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May 2016

Vol. 158 / No. 1358

International Pop; The World Goes Pop. Dallas, Minneapolis and Philadelphia; London

Reviewed by Thomas Crow

by THOMAS CROW

 

THE IDEA OF Pop art has burst its old boundaries, and 2015 saw two important exhibitions testifying to this fact: International Pop is currently showing at Philadelphia Museum of Art (to 15th May);1 The World Goes Pop was an exclusive autumn offering at Tate Modern, London (closed 24th January). Together the two shows have done much to lend Pop fresh currency, their largely retrospective checklists countered by the novelty of so many works that are rarely, if ever, seen beyond their places of origin.

 

A question hangs over both, nonetheless, as to whether Pop as a category is still desirable. Ample evidence to the contrary can be found in the pages of the World Goes Pop catalogue,2 which includes a round table ‘Conversation’ among a score or more of the participating artists. Asked at the outset, ‘Did you ever consider yourself (now or in the past) to be a pop artist?’, their answers, almost to a person, are in the negative – at times categorically. The octogenarian Cornel Brudaşcu slyly sends up the show’s categorising impulse by stating, ‘No, I never considered myself a pop artist until now’ (p.123). To encounter Brudas¸cu’s figure paintings of 1970, however, would immediately take spectators of a certain age back to Richard Avedon’s colour portraits of the Beatles inserted into Richard Hamilton’s sleeve for the group’s White Album, issued in late 1968.

 

How would Brudas¸cu’s oil-on-canvas adaptations of Avedon’s high-style psychedelia not count as prima facie Pop (cat. nos.12 and 13; Fig.76)? Why would their maker not count them as such? His catalogue entry discloses that he took advantage of Romania’s relative openness to Western publications and rock music to compile sources for his art. Sometimes he would use them straight; other times he would depict his friends in the same manner, enlisting them into an imaginary elite of counter-cultural heroes. To take such mass-market materials and render them in a fine-art format might seem the essence of Pop art procedure, but the artist had good reason to reject the label. By the close of the 1960s, Pop in fine-art terms already seemed old news. The Beatles, via the designers they employed, had liberally helped themselves to the ingenuity of what’s now referred to as ‘canonical’ Anglo-American Pop. In effect, advanced representatives of mass culture reabsorbed Pop art at a higher level, effectively eclipsing it bymeans of their enormously greater exposure, reach and ‘popularity’. 

 

To Brudaşcu, and many others, Pop seemed a bygone style and moment, not a continuing, repeatable process that might be renewed under the same rubric. The pioneering French feminist Dorothée Selz responds to the Pop question with a ‘Not really’, but immediately offers her own substitute affinities by reeling off a long list of youth-culture and counter-culture icons of 1960s London, in which she naturally includes the Beatles, Mary Quant, the Biba boutique, along with artists Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake, as participants in this flowering of street-level expression: ‘In London’, she explains, ‘it was mainly the radical changes in society, the socio-cultural changes, which were the most visible and palpable. [. . .] I wanted to be pop, whether I was or not. Inspiration was found in the streets, posters, adverts, industrialization of everyday life, fashion. Pop was influenced by subversive trends, which were protesting against institutions’ stiffness, conservative traditions and the role of women as housewives’ (p.124).

 

The Croatian video artist Sanja Ivekovi likewise draws a line between Pop and the subversive trends she was tapping for her own art: ‘. . . pop art seemed to be just another product of a capitalist mainstream culture. At the same time we still believed that the alternative was possible’ (p.123). In these remarks lies a reversal of an older, automatic supposition that high-mindedness and advanced consciousness lay in the realm of fine art, while cheap and available commercial products induced conformity and deadened thought. Selz and Ivekovi assert the opposite. Hence their rejection of a debt to Pop as transmitted via exclusively fine-art channels. High-mindedness, in every sense of the term, was to be discovered in the street rather than the gallery.

 

That point is made with unambiguous force by the display in International Pop of Hélio Oiticica’s 1967 silkscreened banner with its isolated, black-on-red silhouette of a bank robber who had committed suicide rather than endure capture (cat. pl.173; Fig.75). Its legend reads: ‘seja marginal, sera herói’ (‘Be an outlaw, be a hero’). Although the artist is now far better known for his elliptical installations of the 1970s, this invention made his name ubiquitous in Brazil under the dictatorship. Oiticica was scathing about imported Pop art, but there can be no mistaking the antecedents of the banner in the work of Andy Warhol, which the exhibition emphasises by hanging a small (but all the more powerful) Warhol Electric chair (Red) on the opposite wall (pl.128). In these juxtapositions lies a recognition that Warhol’s emblematic reduction of borrowed photographic sources provided the international Left with its visual lingua franca. His capacity to render a charismatic likeness with heraldic concision and effortless portability easily jumped borders, soon becoming a part of youthful street culture.

 

The World Goes Pop catalogue contains an isolated exemplar of this phenomenon in Listen America!, a painting by Raúl Martinez from 1967 (no.105), which repeats a portrait vignette of Fidel Castro in a three-by-four pattern with evident reliance on the signature Warhol grid. For a gay artist such as Martinez, the international reputation of Warhol’s Factory as a haven for unorthodox sexuality would have carried its own attraction, while the microphone in front of the Cuban leader bespeaks the great political event of that year: Castro’s convening of the Organización Latinoamericana de Solidaridad (OLAS) as an act of independent defiance directed towards both the United States and, more indirectly, the Soviet Bloc.

 

Each of Martinez’s twelve tropical-hued, broadly caricatural panels varies slightly in the manner of a filmstrip but, at the time he made these works, printed posters were abundantly on view in the streets of Havana emblazoned with truly Warholian photographic silhouettes on a public scale. On hand to witness the spectacle was a crowd of French visitors, gauchistes artists and intellectuals, who had brought with them the Parisian Salon de Mai to be reconfigured by inclusion of Cuban artist peers. The lesson took hold: in the words of Sarah Wilson in the Tate catalogue (p.116), ‘The graphic power of Cuban posters now emigrated to Paris’, and the silkscreened consequences covered the walls of the Latin Quarter of the French capital eight months later in May 1968.

 

That episode attracts no more than this quick glance from the Tate and none at all from International Pop,3 despite the latter’s telling coverage of politics and Pop in Brazil. The Cuban case offers a grander historical canvas, one in which an authoritarian state (pace the wishful thinking of the French tourists in 1967) embraced devices hatched in the New York underground, from which they were then returned to the service of revolt in Paris. The ubiquitous Che Guevara icon, a direct outcome of the Franco-Cuban interchange of 1967, remains an ineradicable Pop reminder of its salience. The Oiticica–Warhol confrontation in International Pop at least points in this direction while making its own cogent point. 

 

In an equally resonant, if more discreet correspondence, the open Philips Neon scrapbook by Eduardo Paolozzi (1947–52; pl.79) exposed two aerial photographs of a Japanese port bombed by the Americans in the Second World War; while on the opposite wall were striking collage works by Tanaami Keichi from the later 1960s (pl.114), in which Roy Lichtenstein’s lethal jets bearing the stars and stripes unleash fury over a ground of air-surveillance photography. No question of derivation here, of course, but a reminder of the shadow cast by war over victor and vanquished, both humbled before American power. As Hiroko Ikegami, who curated the Japanese section, brings out in her essay, a generation of Tokyo artists had to reconcile childhood exposure to the violent endgame of the War and the accompanying imperial propaganda with the sudden imposition of foreign occupation, anti-militarism and the full panoply of American consumer enticements. As a contemporary critic whom she quotes put it: America was ‘not just over here [. . .] but in yourself’ (p.176).

 

Such moments in International Pop were possible because of its generous inclusion of standard-setting Anglo-American works, which had the effect of enhancing the qualities of the unfamiliar works (for American audiences) placed in their company. The World Goes Pop took a different tack, by including from the English-speaking world only the feminist exemplars Judy Chicago and Martha Rosler, together with a rather lonely Joe Tilson. Critics in the London press, who largely dismissed the quality of the work on display, might have paused if they had been able to make direct comparisons rather than rely on memory. There was a good deal of overlap between the two exhibitions, but works included in International Pop were shown to better advantage in the more challenging company. 

 

A case in point in this latter exhibition was the dramatic punctuation of the visitor’s passage provided by Antonio Manuel’s 1968 Repression Again – Here Is the Consequence (pl.164). On four largish panels unabashedly indebted to Warhol, in the same black-on-red colour scheme as the latter’s adjacent Electric chair (Red), Manuel reproduced press pictures and headlines documenting Brazilian state repression of student protest. But in a twist that might sound over didactic, he covered each canvas with a black shade that viewers needed to lift by means of a rope-and-pulley arrangement in order to see the pictures, which disappear if one slackens one’s grip. That makes its point about official cover-ups, but makes another about awakening the act of viewing itself from its customary unengaged passivity, the process enhanced by elegant sculptural means.

 

Darsie Alexander, chief organiser of International Pop, declared emphatically that ‘it’s not about America, and it’s not about the claims of where Pop began, which aren’t all that interesting anymore’.4 An attentive visitor, however, could in fact gain an excellent lesson in the beginnings of the American genre by observing that Roy Lichtenstein’s first Pop painting, the Disney-derived Look Mickey (pl.60), hung directly across a gallery from James Rosenquist’s first Pop painting, the black-and-white billboard pastiche Zone (pl.97; Fig.77). Viewing such landmark works in new company makes them look better and fresher. There was a tight, excellent show of Anglo-American Pop art contained within the larger envelope, but one left grateful that this was not all that was on offer, reflecting – for all the intrinsic quality of the works – that it needed this setting in which the untapped potential of first-wave Pop might be understood.

 

The fact that this potential had been first and best exploited outside fine art in, for example, the style, fashion, music and graphics of 1960s London evoked by Selz, worked against the street-level reputation of Pop art to such a degree that the best of its successors reject the label altogether. While no label is intrinsically important, awareness of historical processes – the actual migration, transformation and uses of artistic themes – remains an unfinished project. In advance of these two exhibitions and their informative catalogues, a start was made in 2010 by Sid Sachs and Kalliopi Minioudaki in their Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958–1968 (Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2010–11). A good number of the artists they included reappear in the shows under discussion here. Taken together, the case has been made: half-a-dozen male Pop artists active in the 1960s cannot adequately encompass the phenomenon and need for their own sake a wider purview.

 

Nor have the permutations of Pop ceased to develop into the present, although they have acquired other labels along the way: simulation; appropriation; the zombie persistence of the ‘ready-made’. As Pop spreads wider geographically, whatever it might be called, it will expand across a broader range of media and audiences, as well as forwards and backwards in time. These two exhibitions offer strong intimations of what any exhibition in the future will need to look like if it has Pop in its title.

 

 

1. International Pop was first shown at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (11th April to 29th August 2015), and travelled to the Museum of Art, Dallas (11th October 2015 to 17th January 2016).

2. Catalogue: The World Goes Pop. Edited by Jessica Morgan and Flavia Frigeri. 272 pp. incl. numerous ills. (Tate Publishing, London, 2015), £40 (HB). ISBN 978–1–84976–346–2; £29.99 (PB). ISBN 978–1–84976–346–2.

3. Catalogue: International Pop. Edited by Darsie Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan. 352 pp. incl. 230 col. + 115 b.& w. ills. (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2015), $85. ISBN 978–1–935963–08–0. 

4. Quoted in R. Kennedy: ‘When the World Went Pop’, New York Times (8th April 2015), http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/arts/design/new-exhibitions-explore-pop-arts-foreign-agitators.html?_r=0 (accessed 25th April 2016).