bland portraits whose generic subjects range from athletes to American Indians. Predictably the gay-orientated Warhol gave us representations of sexual organs. Likenesses of the Queens of England, Denmark, Holland and Swaziland must rate among the blandest royal portraits ever created. Art continued to be a source of subject-matter, as in sequences of works dedicated to exploring imagery by Munch, de Chirico, Leonardo da Vinci and various lesser Renaissance painters. Warhol’s affinity with the anti-art neo-Dadaism of Rauschenberg and Johns in the 1950s resurfaced in 1977 when he created a highly smelly Oxidation series of canvases by getting his pals to urinate on to wet copper paint, thereby causing the chemical reaction of the titles. In a sequence of wholly abstract paintings, the Shadows series exhibited in 1979, Warhol’s lifelong tendency to bring out the purely formal qualities of the images he used came wholly to the fore, although to no artistic effect whatsoever. Between 1979 and 1986 he returned to the subjects of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup cans, although now he treated them in the manner of photographic negatives, thereby creating a parallel with the negativity of the world around us. In highly inventive, photo-negative-like portraits of his admirer, the German artist Joseph Beuys (whose work he did not esteem in return), Warhol covered each canvas with diamond dust, thereby making a witty and valid point about art world glitz and glamour. A new set of dollar sign images again allowed him to portray the money he loved so much, while in the opposite vein he transformed yet another arch-enemy of capitalism, Vladimir Ilych Lenin, into a glamorous figure whom he set before the haute-bourgeoisie for their delectation and their money. Perhaps most tellingly Warhol created a series of pictures of handguns in 1981. These are not any old guns, however; they are .22 snub-nosed revolvers, one of the two types of weapon his assailant had carried in 1968.
Just before his death resulting from poor medical attention following a minor operation in 1987, Warhol made a couple of series of religious images. In one he dealt with the repetitiousness of kitsch sculptural reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, while in the other he transformed a Raphael Madonna and Child into a tawdry advertisement; both series therefore make valid (if rather slight) points about the bogusness, commercialism and cheapening of religious imagery in the modern world. After Warhol’s death it emerged that he had been a dedicated if secretive Roman Catholic, so quite evidently he did hold genuine views about the debasement of religious art in our time. His concealment of that authentic side to himself was entirely in keeping with the way he worked hard to appear mindless and robotic after 1963, for he was anything but brainless and mechanical. That he was aware he masked his true self is proven by another late series of works, his Camouflage Self-Portraits, for camouflage serves no other purpose than to cloak what is real.
Of all the artists who have contributed to the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition, it seems valid to claim that Warhol was one of the most thematically varied, visually inventive and humanly insightful, which is why he has been accorded so much space here. In the five or so years between 1962 and 1966, and on occasions thereafter, he created works that still have an enormous amount to say about the modern world. Admittedly he was a largely associative artist, setting off chains of mental links by means of his images, rather than producing images that possess much pictorial resonance (as is the case with, say, those many Old Master painters whose exploration of both the visual and the associative can seem inexhaustible). But if he was a largely associative artist he did possess the rare ability to project huge implications through the mental connections he set in motion (as with the parallels he drew between pictorial repetitiousness and industrial repetitiousness). By such means he threw a great deal of direct or indirect light upon modern nihilism, materialism and conspicuous consumption, world-weariness or anomie, political manipulation, economic exploitation, media hero-worship, and the creation of artificially-induced needs and aspirations. He also carried forward the assaults on art and bourgeois values that the Dadaists had earlier pioneered, so that by manipulating images and the public persona of the artist he was able to throw back in our faces the contradictions and superficialities of contemporary art and culture. Ultimately it is the trenchancy of his cultural critique, as well as the vivacity with which he imbued it, that will surely lend his works their continuing relevance long after the objects he represented have become technologically outmoded, and the famous people he depicted have come to be regarded merely as the faded superstars of a bygone era.
James Rosenquist
If Andy Warhol’s art generates associations, so too does that of James Rosenquist, albeit in a far less explicit and much more visually fractured way. Rosenquist spent about seven years of his early working life as a billboard painter, both in the mid-western United States, from where he hails, and in New York, to which city he moved in 1955. In 1960 he terminated that activity in order to concentrate on his art. He had continued to work in the wholly abstract manner he had been pursuing for about three years, but then he finally brought his imagery into creative focus at the end of 1960.
Like Warhol, Rosenquist had also been enormously impressed by the Jasper Johns show in 1958, as well as by works by the same artist viewed later. What particularly attracted him was the degree of abstractiveness Johns had elicited from images of real things, such as flags and other signs such as numbers and the letters of the alphabet. After tentatively exploring this influence, Rosenquist finally decided, “…to make pictures of fragments, images that would spill off the canvas instead of recede into it… I thought each fragment would be identified at a different rate of speed, and that I would paint them as realistically as possible.” The results were canvases such as President Elect of 1960-61. Here the face of US President John F. Kennedy is juxtaposed with a slice of chocolate cake being pulled apart by some perfectly manicured female hands, alongside the shiny body and wheel of a car. Essentially the work marks a return to Picasso’s assembled Cubist images of exactly half a century earlier, except that instead of pasting down bits of visual flotsam and jetsam on small-to-medium sized pieces of paper or canvas as the great Spanish artist had done, Rosenquist hugely scaled up fragments of imagery taken from magazine photos and the like, painting them impersonally and with enormous verisimilitude. The constituent images are strongly bound to each other with intersecting lines and interpenetrating masses, and they help construct an overall meaning, relating the President to the society he governed by means of some of its artefacts and glossy images.
Rosenquist went on mining this pictorial vein thereafter. As he commented, “I’m interested in contemporary vision – the flicker of chrome, reflections, rapid associations, quick flashes of light. Bing – bang! I don’t do anecdotes. I accumulate experiences.” Thus Painting for the American Negro of 1962-3 uses all kinds of images taken from the mass-media to project generalised points about ethnicity, sexuality and consumerism. Again an allusive overall meaning emerges from the constituent images, although the lack of any direct relationship between the people and objects represented says much about the fracturing of communication, identity and self-confidence that was very much the lot of American blacks when the picture was painted.
The use of visual connection and fragmentation can equally be encountered in what is arguably Rosenquist’s masterpiece, the gigantic F-111 of 1965. Totalling more than 26 metres in length and running around four walls, the composition is underpinned by the shape of what was then the very latest American fighter-bomber, the F-111 of the title. In overall terms the work makes a running statement about the visual overload of the contemporary world, its rampant, glossy materialism and, not least of all, its militarism (for when the picture was painted, things were really hotting up in Vietnam). The work also incorporates a number of inventive visual metaphors, as will be seen in the commentary on the colour plate below.
The same sense of scale, an even more sophisticated sense of abstractive form and some wonderful colours are all present in Rosenquist’s next major work, his Horse Blinders of 1968-9 (1, 2, 3, 4) which is largely about the way we perceive things. Although Rosenquist’s art went into decline following a horrendous road crash in 1971, it slowly regained in strength. This is made abundantly clear by superb paintings such as Star Thief of 1980, which acts as a metaphor for the earth in space; and by 4 New Clear Women of 1983, which addresses the fragmentation of women in modern society. If nothing else Rosenquist has developed the power to create beauty out of all the disparate visual phenomena that surround us, and to do so with the most impressive dash. It is a rare achievement.
Jim Dine, Car Crash, 1959-1960. Oil and mixed media on burlap, 152.4 x 162.6 cm. Private collection.
George Segal, Cinema, 1963. Plaster, metal, plexiglass and fluorescent light. 299.7 x 243.3 x 99 cm. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, gift of Seymour H. Knox, 1964. Art © 2006 The George and Helen Segal Foundation/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Ed Kienholz, Roxy’s, 1961-1962 (detail). Paint and resin on mannequin parts, furniture, lamps, bric-a-brac, boar skull, papier maché jack-o-lantern, jukebox, string puppets, garbage can, potato sack, sewing machine stand, treadmill, towel, paintings, live goldfish in bowel, disinfectant, perfume, clothing, rugs, wood, wainscoting and wallpaper, variable dimensions. Reinhard Onnasch collection.
Jim Dine
Jim Dine has always been termed a ‘Pop’ artist simply because he became prominent around 1960 and participated in the 1962 ‘New Realists’ exhibition, in which he displayed a ceramic wash-basin attached to a canvas, a panel of bathroom fixtures, a painting with a lawnmower attached, and a canvas supporting five feet of coloured hand tools. Yet Dine very speedily disassociated himself from ‘Pop Art’, and he was quite right to do so, for rather than address any aspects of popular mass-culture, he merely made use of many of its familiar objects to express aspects of his inner life. As time has gone on that self-exploratory trend has continued, with his recent output bearing no links to mass-culture whatsoever.
George Segal
An artist whose output has continued to enjoy such a connection, however, is George Segal. He began his career as a painter who occasionally tried his hand at sculpture, but the turning point in his development was reached in 1961 when a technical breakthrough enabled him to achieve a very direct degree of sculptural realism. On the back of this he went on to fashion an art dealing with the anonymity of modern life, the complex and often inexpressible relations between men and women, the disconnection of the individual from the crowd, our links with the media and technology, and much else besides (Cinema, 1963; The Dry-Cleaning Store, 1964; The Diner, 1965; The Subway, 1968). We are on familiar American territory here, of course, for anonymity, insularity, loneliness and alienation are the characteristic themes of Edward Hopper’s work, and Segal has not only admitted his artistic indebtedness to that painter but done so in a way that reveals as much about himself as it does his creative forebear:
…for [Hopper] to use the real stuff of the world and somehow – not suddenly but painstakingly, painfully, slowly – figure out how to stack the elements into a heap that began talking very tellingly of his own deepest feelings, he had to make some kind of marriage between what he could see outside with his eyes, touch with his hands, and the feelings that were going on inside. Now, I think that’s as simply as I can say what I think art is about.
As in Hopper’s work, the world represented by Segal is somehow stocked with people filled with a mute sense of their drab ordinariness. In Segal’s case that sensibility is communicated by the figures appearing in monochrome amid fully-coloured environments that are often created out of real objects.
Ed Kienholz
Another sculptor who emerged during the first great phase of the Pop/Mass-Culture Art dynamic also frequently used real objects in his works. Often he employed wit to mask his seriousness about the contemporary world, thereby creating some very deadly barbs indeed. Ed Kienholz had worked as a handyman in Los Angeles for a long period during the 1950s, and so he had become very adept at re-utilising cast-off materials. It was therefore logical that he should eventually incorporate such throwaway stuff into his works. As he once stated, “I really begin to understand any society by going through its junk stores and flea markets. It is a form of education and historical orientation for me. I can see the results of ideas in what is thrown away by a culture.”
Kienholz’s use of found materials can be readily witnessed in his breakthrough piece, the large sculptural ensemble entitled Roxy’s of 1961-2 (1, 2, 3, 4). Here he re-created on a life-size scale a suite of rooms in a cheap brothel in Kellogg, Idaho, which he remembered from his youth (although the work is named after a similar bordello in Nevada). The space is filled with real pieces of furniture, a jukebox, live goldfish in a bowl, lamps, rugs, wallpaper, bric-a-brac and all kinds of other artefacts, including pictures and posters. Naturally the creatures and objects help the rooms act as a realistic backdrop to the extremely disturbing representations of the prostitutes. These ladies enjoy picturesque names such as Cockeyed Jenny and Five Dollar Billy, and their forms are constructed from parts of shop-window mannequins covered in paint and resin.
A less spatially ambitious work of Kienholz’s breakthrough years is The Illegal Operation which makes a horrifying statement about back street abortion. By definition the work touches upon sexuality, but Back Seat Dodge ‘38 of 1964 is openly explicit about such matters, for it shows a couple making love. The work caused outrage in some quarters of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art when it was shown there in 1966, although just to regard the piece as a statement about people fornicating in a junked car is clearly to miss the point, for the work offers a wittily trenchant critique of the coarsening of sexual relations in a throwaway society. But there was a tragic side to Kienholz too, as he made clear in his superb ensemble of 1964-5, The Wait, which is surely one of the most moving treatments of old-age, loneliness and mortality to be found anywhere in art. Again, Kienholz’s genius for expressively and associatively re-cycling found objects is vividly apparent, for the work aptly includes some old bones and a stuffed cat. As the frequent marginalisation of old people is one of the saddest effects of modern life, The Wait indubitably forms part of a creative tradition dealing with mass-culture.
Another ensemble Kienholz created in 1965 also addresses mortality, for according to the sculptor himself the people in the work are all trying to bypass their awareness of death. The Beanery (1, 2, 3) represents a crowded West Hollywood restaurant and bar, complete with the tape-recorded sound of the clientele drinking and talking running continuously in the background. The customers propping up the bar each sport clocks instead of faces, with all the hour and minute hands stopped at exactly the same moment in order to denote the ennui and killing of time typically encountered in such an establishment. And a subsequent work was far more disturbing. In The State Hospital of 1966, Kienholz drew upon his experiences as an orderly in a state mental hospital almost two decades earlier to create not just an isolation cell but some profound metaphors for the assaults upon both mind and body encountered in such an institution. Kienholz created what is possibly his best-known work in 1968 with The Portable War Memorial. Here patriotism, militarism and their symbols, plus the futility of war, the contradictions of Christianity and the brevity of historical memory are contrasted with the banal consumerism that modern war is ostensibly concerned with defending. Such a contrast was most apposite when American involvement in Vietnam was at its height, and sadly the work has lost none of its relevance down the years.
In a host of subsequent ensembles and single sculptures, Kienholz dealt brilliantly with an enormous array of social and cultural issues: trashy television; the onset of middle age; racial violence (1, 2, 3, 4) and Nazi oppression; marriage, sexual identity and sexual voyeurism; the loneliness of hotel life and the separateness of compartmentalised living; family memory; religious fixation and insincerity expressed as a form of masturbation; the American judiciary and the economic interests it serves; and much else besides. One of Kienholz’s wittier later pieces was The Art Show (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) which he completed in 1977 in collaboration with his partner after 1972, Nancy Reddin. In 1988 the two of them completed another treatment of the brothel theme, now re-creating a street in Amsterdam’s red-light district in all its tawdry glamour. In The Merry-Go-World Or Begat By Chance And the Wonder Horse Trigger of 1994, the two artists made a statement about the accidents of birth that confer an affluent lifestyle upon some but accord many others extreme poverty, and not just outside the USA.
As every one of his works makes clear, Kienholz (either alone or in tandem) was a highly associative artist, setting in motion all kinds of mental links concerning memory and the associations that materials might hold, which is partly why discarded elements proved so necessary to him. He not only consistently contributed to the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition but will in time surely come to be regarded as one of its towering figures. Certainly some of his output crosses the frontiers of good taste, but as polite decorum played no part in his scheme of things, such banality is unimportant. (In any case, as Warhol and others have made equally clear, banality is entirely congruent with what is being critiqued.)
Some Further American Pop/Mass-Culture Artists
We can deal with a number of other American contributors to the first phase of the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition more briefly, simply because their work is less inventive, or because essentially these figures have just had one thing to say and have stated it repeatedly without much development, or both.
Tom Wesselmann specialised in producing still-life pictures of consumer objects and packaged comestibles, using pasted photographs of supermarket goods such as food cans, beer bottles and cigarette packs to project a visually brilliant and sharply-focused awareness of the garish side of American consumerism. In some works he also employed real objects such as televisions, refrigerators and bathroom fittings to heighten the banality of what he painted or incorporated around them. In a series dealing with the American nude Wesselmann represented the female form in a flattened manner derived from Matisse and Bonnard, thereby touching upon the territory covered by both art and soft-core pornography, as well as slightly spicing things up sexually. Often Wesselmann related mass-consumption to art by including reproductions of works by Cézanne, Picasso and Mondrian among others; as art is yet another marketed area of human activity, the relationship seems germane. Everywhere in Wesselmann’s work the falsity and garishness of modern mass-culture are allied to the frigid, frozen realism of the advertising image. In time, his way of representing things freed up and, in the process, loosely allied itself to the flattening of forms encountered in the pictures of the non-representational painter Ellsworth Kelly. On occasion Wesselmann’s images also became more sculptural and even larger in size. Finally, his later works became both sketchy and sculptural, as he created vivacious images of still-lifes and landscapes in enamel on cut-out pieces of steel or aluminium.
Like his contemporaries Warhol, Rosenquist and Wesselmann, Wayne Thiebaud also dealt with American plenitude, specialising in pictures of food, arranged succulently and painted with a thick, creamy impasto that heightens the sense of appeal (Salads, Sandwiches and Desserts, 1962; Lunch Table, 1964). Often the wide numbers of dishes on offer is reminiscent of the multitudinousness of repeated images found in Warhol’s work, although the only associations engendered by such massive duplications are those of a flavoursome availability.
Allan D’Arcangelo mapped out the great American highway as his artistic territory, making graphically flattened and wry comments upon the bland ubiquity of landscapes filled with gas stations, diners, motels, advertising emblems, road signs, neon lights and the like. Sometimes the emblems could double as romantic symbols and occasionally the signs could figure in political protests. After portraying American media heroes and villains, Mel Ramos produced endless images of pin-ups, frequently coupling them with consumer objects or animals, to summon forth the associations of advertising. And Robert Indiana specialised in the symbolism of words, often in connection with the behavioural exhortations of modern consumerist culture.
Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude #54, 1964. Oil and collage on canvas, acrylic and collage on board, enameled various household objects, 177 x 215 x 99.6 cm. Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, gift of Ludwig. Art © 2006 Estate of Tom Wesselmann/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Meanwhile, back in Europe…
We have already seen that some of the earliest contributors to the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition lived and worked in Europe. In the 1960s Eduardo Paolozzi began creating large numbers of screenprints drawing upon technological imagery, works that in their pictorial density, propensity for witty, surrealistic juxtaposition, elegant colouring and formal variety constitute some of the most vivid portrayals of the image-bombardment of our era. No less relevant and stimulating is his sculpture, which often includes impressed patterning taken from machine parts, electronic circuit-boards and the like, thereby reminding us of the effects of technology upon humankind.
Richard Hamilton never relinquished his interest in mass-culture, although sadly his output failed to pick up very much creative momentum. He could deal with consumerism, as he did in a small number of views of domestic interiors created in the mid-1960s; with stardom, as he did in a 1965 treatment of a group of photographs of Marilyn Monroe as though they had been selected by a newspaper editor or advertising executive after a photo shoot; and the art world, as he did in a rather pointless sequence of 1965-6 views of the Guggenheim Museum, New York. But it is all very inconsequential. Even images from the 1980s, such as his Soft Pink Landscape, with its single roll of toilet tissue set in a washy landscape reminiscent of an English watercolour, do not say a lot about the banality of publicity, and certainly nothing that advertising does not itself proclaim much more loudly.
Peter Blake has proven to be far more productive and visually inventive down the years. Throughout the 1960s and beyond he produced vibrant images that portray or even incorporate elements taken directly from popular mass-culture. A good example is his self-portrait of 1961. By covering himself with badges that proclaim his tastes and star-worshipping affinities, Blake affords us a clever insight into the inner man. As the work makes clear, he loves jazz and pop music, and the latter appreciation was further articulated in Got a Girl of 1960-61 which actually incorporates the vinyl record of that title by the Four Preps, as well as photos of leading pop stars of the day, including Elvis Presley. In 1967, along with his first wife, Jann Haworth, Blake took a further step towards putting his art at the service of pop music by designing the cover for one of the best-selling albums of all time, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This is a photographed image of a witty assembly of pieces of sculpture, waxworks figures, life-size photographs of politicians, musicians, artists and media stars, musical instruments and, of course, the Beatles themselves, dressed in quasi-military costumes that now look embarrassingly dated. As a portrait of a pop group and its cultural affinities the cover is perhaps unequalled, and it is surely the most widely-communicated Pop/Mass-Culture Art image of all time.
At the end of the 1960s Blake moved away from London and for many years thereafter indulged his sense of nostalgia by becoming a ‘Ruralist’, or a painter dedicated to extolling rustic values. Only occasionally would he return to aspects of mass-culture, as he did in 1981 with his witty homage to Courbet, The Meeting or Have a Nice Day Mr Hockney. This shows Blake standing alongside the painters Howard Hodgkin and David Hockney before some of the hedonistic pleasures afforded by southern California.
David Hockney
David Hockney is, of course, perhaps the most admired painter of the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition to have emerged in Britain. Born in the north of England, he studied art in his hometown of Bradford before becoming a post-graduate at the Royal College of Art in London between 1959 and 1962. At the college Hockney almost immediately met R.B. Kitaj who encouraged him to abandon the Abstract Expressionist approach he was dutifully following, in favour of his true artistic interests. As a result, Hockney entered the first of his many mature stylistic phases.
Like his supreme artistic hero, Pablo Picasso, Hockney has passed through differing creative stages. The first of these lasted between 1961 and 1966, and arguably it proved the most visually inventive period of his entire career. Stylistically it owed much to the influence of the French painter Jean Dubuffet, who had developed an intentionally crude manner of painting based upon the visual and expressive directness of graffiti and child art. The slightly childlike side of Hockney’s nature found this approach highly congenial. Other influences were ancient Egyptian sculpture, the paintings of Piero della Francesca and Jan Vermeer, and the pictures and prints of William Hogarth. By drawing upon such stimuli, Hockney was able to explore a number of preoccupations that have remained constants in his work down to the present day: the relationship between art and illusion; perspective and its contradictions; and his homosexual impulses, which he has never denied. Occasionally he even demonstrated an awareness of mass-culture and its artefacts, as can be seen in his Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style of 1961. Here he attained a number of goals simultaneously: he represented a familiar consumer product; he got in a cheap joke at Francis Bacon’s expense; and he explored the nature of pictorial space. To do so he used a shaped canvas in a sideways look at what American painters such as Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella were doing contemporaneously with such supports.
Between 1961 and 1963 Hockney projected a far more complex set of responses to contemporary mass-culture in his series of etchings, “The Rake’s Progress”, of which one example is reproduced opposite and some others are discussed below (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). In this sequence he updated William Hogarth’s famous set of engravings by transporting his rake to present-day New York and Washington, and charted his downfall there. Amid other subjects the images deal with contemporary religious mass-meetings, body-building athleticism, gay sexuality, political elections, the cinema and race relations, psychiatric deterioration and the mental subjugation enforced by pop music.
In 1964, following his first visit to southern California, Hockney began dealing pictorially with American art collectors and the artificial ambiance in which they lived; a memorable painting in this vein is the California Art Collector of 1964 which owes a good deal stylistically to Piero della Francesca. However, by 1966, Hockney began to move away from the freewheeling spatial organisation and intentionally crude drawing of his initial manner and gravitated towards a more conventional organisation of space and a more traditional way of modelling forms. This is unsurprising, for by now he was becoming increasingly reliant upon photographs to supply the visual information needed for his pictures. In this second phase, Hockney surveyed the clean-cut but somehow inert side of Los Angeles life. Such an approach is typified by the portrait of Nick Wilder of 1966. Here the influence of Vermeer is quite apparent, for almost all the major compositional lines run parallel to the edges of the canvas and thus imbue the image with a still, hieratic quality. In A Bigger Splash of 1967 Hockney captured to perfection the artificiality, heat and stillness of affluent, hedonistic Los Angeles, where the sun is always shining and the pool constantly beckons.
During the 1970s Hockney generally lost interest in the mass-culture around him, preferring to paint his friends and relatives, as well as landscapes and still-lifes. However, towards the end of that decade he started exploring the subject of swimming pools once again, especially in a memorable set of prints in which he was able to take advantage of a new method of bonding pigment and paper. Throughout this fourth phase of his development the influence of Picasso’s Cubism constantly increased, motivating Hockney to explore all kinds of perspectival contradictions. And the garish colouring of Fauvism also began to creep into his work, which proved exceedingly handy when he began representing the hot landscapes of Los Angeles and its environs in a fifth phase of his development around 1980. In these works Hockney ably projected the suburban sprawl, garish colours and varieties of form encountered in one of the most inelegant cities on the planet. His exploration of Polaroid photography, with the spatial disjunctions and intense focusing of attention upon details it can bring into play when used in collaged form, also permitted him to create a most memorable image of the American landscape and its despoliation by endless signs.
David Hockney, The 7 Stone Weakling from ‘The Rake's Progress’ series of etchings, 1961-63. Etching, 30.3 x 40.6 cm. The Royal College of Art, London.
Allen Jones, Chair, 1969. Painted fiberglass, leather and hair, full-size. Neue Galerie, collection Ludwig, Aix-la-Chapelle.
Allen Jones and Others
The output of Allen Jones between 1960 and about 1964 tended towards the abstractive, reflecting his interest in the workings of the subconscious mind as informed by his readings of Nietzsche and Jung. By 1962, however, in paintings of planes and buses, Jones also began taking his subject-matter from mass-culture, giving us stylised representations of vehicles in movement, mainly in the form of areas of colour which he has always explored for its perceptual and expressive qualities, as well as for its structural importance. Subsequently, Jones began to probe sexuality as the central subject of his work, initially in a semi-abstractive way. But in 1964 David Hockney drew his attention to sexual fetish magazines, the imagery of which has informed his paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints thereafter (Chair, 1969; Female and Male Diptych, 1965; Perfect Match, 1966-67; Sheer Magic, 1967; Chair, Hatstand and Table, 1969). Throughout his work the psychological relationship between the sexes has obviously proved important, and although sculptures such as Chair and Hatstand of 1969 clearly downgrade women to the role of sex-objects – although that does not utterly obviate their aesthetic value, which is why the pieces are included in this book – Jones has also portrayed females as winners in the constant war between the sexes; they may be dressed according to male fantasies but they can be dominant nonetheless. Sadly, over the past 40 years Jones’s work has gradually descended into slickness, mannerism and cultural irrelevance as he goes over the same ground time and time again.
Other British painters and sculptors who have either dealt directly or tangentially with facets of mass-culture are Peter Phillips, Michael Andrews, Patrick Caulfield, Clive Barker and Richard Smith. To take the first, Phillips’s works are bright, glossy and often huge in size, and they certainly celebrate mass-culture and its artefacts (Custom Painting #3, 1965; Art-O-Matic Cudacutie, 1972). This is unsurprising, for as Phillips has commented:
My awareness of machines, advertising, and mass-communication is not probably in the same sense as an older generation that’s been without these factors; I’ve been conditioned by them and grew up with it all and use it without a second thought… I’ve lived with them ever since I can remember and so it’s natural to use them without thinking.
Although the resulting paintings may lack intellectual complexity and associative resonance, they do pack a hefty visual punch with their unashamed embracing of automotive imagery, technological patterning, soft-porn kitsch and the like, all deployed in vivid colours and frequently enjoying the silkiest of airbrushed surfaces.
For a time during the 1960s the figure, portrait and landscape painter Michael Andrews created large and memorable pictures of international jet-set life, with all its banal bonhomie, glitz and glamour. The people in these works are set within dynamically projected spaces that contain internal disjunctions suggestive of cinematic jump cuts. In spirit such images are not very far from the more stylistically inventive but far more static sculptural ensembles of Marisol, and they also relate to pictures of art world beautiful people by the American Howard Kanovitz.
The vacuity of mass-cultural images and objects has always been the overriding subject of Patrick Caulfield’s work. In the main, he has painted landscapes, interiors and still-lifes, all depicted in a flat way that subtly emphasises the blandness and vapidity of what is represented. Occasionally he has also injected triteness into renowned images of past art, as well as invested images treated in his customary deadpan fashion with passages painted in a photographically realistic manner, in order to heighten, by contrast, the overall artificiality of what is represented (After Lunch, 1975; Dining/Kitchen/Living, 1980). Like other artists working within the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition, such as Roy Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons, Caulfield has emphasised the poor taste and bad design that often surround us, and thus expressed a sense of cultural superiority to such defects. The resulting paintings can certainly make for some sardonic, richly coloured and compositionally complex experiences.
Perhaps more subtly ironic are the objects of Clive Barker. These are usually made by workmen following his instructions, as a post-Duchampian way of entirely removing the artist from the creative process. Often his sculptures take art as their theme, as can be seen in a version of Vincent van Gogh’s chair at Arles which comments upon the accruing of value by works of art. And Richard Smith drew the basic forms and colours of works he made during the 1960s from the shapes, surface designs and arresting colours of objects such as cigarette packets and the like. As he stated in 1966:
The carton is an incessant theme in present-day civilisation: shops are full of boxes and you see these before you see the goods… I have tried to keep close to the sensibility, ethos almost, of objects and themes in present-day life (like boxes) rather than reconstructing the boxes themselves.
After 1963 Smith began using shaped canvases which pull away from the wall, thereby initiating an intense spatial dialogue. Everywhere on view is the dynamism of billboards without any particular products being identified, for consumer culture and its large-scale images merely acted as pictorial starting points in this phase of Smith’s art. Later in his career he became a wholly abstract artist.
Photorealism and Mass-Culture
Smith demonstrated that abstractiveness could healthily develop out of the familiar imagery of mass-culture. At the opposite end of the visual spectrum, intense verisimilitude served as a highly useful tool for the exploration of that culture. Around the end of the 1960s a new type of representational painting emerged in the United States, namely photorealism. This was based upon the close analysis of colour photographs and/or the overpainting of colour slide projections, and it flourished for a number of reasons other than the mere absence of visual imagination: the intense scrutiny of photos permitted the seeing of a large amount of detail that the eye might overlook; it made possible the focusing upon everything at once, unlike the eye; it allowed for total objectivity and a complete absence of emotion; and it carried on a tradition of visual realism that went back to the Renaissance. Yet photorealism was not necessarily backward culturally, for because a significant amount of the work made via photography dealt with the empty promises, garishness and visual overload of the American Dream, photorealist painting strongly allied itself to the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition.
An approach to mass-culture through the transcription of photographs was certainly validated by the fact that painters such as Rosenquist, Rauschenberg and Warhol had either replicated photographic material with enormous faithfulness or even incorporated actual photographs into their images. In part photorealism was about both the processes of painting and the most minute examination of appearances, almost putting reality under a microscope. Following such an approach, artists who included Robert Cottingham, Richard Estes (Food City, 1967; Welcome to 42nd Street (Victory Theater), 1968; The Candy Store, 1969), Ralph Goings and Don Eddy turned their cameras on people, the exteriors and interiors of buildings, street scenes and all kinds of consumer objects, usually with a sharp alertness to the cultural values of a given subject. The images were then laboriously transferred on to canvas, a process that could take many months. Due to the fact that much photorealist painting draws attention to corners of the urban environment that we usually take for granted or even overlook, it has had much to say about the world of mass-consumption, the availability of cheap products and services, and the banality that often surrounds us.
Duane Hanson, Sandy Skoglund and Ed Paschke
A realism bordering on the photographic is equally to be found in the sculptures of the American Duane Hanson. This is unsurprising, for like George Segal, Hanson cast his figures directly from life. He then went on to make them utterly faithful to appearances by first spray-painting them with flesh tints, then adding hair and similar details, and finally clothing them in real apparel. However, the attainment of an intense verisimilitude was not Hanson’s ultimate goal. Instead, he wished to draw attention to particular social types within our mass-culture, and indeed, he often achieved that aim quite scathingly. Reality is used to comment upon mass-culture in quite another way by the American Sandy Skoglund. She sets up sculptural ensembles employing live models and real objects, which she then photographs and disseminates through the sale of Cibachrome prints, books, posters and postcards. Certainly there is a somewhat surrealistic level to much of her work but she has turned her attention to the lifestyle and values inherent to mass-culture, as in her installation/photograph Germs are Everywhere, with its witty comment upon the problems of an anally-retentive suburban existence. In the paintings of the Chicago-born artist Ed Paschke we encounter the vivid patterning and colours that are often displayed by the electronic mass-media (Nervosa, 1980; Electalady, 1984). Sometimes the pictures are invested with a violence that can prove very disturbing. The transformations that famous faces often receive electronically was also the subject of Paschke’s work.
Keith Haring, Jeff Koons and Mark Kostabi
Because of his highly communicative, clear-cut and funky graphic style, the American painter and sculptor Keith Haring quickly rose to prominence in New York during the 1980s. He had first perfected his approach while painting graffiti-like images on blanked-out poster sites within the Manhattan subway system. Amid his vast numbers of cartoon-like images we can often encounter statements about contemporary sexuality, the relationship of the individual to the mass, and aspects of technology (St Sebastian, signed, titled and dated ‘August 21 1984’ on the overlap, 1984; The Great White Way, 1988). Often the American Jeff Koons leads us back to the familiar territory of cultural and social banality previously explored by Andy Warhol in, say, his Marilyn paintings, although Koons goes much further than his predecessor in forcing the artificiality, falsity and tastelessness of modern life up to an incredible pitch. Like others before him, Koons’s apparent embrace of kitsch really masks a rejection of such crassness, for in truth the artist is subtly affirming his superiority to the degradation of taste in modern society. And the American Mark Kostabi does not just hire others to make the objects to which he adds his name (like, for instance, Koons and Barker); he also gets his employees to conceive his works as well, not usually interfering in the process at all. Like the chairman of an industrial manufacturing company he simply manages things strategically, leaving the conception and production of the artefacts to others. By such means Kostabi attains three aims simultaneously: he mimics the processes of mass-production; he comments upon the divorce between means and ends commonly encountered in an industrial society; and he takes to its logical conclusion the creative method first advocated by Duchamp with his ‘ready-mades’, whereby the artist plays no part whatsoever in the production of artefacts. He simply ‘chooses’ them – or, in Kostabi’s case, he doesn’t even do that.
Arman, La Chute des courses, 1996. Group of supermarket trolleys, 345 x 433 x 115 cm. Galerie Vallois, Paris.
Erró, American Interior n° 7, 1968. Oil on canvas, 97 x 115 cm. Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen.
Arman
As we have already noted, a number of leading creative figures from the continent of Europe took part in the autumn 1962 Sidney Janis Gallery ‘New Realists’ exhibition that finally launched Pop/Mass-Culture Art into the aesthetic and commercial stratosphere. They included some artists whose works implicitly explored aspects of mass-culture. One was the French-born Arman who has specialised in bringing together large accumulations of artefacts to pinpoint the materialism of modern life (La Chute des courses, 1996; New York Marathon, 1978; Office Fetish, 1984). Often his gatherings attain beauty simply through sheer weight of numbers, and many of them have alluded to violence (Home, Sweet Home, 1960; Kennedy-Khrushchev, 1963). In 1995 he even created one of the world’s most impressive war memorials, a 32-metre high, 6000-ton concrete tower in Beirut, Lebanon, that incorporates the very machinery of conflict itself, namely tanks and heavy artillery. As most wars since well before 1939 have witnessed the infliction of equal violence upon both soldiers and civilians, Arman’s piece not only commemorates a major local tragedy; it cuts to the heart of modern mass-cultural experience.
Martial Raysse, Mimmo Rotella, Erró and Others
In the 1962 ‘New Realists’ show the Frenchman Martial Raysse displayed everyday objects as part of a larger project to demonstrate the vast, bewildering and ultimately meaningless variety of choice in a consumer society. Subsequently he created a great many works that typify the synthetically-coloured or neon-lit artificiality of modern life (Peinture à haute tension, 1965; Souviens-toi de Tahiti, France en 1961, 1963; America America, 1964). And another 1962 ‘New Realists’ exhibitor was the Italian Mimmo Rotella who displayed torn advertising posters as a way of attacking the values such visual appeals embody (Cinemascope, 1962; Marilyn, 1962).
The Icelandic-born painter Erró first came into contact with Pop/Mass-Culture Art during his initial visit to the United States in 1963, after which time he began using the imagery of mass-culture to explore the cosmos of endless consumption. Not much of his output is particularly original but occasionally he has produced some memorable images of cultural overload. Similarly the German artist Wolf Vostell, who was a founding figure of the FLUXUS group that sought to overthrow all conventions of artistic expression and taste, occasionally created works that afford new perspectives on mass-culture. One sculpture in particular, his Television Obelisk – Endogenous Depression of 1978, wittily piles up the principal means of mass-communications in the modern world.
In France the sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle occasionally touched upon political-military issues that involve us all, as in her striking Kennedy-Khrushchev of 1963. For a time the Frenchman Alain Jacquet was particularly interested in the breakdown of images by printing techniques, moving matters much further towards abstractiveness than, say, Roy Lichtenstein, who was no less concerned with the replication of such processes.
The Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto literally involved people in his works, for he drew or photo-silkscreened life-sized figures on to mirrored surfaces, thereby blurring the distinction between levels of reality and forcing the viewer to enter the images. And entry to a work by means of mirrors was also afforded to vast numbers of people by The Weather Project which the Icelandic/Danish artist Olafur Eliasson created in 2003 within the massive interior of Tate Modern, London (Hope for Peace, war memorial, 1995; The Weather Project, temporary site-specific installation, Tate Modern, London, 16 October 2003-21 March 2004). The centrepiece of this installation was a semi-circular disc made from the mono-frequency lights usually used for street illumination, and its reflection by a ceiling covered in mirrors turned it into a vast yellow/orange sun, beneath which visitors often lay on the floor to revel in the simulated light and form shapes with their bodies which were reflected by the mirrors. By dint of its concern with the cultural aspects of the weather, Eliasson’s giant work implicitly addressed mass-culture. Because it was experienced by over two million people, it is also discussed below, for art and mass-culture often form a two-way dialogue.
Martial Raysse, Peinture à haute tension, 1965. Photographic film, neon, oil and fluorescent paint on canvas, 162.5 x 97.5 cm. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Haim Steinbach, Ashley Bickerton and Others
Back in the USA the American artist Haim Steinbach uses everyday, mass-produced objects as the building blocks of his works. These artefacts are purchased on shopping expeditions, thereby reinforcing a sculptural tradition that goes back to Marcel Duchamp. Subsequently such elements form groupings which impose order and balance upon the chaos of consumerism. Because Steinbach possesses a good eye, the resulting sculptures are usually very elegant, and they certainly force us to look anew at everyday objects we might normally underestimate aesthetically. Undoubtedly there can be a feeling of banality to the proceedings, but this is entirely understandable, given that Steinbach clearly selects many of the objects he uses for that very reason.
For a time Ashley Bickerton made non-representational sculptures that enjoy a machine-like look. He then adorned them with the identifiable logos of large corporations, thus reminding us of the economic powers that engender most artefacts in reality. The American Allan McCollum has addressed the multitudinous output of mass-society by manufacturing sculptural ensembles comprising enormous accumulations of objects. These include framed pictures of nothing which inescapably remind us that art galleries the world over are often filled with aesthetically empty images pressed behind glass.
The American sculptor and performance artist Chris Burden has also created some telling comments upon modern industrial society. In 1987 he made clear the historical magnitude of his nation’s military might in his stunning ensemble, All the Submarines of the United States of America. His Medusa’s Head of 1990 is a huge and potent metaphor for a gorgon or monster of ancient mythology. Medusa turned every living creature that looked upon her into stone; in Burden’s work our entire planet has been transformed into rock by technology, as represented by a covering of miniaturised railroad tracks which double as tropes for the snakes that writhed upon the ogre’s head.
British Sculptors and Mass-Culture
A number of leading sculptors in Britain have also dealt with aspects of mass-culture. Perhaps the foremost of these is Tony Cragg, the major part of whose work is not at all representational. Yet Cragg does possess a marked sense of metaphor, and around 1980 he put this advantage to good use by creating striking ensembles out of the detritus of industrial society, such as objects retrieved from scrap heaps and the like. Thus in Britain Seen from the North of 1981Cragg constituted a sculptural representation of mainland England and Scotland that expresses both personal disorientation and national fragmentation. And in Zooid of 1991 he took two kitsch, interior decorator’s porcelain statues of leopards, broke them into pieces and placed those fragments within industrial containers whose metal bars remind us of cages. The meaning of the resulting work is strongly hinted at by the title of the piece, and it says much about the contemporary containment of the natural world, both in zoos and beyond.
David Mach creates site-specific sculptures, often on a massive scale. One of his favourite devices is to use tens of thousands of pristine newspapers or magazines to project the vast ebb and flow of information in our time. No less site-specific is Rose Finn-Kelcey’s 1987 Bureau de Change, with its coins arranged to simulate a van Gogh painting and its gallery attendant included to prevent their theft. Given that the Dutch artist’s works have moved upwards in value perhaps more than those of any other painter in history, Kelcey’s statement about art-as-money seems both witty and relevant. Another site-specific work was Tim Head’s 1990 Techno-Prison (see above). Here the walls of a room in a London art gallery were briefly covered with lurid Day-Glo colours, over which were painted huge bar-codes, to remind us that every aspect of life today is being processed, tagged, logged and stored in electronic databanks: a techno-prison indeed.
Tim Head, Technoprison, 1990. Installation for the exhibition ‘Seven Obsessions’, paint on walls, variable dimensions. Whitechapel Art Gallery, London.
Charles Frazier, American Nude, 1963. Bronze, 19.6 cm high. Collection of Dr and Mrs Leonard Kornblee, New York.
A Necessary Change of Name
In the preceding paragraphs we have touched upon just a few of the artists who have dealt memorably with mass-culture down the decades since the late-1950s. Their inclusion demonstrates exactly why it is necessary to alter ‘Pop Art’ to ‘Mass-Culture Art’, for while it may seem appropriate to describe creative figures such as Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Rosenquist and Wesselmann as ‘Pop artists’ because they communicate generally light-hearted moods in their works, it would seem wholly inappropriate to apply the same term to artists such as Warhol, Kienholz and Segal in whose output the darker side of life has frequently figured. Moreover, to characterise sculptors such as Steinbach, Burden, Mach and Finn-Kelcey as ‘Pop artists’ would seem utterly ridiculous (which is why it has never been attempted). But if we apply the term ‘Mass-Culture Artists’ to all the creative figures discussed in this book (and to many more who have not received coverage), then not only does that designation fit them all very aptly; it also makes evident the tradition that binds them.
Lack of space has necessitated the omission from this book of many artists who have explored mass-culture but whose insights have proved fairly insignificant, figures such as Raymond Hains, Eduardo Arroyo, Oyvind Fahlström, Derek Boshier and others. Naturally, painters who have often been (wrongly) associated with ‘Pop Art’, such as R.B. Kitaj, but who have never even been remotely concerned with mass-culture, have also been omitted. As may have become apparent from the space already accorded to them above, and hopefully will become even more so below, some artists have proven themselves to be of major status, while others with substantial reputations have revealed themselves to be minor contributors to the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition, having often been hyped up by art-nationalism and/or the marketplace. Quite a few contributors to the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition have produced only a small number of works that deal with mass-culture, but have done so most memorably in those pieces, while others have frequently addressed that culture but in a singular way, saying the same thing over and over again. Merely a small number of artists – Oldenburg, Rosenquist, Kienholz and Arman – have consistently created large numbers of good works, although perhaps the failure of most others to do so is a measure of the fragmented culture everyone has had to deal with. Then there is the question of transience, for much Pop/Mass-Culture Art created during the 1960s and 1970s already looks exceedingly dated, just as words like ‘fab’, ‘trendy’ or ‘groovy’ were once in vogue but now belong to the language of a bygone era. Doubtless such dating will continue but it has always greatly served art by dividing the relevant from the irrelevant, and the good from the bad.
Sir Peter Blake, Got a Girl, 1960-61. Oil and mixed media on hardboard, 92 x 153 cm. Stuyvesant Foundation, London.
The Cultural Status of Pop/Mass-Culture Art?
But where, finally, does Pop/Mass-Culture Art stand within the historical continuum of art? Has it just been a passing phase, or has it constituted something more lasting and significant?
To attempt an answer to these related questions, we need to go back to the end of the 1960s, when Pop/Mass-Culture Art had already firmly established itself as a valid area of cultural expression. At that time, many within western art circles increasingly concluded that Modernism, or the positive response to the challenges posed by living in an industrialised epoch, had come to an end simply because it had supposedly exhausted its potential. Where painting and sculpture were concerned this meant that a sequence of movements that included Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism had eventually and most logically culminated aesthetically in Minimalism and Conceptualism, with Pop Art as a transient, unimportant aberration or side-show. Beyond conceptualism there seemed to be nothing left to explore, for where do you go beyond empty spaces or blank canvases, written statements denying the validity of art that you pin to walls or pop in the post, and the notion that art is simply a concept whose existence does not require any physical realisation whatsoever?
Certainly an attempt to answer these questions and thereby sidestep such an ‘end of history’ was made by cultural historians in the mid-to-late 1970s, when they came up with a wholly spurious new phase in western art (and indeed life) which they termed ‘Post-Modernism’. This concept remains especially bogus because it presupposes a complete divorce between art and society: faced with the ostensible ‘end of history’ that formalism and conceptualism represented, ‘Post-Modernist’ artists were encouraged to range freely over the entire gamut of visual experience and art history, of necessity appropriating from the past in order to cobble together some valid style for the present. Yet the Modernist epoch in which they operated had not come to an end in any way – indeed, it still went on evolving in scientific, technological, democratic, mass-cultural and multi-cultural terms exactly as it had done since its beginnings in the late eighteenth century. Moreover, far from the Modernist technological epoch being a phase in the development of humanity that had come to an end, as advocates of ‘the end of history’ and ‘Post-Modernism’ would have us believe, if anything it is clearly still continuing and intensifying. In the process, it is making the world an ever-more homogenised place, thereby producing one of our major global problems, namely the erosion of ethnic and geographical identities. But how can art be ‘Post-Modern’ if the surrounding society it reflects is still fervently Modernist in outlook, and indeed is increasingly so?
The tradition of Pop/Mass-Culture Art as it has developed over the past four decades supplies the answer, for that creative impulse has utterly negated the validity of ‘Post-Modernism’. This is because Pop/Mass-Culture Art is quite clearly an artistic dynamic that for the entirety of its comparatively brief history has been wholly rooted in the Modernist outlook, with all its technological, cultural, social and visual complexities. One just has to look at the core concerns of its contributors to perceive this very easily, as hopefully the present book will demonstrate. Artists who have subscribed to the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition have in fact completely sidestepped the supposed ‘end of history’ created when a barren formalism and an even more arid conceptualism ran artistic Modernism into sterile ground and ultimately led to the invention of ‘Post-Modernism’. In doing so, they and their heirs have made no end of relevant comments about the contemporary, Modernist world. The promulgation of observations about the arena in which humankind lives has always been a prime purpose of art, and those creative figures who have specialised in exploring mass-culture have therefore proven both highly relevant and aesthetically innovatory. In the light of all this, Pop/Mass-Culture Art can therefore legitimately claim to be the central creative area of the visual arts in our time, with hopefully still much to give us in the future. We look forward to things to come.
Richard Hamilton, Soft Pink Landscape, 1980. Lithograph and screenprint on paper, 73 x 91.8 cm. Tate Britain, London.
