Pop art: messages and the medium at the Art Gallery of NSW

THE phenomenon of pop is about more than fun. And it is about more than any of the other cliches that spring readily to mind.

Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe silkscreen (1967) presents the actress as a commodity.

A PREVIEW article for this exhibition in another newspaper took the line that a show about pop was bound to be fun. No doubt the author was trying to be upbeat, given the poor publicity the Art Gallery of NSW has attracted recently, and the fact the article would go on to recall disappointing attendances for the America exhibition last summer.

But it was nonetheless an example of the way we so often evacuate the meaning of art and turn it into an object with superficial stylistic and decorative properties. Thus a baroque altarpiece can be reduced to a sumptuous piece of interior decoration and an ostensibly political work of contemporary art can become the hip moral alibi of an investment banker.

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Admittedly, pop artists were not innocent of these tendencies to superficiality, cynicism and even exploitation. But one still has to assume any art movement has a core of authenticity — that the central reason artists make the things they do is they feel them to be in some sense a true, perhaps even urgent, image of contemporary experience.

One important role of artists is certainly to give voice to the emerging but still only semi-conscious feelings, hopes and fears of the community to which they belong. This is why, when they are successful, their audience recognises, with surprise, delight or sometimes even dismay, things it had dimly felt but had never been able to articulate. In this sense the surprise of Giotto’s contemporaries at discovering a world of solid volumes, which spoke to them of their own new attitude to life, is directly comparable with that of Warhol’s viewers, discovering they lived in an environment of mass-produced commodities like soup cans.

And yet neither audience nor even artist may fully understand what these things mean, because the audience is still submerged in the experience, and because the artistic articulation of an experience precedes rational analysis. And just as an anthropologist may understand things that members of a cultural group cannot, because of their internal perspective, so it may only be in retrospect that we can fully appreciate the significance of a cultural movement.

The phenomenon of pop, extensively surveyed — including in its Australian manifestations — in this ambitious and impressive exhibition by Wayne Tunnicliffe, is about more than fun. And it is about more than any of the other cliches that spring readily to mind but say nothing about substance: that the artists were challenging conventions or rebelling against tradition — the shop-worn phrases that had already been applied to all their predecessors for the past 100 years.

What pop reveals is the nightmare of cultural noise that fills the head of modern men and women: images of consumer products, advertising slogans, insidious sociopolitical programming, the kitsch of mass music and films, disconnected bits of information reduced to trivia, arbitrary fashion pronouncements, fads and panics, illusory fears and illusory ideals.

Artists had begun to notice this phenomenon earlier in the century, with the beginnings of collage and more subtly in the way that labels and newspaper mastheads would appear in ­cubist paintings, as though even when nature itself was deconstructed, these cultural artefacts retained a kind of stubborn solidity.

But abstraction, with its celebration of direct expression, tended to ignore the rising tide of junk culture — or, as Clement Greenberg implies in his famous essay Avant-garde and Kitsch (1939), responded to it by climbing to more inaccessible heights. Ultimately an artist such as Jackson Pollock is heir to the romantic ideal of the creator-genius whose work mimics the creative action of the divine itself.

The movement we call pop, however, arose from a realisation that the world of kitsch was not just a debased form of artistic expression, or a problem of interest to critics: it had come to dominate the lives and consciousness of the mass of the population.

This is really the point of the collage by Richard Hamilton that gave the movement its name, here reproduced as an inkjet print, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956). The work’s title mimics the question-begging logic of advertising slogans: “why are our hairdryers the best?” — as though that crucial fact were already established.

Hamilton’s room is filled with the furnishings of modern consumer life, from fashion and decoration items to a vacuum cleaner. Most significant, though, is the fact the couple who inhabit this modern home are themselves turned into advertising cliches of masculinity and femininity. Kitsch reaches beyond consumer products and into self-consciousness.

Pop reveals a deadening alienation from nature, both from our own physical natures, including the truth of mind and body, sexuality and death, and from the ecological environment that sustains our life: it reflects a postwar consumer society intoxicated with the power of technology and convinced the good life can be bought, if necessary on the instalment plan.

From the opening of the exhibition, these are the themes that return again and again in works crammed with the flotsam and jetsam of consumer products, with advertising or soft-core pictures of girls, with newspaper cuttings, pictures of wars and bombs, advertisements and ­labels, and with views of bland but hygienic domestic interiors.

One of the most interesting paradoxes of consumer culture is that although it is based on a quasi-totalitarian sameness and conformity, it simultaneously encourages in each consumer a solipsistic illusion of individuality and entitlement. This paradoxical ideology, damaging to social cohesion and individual sanity, is stronger than ever today: people may not have a life, but they are convinced they have a lifestyle.

Within the exhibition, there are naturally a lot of minor artists who either show some awareness of these issues or who follow in the wake of the leading figures of the movement, but there are a handful who define the style and state its principal themes in a memorable way.

One of these is Roy Lichtenstein, an intrinsically minor talent who happened to stumble on an idea with considerable potential. He discovered a whole universe of kitsch imagery, flourishing in the world of comic books, existing on a plane parallel to but never intersecting with that of high art. And while the world of high art had withdrawn into abstraction, the world of comics revelled in crudely simplistic and highly charged images.

Lichtenstein’s first appropriation — he copied all his images from cartoonists — was a folksy slapstick gag with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. But where he really found his theme was in war and especially romance comics. In the car (1963), for example, is an image of pure illusion and even manipulation: the kitsch mirage of a successful and prosperous man and woman from which all reality of physical nature, social class and family role have been stripped away.

Every little clerk, every middle manager, can imagine himself as this square-jawed all-American male, every checkout girl, every receptionist, can be this glamorous doll. And yet the hollowness of the self-absorbed fantasy that ­underlies these images comes through fatally, even in the comics themselves, where so often — as in this case — the subject appears to be the impossibility of knowing the minds of others.

But if Lichtenstein uncovered a world in which pandering to mass wish fulfillment becomes ideological programming, it was Andy Warhol who went further, beyond the critique of prolefeed to what can be considered the ontological or metaphysical consequences of the new regime of mass imagery.

The death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962 was a moment of revelation. Warhol went out a few days later and bought a studio publicity still of the actress from the film Niagara (1953) which he reproduced first in his Marilyn Diptych (1962) and then in other variations, such as the silkscreen suite shown here (1967).

Warhol reflects — and capitalises — on the way suicide turned the star into a tragic legend, but also demonstrates how she has been objectified. He has heightened tonal contrast, reducing the features to a few schematic black shadows that nonetheless unmistakably define the image, or the sign, of Marilyn, and then he has produced multiple versions of this image, overlaying each with a different and equally gratuitous colour combination.

He has effectively approached his subject like a designer producing a range of curtain fabric: first devising a pattern, and then imagining variations. Reducing Marilyn’s face to a schematic pattern was already depersonalising her; turning her into multiple colour variants is radically denying her specificity as a unique person.

Such is the nature of fame in the age of mass media: real personality is obliterated and false images are endlessly manipulated. But as Warhol said, in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes — it’s actually even worse with the micro-fame of social media — and so the fate of the star becomes emblematic of the universal condition.

The images of Marilyn and other stars thus stand for a general social alienation in which the human subject is increasingly reduced not merely to an object, but to a sign. And the tragedy is the sign of Marilyn, instantly recognisable like a logo, becomes more real than the woman not just in our eyes, but even in her own.

Warhol was not a campaigner against the evils of the consumer society and the mass media, however; it is almost as though he felt he could only get under the skin of this culture by maintaining a detached or even ambivalent attitude towards it. Hence his frequent assertions that his work had no meaning beyond its immediate appearance, that he himself had no hidden depths, and perhaps most suggestively, that “pop is liking it”.

In the hands of many who followed Warhol without fully understanding the implications of his work, this sort of assertion became an excuse for some of the uncritical attitudes and woolly thinking of postmodernism.

Most of the later pop and postmodern work in the exhibition looks a little tired these days, and quite a few pieces, while interesting to reconsider as part of a complex historical picture, can safely be put back in storage when the show comes down. Little of it stands up to the late Warhol self-portrait in which the artist contemplates his own fate, consumed simultaneously by the image, the sign of Warhol that he had himself created, and by the imminence of death.

Pop to Popism, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, to March 1