Andy Warhol (1928-1987) who, more then any other pop artist, took on the sheer mind-numbing overload of American mass culture, his Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962 oil on canvas) are about sameness (although with different labels): same brand, same size, same paint surface, same fame as a product. They mimic the condition of mass advertising, out of which his sensibility had grown. They are much more deadpan than the object, which may have party, inspired them, jasper john’s pair of bronze Ballantine ale cans. This affectlessness, this fascinated and yet indifferent take on the famous object, became the key to warhol’s work; it is there in the repetition of stars faces (Liz, Jackie, Marilyn, Marlon, and the rest), and as the record of the condition of being an uninvolved spectator it speaks eloquently about the condition of image overload in a media-saturated culture. Warhol extended it by using silkscreen, and not bothering to clean up the imperfections of the print: those slips of the screen, uneven inking of the roller, and general graininess. What they suggested was not the humanizing touch of the hand but the pervasiveness of routine error and of entropy. Warhol once remarked that ‘’everything I do is connected with death,’’ and indeed his most memorable images – apart from the soup cans – were all Thanatos and no Eros, like the electric chairs, those dark and awful versions of a photo of America’s then favourite tool of legal execution, standing unoccupied in its chamber with a notice on the wall enjoining SILENCE3.
Characterising itself with an unapologetic decorativeness, through delving into areas of popular taste and kitsch previously considered outside the limits of fine art. Pop concentrated on the contemporary subject matter integral to the ready-made sources the artists have used, which eliminates the dichotomies between high and low art, ‘’ good’’ and ‘’bad’’ taste, also between representational and abstraction, and also between fine art and commercial art techniques4.
Pop had been more than just an artistic voice; it was a part of something bigger, which being the emergence of popular culture. Whose effects were ever present in film, literature and music. Creating serge of experimentation in most spheres of public and private life that can be better understood in reference to the economic, social, and racial climate of the time. Also an increasing violent society that reflected upon images of Vietnam would generate a revolt against the American institutional systems, creating a generation hungry to make a cultural statement.
The 50’s really triggered off popular culture, because of the decades ever persistence in enforcing its ideals upon its young ‘’to be part of a group.’’ And that ‘’to stand out’’ was bad; to be ‘’weird’’ was not normal. These concepts focused on children and socialising them in the ‘’right’’ way through various organisations and activities. This attempt at forcing values ultimately produced a spoiled generation. It was labelled the ‘’corporate mind’’ allowing the conformity to produce order. Money seemed plentiful there was no need for ‘’self-denial’’, and materialism was a way of life. New advances in technology promised new and better lives and the people bought into it, as they believed a better life was in the making and the that science was responsible. The single-minded pursuit of money created a gap between children and their parents. The promise of a better life seemed to be dissolved, thus creating a visible gap between the rich and poor. While the suburbs were reflective of the newest time saving technologies, and entertainment advances, the inner cities were economic prisons, providing no jobs, little municipal services, and little means of escape. This promise of social fulfilment began to unravel, leaving millions of disillusioned Americans as the cosmetic face of America had finally been washed, thus breaking an illusion and exposing the truths of a nation that had tried to hide its flaws and in capabilities with self-denial. This American stance inevitably exploded back in the face of it’s bureaucracy, surprisingly seeing a consensus that held American society together for a hundred years come unstuck in a spectacular fashion. It ultimately has to be understood that Americans are in origin all immigrants, yet they are so different to one another, and are quick to disagree but good at creating consensus. But seemed to have lost their touch for generating agreement after Vietnam, the results of this are much evident in contemporary American society. For example, a persistent mistrust of government, the collapse of great society programs, the so-called culture wars between the politically and patriotically correct, and in America’s disillusionment with its power to fulfil its own idealist promises. Bringing forth a new understanding of what it actually entails to be American through the breakdown of certain ideological notions which if anything where held sacred by predominantly white America, seen with a sense of irony as were made to see a reversal of popular characterisations. For example, the cowboys were no longer the good guys. The Indians were no longer the savages. The nightmare of Vietnam cast America into an age of anxiety4, which was very much evident in almost all sphere’s of artistic expression and in truth it wasn’t as though American artists suddenly discovered such a thing as politics and injustice. Political art had been made in America since the 1930s, and reached a peak of indignation during and immediately after the Vietnam War. The problem was that little of it had much weight and mostly representative of Manichean ideological stereotypes. However there were certain political artists that managed to acquire unquestionable power, and for others it became difficult to remain above the political. One such artist whose work was highly politically charged was Ed Kienholz (1927-1994).
Kienholz didn’t believe in refinement. What he believed in was mixtures of technical know how, moral anger, and all American barbaric yawp. As an artist kienholz was self-taught, and achieved his originality in the 60’s through junk, scraps, the off cuts and excreta of America, which he combined first into small hybrid pieces and then into whole rooms and environments.
He was a raging satirist, attached to the view from over the top. Show him any kind of establishment and he loathed it. Almost from the start, his work was about social pain, madness, and estrangement. Even the silver GIs in his great piece The Portable War (1968 mixed media) have a spectral hop perish sadness as they raise the Iwo Jima flag on a patio table. To the left, the patriotic singer Kate Smith, represented as a trash can on legs with a head sticking out the top, emits a continuously taped rendition of the unofficial national anthem, Irving Berlin’s ‘’God Bless America.’’ The GI’S are faceless – mere units in the military machine and behind them is the most famous of all American recruiting posters, James Montgomery Flag’s World War Ι Uncle Sam with a bony finger pointing at you. To the right is a blackboard are scrawled the names of 475 nations that no longer exist because of wars. But beyond that, a couple eat hot dogs at a fast food counter, besides a Coke machine. Their hot dogs a killer, but they don’t even notice the GI’s. Kienholz is saying that America is so tied in a war mentality, a vast militarist economy that war can seem quite ordinary and just like business as usual, taken for granted5.
This American crisis left its mark all over culture back in the 60’s and 70’s: predominately in writing, theatre, and film. And yet, American art seemed to be unhindered by this, well at least the painting and sculpture being in the ‘’mainstream’’ from the studio to the dealer and hence to the museum collections of modern art. But as the 60’s moved swiftly into the 70’s there seemed to be a lot more activist art that was being produced. Nevertheless the larger mainstream works that enjoyed a mandate from the museum of modern art (MoMA) seemed to have remained oblivious to politics, obviously reflective of the unimportance of political art for a major institution, or one might say an ‘’outlet of culture’’. Thus insinuating an alliance between the government and major national institutions, as its imperative we understand that they function as different parts essentially operating one machine. So inevitably affecting the credibility of one would have its repercussions on the later, thus emphasising the importance of unity and common ground especially when it involved the threat of communism, perceived as the greatest threat to western society. So major American institutions of power responded by systematically creating an immense hysteria and fear of communism and atomic war, which had become deeply rooted in American society. This inadvertently effected the development of American culture, as it brought fourth this constant paranoia in American society.
As for many Americans this struggle against communism was seen as a fight between good and evil, which brought censorship as the people in power presumed that these new modes of artistic liberation and freedom being introduced to the popular culture at the time would erode the values of young people. This very much lead to the censorship of questionable books and in retrospect art, major institutions such as MoMA that had been created by powerful capitalists such as the Rocker Fellas who stayed well away from anti American politicisation and promoted good all round home grown artists that were non political and stayed within the boundaries of high art and remaining true to its more traditional aesthetic nature.
By then to be American was just not enough. Victory in World War ΙΙ, possession of the bomb, and stupendous global expansion had all combined to confirm the long standing belief in exceptionalism that Americans were a unique and anointed people, enacting a scared history on earth, which had been of the motifs of American culture ever since the puritans arrived with in the seventeenth century. Exceptionalism required constant fuelling by paranoia to keep at boiling point. Hence the apocalyptic anti-communism of politics in a country which, having defined its ideology of ‘’Americanism’’ in terms of individualism and private enterprise, saw its opposite in the Soviet Russia6.
The atmosphere of super patriotism and fear of ‘’the enemy within’’ dumped an extraordinary excess of meaning into American public icons, most obviously the flag. Americans had always revered the stars and stripes as their prime symbol of national identity, but now they began to worship it. To burn or deface it was a supercharged political act, and right-wingers are always trying to create a constitutional amendment to punish such indignities. But on the other hand they made jeans, t-shirts, and under wear out of it, and use it to advertise everything from gas stations to hot dogs stands, some artists intrigued by this irony of this symbol, made paintings of it. The most influential and well known of them was by an artist called Jasper John’s (b.1930). He wished to work with something that was not invented, something so well known, as he put it, that it was not well seen, hence the flag. In real life, even after johns the flag continued to be the communal property of all Americans, the climax of their stock of public symbols. But in the art world it belonged almost entirely to johns; it became his sign. Other artists would include flags in their work in a spirit of protests and provocation. Johns never did; his flags had a beautiful and troubling muteness. They were cooler than the culture wanted them to be, in the midst of the cold war.
Johns Flag, 1954-55, comprised of encaustic oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood. It resembles a flag in design, forty-eight stars and thirteen stripes, and it is not made of cloth but in actuality of paint. And it does not ‘’fly’’ – it is static, stretched, rigid and completely iconic. You are only meant to pay attention to its surface, which never happens with a real flag. This surface is beautifully articulated, in an impasto of encaustic pigment over a ground of glued-on newspaper, some of whose print shows through7.
His second noticeably famous addition to the flag series was the White Flag, 1955, encaustic oil and collage on canvas. Its patriotic design recedes into an underlying fossil beneath the surface, which is mostly what counts that pale, perfect skin of white encaustic, exquisitely nuance. Or the flag abandoning all traces of its softness could become a rigid metal plaque; or be half lost in the silvery shadings of a pencil rendering. Sometimes the stripes are longer then they should be, or there are more stars. All these wilful changes produce a double reaction. On one hand Johns seems devoted to the flag, but his devotion seems aesthetic, not patriotic. On the other, by treating it as scared form as mutable, he undermined it as a conventional symbol. But since he did so without any visible aggression or scepticism, you could not tell where he stood in the American patriotic frame8.
Intellectuals took view that a real artist was who worked against vulgarity, who aspired to a European complexity and subtlety and felt alienated at home, as they hadn’t surrendered to a masscult, to an empire of commercial signs and thoughtless patriotism. If Americans were happy wallowing in that, they were culturally deluded. The art critic Clement Greenberg in 1947 summed up this scheme of total alienation within America9.
Our difficulty in acknowledging and stating the dull horror of our lives has
Helped prevent the proper and energetic development of American art
[since 1925]. Apart from Jackson Pollock, nothing has really been
accomplished as yet. [For serious American artists] their isolation is
inconceivable, crushing, unbroken, damning. That anyone can produce art
on a respectable level is highly improbable. What can fifty do against
140,000,000?
[Hughes: 466]
This statement tried to reflect that stresses of an American artist under the heel of his fellow Americans locked in a weak but noble opposition to a country that attached no value, monetary or spiritual, to his work. The heroism of failure.
In actual reality abstract expressionism encountered no public indifference and ridicule and if anything was in fact recognised as the dominating force in American painting, and encouraged as such by the American government as a symbol of American cultural freedom, in contrast to the state repressed artistic speech of the soviet Russia. By the early 1960’s the abstract expressionists were Exhibit A in the display of American cultural prestige, the ornaments of an American modernist establishment gone global10. Its dominant position was largely due to the influence of art critic, Clement Greenberg.
Greenberg was thought of as the most influential of all art critics in of modern day history. In championing the abstract expressionism, especially with Pollock, he had won a reputation for near infallibility. But a reputation is one thing and powers another; real power over taste, in the end, is granted to a critic by institutions and the market. Some critics want this, others don’t, and Greenberg did. More then anyone else, Greenberg was responsible for the fiction that American art only came of age, achieved international quality, with expression11.
Greenberg and other institutions promoted artists they favoured as the sole hope of western art in a age of trivial ‘’novelty’’, which would be politely referring to pop art. He was able to find a little grudging praise for Johns, but for Rauschenberg he had no time at all, and he dismissed pop art as a whole just as harshly as fifteen years earlier, he had brushed dada and surrealism aside12.
Pop was very much a movement that emerged with very few blessings from the establishment that housed it, as it was thought upon as vulgar and completely contrary to what art should be. And unacceptable were the images it was producing that had been thought of as no more than a colourful satire of society with its sneer like qualities aimed at exposing the inability of a nation as great in size and wealth, the pinnacle of capitalism to correct a deep rooted state of turmoil in the structure of its socio-political culture. This publicity through pop art was widely regarded by major institutions as damaging for the nations morale. As pop delved deep into the darkest part of corporate American psyche, exposed certain truths that had been repressed for to long. Which is one of the reasons why one could debate Pop didn’t have as great a voice in the mainstream, through major galleries, museums and highly acclaimed critic’s dismissing it as no more than a ‘’novelty’’. Encouraging their own counter movement to restrain the threat of pop and promote what they perceived to be free, democratic, and American. Creating a sense of irony whereby your made to draw distinctions between pop and communism making you wonder which was the greater threat, or if either was.
Even though pop had not acquired the respect of an establishment, or been elevated in the mainstream to a position of the highest acclaim that it surely deserved. But one thing was for certain even in the face of such formidable opposition pop may not have been excepted, or been thought of much by the American establishment, but it surely had been embraced by ordinary people even more so than expressionism as it captivated the hearts of millions of people through images of everyday ordinary life, represented in varying degrees from its most simplistic to highly explicit. A representation of things that even the mass populace could find some point of interest in. Pop surely should have been credited with the fact that it so took art into to a new mode aesthetically, through techniques and format’s which prior to pop had never been seen before. It can indeed be described as cultural phenomena that were created midst a difficult yet spectacular time, giving birth to a movement as colourful and interesting as itself, an art that indeed could be accredited as the people’s art. As the movement itself and its artists are a reflection of the time itself, making it very difficult to successfully make evident the intentions of the artists and their works. In terms of whether they may have been politically motivated, or plainly just reflecting upon the turbulence of the time. As its virtually impossible for any artistically expressive movement to completely bypass the current happenings, may they be political, social, racial, or just plain interesting, which in the case of the pop art movement was all surprising occurring at one given time. Making pop one big concoction of all these different events. Generating a movement that wanted to deviate from the normal practices, thus experiment with new modes of representation as versatile and vigorously vibrant as the socio-political context in which it was created.
1 Lucie-Smith. E (1997), Movements in art since 1945, P.115
3 Hughes. R (1997), American Visions, P.539.40
4 Hughes. R (1997), American Visions, P.544
5 Hughes. R (1997), American Visions, P. 608
6 Hughes. R. (1997), American Visions, P.510
7 Hughes. R (1997), American Visions, P.512
8 Hughes. R (1997), American Visions, P.513
9 Hughes. R (1997), American Visions, P.466
10 Hughes. R (1997), American Visions, P.466
11 Hughes. R (1997), American Visions, P.545
12 Hughes. R (1997), American Visions, P.546