The Instant Nostalgia of Pop

By ROBERT HUGHES

Pop art reflects the times. It is an expression of a society that puts less emphasis on breeding, formal education and even wealth than on presentation . . . It is a chic open to everyone, and qualifications for entry can be acquired as easily as learning the latest dance fad.

Thus, in 1965, the director of the Philadelphia Institute for Contemporary Art, Samuel Green, took the pratfall from the ivory tower in a preface to the world's first book on pop art, an emetically extravagant volume by a writer named John Rublowsky. Yet who today shall say he was not right? By 1965 pop had become the most popular movement in American art history, drenched in ballyhoo, gratefully supported by legions of collectors whose appetites bore the same relation to connoisseurship that TV dinners do to poulet en demi-deuil. Warhol, Lichtenstein, Indiana, Rosenquist, Wesselmann, Oldenburg, Johns and Rauschenberg became instant household names, not counting their swarm of epigones. "What we have with the pop artists," wrote the English critic Lawrence Alloway, "is a situation in which success has been combined with misunderstanding." He had coined the term pop art, in England in 1957, "to refer approvingly to the product of the mass media." Appropriately, Alloway, whose fascination with mass culture as anthropology long predates the movement that he christened, has now organized a pop retrospective at Manhattan's Whitney Museum.

In a weird way, this show exhales as musty and involuntary a breath of vanished time as any revival of neoclassicism. Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup can, once considered an icon of intimidating cool, has become a sort of madeleine. Irrevocably, the cachet of pop has gone, and many of its artifacts now look tenuous. It cannot be long before some enterprising museum (the Metropolitan?) opens a '60s Period Room, to go with its transplanted Louis Quinze paneling and reassembled colonial parlor: a Wesselmann and a Warhol Marilyn on the stainless-steel walls, a coffee table strewn with multiples and macadarnia nuts, a Panther poster above the vinyl settee, and under the supergraphic in the corner a waxwork group of Henry Geldzahler hustling that week's trend to a slim, wrinkled matron in bandoleers and Courreges boots.

Pending such feats of instant nostalgia, all we are left with is the pictures. The crass cultural chauvinism and blatant flackery that surrounded and fed American pop have not by any means gone from the art scene, but they are muted. All the talk about how pop meant a democratization of the art experience, how it would obliterate the line between "art" and "life," has turned out to be the merest jive. It could hardly be expected to convince anyone in a world where Lichtensteins cost $50,000 apiece.

Systems and Signs. There is no longer any difficulty in seeing the best of pop as a mannered game with art language, rather than a vulgarian's assault on le beau et le bien. Ten years ago, Art Historian Robert Rosenblum predicted that "the initially unsettling imagery of pop art will quickly be dispelled by the numbing effects of iconographical familiarity, and ephemeral or enduring pictorial values will become explicit."

And so it happened. During the late '60s, much was written to show how pop, in its tendency toward large formats, taut plain surfaces, heraldic forms and flat color, had its resemblances to minimal abstraction. This has a germ of truth. A Lichtenstein like Blam, for instance, has more in common with a geometrical painting by Frank Stella than it, or the Stella, has with a De Kooning.

But, as Alloway insists, what really mattered in pop was not its formal devices but its imagery. "Pop art," he argues. "is neither abstract nor realistic, though it has contacts in both directions. The core of pop art is at neither frontier. It is, essentially, an art about signs and sign-systems."

An art that addressed itself with cool and cunning to the nature of signs was unfamiliar in the early '60s. Thus a Jasper Johns like Three Flags, 1958, was--and still is--maddening in the questions that it puts. Just what are these three canvases, one glued to the next? American flags are made of cloth; can one imagine an American flag made of paint? And if there were an American flag made of paint, would it be a flag, or a painting, or both, or neither? And is a flag made of paint a painting of a flag, or does the fact of its being painted return it to the realm of pure abstract design? The rendering of such a configuration in paint contrives in an extremely subtle way to change its symbolism. For it will now attract closer attention than any flag normally gets. Johns' surface takes care of that--an even, sumptuous, almost edible skin of wax encaustic, so full of nuances and textural incidents that the eye travels every inch of it with relish. A real flag is a sign, which can only be stared at; these painted flags become an image, which demands to be studied.

Inclusive Monsters. If Johns was pop's laureate of aesthetic doubt, Rauschenberg and Oldenburg were (and are) its monsters of inclusiveness. Rauschenberg's Monogram, 1959, once seemed a perverse resuscitation of Dada, with the blots and smears of paint on the Angora goat's nose forming a cruel parody of abstract expressionism. No longer; the threatening air of the tire-girdled animal has gone, and the residue is like a culmination of the collage tradition in modern art. "There is no reason," Rauschenberg once remarked, "not to consider the world as one gigantic painting."

His combines of junk, photos and paint betoken a Rabelaisian generosity in the face of that world--art as an affable bombardment. There are no "Irrelevant" details in a Rauschenberg combine, and his belief that "there is nothing that everything is subservient to" became of immense importance to later pop artists. That article of faith connects to Oldenburg's art in an obvious way, for Oldenburg too wished to reject nothing: electric fans or fried eggs, toilets and Chrysler airflows, lipsticks and drum sets--all were subjected to bewildering change, robbed of their identity, skinned and stuffed and softened, arrogantly rescaled in what now looks like a monumental recapitulation of the child's primal will to dominate his surroundings. Oldenburg is America's justification of Baudelaire's remark that "genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered at will--a childhood now equipped for self-expression."

Johns and Rauschenberg, then, and Oldenburg, and some Warhol, a good deal of Lichtenstein and a few pieces by Rosenquist and (surprisingly enough, in view of his calamitous recent work) by Jim Dine: such are the survivors. The losers are more numerous.

When pop was at its height in the early '60s, it seemed that nearly every young painter in America was churning out his or her cigarette packets, car grilles, Mickey Mice and talking Coke bottles. The result was a babel to surpass the ceaseless yammer of neons in Times Square. The problem of how to survive in this battering surplus of gratuitous images became acute for the serious artist, especially when the public became surfeited by having its quotidian environment rammed back down its throat, lubricated by an arty sauce.

Banality and Bliss. The truth of certain maxims once thought demode and elitist now reasserts itself: for instance, that a posture of cool boredom can in itself become boring; that a perfunctory infatuation with the signs and portents of "masscult" means nothing unless it is subjected--as by Oldenburg--to a profound change and rethinking; that banality is not always imaginative bliss. And if one happens to find sense in these propositions, it is hard to take all that seriously the marginal artists whose work Alloway has selected. Their work may have this or that to do with signs, but on aesthetic grounds it varies between limpness and indulgent kitsch, typified by the show's California contingent, Joe Goode, Ed Ruscha and Mel Ramos.

Goode's constructed fragments of staircases are among the emptiest works of art ever to travel east of the Rockies, and Ruscha's variations on the painted word-as-object, which derive from Jasper Johns, are so cute that Alloway's normal eloquence is reduced to calling them "deceptively obvious." In fact, their obviousness is not deceptive; it is just obvious. And Ramos, whose Batmen and Playboy Bunnies go as far as pop ever went in unctuous, opportunistic triviality, seems to be in the show merely to illustrate an amusing feedback loop between pop and commercial art. In 1962, at the peak of the Batman revival, Ramos got some mileage from painting the masked hero of Bob Kane's comic strip. Four years later, a Batman comic returned the compliment by illustrating a pop exhibition in the Gotham City museum; on the wall were paintings clearly meant to look like Ramos' own.

Despite these and other longueurs, this is a worthy show. Alloway has succeeded where many previous critics failed, by clarifying the issues of pop and reminding us that the time of generalization is past. There is no honest way of rejecting or accepting the whole of pop, but it is useful to note how its good works survive as aesthetic objects and not brassy manifestoes of Yankee materialism.

Robert Hughes

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