Andy Warhol wasn’t the only artist of the mid Twentieth Century who broke out of the era of Abstract Expressionism, which had lasted, after all, for only about twenty years, by painting objects that were found all around us in the consumerist culture recognized by the thinkers of the time and in ways that led to ready duplication by all the technology of the mechanical revolution. It was just that Warhol was expert at merchandising himself, which was perfectly appropriate a way to unify production with the meaning of his product, though one can claim that all artists, back to those recorded in Vasari, were up to the same task of projecting their names and reputations and in competition with one another for fame and money. Here are three other pop artists worth notice and from whose works we can assess the purely artistic strengths and shortcomings of their movement.
Roy Lichtenstein is a good place to start. He is famous for reproducing comic book art, certainly something that is or was part of the consumerist economy before the arrival of the graphic novel, in acrylic colors. His painting “Hopeless” shows what he can do. A pretty young blonde woman is caught in closeup. She has carefully manicured brows, full lips, and a tear in her eye, just the way she would be caught in a cartoon. The balloon above her reclined head reads “Thats the way it should have begun! But its hopeless!” That captures the rhetorical style of cartoons, what with its vague reference to a story untold which could be about any number of ways in which a romance can fail, and with exclamation points to emphasize the poignancy and melodrama of her emotions: terribly self-referring, she feeling sorry for herself. We enjoy the joke of feelling we know the world better than do the comics and yet engage with the comic book sense of the world. Lichtenstein even gets right dropping the apostrophes from “That’s” and “it’s” because a cartoonist has to worry about not wasting space in his balloons.
Lichtenstein is doing what Arthur Danto, the leading art theorist of the time, took to be the nature of art: putting a frame around something, anything, so that it became art, as happens when you look at a woman walking down the street and think of her as a Madonna or as a peasant out of Courbet rather than just the girl who lived next door and so was real rather than a work of art. Lichtenstein applies this doctrine by framing cartoons for an art audience. They are art if you look at them that way, and that was something new to do, he working at the same time that other aspects of popular culture, such as music and films, were also becoming considered proper subjects for expert critics who had been trained on Dickens and Keats.
My problem with Lichtenstein’s art, aside from the fact that he repeats himself, is that he does not bring enough to it from outside the comic book art. He gets comic book art right but is that not a parody of true art and, even less than that, not even a work of art in itself? How has he deepened the experience of comic book art? I don’t see that he does. So he is relying on the artistic experience he is creating for the viewer to come from the contrast between comic books as what they are and what they are if taken as art. That is all there is, this joke, not the deeper probing that, as a non-Dantoite, I expect from art, that it elevate an experience or somehow transform it so that it is more real than even the realist artist, like Courbet, found out there in the peasants he transformed into being stereotypes of peasants, their complete story told in the way they went off, all dressed up, to a village fair. I get Lichtenstein’s joke, but it is not a profound one.
Another artist of the period who is not generally considered one is Wayne Thiebaud who takes as his subject matter the shelves of grocery stores and pastry shops. He is thought of as idiosyncratic in his choice of subject matter because he does it up in a realistic style. Why would anyone want to paint a custard pie that has had a few slices removed? Never mind that the painting of still lifes has a long tradition, however much those in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century preferred to use fruit and flowers, even rotting fruit, as their subject matter. Viewers find Thiebaud delightful if not deep because he makes their mouths water for the concoctions placed before them. That is what art does: make you want what is not there whether an odalisque or a fruit pie, or some enchanted golden age, as was the case in Cole’s “The Course of Empire”
Thiebaud is up to more than that. He is also asking of his viewers a little metaphysical trick, just as when Lichtenstein asks you to see at once pop art and real art in the same image. Thiebold wants you to see the custard pie in all its lusciousness and also to see an abstract compilation of geometrical shapes: the three layers of custard each constitute a panel, each one slightly different in color, and on top of that is the triangle created by the topping. The same thing happens in his painting “Cakes” where there are a number of them on a counter, some of different heights and colors, one only half a cake, and one that is the same as the one next to it. The number of cakes adds up to thirteen but that is not the point. There are a lot of cakes, enough so that the viewer sees differences and similarities between them, just as one notices the similarities and differences between faces in a crowd. There are enough of them, moreover, to constitute “a lot” if one thinks of numbering as consisting of “one, two, three, a lot”. So how much makes a lot? A good question, worth pondering. So shifting back and forth between representation and abstraction and between an individual item and its group is what Thiebaud does. Those are the artist’s little jokes, the viewer amused by every imaginative leap.
Another of these Pop artists is even more intriguing because his joke is a bit more grand. Claus Oldenberg is known for his statues in public places that replace the traditional subject matter of statuary, such as generals on horseback, or Columbus on top of his pillar in Columbus Circle, with new subjects drawn from pop culture and therefore always amusing. Each one of these conveys the joke that anything can be turned into a statue or a monument no matter how insipid it is. Oldenburg compounds his infraction of artistic decorum by making his statues colored in bright hues, very different from traditional statues who take on the green patina of ionized metal. Oldenburg can earn the ire of people who think that they know what statues should look like, and so his are taken to deface the landscape, which did lead, in fact, to some of them being removed after short display.
Oldenburg, like Thiebaud, is also up to something else. These statues, in the way that statues can do, make their objects over size. So an ice cream cone has to be large enough to inhabit its pedestal, which in its case, is an office tower The viewer is therefore presented with objects that are out of scale, upsized, just the opposite tack from that taken by artists who work to miniaturize the objects they portray so that the viewer has to pay very close attention to see what is being portrayed. Oldenburg is creating a Disney like world of very big Mickeys prancing about to be hugged by little children. This is in keeping with other things going on in American and world culture at the same time. NASA was supplying scenes of the breathtaking vistas of outer space, filled as it were with very large objects like Jupiter and very small objects like asteroids and, smaller than that, how these scaled up against human beings. Gigantism in conflict with puniness. The best visualization was supplied by Stanley Kubrick in “2001”, made in 1968, that shows the spacecraft bringing Dr. Floyd to the space station swallowed up by the landing site that it first approaches, enters and then descends onto a platform while going past layer after layer of people working in the space station. Oldenburg, in similar fashion, is making all of us into lilliputians before our statues of bananas. He is therefore among the American artists preoccupied since the beginning of the Republic with the meaning of space and extension. In addition to his realized outsized sculptures, such as “The Garden Hose” and “Shuttlecocks”, which is particularly successful because it looks somewhat like a bird and so a bit more like conventional art, Oldenburg also drew proposals for statues, as when he proposed a rear view mirror to be placed in a public square. It doesn’t matter that many of his proposals were never realized because the idea of them is there in the drawings. The viewer is asked to consider the distortions size gives to constructed and merely imagined sculptures, given how much they look like what they are supposed to resemble except for their size.
The jokes told by these pop artists are metaphysical ones in that they are contrasts or surprises in reversals that are true by definition. Whether people have free will or not is a matter of definition, as is whether, to the Supreme Court, the term “sex” in the Equal Accomodations Act includes gays and transgender people. These are not empirical or theoretical decisions and so are metaphysical however much heat goes into the assertion of one view or the other. Whether a cartoon is a cartoon or a work of art is a metaphysical joke rather than just metaphysical because the reversal itself is the subject of observation.
Jokes aside, even metaphysical ones, what does Pop Art accomplish? It is a derivative accomplishment because behind it stands the spectre of real art, of three thousand years of art, which is to be taken seriously in that it admits to its purpose of getting representation and/or feeling right, whether that is the souls of peasants or of the Sinai Desert monks who were portrayed so many centuries ago. The history of painting up to DuChamps’ toilet was honest and brave, we can see in retrospect, because it was right out there in its claim to do the best it can at doing justice to its subject, whatever were the ironies within the frame, the audience to judge whether it had accomplished its goal. The major joke for pop art is to say that it is not like all that other art, while what it does for me, at least, is show how much is lost when we don’t take art seriously in its bare faced project, but instead allow art to play at art, putting off the viewer so as to play with him or her. That is a bit cold, and suggests art has come to find other things to do than show what is really out there as best as it can, in the same way that literary criticism for so long now has used literature as a way to engage in advocacy for one or another cause rather than to pursue its proper object, which are the aesthetic qualities of literature. Such deflections of art and criticism can be sustained for a moment or two, though that moment, to my taste, has gone on much too long. I want both more heat and more light from painting and sculpture.