By James D. Balestrieri
PHILADELPHIA, PENN. — From the inside, through its inception in the 1950s and its explosion in the 1960s, Pop Art must have seemed like exactly that — an explosion, breaking the boundaries between high and low culture, drawing on imagery from advertising, comic books, fashion, photography and other forms of mass media and transforming them into brash, visceral klaxons. From Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans and Marilyns to Lichtenstein’s blown-up comic book panels, Pop was the external to Modernism’s internal, especially as Modernism resolved itself into Abstract Expressionism. Pop was the public to Modernism’s private, the communal to Modernism’s personal, the sensual to Modernism’s cerebral, the commercial to Modernism’s elitism.
“International Pop,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through May 15, describes Pop as a phenomenon born in post-World War II Britain, as British artists simultaneously celebrated, decried and sought to express their anxiety about the influence of American popular culture. Pop quickly spread back to the United States and was broadcast elsewhere in Europe, Asia and South America.
Two works by the British artist Richard Hamilton confirm the vertiginous trajectory of Pop Art. A 1958 work, “Hers Is A Lush Situation,” hearkens back to Dada and Surrealism, demonstrating Hamilton’s interest in Marcel Duchamp’s avant-garde disregard for canonical, classical composition. Still, the painting is not at all out of line with the tenets of Cubism and Futurism. From any number of vantage points, including the central, negative space, the work suggests a female form. But each component is a fragment of a car: a window (reflecting a modern skyscraper), a fin, a fender, a “Dagmar” headlight, a distorted reflection in chrome. Only the floating, disembodied lips and teeth — a very Daliesque element — imply an actual woman.
A quick jump ahead and a glance at Hamilton’s “Epiphany,” and we see full-bore Pop.
Just six years later, in 1964, Hamilton was traveling in the United States, lecturing on Duchamp, when Pop made a real mark on him, as he observed in a 2002 interview with The Guardian: “I sometimes wonder if a sudden epiphany hit Marcel Duchamp when he picked up a bicycle wheel and put it through a hole in the top of a kitchen stool in 1913. I experienced such a moment of understanding when I encountered a large button in a seedy gift shop in Pacific Ocean Park, Venice, California, with the words ‘Slip It To Me’ blatantly displayed across it.”
Possessing scale, sensuality, humor and roots in mass culture and advertising, “Epiphany” — a giant lapel button bearing a slogan for a nonexistent product or a broad-minded political campaign — is a work which Hamilton reproduced and altered for many years, and is one of the keystones of Pop.
Slogans became central elements in Pop Art, making their way back from pop culture whimsy to the political realm in the highly charged atmosphere of the 1960s in the United States and elsewhere. “Be an Outlaw, Be a Hero” by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica is both an artwork and a piece of propaganda, one that evokes early Soviet posters. But instead of advocating the collective actions of the state, these works featured battle cries of the many countercultural movements of the time that opposed war, dictatorship and oppression and saw artists as ethical, romantic revolutionaries.
Revolution was in the air in the Pop era, and one of the real attractions of the exhibition is the attention paid to other art forms, especially the music of the late 1950s and 1960s. A Spotify playlist, curated by musician Ben Vaughan (whose own music embraces rockabilly, folk and jazz) and available through the Philadelphia Museum website, ranges from Sonny & Cher’s “The Beat Goes On” to Astrud Gilberto’s “Agua de Beber,” from Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground to Miles Davis and Neal Hefti’s “Theme from Batman,” exploring the sounds that accompanied the art.
Just as in the imagery of Pop, the music seems to have detonated and burst out in a number of directions. But if Link Wray’s 1958 hard-driving guitar side “Jack the Ripper” has affinities with “Hers Is a Lush Situation,” the sexual innuendo in Nina Simone’s “See-Line Woman” and The Beatles’ “Drive My Car” links up with “Epiphany” in its staccato rhythms and a driving, jangling, almost electronic insistence that, definitively, goes on.
Woman, liberated and in control, is one of the singular subjects and subtexts of both Pop Art and pop music. Amazingly, the capacity of the idea of a liberated woman to shock, and even to elicit censure, reverberates to this day, as evidenced by the fact that Belgian artist Evelyne Axell’s 1964 work “Ice Cream” was briefly banned by Facebook for its suggestive nature when the Philadelphia Museum posted it on its webpage as part of its exhibition announcement. Exuding glamorous confidence, the woman in Gerhard Richter’s “Woman Descending the Staircase” echoes Duchamp’s famous 1912 cubist painting “Nude Descending the Staircase” (Duchamp might well be the source and spirit of Pop) and Umberto Boccioni’s 1913 bronze “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.”
Unlike Duchamp and Boccioni, Richter’s woman is not fragmented and reassembled to represent movement and speed. Instead, Richter’s woman, wrapped in haute couture, coiffed and shod for an elegant evening, is caught in a moment of blurred metallic motion. With a gossamer scarf trailing behind her, she glides like a hood ornament that stepped off a luxury car of the 1930s.
In consumer culture, the flip side of glamour is excess, and many Pop artists created works that, while seeming to document and celebrate mass culture (and marketing), come across as implicit critiques of capitalism, advertising and the suburban ideal. Erro’s “Foodscape,” Dalila Puzzovio’s “Dalila doble plataforma,” Ed Ruscha’s “Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas” and Tom Wesselmann’s “Still Life #35,” for example, are vastly different works conceived in different parts of the world, yet there are a number of things that connect them.
Where “Foodscape” is a stuffed canvas and “Standard Station” is spare, both are strangely sterile, suggesting that emptiness can be a consequence of too much as easily as it is a consequence of too little. Where “Dalila doble plataforma” and “Still Life #35” are enticing and attractive, dressed windows with eye appeal advertising themselves as artworks, there is definite menace in the surfeit of nearly identical shoes and in the eyes of the Made Rite girl masking the filtered cigarettes that stand like distant towers.
Pop Art calls language, whether it is the language of advertising or of love, into question, interrogating its sources and agendas. It is no accident that the era of Pop Art coincided with an interest in honesty and openness, and an insistence on human rights, free speech and free love. By isolating and greatly enlarging individual comic book panels, Roy Lichtenstein calls the concept of the individual moment — in imagery, language and time — into question. An instant, removed from the context of past and present, can convey incredible meaning, or be entirely devoid of it. In “Look Mickey,” the simple joke — that Donald Duck thinks he has hooked a big fish when, in reality, he has only hooked his own jacket — describes an existential human condition.
When Pop Art was not only in vogue, but simultaneously in Vogue and on the streets, everywhere, in far flung corners of the globe, it expressed itself in so many different ways that it seemed to be actively resisting any unity of purpose or method. But now, in hindsight, a major exhibition of Pop Art, like the one in Philadelphia, reveals some startling harmonies. Pop Art insisted that we look — as Joe Tilson’s “Look!” explicitly does — at the languages that compete for our attention, appetites, acquiescence, compliance. It achieved this by scaling up images and concepts that lurked then — and still lurk — in the collective, commercial unconscious.
As Sonny & Cher sing it, the beat goes on, whether it is the drumbeat of war or the beat of the sales pitches of Madison Avenue drummers. They — and Pop Art — asked us to hear the beat, know it for what it is and work to replace it with something better, something authentic, something real. We leave “International Pop” with an unanswered question: In the decades that have rolled in and out since Pop Art faded in the 1970s, have we hooked that big fish? Or are we still battling our own tails?
About The Show
Organized by the Walker Art Center and curated by Darsie Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan, “International Pop” is the first traveling exhibition in the United States to present a comprehensive account of the development of Pop Art during the 1960s and 1970s. A fully illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition.
On view in the Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, “International Pop” closes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on May 15. The museum is at Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For information, 215-763-8100 or www.philamuseum.org.
