ARTS Les enfants du parody
BRYAN ROBERTSON
The pop art show at the Hayward Gallery, ably selected by John Russell and Suzy Gablick for the Arts Council, is for me a lead balloon—or at least kapok-filled, to keep the apt metaphor inside the right media. It may be the heat that creates for even the youngest visitors a mood of lethargy, readily perceptible in their tour of this truly dreadful gallery: itself becom- ing for the occasion a monstrous pop art fortress of concrete architectural non- sequiturs, and dull lighting that is lethal for most of the exhibitors, especially down- stairs. The greater part of the exhibition covers transatlantic pop; the English con- tingent includes Richard Smith, Peter Phillips and Allen Jones who survive the ordeal with distinction.
But, though there are some notable omissions from the Continent (Martial Raysse from France and Pistoletto from Italy among others), the show gives a ser- viceable account of a movement which has now passed into a minor phase of art history. That is the trouble: as a living issue, it is all over; and there is nothing quite so dead as a recently abandoned vein of painting. A friend once drew attention, accurately alas, to what he called my 'smile of approving disfavour', and that is the spirit behind a lot of the merchandise at the Hayward. The starting points in everyday life, however neutrally observed and recorded, seem only too often to be lovingly killed somewhere in the gap be- tween perception and transmission: which is not what Robert Rauschenberg had in mind when he mused on the now famous gap between art and life.
A simple definition of pop might per- haps help here: it is essentially a form of social realism enlivened by wit. It is, there- fore, rather unpopular with the masses, who prefer to take their posters, movie stars, hamburgers and hot dogs straight and not conceivably sent up or, worse, deified into one of those fetish photos, silk- screened on to pillows against which cis once pressed their cheeks during service periods abroad. And the man in the street is seldom enchanted to see three dimen- sional replicas of dated bedroom interiors, or sections of baked beans ads, blown up to gross proportions as a constituent part of a pop mural. Our total environment seen as a work of art—even aspects of commercial art already digested—gives most people the fidgets. The notion is too artistic.
The catalogue cover of an eighty-six feet long mural by Rosenquist contains a section of spaghetti in tomato sauce; but the mural isn't in the show, which rather adds to the corporate feeling of non-event flooding so inertly into what should have been a somewhat disconnected but lively tunnel of love. Pop art was essentially for disenchanted millionaires, a section of the community which has most eagerly and persistently acquired examples of this art during the past decade (usually playing it safe by simultaneously buying a Rothko or two, a Noland and a Stella, for spiritual uplift or safe financial return on their financial outlay). Pop art acts for them in a way similar to the serum administered as an antidote to snake bite. Another toxic agency is added to an already toxic condi- tion: the mindless environment of Pepsi- Cola ads and Elvis blow-ups is extracted from context and re-presented, undis- turbed, unadulterated, and wholly untrans- formed, as art. This is a heady form of safety.
The millionaire collectors are thus well provided for, because they have an affec- tionate dislike for the brash world of com- mercial advertising, movie junk and TV which surrounds them, and are mildly stimulated to find it served back again, sometimes in campy guise or at least in inverted commas. But this definition is unfair to Warhol, and not exact enough for what he achieves. His work provides the central issue of pop art and he is its main problem. Before indicating his assets, how- ever, let us examine some possible genea- logies for the movement as a whole.
The cubists used fragments from every- day life in their still-life collages and paint- ings, including cuttings from newspapers. The very early George Grosz anticipates Rauschenberg by some forty years in the way in which revolvers and other menacing objects were used in abstract layout form. More recently, in an issue of the New American Review, Mordecai Richler traces in a seminal essay the factors involved in the origins of sick humour. Richler and some fellow Canadians and Americans, in- cluding Terry Southern, were living in Paris around 1950 and reading, among many literary expatriate activities, the nihilist- fascist writings of aline and the American newspapers, particularly the strip cartoons. The strips have always been notoriously full of violence; the combination of this fascist rough stuff with Cline's particular brand of fascist impassivity, bordering on despair, produced the more sado-masochist reflexes which later informed sick humour, that queer brand of lethal whizz-bang heartiness—Nietzsche on the skids.
I cannot see any proto-fascist aspects of pop art, but the sado-masochism is there in the form of an unblinking stare that goes on for ninety-seven hours, so to speak, at one object; or becomes the visual equiva- lent of one note insistently held for an indefinite period, in which performer and listener are mutually trapped, both acqui- escent in an enervating situation : the punishment routine, in fact. There is a kind of anti-art silliness threading its way through much of pop-art's artiness; and as both activities, though contradictory, seem to be reflections of each other, you are left with a bland art from which any possible sting has been removed.
Placed together, some good talents which are remarkable in isolation seem flattened out by the big family atmosphere on the South Bank; notably Warhol, who sums up everything negative that I have said about pop art but still contrives to be several steps ahead, in sheer transformative magic, of all other participants. Oldenburg stays the
course magnificently, with his Bedroom In- terior II 1969 portraying a reconstruction
of a sort of Ann Sheridan-Lana Turner bachelor girl bedroom of the 1940s: bed and chest of drawers at a treacherous slant, replete with equally disturbing echoes in the form and finish of detail and materials. But his first shot at this tableau. exhibited with Janis in New York in 1961, was finer and more subtle.
At the Rowan Gallery, Bridget Riley is showing a handful of large canvases which bear eloquent testimony to the new space age. Her use of colour is elementary, so far, in terms of action, hyper-sophisticated in terms of emotional response and allusion. The show is effortless and a delight to the eye, leaving one impatient for more. All the more reason to visit the Tate, where her brilliant Late Morning painting is now back from its Biennale tour: one of the few absolute masterpieces I can recall in British art of the past twenty years.
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