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CHAPTER 1
Varieties of Pop
During the early 1960s, critics quickly grouped Warhol with a number of other artists who were exploring similar images, styles, and technologies. Their work was dubbed "pop" or "pop art," in reference to the popular culture it resembled. These punchy terms have proven remarkably durable; they indisputably point to shared qualities and themes. For the art dealer Ivan Karp, pop was "painting or sculpture that revolved around commercial imagery or industrial images, signs and symbols from the everyday life, things that you see all the time, repeated interminably, and done in a ... very stylized way." The "you" in his description was left capaciously vague.
But pop's critics have long disagreed about the attitudes pop demonstrated toward popular culture. Did these artists affirm "commercial imagery" or critique it — cynically or sincerely? Were they resurrecting Marcel Duchamp's or Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's ironic and sophisticated readymades, or searching out and celebrating the most exhilarating visual culture available? Could "vulgar" objects and images provide a challenge to artists, a new test of their abilities to convert the mundane into form and beauty? These questions led to innumerable arguments regarding pop's political outlook, arguments that attempted to find an interpretive frame that would accommodate all of pop's practitioners.
Pop's shared iconography — its comic strips and commodities and tabloid headlines — has obscured some profound differences among its practitioners. Sorting out Warhol's approach to this imagery will require differentiating it from those of his peers, and particularly from the artists with whom he was most frequently compared in the early 1960s: Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg — many of whose most celebrated works from this period were produced in uncredited collaboration with the artist Patty Muschinski. Lichtenstein's and Muschinski/Oldenburg's approaches to commercial imagery were vastly different from Warhol's; together, they demonstrate pop's diversity, and Warhol's unusual place within it.
The world that pop artists attempted to engage constituted a decisive transitional stage in postwar culture, when new strategies were developed to attract the attention of a vast segment of the American populace — the working class — that had hitherto mostly been considered an unworthy target for commercial culture. Pop artists' attitudes toward these strategies and audiences were divergent, to say the least; it barely makes sense to speak about pop as a single category in this regard. Lichtenstein recognized the power of this new culture, the "certain strong and amazing and vital things about it," but he was careful to distance himself and his work from its "vulgar" qualities: "I certainly don't think that popular life has a good social effect. In fact I think just the opposite. ... It's not the society that I really like to live in." Investigated as an archive in its own right, Lichtenstein's source material reveals a far more nuanced and destabilizing set of powers and understandings than the paintings he produced from it were willing to accept. But Lichtenstein's anxious attitude toward mass culture was by no means shared by his pop art peers. Where he emphasized an essential difference between art and commercial culture, Muschinski and Oldenburg claimed the overturning of this distinction as one of their primary motivations. They found commercial culture fascinating and wanted to harness its vast new powers. For his part, Warhol seems to have maintained a profoundly ambivalent attitude toward mass culture — recognizing its great appeal but also its mendacious promises of cultural participation and social mobility, and their profoundly frustrating effect upon many of its greatest admirers.
Lichtenstein: Things we hate
In 1979 an art student named David Barsalou began combing through 1960s romance and war comic books in search of the sources for Roy Lichtenstein's early pop paintings. It was a daunting project: at the time, as Barsalou remembers it, only three of Lichtenstein's comic-book source images had been identified. Barsalou eventually examined over twenty-five thousand books and found almost all of Lichtenstein's original panels. The results, collected on his aptly titled website "Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein," are startling. Across dozens and dozens of images, Barsalou's research reveals unmistakable patterns of adjustment and alteration. Again and again, the comparisons show Lichtenstein adopting the basic shape and structure of a particular panel, its dominant forms and contours and color arrangements, but paring away the unnecessary details — background, hatching, halftones. The resulting paintings are punchier — more lurid — than their sources, but also cleaner and more aseptic.
Compare Grrrrrrrrrrr! (1965) with its source, a panel by Joe Kubert. Lichtenstein adopted the composition almost wholesale but simplified and tidied up the furry hatching that gave Kubert's dog its disquieting dinginess and grit. The hatching along the ground plane was eliminated completely, as were the background figure, the dialogue along the panel's right edge, and the lettering in the lower left-hand corner. But the difference between the two images is much more than the sum of these details; as in every example Barsalou has uncovered, the colored dots in Lichtenstein's version have a smooth consistency that is absent in the source image. More than anything else, it is the pulp of comics that is repressed in Lichtenstein, the smudged unevenness of mass-produced Ben-Day dots on cheap paper. His simulated Ben-Day dots seem, next to their source material, to be distinctly sublimatory, consistently and efficiently converting these grimy panels into sharp, snappy images. They work hard to make their sources palatable, to aestheticize them, to render them acceptable for the walls of a penthouse or a museum.
Many critics, however, were unable to see the difference between Lichtenstein's work and its source material. Reviewing Lichtenstein's 1963 exhibit at the Ferus Gallery in Artforum, Douglas McClellan dismissed the distinction out of hand, derogatorily belittling both original and copy in the process: "Lichtenstein has seemingly rearranged nothing, he has stayed reverently close to the originals except for greatly enlarging the scale. He has avoided the risks of transformation and he has picked a cripple for a target." Upon seeing a reproduction of Lichtenstein's The Kiss in Artnews, Arthur Danto was similarly unable to distinguish it from its source, describing the painting as "look[ing] like it had been cut out of the comics section of an American newspaper." It was this painting that provided the initial impetus for Danto's famous "artworld" thesis, which would come to be so closely associated with Warhol: "Suffice it to say that I was stunned. I was certain that it was not art, but as my year in France unfurled, I came increasingly to the view that if it was art, anything could be art." Some viewers — like Adam Gopnik, one of the few critics to look closely at Lichtenstein's source material — have even claimed that Lichtenstein's adjustments were intended "to bring them closer to a platonic ideal of simple comic-book style." But the producers of such comics disagreed. As Lawrence Alloway reported in 1969, "I showed early comic strip paintings by Lichtenstein to a group of professional comic strip artists who considered them very arty ... [and] old-fashioned in [their] flatness."
The tensions between Lichtenstein's paintings and their newsstand source material have dissipated over the last fifty years, as the paintings have gained ubiquity and their sources have moldered in closets and basements. Recent scholarship on the artist has yet to rise to the challenge posed by Barsalou's archive. Seen next to this material, the perfectionism that characterizes Lichtenstein's paintings takes on new significance: it has to be recognized as a consistent and concerted effort, not just to make beautiful or elegant paintings, but to rid those paintings of what Lichtenstein saw as the overbearing vulgarity that characterized their sources. Asked by G. R. Swenson in 1963 whether pop art is "despicable," Lichtenstein was anxious but explicit: "That doesn't sound so good, does it? Well, it is an involvement with what I think to be the most brazen and threatening characteristics of our culture, things we hate, but which are also powerful in their impingement on us."
The dichotomy that Lichtenstein attempted to establish between commercial and fine art is crucial for understanding his project. On the one hand stands commercial work, which is pre-artistic: constitutively lacking in form, it has yet to be artistically unified. On the other hand is art itself — fully formed and noncommercial. Escaping commercialism was for Lichtenstein a matter of drawing the work out of the realm of commercialism and into the realm of the artistic: "What I do is form, whereas the comic strip is not formed ... there has been no effort to make them intensely unified." As Michael Lobel has shown, this forming involved a painstaking process that incorporated drawing, projection, sketching, and painting. "Things we hate" were thereby converted, against all odds, from vulgarity to dignity. Contemporary critics agreed: in one of Lichtenstein's first major reviews, Donald Judd proclaimed that "the social meaning of comics ... would be minor" among the works' references.
Lichtenstein's signature handmade Ben-Day dots were a crucial element in this equation. He insisted that his "techniques ... are not commercial, they only appear to be commercial — and the ways of seeing and composing and unifying are different and have different ends." Part of the paintings' sublime achievement was to transform this most mundane, commercial, and mechanical medium into something worthy of artistic respect. Lichtenstein's early collectors felt that, by purchasing the artist's early pop paintings, they were sharing in the glory of this challenging endeavor. As Richard Brown Baker told his journal, "Having an excited admiration for Lichtenstein's WHAM painting, I decided to take the risk and buy it. Without the taking of risks, a great collection is not formed." One of pop's most prominent collectors, Robert Scull, echoed this sentiment in Vogue: "Somehow or other a good artist seems to transform these objects into a valid and wonderful statement which gives me a thrill."
The participatory culture Lichtenstein envisioned was resolutely hierarchical, with art and artists providing the possibility of a sublime transformation from lowest to highest through form, and buyers certifying this achievement through the "formation" of their collections. This vision of pop art was compelling and familiar, and played a central role in the definition of the movement, both prospectively and retrospectively. It was closely correlated with a powerful set of aesthetic assumptions about art's relation to the world of commerce and profit, and the role of form in distinguishing one from the other. The achievement of Barsalou's research is to have begun the recovery of the specific world that Lichtenstein's work attempted to aestheticize and transform. Put another way, Barsalou's archive demonstrates that the positive drive toward form and unity in Lichtenstein is always simultaneously a defensive attempt to ward off the specificities of the source material. But this recovery has only just begun, particularly since Barsalou's website provides only the individual panels Lichtenstein borrowed. These panels were, of course, always elements of larger stories, with themes and priorities of their own, stories that have never been considered worthy of art historical attention. As it turns out, these stories reveal new challenges — sexual, economic, and bestial challenges — to Lichtenstein's drive toward sublimation and aestheticization. There was much to hate about these comic-book worlds and their imagery: they were often shallow and built on stereotypes; their understanding of their audience was frequently contemptuous; misogyny and racism were pervasive and mostly unquestioned. But a closer look at some of Lichtenstein's sources shows they also included strong alternatives to the hierarchical framework he propounded.
"Run for Love," the source story for Lichtenstein's Hopeless and Drowning Girl (both 1963), is instructive in this regard. The hero, an "ugly duckling" named Vickie Brownley, is introduced as a tomboy who buries her disappointments in car repair: "I like to cry when I'm fixing my heap! C-can't t-tell m-my tears from th-the grease!" Vickie meets a mysterious stranger forebodingly named Mal and then repeatedly rescues him from calamity, twice when Mal is stranded with his car, and once when he is drowning. In each case, Vickie's competence and bravery activate Mal's misogynistic insecurity. He responds to Vickie's aid with resentment: "Run along, little girl! I need a mechanic — not a fugitive from kindergarten!"
And yet, despite the fact that most of the story focuses on Vickie's courage, Lichtenstein chose to borrow two images that frame Vickie at her moments of maximum despair and peril. In Hopeless, she has just daydreamed a better Mal, who would be secure enough to appreciate her competence and generosity. Awakening, she realizes that Mal will never be capable of this gratitude: "That's the way — it should have begun! But it's hopeless!" Drowning Girl captures the moment in the story when Vickie's role shifts from hero to helpless victim; she has rescued Mal for the third time but is inexplicably racked by cramps while swimming to shore, giving Mal a chance to save her: "Helping a woman is a man's job!" he exclaims, "You see that now, don't you?" Through their selective borrowings, Lichtenstein's paintings work to elide the story's subtext of feminine competence and valor. "That's what you used to see in comic books," as Lichtenstein put it years later, "women who were like that, women were always in trouble." Such a thesis could be drawn from the conclusion to Vickie's story, but it overlooks the bulk of the narrative where it is the man who is "Mal"-functioning — "always in trouble." The paintings' condescension toward popular culture is achieved through a forceful suppression of the story's ambivalence regarding gender stereotypes; tellingly, in Hopeless, Mal is rechristened "Brad."
Or take the source story for Lichtenstein's 1965 painting Brushstrokes, published in Strange Suspense Stories in October 1964 and entitled, simply, The Painting (plates 3 and 4). In six surreal and convoluted pages, this tale follows Jake Taylor, an aspiring young painter, from childhood until old age. Taylor is haunted by a face he has painted, a sinister man with a widow's peak, who berates him for his perceived artistic failures: refusing to share his art with the public, and deigning to produce commissioned portraits of "Wealthy widows, their awkward daughters, anyone who asks!" Taylor's response is defensive: "You're not being fair! I must eat! I must pay the rent! What must I do to make you understand and stop tormenting me??"
The painted superego is a fanatical Kantian: he demands that the artist share his genius, and do so without thought of recompense. Taylor is too insecure — or too hungry — to heed these demands; the painted man repeatedly calls him a "coward." The panel that Lichtenstein chose to borrow illustrates Taylor's response to the painted man's challenges: he has taken a broad brush loaded with red paint and aggressively covered the painted man's face with sloppy strokes, marks that would have to have read in 1964 as referencing abstract expressionism. "The painting was destroyed ... The voice was silenced ... [Taylor]: I must be having some kind of nightmare!!"
Brushstrokes illustrates a pivotal moment in this doleful narrative. Abstraction is being proposed as an alternative to the Kantian aesthetic imperatives: if an artist cannot live up to Kant's lofty demands, perhaps he can drown them in paint and frustration. Unlike the story's cowardly painter, Lichtenstein will neither succumb to this temptation nor retreat to commercialism or seclusion. Instead, in this painting, he emblematizes his own effort to find a new accord between figuration and formal rigor. But in this respect, the original comic-book narrative may have the last word: on the story's final page, Jake discovers that the sinister man has been found dead. He is wracked by guilt, believing that his vandalizing the painting has caused the man's death. In penance, Jake repeatedly attempts to resurrect the man through his painting; the final panel shows him old and destitute, surrounded by portraits of the sinister Kantian, all silently refusing to share their wisdom. From the story's perspective, once the Kantian voice has been silenced and renounced, it cannot be resurrected; the reconciliation between figuration and Kantian quality that Brushstrokes proposes is thus imaginary rather than achieved.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Warhol's Working Class"
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