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[[image: cartoon based artwork containing following words]] I PRESSED THE FIRE CONTROL...AND AHEAD OF ME ROCKETS BLAZED THROUGH THE SKY...
WHAAM

[[Caption]]Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam, magna, 68 x 120 (two panels), 1963. (Tate Gallery, London.)

all over, as if they had taken out squatter's rights on the sky. In We Rose Up Slowly, an underwater scene, their crude veiling contrives only to look like several runs in stockings. A work called Non-Objective Painting blatantly coarsens with a dotted half-tone what otherwise passes for a reproduction of a Mondrian. By accepting the limitations of only the cheapest mechanical printing, Lichtenstein restricts himself to a kind of basic visual English. In an important sense, the schematic contrast between the inarticulate and inflexible materials, and the implicitly more complex passages, phenomena, and volumes they represent, is Lichtenstein's subject. Or rather, his stock in trade. From the inadequacies of rotogravure, he mines a rich sensory confusion.

The same might be said about his attack on the linear mannerisms of comic strip draftsmen. Tentacles of hair, leaves of fire, crevices of shadow, these are but some of the unintended metaphors that sprout in his scaled-up and hardened view of the funnies. It's curious that while on one hand he particularizes the emotive handling in this kind of drawing, on the other, he generalizes its perceptual capacities. A girl's tresses and the pushed, bristled paint of a giant brushstroke, are executed with a similar line. We know very well what a glint of metal looks like in the comics; we're less accustomed to see the same linear motif appear in an area of a "Picasso." In everything he does, Lichtenstein designs that we catch him red-handed, the better to show the interchangeability of his elements. The carapace of such degraded line freezes all possibility of personal touch and spontaneous pressure, one of the reasons for the acceptability of its hysterical subject. Hyped and hoked up on Roy's inflated terms, it comes alive as a slow, florid overgrowth of sensation. Though each object still conventionally reads as what it is, it tends to lose its symbolic leavening, and lifts off, freely created in its own right. 

I used to think he was infatuated with violence. And I will not, even now, absolve him from an exquisite spite. Pop art would have yielded such aggression, in any event, if only because it absorbs into itself trans-continental kitsch, phallic dreams of national glory. And these are positively barbaric. But such violence can be attributed neither to individual taste nor a didactic intent. True, it exists for Oldenburg, as a kind of organic alarm which can only be exorcised by detumescing the whole environment. Lichtenstein is more removed. Along with, or even before Godard, he had been responsible for magnifying that lethal kid stuff into an obsessive talisman of the cold war. He may be less of an anarchist than the Frenchman, but he is as much a revolutionary technician. The baroque cinema of the comics, their combination of words and visuals, are mutually explored by the two men. In contrast, Warhol's is a literal trans-

[[image: cartoon based artwork containing following words]] WE ROSE UP SLOWLY... AS IF WE DIDN'T BELONG TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD ANY LONGER... LIKE SWIMMERS IN A SHADOWY DREAM... WHO DIDN'T NEED TO BREATHE...

[[Caption]] Roy Lichtenstein, We Rose Up Slowly..., oil and magna, 68 x 24, 68 x 68 (2 panels), 1964. (Mr. Karl Stroher, Darmstadt.)

[[Caption]] Roy Lichtenstein, Preparedness, oil & magna, 10 x 18' (3 panels), 1969.