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AF Dec. 1966
From: "Present Day Art and Ready Made Styles" D. Bannard

have from the "frozen" quality, which lends a vague, Surrealistic aura, and this is sometimes heightened by theatrical lighting.

7. Andy Warhol seems to accept the consequences of Pop thinking more than the others. His Brillo boxes and Campbell's Soup cans reproduce the original, or at least look as much like the original as possible. He is the least "artistic" and most up-to-date of the Pop artists (except Kaprow, below), because he recognizes that Pop thinking can express itself better in film or in the theater, or even in "real life" than in the gallery, that in fact, Pop art does not belong on the walls of a gallery. The only concession to traditional picture-making in his last show was the wallpaper.

8. Allan Kaprow, more consciously and positively than Warhol, apprehends and accepts the implications of Pop thinking. Rauschenberg has said that anything can be subject matter for art, but Kaprow really means it. He has taken the Pop notion at face value. For him, anything we sense and experience in any way, can be, and should be, experienced esthetically. This becomes a kind of pantheism, or a specialized kind of theater, which is interesting, but has little to do with my subject, gallery art.

Because Kaprow is the most extreme, or purest, Pop artist, he is the furthest from painting in the gallery sense, demonstrating, to me at least, that gallery painting and Pop thinking are antithetical, and that their union on canvas is an unnatural one. I have always felt that the more successful Pop works were those furthest removed from "artistic" consideration, as indeed the Pop esthetic clearly states. Rauschenberg's Abstract Expressionist hangover, Rosenquist's awkward Cubist make-up, and Indiana's picture balancing are useless vestiges. (Lichtenstein is the only one of the eight I described who seems to be moving back into painting.) Eventually the cleavage will become visible; on the one hand there will be painters and sculptors, and on the other there will be Pop artists, doing the sort of thing Warhol and Kaprow are doing. It is just a matter of evolution and distinction. Pop thinking will find its proper expression away from the gallery.⁴

The examination of Pop art raises a point which is important for an overall understanding of the Pop phenomenon - the apparent originality of a work depends on the prevalence and acceptance of the style within which the work appears. Pop art multiplied rapidly in the early '60s. I was amazed at its wide acceptance, because Rauschenberg and Johns were the acknowledged proprietors of this style, and it seemed to me that the newcomers were simply imitators. I did not reckon on the intense need for a jazzy successor to Abstract Expressionism. Instead of being astonished at the apparent similarity between the Pop artists, I should have realized that they were advancing a new front, a new stylistic environment, soil from which many slight varia-

[[image, top left]]
Carl Andre, Compound, detail, styrofoam, 1965

[[image, bottom left]]
Robert Morris, untitled, 8' dia., 2' h., fiberglas, 1966. (Dwan Gallery, L.A.)

[[image, right]]
Donald Judd, untitled sculpture, galvanized iron, 6" x 29" x 24", 1965

"...a set of clues, leading to talk."

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