Thoughts on Pop Art

 

Like almost all of the great works of the 20th century, Pop art is a joke.  Pop art, at its best, is a witty articulation of the paradoxical - indeed, contradictory - conditions of the commodification of art.  For instance, there's the work by the MSCHF art collective in which they bought an original Andy Warhol drawing for $20,000, then drew 999 high-quality forgeries of it, shuffled them together, and sold them for $250 a pop.  Or, for that matter, Maurizzio Cattelan's famous banana duct-taped to a wall, sold for $120,000.  Or Salvatore's invisible statue, "Io Sono," which sold for $18,000.  Of course, that's not a new idea: Yves Klein's "the Void," (1958) - an empty space - recently sold for a million dollars.  Or what about Andy Warhol's own pranks, from his prints of Campbell's Soup cans to his art that he didn't touch, manufactured in his factory by unnamed underlings, to his "oxidation" paintings (1977) - blocks of different materials that he would ask his hunky assistants like Ronnie Cutrone to piss on?

When I think of stunts like this, I can't help thinking of the delicious assaults of the Situationist International.  When Guy Debord screened Hurlements en Faveur De Sade (1952), his film which contained no images, merely total darkness occasionally punctuated by brief periods of a blank white screen, this was a deliberate provocation, calculated to motivate enraged audiences to demand their money back (the mass nature of film projection makes it different from other art forms in this respect - it creates a potential army of disgruntled consumers).  In 1913, the debut of Stravinky's ballet, the Rite of Spring, provoked riots - perhaps Debord was going for the same effect.  He and his friends even dumped food on the moviegoers, trying to stir up their ire.  I wonder: are some pop art pieces directed towards a similar effect as Debord's Hurlements?  (I have heard that the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh designed its screening area in keeping with Warhol's wishes for this theater which would show his films like Empire (1965), an 8 hour and 5 minute stationary shot of the Empire State Building; Warhol stipulated that the seats should be as uncomfortable as possible.)  As Debord literally projected nothing onto a screen, was Warhol expressing a nothingness, a hollowness, at the center of the commodity-form, in the hopes that this would provoke the public to rise up and tear down the world of the commodity-form?  Even if not, this still presents itself as possibility for an enormous aspiration of potential art.

Repeated over and over again, the joke isn't funny anymore. 

Of course, the paradoxical conditions of the commodification of art are such that those who are the joke's targets are they who are in on the joke.  If you get it, then it's laughing at you.

One way to be in on the joke is to buy one of these works of art.  Or to sell it.  Another way to be in on the joke is to write art criticism, or to make some of this art yourself.  There are indeed many, many ways to be in on the joke.

Note that revealing or accenting the contradiction of the commodity-form is not the same thing as "breaking down the barrier" between high art and low art, artist and audience, art and advertising, high culture and popular culture, etc., etc., etc..  None of that happens in Pop art.  There is nothing kind, or comfortable, or nice, or democratic, or egalitarian about Pop art.  Pop art is an attack.  It is cruel.  If there is an emotion expressed by Pop art to the audience, it is contempt.  But even that is saying too much - there really is no emotion at all.  And I emphasize: I am not accusing the artist of being cruel or expressing contempt - it is the commodity itself that expresses (or doesn't express) contempt, from up there on its throne, as master of society.  The artist is down here, with us, just as much in thrall to it as we are.

I can imagine an interview between myself and Andy Warhol, vis-a-vis his famous Rorschach paintings, in which he took canvasses (some of them enormous), put paint on one half, and carefully folded them over and made symmetrical images in imitation of the famous "inkblot" tests developed by Hermann Rorschach.  

Me: "So are you saying, through these paintings, that the meaning that we interpret into these paintings, and thus the value we ascribe to them, including the monetary value, is all in our heads?"

Andy: "No."

As I say, at its best, Pop art accomplishes this, or at least is aimed at something like this.  But all too often, Pop art falls into something else.  It may fall into, for instance, a nostalgia, or a kind of complacency, an acceptance, even a celebration of the brands, logos, and iconography of our youth.  There may even be a reactionary yearning to return to the "innocence" of Mickey Mouse, Elvis, Pokemon, the Gerber Baby, a child holding a Coke in an ad, or any of the various characters in the paintings hung on the walls in the decor of a 50s-themed diner.  All-too-often, so-called Pop art gives us nothing but 'memberberries.  

What is nostalgia? Misplaced cruelty.

Or, worse yet, it may fall into morality.  It may lecture you to feel ashamed of being put into the role of consumer - it may, in some tiresome and pointless way, didactically list all of your prurient desires.  Andy Warhol, fervent Ruthenian Catholic that he was, usually fell into this trap.  Fellini, too, was a moralist, and therefore fell short of the true potential of Pop art, as in La Dolce Vita.  Shaming the audience for their consumerism, shallowness, and vanity is not at all the same thing as inciting a real revolt against the commodity form - indeed, it may be the opposite.  Shame is simply another form of acceptance.

Another, more subtle way that Pop art can fail is through a kind of relentless provocation, always turning up the intensity of provocation, which, after relentless bombardment by incongruous signs and symbols, ultimately has a kind of numbing effect, rendering the subject jaded and cowed into an ironic acceptance.  After a certain level of inundation, Pop art loses its quality as a prank and becomes simply what is expected.  Both the art producer and the art consumer, having lost the feeling of the initial shock, become lost in the details of technique and skill, process over product.  People spend thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars trying to replicate the tone of the grainy recordings of the Velvet Underground.

There are, indeed, many ways for Pop art to fail.  Perhaps it has become a dead end, or perhaps not.  I've remarked before that the formula for successful modern art is: "a joke that you don't get."  

Maybe it's time to stop joking.  Maybe it's time to get serious.