 As I Opened Fire by Roy Lichtenstein c.1964 |
The most "avant-garde" thing about Pop was it's use of media usually reserved for Commercial Art. The message, as your text points out is the same Romantic message, a "... parody of the superficiality and materialism of modern popular culture."... social commentary. On another level they were attacking the traditional idea of the "Art Object" as a unique object created by a unique process.
Virtually every vestige of the subjective, heroic condition of art making that has been implicit in Modernist culture, from Manet to Jackson Pollock, has been removed. As I Opened Fire and Drowning Girl by Roy Lichtenstein are commentary on where people get their information. And the kind of "messages" that being sent. The early 60's was also the beginning of the Hippy "movement" in Californian that started out as a revolt against a society seemingly driven by crass materialism and indifferent to human values... the escalating war in Viet Nam only seemed to reinforce that concept of modern American Culture.
 Drowning Girl Roy Lichtenstein c. 1963 |
You couldn't trust anyone over 30 because they were probably part of the establishment and "they" were responsible for the war and the lies... but where to find images that translated into the anti-establisment vocabulary?
Rauschenberg, Johns and the Pop Artists were already anti-establishment; they had been taking on the Popular Culture. This combined with Rauschenberg's Neo Dada connection to Duchamp and through him to the anti-war, anti-establishment Dada movement, all came together in the 60's to usher in the Postmodern period.
 Nude No. 48 |
 A Set of Six Self-Portraits Andy Warhol c.1967 |
And what to say about Andy.. "I want to become a machine", he said, and he almost did. His mechanized lifestyle and constant flirtation with the "celebrities" of the day made him the very personification of the Pop attributes of alienation, commodity fetish, fashion and the neutralized individual. Everything was slightly interesting, but that was it. Kind of like the evening news where everything from auto accidents, to murder, to the local flower show all have their three minutes... all slightly interesting. And there we set desensitized by the glut of images, each one no more important than the last.
So what was Pop Art about? On the one hand, it was a representation of contemporary society; on the other, it was a searing critique of that same contemporary society.
The critique side was lost on most of the society who quickly assimilated Pop to sell everything from cars to floor wax. And they hung Pop Art in their corporate headquarters to prove they were chic... as far as changing anything, well, look around.
As to the multitude of styles and "isms" that followed Pop, many of them can be seen as an attempt to avoid assimilation by breaking free from the production of commercial objects (cultural commodities) in the hope of producing a purer art.... although I notice that Joseph Kosuth One And Three Chairs (Conceptual Art p.467) was purchased by the Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Anyway, Conceptual Art, Site Works and Earthworks as well as Performance Art, including Events and Happenings, along with Installations and Environments, more or less fit into this category.
I worked with Allan Kaprow on a Happening in 1969 in Kent, Ohio when I was in graduate school. It was a typical Ohio winter, you know, snow on the ground, bare trees and cold. He got 300 dollars from the school to use for the happening, all one dollar bills... my job, along with three friends of mine, was to climb a tree in front of my friends' house and tie 300 one dollar bills to the bare limbs, which after suitably fortifying myself (it was very cold) I did. While I was climbing around in the tree, Kaprow called the local radio station and had them announce that there was, literally, free money growing on a tree on such and such street.
We then retreated to the front porch of the house to wait for the crowds to descend on the money tree - the Happening part. Four hours later and a good hour after darkness had settled in, it gets dark early up there, we were still sitting on that porch waiting for the Happening, except for a neighbor out with her dog no one had even walked by our money tree... our neighbor waved at us but never bothered to look up at the tree as the footing was getting slippery and between waving at us and trying to hold onto her dog she had all she could handle. It was getting late and Kaprow had to go, so he suggested that we might as well climb the tree and get the money down before it blew away and perhaps we could find a good use for it. Which we did. It was a little more difficult climbing back up as we had been "fortifying" ourselves against the cold all afternoon; fortunately, it was winter and there was snow on the ground, so falling out of the tree wasn't nearly as traumatic as it could have been. In fact, it all became rather hilarious with the four or us trying to stay in the tree long enough to untie the dollar bills. I don't know how Allan felt about the Happening that never happened, I haven't see him since then, but we enjoyed it.
Today we are faced with scores of "isms" and Neo-this and Neo-that. Most seemed to be about social commentary in one form or another, usually as it pertains to the individual artist's subjective view of society... everybody would seem to have an opinion. As much as the Romantic concept of the artist has been challenged, it still persists within the society (society being both the "public" and the artists themselves).
The artist as shaman, the teller of significant truths. Despite Rauschenberg and especially Johns assault on High Art and Dada's attack on the "Church of Art" there still persists the idea that "Art" is about looking slowly, about craft and elevated subject matter. Art is supposed to take time, rise above popular culture and be "significant".
The media has changed; the traditional arts (painting, sculpture, prints, etc.) are a, more or less, minor voice having been replaced by movies/videos and television as a form of public discourse... minor being a relative term.
The advantage of the traditional arts is that "it's" there, in your home you can walk around it, pick it up and when you walk into a room, it's hanging on your wall; you have time to look at it, time appreciate how the artist manipulated the media to create a certain effect--why that effect? What was it that drew you to that particular work? The color, or shapes, or was it something that nudged a sympathetic cord in your unconscious - a memory or emotion? The more you get to know about "it" the more you might get to know about yourself.
Most of the art we have been looking at in this last section was never meant to be "public art" (i.e:. the Pyramids or the Acropolis... a kind of spiritual or political propaganda, nor did Monet, or Picasso or Van Gogh paint for the Museums they painted for people). People who would take their work home and hang it on the wall or set it on a table or pedestal in their favorite room... people like you and me.
Appreciating art is not just going to museums - museums are kind of like going to car shows. You look at a lot of cars: some you like, some you don't, some look cool, some you wouldn't be caught dead in; but you can't really appreciate any of them because they won't let you touch it or sit in it and of course you can't drive it -- that's when you could really know/appreciate it. Of course, if you all ready know something about them, then that's a different story for both the car show and the museum. But most of us can't afford the cars at the show or the art in the museums.
Fortunately, there is a lot of good art out there that's not hanging in museums. There are local sales galleries in most towns carrying local artists who, like Gauguin and the boys, are trying to make a living off their art - some are good and some are, how to put this, not so good. Take a Saturday or check the local paper to see when there's an opening coming up - they usually have free food and wine - and make a night of it and just go look... Don't Buy Anything! That's why they serve all that free wine. If you find yourself intrigued by something come back in a few days when the crowds are not there and look at it again... not a bad idea even if you weren't at an opening. Who knows; you might have found a friend for life. Do we need the arts? We must. They have been with us from the beginning, they're part of what makes us human beings. Support the Arts - yes. But support them by participating in them... go to a play, buy a print or a painting, go the ballet or the symphony. Take time to enjoy the pleasure of being human.
Lynn University Art Appreciation
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