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MAY 16, 1974
THE SOHO WEEKLY NEWS

[[image: painting]]
Dine's "Child Blue Wall"

Pop Art

PETER FRANK

The survey of American Pop Art at the Whitney Museum (until June 16th) is inarguably an exhibit of great significance and arguably a critical-curatorial effort that splendidly fulfills its promise.  The show takes Pop that necessary step beyond enshrinement which an art movement must make truly to enter history: it reopens the debate as to the movement's definition.

During the period of Pop's gradual emergence (ca. 1957-62) there wasn't anybody who could manage quite to get a handle on the style.  It was linked to everything in creation ("new Realsim," "Neo-Dada," "Anti-Sensibility Art," "Common Image Art") by a critical army who in retrospect resembled nothing so much as the seven blind men encountering the various sides of an elephant.  (Why the particular amount of confusion with regard to this movement is a question that could itself be explored at length.  I believe it was symptomatic at least of the nascent self-consciousness that was soon to turn the art world into a social microcosm dictated by people who paid exaggerated attention to their own awareness of art history.  But don't get me start.) Once the dust had settled, a label had been agreed upon, and Pop entered its heyday, everyone knew what it was, right? It was only a matter of time until that clear, obvious definition of Pop broke loose from its mooring.  John Russell and Suzi Gablik gave the first tug on the anchor with their book, Pop Art Redefined, which suggested that Pop was a lot wider a term than everybody thought. Now comes along Lawrence Alloway with a "revisionist" tack that approaches from the opposite direction; for him, Pop is to be more, rather than less, narrowly defined than before.

Alloway's critical position merits our attention not only because it is so cogent, but because of his own history.  Quite simply, Alloway was there when Pop stated - England, the latter '50s - moved with it as it moved, and observed it sympathetically from the beginning.  Of all the blind men, Alloway was the one who came closest to the idea of "elephant."

What permitted Alloway his close, perceptive association with Pop art was, and still is, his sensitivity to the sociology of art and its interaction with the sociology of general culture - an important factor in the consideration of an art that not only derives its attitudes from the prevailing mood of society but adopts the most basic, inglorious, vernacular images of the society as its visual vocabulary.  The thrust of Alloway's catalogue essay is thus.

The essay, to say the least, is enlightening.  It covers all aspects of Pop art with great depth and insight, yet provokes enough thought on the part of the reader to maintain the promise of the subject.  In considering so many points, broad and fine, and by assuming so assertive a critical position on all these points, Alloway suggests how much more can be considered, and how much more can be argued.  It is almost as if Alloway takes bold stances just to provoke informative discourse - an observation I found reinforced by Alloway's participation in a panel on Pop art at Artists Space last Friday night.  Also on the panel were Robert Indiana, who is in he Whitney show; George Segal, who isn't; and critics Robert Rosenblum and Irving Sandler.  The panel, one of the most worthwhile such symposia I have recently attended, was marked by much clear thinking and useful debate, sparked in good part by the precise but not unyielding stands taken by Alloway.

The panel was most enlightening in attempting to thrash out a delineation of what Pop art was, i.e., who was a Pop artist.  For once, everyone did not go about disclaiming labels; the artists and the critics alike acknowledged a priori the existence and widespread circulation of a Pop aesthetic.  Rosenblum argued against the inclusion of Rauschenberg in
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