Having It Made
MELLOW, JAMES R.
ON ART By James R. Mellow Having It Made To the casual observer, the American artist has it made. The latest trends in the art world are reported in the daily press; the liveliest "doings'"...
...What the exhibition makes clear is that the most forceful art among the younger generation is still abstract—Larry Poons's optical paintings, Charles Hinman's shaped canvases, the non-functional constructions of Robert Morris...
...the liveliest "doings'" are revealed in the New York Times gossip column on the arts...
...The artists themselves are at the top of the heap they would have to demolish...
...With changes of taste and reputation so rapid, one no longer looks to the museums to confer status upon a man or a movement after a judicious period of evaluation...
...It dispenses with those values by which the critic formerly was able to grasp hold of and discuss the individual work of art as an expression of the particular sensibility...
...Far from sprouting up amidst the grass roots, it is culled (in the case of most of Rublowsky's artists) from the New York streets and corner newsstands...
...Breathless with excitement, silly and uncritical, it is a parody of the worst forms of current writing about art...
...It is a form of technical expertise, limited in its appeal, in which the division of the canvas, the problem of the edge, the figure-ground tension are the important considerations...
...It has settled for too little, being content to imitate commercial processes and to capitalize on the imagery of the mass media...
...Nor are we apt to be persuaded about the rigors of this art by an account of Roy Lichtenstein's herculean search for models among the comic books...
...What is significant about this otherwise trivial and diffident art is its reliance upon commercial processes for its techniques...
...the smartest productions along gallery row are spread out in glowing color on the pages of Look or Life or Time or Newsweek...
...As each year attendance records grow healthier, controlling the traffic becomes a problem for museums not set up—like the Guggenheim—for the efficient processing of art lovers...
...One of my assistants or anyone else, for that matter, can reproduce the design as well as I could...
...Remembering Duchamp's famous urinal of 50 years ago, it is mildly humorous to hear the author telling us that Warhol, with his "elemental soup cans and cartons,' is a red-hot innovator, an artist meeting the awesome challenges of our times...
...Marilyn Monroe dead is a tragic sex goddess...
...While the relationship between the artist and the critic has never been an easy one, it has had its public function, and it is interesting to speculate on the fact that now that art has found its broad public, the critic's role is somewhat diminished...
...It is part of the cant of Pop Art promotion that we now have an art that takes up the great theme of the American Experience, an art of our time and place, reflecting the commercial and technological values of our society...
...It is a bad time for the critic, however...
...Young artists of all persuasions are snapped up by the higher-priced galleries, while figures like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, having operated in the gap between Abstract Expressionism and Pop, are declared the young "old masters" of today...
...A strange breed of mutants has also occupied the galleries and museums—canvases that jut out from the wall like brightly colored mushrooms, chairs covered with thousands of hostile common pins, staircases set with blinking lights and old shoes...
...The gray eminence of the movement, he predates it by half a century with his readymades...
...Andy Warhol's Brillo and Campbell Soup cartons are turned out on a production line with stencils: "This way, I don't have to work on my objects at all...
...A representative selection, it covers the trends of the moment, from plastics to perversity...
...In this sense, I think there is a distinctly anti-critical spirit at work in contemporary art...
...There are, fortunately, more vital developments in art...
...They put the period to a sentence that has been pronounced in the daily press, the publications of the Luce syndicate, or the monthly art journals...
...The painters loosely classified under the term, post-painterly abstraction have held firm as sculptors of all aesthetic origins have been thrust into prominence...
...As art moves into the factory, criticism seems headed for the studio...
...This work is more intent upon the development of a technology than the refinement of a uniquely personal style...
...The point is that little of this art can be validated on the grounds of rigorous technique or the artist's personal vision...
...That his career constitutes a tradition of no small duration is a fact which both Tomkins and Rublowsky underplay in the interests of seeing present developments as radical and unrehearsed...
...A good deal of this work aspires to the machine look, and the remark of the young sculptor, Robert Murray, is indicative of the trend: "I prefer to work under factory rather than studio conditions " The machine aesthetic is not a new idea, certainly, but it is one that figures prominently in some of the most vigorous work to be seen nowadays...
...Its inspiration seems to have been largely piped into the studios through the major television networks...
...There is even a small contingent of old-fashioned figurative painters (respectable, if not inspiring) and one or two Pop artists...
...The fact seems to be confirmed by two recent books and an exhibition, Young America 1965, at the Whitney Museum of American Art...
...Marilyn Monroe alive is a sex goddess...
...Rauschenberg's images, for example, taken from the glossy magazines, are transferred to silk screen by a commercial company...
...They merely pass on, unexamined, the current "in" version of Pop Art and its antecedents...
...In the one area in which a case might have been made for Pop Art—as a form of social protest, like the art of the Thirties— its performance has been ambivalent, to say the least...
...The struggle of earlier Americans to establish art in our grudging terrain might well seem touching, compared to today's cultural bloom...
...But it is not criticism in its public role...
...Rublowsky concentrates upon the better known brandnames of Pop Art—Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Rosenquist, Warhol and Wesselmann—and the stores in which these commodities may be bought, together with a few obvious testimonials from satisfied customers...
...Much of the exhibition is given over to artists working in the optical and color exercise vein...
...What Pop Art deals in is a segment of the American Experience as first predigested by the mass media...
...Its imagery is transient and opportunistic...
...No sooner has he touched off his salvo of Wittgenstein than he realizes he might better have spent his time stoking up on Merleau-Ponty...
...In a camp version of the Vogue photo the artist is discovered, seated on a John, in a bathroom papered in aluminum foil...
...Tomkins' book, though no more critical of the art under discussion, is a much more sophisticated affair...
...The two books— John Rublowsky's Pop Art (Basic Books, 212 pp., $12.50) and Calvin Tomkins' The Bride and the Bachelors (Viking, 237 pp., $6.50)—are of little value critically speaking...
...Not a judgment likely to be reinforced by the photograph of Warhol which accompanies his text...
...First Pop and then Op made the scene...
...Small wonder, then, that Pop Art—child of the mass media industry and its bride, advertising —was clutched to the family bosom the moment it appeared on the scene...
...While Cage and Rauschenberg each have had a direct influence upon the aesthetic attitudes governing Pop Art, Tinguely—the Swiss inventor of contraptions that jiggle, shake, and eventually destroy themselves —is only an amusing symptom...
...A significant portion is devoted to the new object makers...
...Their predicament is a peculiar one: how to remain at the head of those eager squads for which they are supposed to be the leaders...
...his expression is suitably arch...
...There is a body of artistic ideas developing out of these new tendencies in art...
...A series of profiles on Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Jean Tinguely and Robert Rauschenberg, it first appeared in The New Yorker...
...An unfortunate move since, as we already can see, the critic's former territory is becoming the special preserve of the public relations man...
...The newest names in the New York galleries show up in record time on the television screen at night...
...Rublowsky makes it one of the virtues of Pop Art that it is an art "untouched by human hands...
...His book is, in both senses, a collector's item...
...The challenge potential of our times must be low indeed...
...Here, the Whitney exhibition, one of those summer round-ups of 30 artists under 35, is a useful guide...
...The career of Marcel Duchamp, of course, has provided the main precedent for Pop Art...
...Where 10 years ago he was faced with torrents of thick paint, he is now confronted with a billboard-sized illustration of Franco-American spaghetti swimming in its orange gravy...
...The museums now play host to the names that have already arrived...
...Only critical myopia can account for this view...
...Anarchy along our cultural front...
...So far as the individual work of art is concerned, many of these artists are— quite literally—intent upon having it made...
...But their publication does raise the question of the critical standards now prevailing...
...With the demise of Abstract Expressionism, a proliferation of new styles has appeared...
...It is a problematic time for the museums...
...Charged with discussing this art, the critic is reduced to speaking by the book, sometimes with comical results...
...Artists of importance and stature are invited to the White House and the air is full of the sweet sounds of government support...
...These painters and sculptors do not represent a movement—their aesthetic intentions are still quite diverse—but they do share with other artists a form of delivery that is noticeably impersonal, reductive in its means, declarative in its statements...
...ON ART By James R. Mellow Having It Made To the casual observer, the American artist has it made...
Vol. 48 • August 1965 • No. 17
