Open Letter To Artists (From An Art Critic) - Part 13
Pop Art Poppycock
by Joan Altabe - 10/12/2006
If your style is Pop art, reset your relays. Pop art is a dagger writhing under fine art’s work-shirt, striking like a serpent – invisibly.
Pop was OK in the '60s, when it burst onto the art scene out of rebellion against abstract expressionism's messy inwardness. But it went too far.
I’m thinking of Warhol. He repeated the look of Brillo boxes, Campbell soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles, and even the face of Jackie Kennedy in her bloodied pillbox hat after her husband's assassination, and in that repetition, he numbed our perception. He gave us aesthetic emptiness.
It was no accident that Warhol used silkscreen prints for his celebrity portraits, like those of Elvis, Marilyn and Martha Graham. With such a reprinting technique, he could reproduce an image over and over for the most stale, impersonal look.
Warhol said that anything is boring if you look at it long enough. He said he loved being bored and he said he wanted to be a machine - blank and cold. This accounts for why he repeated his images in mechanical reproductions that he silk-screened onto canvas. He made wallpaper, glorifying sameness and mass-production. He attacked individuality, originality and everything else that art used to be, and the real thing never recovered.
As a result, art, the so-called food of the soul, became processed, as far removed from human experience as a TV screen and I blame Warhol. This Chauncy Gardiner of picture making, who liked to watch life rather than live it, succeeded in turning art into a banality that deifies detachment. His hard colors and deadpan expressions did art in.
Gone now are the days of the Zen-like calligraphy of Robert Motherwell, who pioneered abstract expressionism. He was my teacher, so I'm probably biased, but I miss the range of emotions that his work conveyed.
Warhol’s art of slickness and shallowness is enough to send those of us who shrink from the excesses of Baroque art running to it for relief.
Not that this muse-less master of the mundane was the only art killer.
What Roy Lichtenstein accomplished - reducing the world to oversized newspaper cartoon panels, complete with the printing press-process look - never seemed worth the millions they sold for. The hardedge of his cartooning style lacks - well - edge. Lichtenstein admitted being "anti-contemplative, anti-nuance (and) anti-mystery," purposely distancing his work from life, from lived experience. He might as well have hung a sign on it that read, "Do Not Disturb."
When making his cartoon paintings, Lichtenstein even included the dots that mechanical reproductions are made of, blowing them up so you're sure to notice that they're reproduced.
He used an opaque projector to magnify drawings onto his studio wall where his blank canvas hung, and proceeded to make a painting look like he never laid a hand on it. He extolled the idea of reproduced things, and by doing that, he extolled the vicarious life.
This passivity in paint, this copycatting the printing-press process, this leaving nothing human behind, was a career-long practice. If only he had kept up the sketching he did for his painting. Now that was something. I first saw it in a 1989 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: small, casual, pale drawings in colored pencil. They weren't smooth. They looked like a man made them, instead of a machine.
And rather than dots seen in mechanically processed images, Lichtenstein used clusters of diagonal lines, a sketching technique that artists use to suggest shade and tonal shifts.
It's not that I don't understand how he came up with the newspaper-cartoon look in his painting. As a parent, I sympathized when one of his children accused him of not being able to draw as well as a cartoonist and he took up the challenge by painting Mickey Mouse.
But I don’t get making a life out of parodying it. That he did is tantamount to Andy Warhol's decision to paint soup cans.
Soup cans, cartoons: six of one, half-dozen of the other. Both Lichtenstein and Warhol were stringently, unalteringly methodical in their zeal for zeal-lessness.
When Lichtenstein died, The Washington Post obituary said he made stupid images into art and the vulgar into chic. How does blowing up a stupid image and rendering it a reproduced cartoon get to be chic, let alone art?
The San Francisco Chronicle obituary recalled that Lichtenstein's early ambition was to make a painting so "despicable it would defy appreciation."
If you’re into defying appreciation, too, if your work is narrow, repetitive and vapid, you have a lot of explaining to do. To yourself.
— Joan Altabe | October 12, 2006
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Fine Art News Feed
Oh Joan, if everyone loved what you appreciate…. what a boring world it would be. If you don’t “get” making a life out of parodying it, the beauty is you don’t have to. You’re not the first art critic to “not get it”. Artist’s create what they feel compelled to create, period. History shows many a art critic that had less then positive things to say about an artist’s work but luckily it didn’t stop the artist from continuing to create what they were inspired to do.
As for Warhol and Lichtenstein, I think auction records for their work speaks volumes. Based on art shows that I’ve attended in the past year, I have to say the market remains strong for pop art. I observed that artist’s selling pop art had more people admiring, commenting on, enjoying and (wait for it….) buying their work. Will art collectors eventually grow tired of adding pop culture art to their collections? Ultimately that is determined by the general public and/or art collectors at large. My personal experience from an artist and art collector perspective is that collector’s are still lining up to buy it. You know, the ones who “get it”.
Lorna Wallace
October 16, 2006