Book
Review: 'Post Pop Art'
published in Agenda No.6, Melbourne,
1990
Depending on your point of view, a book on Pop Art could
be either the last thing you'd bother with (especially considering
the late Warhol publishing industry) or something to be
welcomed at what could be an opportune time (considering
the replay of late 60s critical cliches which embalmed both
the Pop Art 1955 - 70 world tour and the media coverage
of Warhol's final death).
I
welcome such a book. It's title : Post-Pop Art; edited by
ex-patriate curator/irritator Paul Taylor (whose wish-you-were-here
articles are printed regularly in TENSION to get up the
noses of those who insist on getting upset over Taylor's
flaunted `tall-poppy' career). But I welcome this book with
reservations.
As
editor, Taylor has taken a fairly low-key role in compiling
a number of articles for this anthology put out under the
banner of Flash Art Books (published through the MIT Press)
- many of which those interested in the Pop explosion and
its continuing reverberations would mostlikely have already
encountered. "Pop : An Art Of Consumption" by Jean Baudrillard
(written originally in 1970) appeared in TENSION a few years
back; "In Poor Taste" by Dick Hebdidge comes from a 1983
BLOCK article and is reprinted in his own anthology Hiding
In The Light published last year; Andreas Huyssen's "The
Cultural Politics Of Pop" comes from a 1975 issue of NEW
GERMAN CRITIQUE; and Dan Graham's "Punk : Political Pop"
from a 1979 issue of L.A.I.C.A.'s JOURNAL.
These
four articles are clutched in the centre of the book, and
bracketed by "Detournement As Negation And Prelude" by Guy
Debord (originally written in 1959 for INTERNATIONAL SITUATIONNISTE
magazine) and Roland Barthes' "That Old Thing ... Art" (a
catalogue essay for a 1980 show of Pop Art in Venice) at
the beginning of the book, and at the end by three previously
unpublished articles, all of which had been written after
Warhol's death : "The Handmade Readymade" by David Deitcher;
"Capital Pictures" by Mary Anne Staniszewski; and "Beyond
The Vanishing Point Of Art" by Jean Baudrillard.
Assessing
all of the above together is a daunting task - a futile
one, even, considering how generally most of them talk of
Pop Art. The French battallion of Debord, Barthes and Baudrillard
are the most guilty here, as Pop is often evoked as a virtual
phenomenon - that is, a vague presence felt around the ragged
edges of modernism's materiality, not requiring critical
recourse to actual artworks.
Debord
is posited as a socio-psychic projectionist of Pop's celebration
of the everyday via the devaluation of discourses and systems
which exclude the everyday from evaluation. This - as are
most Situationist documents brought forward in the case
for establishing an intellectual legacy for the contemporary
permutations of the `art-and-life' collapse - is so broadly
applicable as to be irrelevant. I'll put it bluntly : fart
around with that `everyday life' schtick and you join a
long line of people with hang-ups about being intellectual.
The Situationists are then far from visionary - no matter
how many anniversary exhibitions are mounted in their honour.
As
has often been mentioned, if Debord and company left a legacy,
Baudrillard has surely noted it. In his article, Baudrillard
applies his persuasive logic of the circulation of signification
in the everyday to Pop Art - the so-called celebration of
the everyday. But while some interesting points are made
about image production under this logic, many of his critical
points rest on comments the Pop artists have made about
their modus operandi and cultural strategems - a frail critical
framework at the best of times, considering how wrong most
artists are when discussing their own work. In fact we can
only excuse Baudrillard's contemporaneous article (written
in 1970) for not having the power of hindsight to discern
Pop's supreme implosive irony : that it ended up being historically
evaluated from the most anti-cultural of perspectives (the
museographic text) while surviving as perhaps this century's
most hyper-formal period of artmaking.
However,
Baudrillard remains unspecific and even more grandiose in
his 1987 article "Beyond The Vanishing Point Of Art". Threading
Baudelaire's retort to the new gauntlet thrown down by the
emerging spectacle of late 19th century `merchandising'
(to fight the commercialization of aesthetics head-on) through
Benjamin's treastise on diminishing auras and Warhol's treatment
of disinterested art, Baudrillard plots a very Baudrillardian
trajectory of the disappearance of art - of how modern art
as both an iconic and iconoclastic force is propelled by
such burn-out. Fair enough, but the self-destructive urge
in the creative act is clearly visible (to those interested
in reading it this way) as a self-encoding practice in all
20th century art. The practial problematic left facing us
sitting out the century is how do all the strands of modernism
- let alone their postmodernist knots - interpet this practice.
Baudrillard once again bypasses this hot zone which in the
end typifies him as an academic : one who could continue
talking without seeing or hearing.
Herein
lies my frustration with Post-Pop Art. In the book, the
French battalion mentioned above appear to charter the perimeters
of the critical warzone for which Pop, Popism and Post-Pop
dug trenches. And like true intellectual generals they don't
really set foot on the ravaged terrain, but simply wave
their arms toward the battle lines as a gesture toward the
social and artistic `waves' which Pop made. This then lends
the book to be used - and it will be - to if not perpetrate
at least apply the critical myth that Pop can be discussed
as a spectacular crossover between art and life, between
high and low culture, between the gallery and the club.
Like, bummer. But perhaps this is the editorial design of
the book : to service such critical distance in the name
of contemporizing history (now that Pop post-Warhol is allowed
to be made `past' so that it can be remade `present').
But
fortunately, the other half of the book collectively views
Pop Art as an ethos which was formed under complex yet perceivible
cultural conditions that beg yet further inquiry. Of the
reprints, the juxtaposition of Hebdige's overview of the
three phases of British Pop Art with Andreas Huyssen's overview
of the three successive social critiques in Germany of American
popular culture and the subsequent manifestation of Pop
Art throw one into a maze of differences between what many
assume to be clearly split issues in the Pop-versus-Art
debate.
Hebdige
details with precision the role that British art colleges
and institutions played in the formation of the Independent
Group (Paolozzi and Hamilton infiltrating the ICA), the
Royal College contingent (Blake & Smith), and the formal
emergence of the more famous British Pop painters (Jones,
Caulfield, Hockney, etc.). He also notes the peculiar British
preoccupation with both industrial and graphic design which
gives British Pop an unresolved surface from flaunting a
slick finish and feigning a painterly `unfinish', which
is in stark contrast to the American brigade (Warhol, Lichtenstein,
Rosenquist, etc.) sharply rendering their surfaces so as
to accent their formal iconicity as a reflection of their
own cultural environment. Huyssen meanwhile gives an informative
account of the critical perspectives which ultimately framed
Pop as a collusive and coercive activity throughout the
seventies. Outlining how American Pop Art was critically
aligned with the European Student Protest Movement of the
late sixties via the culture critiques of Marcuse, Adorno,
Benjamin and Brecht, she demonstrates the positive ambiguity
Pop brought - whether knowing or unknowing - to modernism's
elite declamations and mock-heroic struggles.
Wrapping
up, Dan Graham's article is of interest to those who know
naught of Punk history (though I still fail to see how a
comparison between UK and USA Punk illuminates the possibility
of a regeneration of Pop as a politicised force); David
Deichter's essay makes some very intersting connections
between Pop and Abstract Expressionism (which is something
many Pop artists always talked about but usually to deaf
ears); and Mary Anne Staniszewski's essay puts forward an
engaging view of the formation of MoMA's fostering of the
culture industry after WWII and how it played a decisive
role in `educating' both the masses and the soon-to-be Pop
artists in phenomenal and visual relationships between the
everyday and its aesthetic appraisal.
In
the end, Post-Pop Art is true to the ambiguity of its title.
It partly treats Pop Art as something gone, something overtaken
by a `post', without a firm account of what it was and why
it went; and it partly treats Pop as an art that has been
transformed from a historically frozen `now generation'
type of thing into a vivid force that has - suprise, suprise
- sneaked up and influenced a wide range of contemporary
and postmodernist art strategies. Its prime value and relevance,
then, is in showing some of the ways in which Pop was (and
it's awful but neccessary to put it this way) legitimately
formed - not simply out of a hedonistic era with dandys
at the helm, but by a wide range of artistic and critical
practitioners in response to the past, present and future
of culture as it burnt throughout the sixties.
In
much the same way, our current mess of contemporary art
has been formed and malformed. Whether it be the thalidomide
effect of Pop's molecular infection with low culture, or
a glorious critical beacon pointing back to Pop's groundwork,
contemporary Pop (Popist, Post-Pop, whatever) is reminding
us not to forget Pop's history, for therein lies much of
our present.
