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[[advertisements]] GALERIE DU PERRON SELIM BENADOR ARP . MASSON . KLEE en permanence APPEL-BAIER-CLAVE-CHAGALL MOKADY-PICASSO-JORN-LEGER HARTUNG-MANESSIER-RIOPELLE-POLIAKOFF 10 rue du Perron GENEVA (Switzerland) Kootz PARKER thru NOV 9 MARCA-RELLI NOV 12-30 655 MADISON AVENUE AT 60 STREET, N.Y. JULIUS LOWY, INC. SHAR-SISTO, INC. 511 EAST 72 ST., NEW YORK LE 5-5250 PERIOD FRAMES AUTHENTIC REPRODUCTIONS MODERN FRAMES GILDING CONSERVATION STUDIO & LABORATORY X-RAY EXAMINATION RESTORATION OF PAINTINGS MUSEUM METHODS AINSLIE BURKE Paintings . Through November 9 WALTER FELDMAN Paintings . November 11-30 JOHN KOCH Drawings . December 2-21 KRAUSHAAR GALLERIES 1055 MADISON AVENUE (cor. 80th Street) NEW YORK REGINALD POLLACK Nov. 12 - Dec. 7 PERIDOT 820 MADISON AVE. (68) GEORGE PICKEN NEW PAINTINGS OCTOBER 28 TO NOVEMBER 16 REHN GALLERY 36 E. 61 ST. NEW YORK 21 MARANTZ Thru Nov. 16 BABCOCK Galleries 805 MADISON AT 68th [[/advertisements]] a little to deal with the problems - old artistic problems, that particular mystery that goes on in painting. You once said that your audience tends to concentrate too much on the subject matter of your work. They can't get past it? Well, that's their tough luck. I was talking about the big audience. The smaller audience gets through it and lives with it and deals with it, just like things coming up all day - in a shooting gallery, you know, things keep popping up to shoot at. And some guys can't shoot, that's all; they can only stand there with a gun in their hands. I'm interested in shooting and knocking them all down - seeing everything... But the statement about bridging the gap between art and life is, I think, a very nice metaphor or image, if that's what you'd call it, but I don't believe it. Everybody's using it now. I think it misleads. It's like the magic step, like -"Oh, that's beautiful, it bridges art and life." Well, that's not so. If you can make it in life - and I don't say that's easy to do - then you can make it with art; but even then that's just like saying if you make it with life then you can make it as a race-car driver. That's assuming art and life can be the same thing, those two poles. I make art. Other people make other things. There's art and there's life. I think life comes to art but if the object is used, then people say the object is used to bridge that gap - it's crazy. The object is used to make art, just like paint is used to make art. Does Pop Art serve a social function? Is it a comment? There are only a handful of people who seem to understand what I'm doing, so I'm certainly not changing the world. People confuse this social business with Pop Art - that it's a comment. If you write some fantastically obscene thing on a wall, that may be an even better comment, but I'm not sure that's art. I'm involved with formal elements. You've got to be; I can't help it. But any work of art, if it's successful, is also going to be a comment on what it's about. I'm working on a series of palettes right now. I put down the palette first, then within that palette I can do anything - clouds can roll through it, people can walk over it, I can put a hammer in the middle of it... Every time I do something, the whole thing becomes richer; it is another thing added to the landscape. But once I've done something, I'm no longer interested in it as a problem. It just becomes another facet of my work. I'm interested in striving to do something tougher. Lichtenstein continued from page 25 important influence and still affect my ideas of visual unity. Perception? Yes. Organized perceptions is what art is all about. He taught you "how to look?" Yes. He taught me how to go about learning how to look. At what? At what, doesn't have anything to do with it. It is a process. It has nothing to do with any external form the painting takes, it has to do with a way of building a unified pattern of seeing... In Abstract-Expressionism the paintings symbolize the idea of ground-directedness as opposed to object-directedness. You put something down, react to it, put something else down, and the painting itself becomes a symbol of this. The difference is that rather than symbolize ground-directedness I do an object-directed appearing thing. There is humor here. The work is still ground-directed; the fact that it's an eyebrow or an almost direct copy of something is unimportant. The ground-directedness is in the painter's mind and not immediately apparent in the painting. Pop Art makes the statement that ground-directedness is not a quality that the painting has because of what it looks like... This tension between apparent object-directed products and actual ground-directed processes is an important strength of Pop Art. Antagonistic critics say that Pop Art does not transform its models. Does it? Transformation is a strange word to use. It implies that art transforms. It doesn't, it just plain forms. Artists have never worked with the model - just with the painting. What you're really saying is that an artist like Cézanne transforms what we think the painting ought to look like into something he things it ought to look like. He's working with paint, not nature; he's making a painting, he's forming I think my work is different from comic strips - but I wouldn't call it transformation; I don't think that whatever is meant by it is important to art. What I do is form, whereas the comic strip is not formed in the sense I'm using the word; the comics have shapes but there has been no effort to make them intensely unified. The purpose is different, one intends to depict and I intend to unify. And my 62 ART NEWS
