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Robert Indiana What is Pop? Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades. It is basically a U-turn back to a representational visual communication, moving at a break-away speed in several sharp late models. It is an abrupt return to Father after an abstract 15-year exploration of the Womb. Pop is a re-enlistment in the world. It is shuck the Bomb. It is the American Dream, optimistic, generous and naïve It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and over-saturation of Abstract-Expressionism which, by its own esthetic logic. is the END of art, the glorious pinnacle of the long pyramidal creative process. Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere. some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola, ice-cream sodas, big hamburgers, super-markets and "EAT" signs. They are eye-hungry; they pop... Pure Pop culls its techniques from all present-day communicative processes: it is Wesselman's TV set and food ad, Warhol's newspaper and silkscreen, Lichtenstein's comics and Ben Day. it is my road signs. It is straight-to-the-point, severely blunt, with as little "artistic" transformation and delectation as possible. The self-conscious brush stroke and the even more self-conscious drip are not central to its generation. Impasto is visual indigestion. Are you Pop? Pop is either hard-core or hard-edge. I am hard-edge Pop. Will Pop bury Abstract-Expressionism? No. If A-E dies, the abstractionists will bury themselves under the weight of their own success and acceptance; they are battlers and the battle is won; they are theoreticians and their theories are respected in the staidest institutions; they seem by nature to be teachers and inseminators and their students and followers are legion around the world; they are inundated by their own fecundity. They need birth control. Will Pop replace Abstract-Expressionism? In the eternal What-Is-New-in-American-Painting shows, yes; in the latest acquisitions of the avant-garde collectors, yes; in the American Home, no. Once the hurdle of its non-objectivity is overcome, A-E is prone to be as decorative as French Impressionism. There is a harshness and matter-of-factness to Pop that doesn't exactly make it the interior decorator's Indispensable Right Hand. Is Pop here to stay? Give it ten years perhaps; if it matches A-E's 15 or 20, it will be doing well in these accelerated days of mass-medium circulation. In twenty years it must face 1984. Is Pop esthetic suicide? Possibly for those Popsters who were once believing A-Eers, who abandoned the Temple for the street; since I was never an acolyte, no blood is lost. Obviously esthetic "A" passes on and esthetic "B" is born. Pity more that massive body of erudite criticism that falls prostrate in its verbiage. Is Pop death? Yes, death to smuggery and the Preconceived-Notion-of-What-Art-Is diehards. More to the heart of the question, yes, Pop does admit Death in inevitable dialogue as Art has not for some centuries; it is willing to face the reality of its own and life's mortality. Art is really alive only for its own time; that eternally-vital proposition is the bookman's delusion. Warhol's auto-death transfixes us; DIE is equal to EAT Is Pop easy art? Yes, as opposed to one eminent critic's dictum that great art must necessarily be difficult art. Pop is Instant Art... Its comprehension can be as immediate as a Crucifixion. Its appeal my be as broad as its range; it is the wide-screen of the Late Show. It is not the Latin of the hierarchy, it is vulgar. Is Pop complacent? Yes, to the extent that Pop is not burdened with that self-consciousness of A-E, which writhes tortuously in its anxiety over whether or not it has fulfilled Monet's Water-Lily-Quest-for-Absolute/ Ambiguous-Form-of-Tomorrow theory; it walks young for the moment without the weight of four thousand years of art history on its shoulders, though the grey brains in high places are well arrayed and hot for the Kill. Is Pop cynical? Pop does not tend to convey the artist's superb intuition that modern man, with his loss of identity, submersion in mass culture, beset by mass destruction, is man's greatest problem, and that Art, Pop or otherwise, hardly provides the Solution - some optimistic, glowing, harmonious, humanitarian, plastically perfect Lost Chord of Life. Is Pop pre-sold? Maybe so. It isn't the Popster's fault that the A-Eers fought and won the bloody Battle of the Public-Press-Pantheon; they did it superbly and now there is an art-accepting public and a body of collectors and institutions that are willing to take risks lest they make another Artistic-Oversight-of-the-Century. This situation is mutually advantageous and perilous alike to all painters, [Continued of page 63] [[image - painting]] Robert Indiana: central panel of a cruciform polyptych, The Demuth American Dream, 5, 1963, 48 inches high. Stable Gallery 27
