Art

and

Literature
An lntematumm Review

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Spring '965

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Nicolas Calas

WHY NOT POP ART?

In the course of conversation on the subj ect of pop art, a young

attist was asked about "1 Love You with My Ford," a painting in
which Rosenquist juxtaposeS the front bumper of a Ford, the still
profile of a prone girl and spaghetti-like tomato-red coils-the total
suggesting a highway accident with the coils substituting for -r'--c,
intestines. The retort was that had Rosenquist wished to :sh(lwinltes'tines,
he would have painted just that. Spaghetti is spaghetti is Sp:'glleu'llf'
And did not T.S. Eliot claim that the spirit kiIIeth but the
keepeth alive? Another aspect was demonstrated by R'LUsch,enller:gJ
when he replied to a suggestion that he paint a portrait ofIris Clert
cabling her: "This is a portrait ofIris Clert if I say so."
For He spake and it was done sounds forceful but is it convincing
we know it to be an assumption based on an inability to d,i"tirlguish
the word from the act. When in the "Key of Dreams" (1930) M<'gritte
combines images with irrelevant words, the egg with the word acaCla,'
the bowler hat with the word snow, an empty glass with the
tempest, he re-presents objects by signs rather than by images.
Magritte did not do was to confuse the sigu with the siguified.
Jim Dine in his series of paintings of tools combines the images
hammers with real hammers which then become unreal because
are deprived of their utility by being included in a useless object,
painting. Still more radical, however, had been the attitude of
champ when he introduced a bottle dryer into an art exhibit.
Brecht manages to break down further the distinction utiIit:ar:ian
aesthetic by obliging us to view a combination of objects solely as
event. In an 'event' in which a stool is placed on a rug, a ball
on the stool and a red ball on the rug next to the stool, it is enough
remove the red ball for this event to be superceded.

Pop art is the complementary opposite of surrealism. When confronted with the juxtaposition of an umbrella and a sewing machine,
, we ask "is it art?" because of the difficulty of adjusting ourselves to a
situation which appears too incongruous to be subjected to an aesthetic
order. When viewing a flashlight painted flat-grcy by Jasper Johns,
we ask ('is it art?" because of our diffi(;ulty in perceiving the difference
between this image and a real flashlight. When George Brecht speaks
of events, he is trying to narrow further the difference between art
and reality.
To return to our starting point: it would hardly be tolerated if a
reporter in Ills account of a violent death mentioned disemboweled
,int:estin,:s next to the victim's body when in fact spaghetti-in-tomatowas spilled alongside. However, if a patient recounts to his
fanalyst a dream ofan accident in which he saw reddish spaghetti next
the victim's body, the doctor might well suspect that the spaghetti
for intestines. The new school in literature and painting demands
us the rejection of all association of one image with another in
name of reality. To PSYchological insight it opposes factual obser,""UU11, believing that pleasure is to be derived from the fiat statement
not from ambiguous meanings, it encourages exploration of
evervclav reality and not the fantastic realm which the surrealists
their own. Literal-mindeduess as criterion demonstrates that
itosen'luist is not a good example of the pop artist: a recent painting,
Early Morning," patently invites us to associate images with
not represented. Rosenquist places in the center of the canvas
oval which in the upper or sky section is shown merely in
but in the lower section becomes a sliced orange. The title
painting prompts us to view the sunkissed orange as a substitute
the sun.
vu~,~ Rosenquist, Jasper Johns cannot be accused of erring in the
:Ii"'Cti,OIl of the melodramatic. Johns' image is the antithesis of a double
it demands that we see it as a variant of the prototype. Had he
;l>aing"d the composition of the flag by placing the stars parallel to the
would such a painting retain the impact of the grey monochromc
"'''"Ull< It is to be doubted for the affinity between the painted ver~~"' "".lU ct;e O~gin:u.wo~ld be too indistinct. What is so often appealing
friend schild 1$ Its likeness to its parent.

'79

Ifwe accepted the thesis that the spirit kiIleth and the letter keepeth
alive we would be unable to say of a kouros represented with one
foot forward that it denotes a man walking because to stand with one
leg before the other is not a proof that one is not standing still. Does
this imply that representation of movement in a work of sc~pnn:e
necessitates turning it into a mobile, as with Calder, or replacIllg It
with mechanical devices as does Tinguely? Was it not the great
achievement of Picasso in "Guernica" to suggest movement by a process
of simultaneity that does not involve tricks of three dimensionality
la Tintoretto? Rauschenberg's recent work permits hope that despite
his endorsement of the thesis of literal meaning he will succeed
suggesting motion in terms of the indeterminate. pa:"ern. .
by Pollock. But it should be recalled that monon III pamnng
silence in music may be for the artist the kiss of death. What we enlOY ''''
Rauschenberg's paintings in which superimposed images or a
cession of images involve repetitions is not the movement but
suggestion of movement. The modern artist avoids imitating the
deceits of the mirror.
George Segal's plaster casts of humans are more unreal than
dolls and too real to be taken for works of art; they seem to have
fashioned to fit into non-existent situations. Pop art is sharpening
sensitivity by emphasizing the objective aspect of being at the
of the subjective one, creating thereby artificial situations
those produced by Giacometti in his group-statues or by
Grillet in his novels. This super-objectivity to which the new
introduces us, does .not justify a dissociation of images from .~,-.,.
the defenders of a literal interpretation insist. If painters were to
images as signs the way the mathematician and the composer treat
sets of signs, they would have to standardize images by
.
them into pictographs such as hieroglyphs.
Pop art focuses on the popular ready-made image. This is un.dOlU,t
edly a healthy reaction to the cult of the dream image of the
bellum period with its political and sexual wishful thinking
fellow-travelers of Marx and Freud. Pop art is tailored to the
of 'the lonely crowd' which congregates in subways and fills hig;hwaJ
gazing at ads and billboards with the fascination medieval
gathered in churches gazed at holy images-ikons. Pop art is
180

of making pop-ikons in an era when magic has withdrawn from mosaics

and stained glass to reappear on the television screen. "I am so
mesmerized by television that I want to buy all that it advertises!" a
City College student was heard to exclaim. Dada with its ready-mades,
surrealism with its objets trOllves, ahstract expressionism with its
emphasis on action, have been resorted to by artists to free us from art.
But then comes the critic to prove that what passes for non-art is
actually a new form of art. The critic blesses the artist's defiance of art.
Thus crities have pointed out that a bottle dryer placed on a mantelpiece requires us to forget its usage and to see it together with the
objets d'~ in the toom. Likewise a weirdly shaped stone is promoted
to the rank ora work of art in a setting which includes works by Tanguy
.' or Miro. A painting resulting from an artist's gesticulation appeals to
understanding of the elements which make it different from
familiar compositions.

From "Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe" to "Martinson's Coffee" by

the question is repeatedly asked: "Is this art?" Modern art
a cultural phenomenon corresponding to the thinking of man of
non-Euclidean age: WI!)' wi assume that parallels meet in the
,infrnitv? In the name of this why wi so eloquently defended by Gaston
rBa,eh,:lar-d in his NOUlJel Esprit Scientijique, why not detach forms and
from objects and combine them in a new pattern? .. why not
~e 'pattern indeterlllinate? . why not increase the probability
obtammg an unexpected result by including chance among the
of our calculation? Pop art rests on the assumption that man
longer a child of nature but of the machine. Warhol may be the
of art-popists when he says: "The things I want to show are
necbaJlical. Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine
ronlnn'. you?"
,

fighting for their place in the galleries of Madison' Avenue, the

,rightest of the younger New York artists were impelled to reverse the
of their elders: while abstract expressionists reduced to a
cinimtllll the difference between creator and creation, pop art
the reduction to a minimum of the difference between the
:ad'V-Doacle aIld the hand-made. When Warhol stencils by silk-screen
his rows of Marilyn Monroe one is reminded of sheets of
But unlike the philatelist who will scrutinize a sheet in the

hope of discovering an imperfection, the critic is interested in seeing

how in his successive renditions an artist can avoid producing
ences when he touches in the colors. When Bob Watts, improving
Warhol, makes real stamps of his miniature pop images, he is,
were, challenging us to look for machine-made improvements on
hand-made originals.
The New Realism viewed as the imitator of machine-made'
marks the triumph of abstract art. It is not the historical, nor the
chological, nor the sociological, nor the political aspect of
that requires our attention but only the phenomenological
banal images. Bob Watts sheets of "stamps" belong with the
positions of La Mont Young which demand that the
attune himself to variations in the lengths of silences falling
a series of repeated notes struck over and over by the
elbows.
Repetition is the motif of D' Arcangelo's painting-series:
by a cinematic view of images he succeeds by means of slight
in the highway-scape to give an awareness of roadwise progression
time. In the artificial world of pop-art how are we to measure
ences? Perhaps Bob Morris gives the answer with his three
inch flat grey yardsticks of slightly differing lengths, for it
inability to distinguish the correct measure from the false one that
our sensibility. Is this not a post-Euclidean way of rel)feSerltirlg~
Sphinx's enigma? Deprived of his measuring rods man
obliged to return to a pre-Eucledian concept of life, unable to
the order of reason to chance's disorder. We shonld never cOJilfuse,tl
inclusion of chance in an orderly sequence with the absence of
In the first instance chance makes its presence felt in terms of
ruption while in the second instance chance cannot be dJJ;WlgtnsJ
from formlessness. But were we to interpret interruption l;.,.,."llv
would have to view it-no more, no less-as an obstacle in the
movement. Hence when the work of art is conceived merely as
(theory of action painting), interruptions of the process are
more than happenings. This is equally true of advertisement
is dissociated from the commodity it is meant to advertise. Ads
happenings that distract our attention when walking or
when reading or talking.

When we narrow our view of the world to the point at which all
,events are reduced to happenings, changes become meaningless since
they no longer are seen in historical perspective. This is precisely
whatJohn Cage wants the artist to forego. According to Cage, in order
to create a purely objective music the composer has to free himself
the impact that time has npon memory and imagination. To
relevance of time Cage opposes that of chance. In a recent essay,
End iflhe ReTllIiwl11ce? (Hudson Review, Summer 1963), Leonard
}~f,eyex, comparing Cage's experiments with those of Rauschenberg
ill. painting and Robbe-Grillet in fiction, calls these artists radical
J,ernpiri,:islS because they substitute chance for causal relations. Empiin science and philosophy is undoubtedly literal-minded when
'/tUdoiogicalstatements are made of the type A is A. It is doubtful whether
Mev,-r', radical empiricists do likewise, or can be held to do so. When
forerunner, Marcel Duchamp, introduced a urinal into an art
exl:rib,iti,on, he made a synthetic staterrunt, i.e. that our conception of
shonld be extended to include ready-made objects beside the handones usually seen in art exhibitions; wh= Rauschenberg claims
a canvas is never empty, he is treating an unpainted canvas in
of tjle fullness of a painted one. Furthermore, whenever an
includes in his paintirrgs effects dictated by irregularities in his
or other such accidents, he is making a synthetic statement on
, relation of random effect upon his work.
\' Meyer holds that radical empiricism has abolished communication
a non-teleological art. Yet a more rigorous analysis of
works themselves shows, to the contrary, that the above-mentioned
as well as their followers, have an end-in-view clearly in mind
they make of interruptions in a work-in-progress and of unfo";"=
'chan;ses in form the prerequisite of their compositions. Witll these
the effects of chance upon form, rather than those of work
form, becomes the basic aesthetic criterion.
This new art movement actually broadens the scope of the indeterminate pattern introduced by the abstract expressionists. Whatever the
of chance happenings, a work of art, in the last analysis, will
be a synthesis of antithetic parts. Its aesthetic interest lies in a
palttern that a viewer consciously or unconsciously associates to preexperiences. Consciousness functions in a historical context

the world of experience which is why the meanin~ of

b xha ted by a literal interpretatIon. .
formed by
.
t
ts cannot e e
us
synthetIc sta emen .,
. cl d
ultiplicity of figures as is often
Wh the compoSltIOn ill U es a m
th'
the : . in the works of Rauschenberg, what we rI:spo nd to JS no1t. ~
ha enings but the vane!y 0 f unexp am
pr?,,:ce
of a
world,.
ep's es.
has
~,_
ered
'~a the COmIcs-the pleasures
berg
reu.u.coV
Rob ert Rauschen
.
R
. ance however ;.
of the 'string of events' technique of the pre- enaJSS
' . t finds'
different the intent. Obviously enough, the present da~ artJS
.
his source of inspiration in the layout of newspapers and p.ctur; :aga- .'
.
th than in the illuminated Psalters and Books 0
ours.
zmes ra er
bin b t ther than
hoI, Rauschenberg is a child of the maC e, u ra
ille W ar
h
t an assemblage
. ' ';
. tat. m'dustry's shallow successes, e crea es
1Illl
e
d arthl aradises "
.
rth of the great painters of hells an e
YP
, ;
unages wO Y J '

~=~I~e ~~tematisation
-H

Jaspcr Johns

SKETCHBOOK NOTES

m~chanised

.'.

Make neg. of part of figure & chair. Fill with these layers-encaustic
(flesh?), linen, Celastic. One thing made of another. One thing used as
.l!!!!~"-,,In arrogant object. Something to be folded or bent or stretched.
(SKIN?) Beware of the body and the mind. Avoid a polar situation.
Think of the edge of the city and the traffic there. Some clear souvenir
photograph (A newspaper clipping caught in the frame of a
.mirror) or a fisherman's den or a dried corsage. Lead section? Bronze
? Glove? Glass? Ruler? Brush? Title?'Neg. female fig.? Dog?
a newspaper ofiead or Sculpmetal? Impressions? Metal paper
Profile? Duchamp (?) Distorted as a shadow. Perhaps on falling
.---0- - section. Something which can be erased or shifted_ (Magnetic
In WHA T use a light and a mirror. The mirror will throw the
to some other part of the painting. Put a lot of paint & a wooden
or other object on a board. Push to the other end of the board.
this in a painting. Dish with photo & color, names. Japanese
phc)n,:tic "NO" (possessive, "of') stencilled behind plate? Determine
paiintiing size from plate size-Objects should be loose in space. Fill (?)
space loosely. RITZ (?) CRACKERS, "if the contents of this
packa!(e have settled," Etc. Space everywhere (objects, no objects),
MI:)\'E1MlmT. Take flashlight apart? Leave batteries exposed?
orange area with 2 overlays of different colors. Orange will
"underneath" or "behind." Watch the imitation of the shape of
body.
The watchman falls "into" the "trap" of Ioolcin.g. The "spy" is a
Off,,,,e,'t person. "Looking" is and is not "eating" and '~being eaten."