Pop Art: A Reactionary Realism
Author(s): Donald B. Kuspit
Source: Art Journal, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 31-38
Published by: College Art Association
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Pop
Art:
Realism
Reactionary
A
DONALDB. KUSPIT
In parodythe implicationis the perverse,and I feel that in my
own work I don't mean it to be that. BecauseI don't dislikethe
work that I'm parodying.... The things that I have parodiedI
actuallyadmire.
- Roy Lichtenstein
LawrenceAllowaywrites that "Pop art is neither abstract nor
realistic, though it has contacts in both directions."' This
article explores its contacts in the realistic direction, even
taking it as a political articulation.Jean Cassou insists that "a
realistic movement in art is always revolutionary."2This article shows, on the contrary, that insofar as Pop art is realistic, it is reactionary,and evades the social responsibility it at
first glance seems to show. Cassou's remarkis based on the
assumption that the main thrust of modern realism is the
unmasking of reality to show its "ugly" truth, which is repressed in ordinary recognition. Realism is not simply
"bound to a concrete situation at a given moment,"3 nor
does it only intend to showthat, in Goethe's words, "no
object of the broadest world and the most manifold life will
be any longer excluded as unpoetical." Going beyond these
superficialconditions, modern realismat its best causes us to
re-cognize reality, denying its appearances any "fictional finality,"to use Alfred Adler's expression. Realism is not only
directed towards true reality, and as such radical, but is
directed against the idealism of much art, which mediates a
presumed ultimate sense, and reinforces the resistance of
consciousness to the real sense of things by giving them ideal
meanings. (Realism is thus a debunking of the idealistic
approach to art in general, which looks for absolute meanings in its appearances.) For revolutionary realism, no perception can become a metaphysical resting place; there is a
perpetual transcending of the given in the name of its sense,
which in the course of being disclosed loses its mysterious-
ness and becomes the new reality. Modern realism involves a
restless, relentless pursuit of the meaning of appearances:
on face
they are not so much faithfully reproduced-taken
value-as charged with fresh import. They are grasped as
physiognomies disclosing important social and personal
truths, rather than simply cannily yet neutrally mirrored. In a
sense, the attempt only to imitate reality, as if the question of
its meaning was not part of its appearance or was settled,
shows resistance to the truth about it, if not outright repression of that truth.
Now any contemporary American attempt to tell the truth
make appearances tell the truth
about appearances-to
about reality-seems handicapped from the beginning by the
mass media attempt to control appearances, for the specific
purposes of commerce and the more general goal of social
control. It is as though Pop art knew that all appearances are
corrupted by their possible media look: as though everything
American was waiting, as it were, to make a guest ar.pearance
on a media outlet, and become patently memorable.4 It is the
lurking presence of this expectation-of suddenly becoming,
simultaneously, newsworthy and glamorous (they seem reciprocal), and thus a celebrity-that had to be considered in
any attempt to communicate an American content. The question is: how did Pop art come to grips with this fact in the life
of appearances in America? Did it, in its well-known use of
them in a way
media images-of visual clich6s-transform
which showed them up, indicating critical detachmentthe world that created them?
mental independence-from
The answer, I hope to show, is no. Pop art did not simply
accept the media cliche image as a kind of lingua franca, the
inevitable communication code of a business society. For all
its supposed irony, Pop art endorsed and embraced these
mass images for the American world they signified-the infinite reproducibility of the images suggested the inescapability and omnipresence of the world-thus putting an artistic
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stamp of approval on the American status quo. The only
sense of parody, as Lichtensteinspoke of it in the quotation
at the beginning of this article, arises from the fact that the
pictorial slang of popular culture images should enter high
art: Lichtenstein'sfeeling of parody is caused by this coming
together of incommensurates, by his high-style treatment of
low images (Fig. 1).
Lichtenstein does not feel this parody is perverse, and he
feels free to express his admirationfor his mass media American subject matter, because the possibility of "communion"
between the worlds of high art and the mass media, which
are usually thought of as having nothing to do with one
another, if not intending to negate each other, is guaranteed
by what Alloway has characterizedas the contemporary fine
art/popular culture continuum.5 This continuum presupposes the existence of fine art and popular culture as "parallel" or, at least, alternative modes of communication of the
same culture. As such, there is nothing forbidding transactions between them, even their interpenetration, for they
emerge from and are expressive of the same matrixof ideas
and events. In a sense, Pop art is based on the discovery that
fine art and popular culture are free to emulate and even
borrow outright from one another, not only in the name of
greater over-all success of communication, and not only
because they often have the same information content and
point to their methods, but because underneath their apparent differences they are in the service of the same ideal of
psycho-social control. They both exist as cultural "exhibitions"-mediums for making public-of the same ideology
of control, based on assurances of the exclusive excellence
of things American. Fine art and popular culture have the
same underlying logic: they are superstructures simultaneously disguising the realworkings of the world they originate
in-workings that show it is not the best of all possible
worlds-and generating allegiance to it. They offer pseudorevelations of realitydesigned at once to please the individual sense of critical understanding of the given social order,
and to promote group loyalty to it. Fromthis point of view,
the boundaries between fine art and popular culture seem to
blur; they seem aspects of a larger cultural "continuum."
They cannot be qualitativelydifferentiated because their subtlety and efficacy are recognized as similar. In a sense, the
discovery of their mutuality, and thus ability to assimilate
each other, is a way of furthering this subtlety and efficacy:
the use of the one by the other increases the influence of
both.
However, from the point of view of a revolutionaryrealism
which would want to understand the full implications of the
social order from which they both emerged, the fine art/
popular culture continuum is frustrating. It supplies readymade, one-dimensional media meanings, or labyrinthine,
self-adumbratinghigh culture meanings, neither of which is
clearly grounded in the social order which they both presuppose. The fine art/popular culture continuum does even
more: it instills the idea of predictable, certified meanings,
foreclosing any further investigation of the "truth." Such
meanings have effect-take hold-just because they do not
pretend to be true, only certain: they afford a sense of
security, of the thoroughly known, which is a satisfactory
substitute for the difficult truth. Such meanings, seemingly
absolute, are socially approved, "ideal," because they form a
clear ground for action; they are in effect a kind of propaganda, generating strong belief and foreclosing on intellectual curiosity and inquiry.
Pop art, while it shares in the fine art/popular culture
continuum, first makes itself apparentas a communication of
media clich6 images ratherthan of fine art ideals. However,
its use of the media clich6 image gives that image a spontaneous fine art-"higher"-meaning. The spectator, who initiallyviewed the media cliche image as telling a kind of truth
about the real world or at least in some sense corresponding
to it, finds that "truth" hypostatized, raised to seemingly
absolute status, by Pop art's location of it in a fine art context.
Pop art gilds an already gilded lily, seemingly making it
sterling gold. Instead of enlightening the spectator by debunking the media clich6 image as an instance of false consciousness, Pop art gives it back to him writ large, with the
sanctity of an art aura around it, as though it were an iconthe image over the altarpiece of a commercial society. This
generates some shame and self-preservative amusement
("camp"), some minimum irony at one's own expense: it is
strange to see everyday idols in a position of overt power,
exhibited for "aesthetic" appreciationas well as information.
But on the whole such exhibition causes no trouble, stirs no
souls to their depths, except among the self-styled cognoscenti of the art world, the "purists" or aesthetes who still
want an exclusive culture, not realizingthat their culture is as
much a social disguise as popular culture, perhaps even
more so.
Fig. 1. Roy Lichtenstein, Blam, 1962. Privatecollection, New York.
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Thus, the spectator is thrown into society's arms by Pop
art, where he was before, but now the embrace crushes and
strangles; it cannot even be evaded mentally. The standardized, "media-ted" appearances of things are taken as truly
significant because they have become art-significant: a standard, clich6 appearance is for all practical and theoretical
purposes a true appearance. Pop realism thus unconsciously
keeps the spectator from questioning media cliche images,
as to either their motivation or construction. The unmediated
reality they mask is overlooked, or not looked at closely
enough; the media do not encourage the close look, but on
the contrary are designed to discourage it by satisfying, to the
point of satiation, any looking the spectator might want to
do. If the spectator has a quasi-realistic urge to establish
continuity between the media cliche image and unmediated
actuality, he is usually only attempting to "justify" the media
cliche image by showing it to be imitative of reality-or
rather, showing unmediated actuality to be imitative of it. For
Pop art encourages him to view the media cliche image as a
kind of dream realization or self-fulfilling prophecy about the
actual, given world: the way it looks on the media is the way it
was meant to look, for that is the way it truly is.
Pop art in effect encourages the assumption that the world
as known through the mass media fatalistically confirms the
actual world. The media seem to say: this is the world, make
the best of it, for it cannot be changed, since it has already
happened. It can only be made newsworthy and glamorousonly celebrated, for better or worse. In Pop art this celebration of the inevitable is itself celebrated. As Lichtenstein
writes,
The world is outside. Pop art looks at it and accepts this environment, which is neither good nor bad ... and if you ask me how
one can love moronization, how one can love the mechanization
of work, how one can love bad art, I answer: I see it, it's here, it's
the world.6
In Pop art "fine art" functions initially as the meta-medium
confirming the "fateful truth"-the unavoidable givenness of
the world-implicitly communicated by media images. But
Pop art mediates these already mediated images-mediates
the given world once more-so that they and the given world
seem not only the case, for better or worse, but potentially
tragic or comic. The media images and the world they reflect
are made to seem not simply inevitable, but dramatically
inevitable, because they are lifted onto the plane of art, with
its "great expectations." The "art" of Pop art is a deus ex
machina descending to the stage of the given world, already
self-consciously reflected in its media, already communicating its reality to itself through the distorting mirrors of its
media. The "art" not only takes the fatal vanity of the world
as self-reflected or mediated for granted, but dramatizes it.
Approved by art, the cliche state of affairs seems a preordained, ultimate situation; and the media cliche images,
brought into the higher world of art and given "style," seem
magnificent, or fraught with meaning, unexpectedly profound. They, in fact, seem to keep the real world running. As
Karl Kraus wrote,
happenings no longer happen; instead, the cliches operate spontaneously. Or, if things should nevertheless happen without
being frightened off by the cliches, these happenings will stop
when the cliches have been smashed. A rot has set in, and the
cliche has started it.7
Pop art, which seems to function
Dramatized-staged-by
like a theodicy, the clich6 acquires a transcendental aura,
confirming the stability of the world it mediates. This world is
also implicitly idealized by art; the cliche becomes its halo.
So idealized by Pop art, it becomes frozen in its cliche image,
denying it the possibility of process; on the contrary, its
image implies that it ought to remain the same, so that it can
be transcendentally significant and "beautiful." Supplied by
Pop art with a pair of art-wings, the media image of the
American world seems its true revelation, its final codification, its set form. Art-mediation does not only not essentially
change the media cliche image, but affords no deeper understanding of the world it mediates. This is why Pop art is
reactionary: it celebrates, by fetishizing, American society's
self-image in its media; this self-image cannot be thought
about further, for it has been made glamorous-its appearance is given the illusion of being a fine art. The fine art of
Pop appearances does no more than crystallize the world
they mediate as a finished product.
Pop art thus furthers what Adorno calls "the standardization of consciousness" by society-its attempt to master our
inner life for its own purposes.8 It may be, as Alloway says
van Gogh believed, that clich6s (visual or otherwise)-the
instrument of the standardization of consciousness as well as
the form and content of such false consciousness-are
"the
authorized expression of mankind, a kind of common property that especially binds us together." But they are also
controlled thoughts, or modes of thought control-stereotyped ways of viewing reality, and as such false to its process.
They inhibit our penetration of social and personal reality,
and repress our re-cognition of it. They restrict our search for
its meaning to prescribed paths, and deny us any critical
insight into its purposes.
A key statement, valuable for an understanding of the
workings of Pop art, and showing it to share in the propaganda purposes of the media, is Allan Kaprow's assertion that
"publicity can in its own way create an equally magnificent
image of a Buick as the Church once created an image of
God." "Publicity" is the method of methods for Pop art.
Picturing a thing for the purpose of publicizing it is to fetishize it into a "magnificent image" worthy of worship. It is to
create an iconic image: Pop art takes images with wide circulation-and thus so familiar they seem commonplace-and
fetishizes them into icons by placing them in an art context.9
Art seems thereby to mock itself, but it is actually fulfilling a
traditional purpose: the "idealization" of the actual into an
absolute so that it seems memorable (venerable and valuable). The fact that the actuality used by Pop art is standardized seems to imply that singling it out and raising it up for
special attention is ironic. But this element of parody, noted
by Lichtenstein, is superficial. A parody is critical of its subject matter; Lichtenstein is not critical of his American content, but admires it. His sense of parody seems a defense
against a hidden envy of the well-publicized character of his
American content, which gives it a "hold" over its consumers
that Lichtenstein would like his art to have. He in effect
appropriates this hold by using an American content, with its
easy familiarity and its everyday desirability. He thus puts one
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on the same easy, unthinking terms with his art as one is with
the everyday American content, which seems paradoxical
(this is what Lichtenstein in fact means by "parody") because
one expects to approach art with uneasy awe, as though one
were in the presence of something with self-evident authority. But of course art does not have any self-evident authority,
whereas the American content does; Pop art uses it because
we are already convinced of its "value." In effect, Pop art
wants the same hold-instant and superficial, yet bindingon its spectators as well-advertised American subject matter
wants on its consumers, and in part for the same purpose: to
sell itself. As Adorno notes,
The well-remarkedshowmanship of the new artists, their exhibitionism, is in fact the gesture by means of which they bring
themselves as commodities to the market.10
By using the same publicity methods as advertising, and by
using a publicized American content-by publicizing the alart assures itself of a hold on the
ready publicized-Pop
American public, for its audience is potentially everyone who
wittingly or unwittingly attends to advertising and publicity,
rather than simply a few aesthetes and purist art cognoscenti.
Pop art's exhibitionism consists in its obvious Americanism,
and it becomes obviously American in the name of commercial success: in the 1960s it still seemed as if America "spontaneously" sold. Pop art is art as a hard sell; its essential
technique is idealizing a visual clich6 into a luxury product,
which "sells" both because it is already well known and
because it has art-status. This combined hold, of the takenfor-granted or commonplace (an unconscious hold) and the
elite-superior (a conscious hold), is almost overwhelming in
its irresistibility, as many critics have discovered.11
This hold serves propaganda purposes, both for society
and art. Jacques Ellul describes "the aim of modern propaganda" as
no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. It is no longer
to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual
cling irrationallyto a process of action. It is no longer to lead to a
choice, but to loosen the reflexes. It is no longer to transforman
opinion, but to arouse an active and mythicalbelief.12
"Propaganda ceases," writes Ellul, "where simple dialogue
begins"; Pop art, while it may be a system of communication
plugged into a larger system, is not dialogue. (One cannot
have dialogue with works of Pop art, or rather enter into the
dialogue between their form and content, because, as many
articles have noted, their formal transformation of their content is minimal, or at least predictable in terms of the media
character of that content.) Now, much as advertising wants to
"loosen the reflexes" so that the consumer will respond,
ideally in Pavlovian fashion, to the publicized products, so
Pop art loosens the reflexes of the spectator so that he will
take to the picture (the art product) without resistancebefore his critical awareness begins to function. In both cases
the attempt is to get a hold on the consumer before he can
re-cognize the product. That is, the attempt is to sell the
product before its character can be carefully questioned. The
attempt is to avoid critical conflict by creating an "active and
mythical belief" in the product. Both advertising and Pop art
prey on the individual weakness for "easy solutions," caused
by his vulnerability. In this sense, both are profoundly propagandistic. As Ellul says
And the individual does not want information, but only value
judgments and preconceived positions. Here one must also take
into account the individual'slaziness, which plays a decisive role
in the entire propagandaphenomenon, and the impossibilityof
transmittingall informationfast enough to keep up with developments in the modern world. Besides, the developments are not
merely beyond man's intellectualscope; they are beyond him in
volume and intensity. ... Faced with such matters, he feels his
weakness, his inconsistency, his lackof effectiveness. He realizes
that he depends on decisions over which he has no control, and
that realization drives him to despair. Man cannot stay in this
situationtoo long. He needs an ideological veil to cover the harsh
reality,some consolation, a raison d'etre, a sense of values. And
only propagandaoffers him a remedy for a basically intolerable
situation.
Succinctly put: "to furnish the collective ideological motivations driving man to action is propaganda's exact task." It
seems, in such a situation, that "critical realism" is impossible. Yet existentially, on the level of individual existencepotentially the level of dialogue-it is necessary for survival,
and it first makes itself apparent as personal sceptical opposition to collective ideology, and its instrument of fetishization. Against the inscrutability that is created by fetishization-against the unenlightened attitude generated by advertising and Pop art-a critical attitude arises in the very process of consumption of ordinary and art products. Against
the fetishized dailiness-in Heidegger's sense of the termof these products, anxious doubt becomes the weapon of
psychic freedom.
Publicity, as a propaganda factor, creates false idols, images meant to be worthy of worship because they can make
life magically meaningful. So long as these images remain
true believer feels
idolized-effectively
ideological-their
imbued with their magnificence. However, the moment faith
is disturbed, and the image seems to lose its magnificence,
because it no longer seems to make life meaningful, its
ideological power collapses. Why should it ever be shaken?
How does the true believer come to doubt its magical efficacy, its special truthfulness? Simply by consuming what it
signifies. For the actual experience of what the image signifies is ordinary, contradicting the image's magnificence.
Awareness of the discrepancy between the two is the beginning of doubt of the image. Much as bread and wine are not
in fact the body and blood of Christ, so first-hand, actual
experience of what the image signifies strips it of its implications-of its magnificence. The belief that there is still significant correlation between the image and what it represents is
purely mythical, the vestige of an ideological hold. Pop art, as
noted, depends heavily on this hold, but its power collapses
the moment one realizes, by personal re-cognition-by diabanality of what these images
logue with its images-the
still
One
may
represent.
give allegiance to it for the sake of its
"art"-for the fineness of art-but one can no longer give
allegiance to the world it implies. Similarly, in realizing the
ordinariness of the products one consumes, their advertised
appearance loses its hold, although one may still abstractly
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ness of experience, with its true discoveries about the advertised reality, undermines the magnificence of the publicized
look, showing it to be an ideological facade on a commonplace reality. In nuce, the image debunks itself in the very
process of its consumption, for the logic of the process
demands that what it represents also be consumed, immediately giving rise to awareness of the difference between the
magnificent image and the experienced reality. Public and
private separate, the one becoming abstractand ideological,
the other becoming painfully concrete and sceptically personal. An ironical relationship exists between the image and
the reality, art and experience, ideology and actuality, but
this has nothing to do with the parodythe Pop artist imagines
he feels when he draws his magic circle of art around the
already artful media cliche image.
Pop art, like advertising, is ultimately indifferent to the
realityit enshrines in a magnificent image. A full awareness of
this reality, with all its implications and relations, would
interfere with the process of publicizing it, which involves
only minimumdisclosure of realityand maximumcelebration
of its appearance. Pop art thus deals in illusions, and the Pop
artist is essentially a publicity agent for already familiarillusions-illusions which seem about to dissipate, but by their
art codification gain renewed vigor. Transformedfrom transitory appearances into quasi-permanent icons, Pop art shows
them in full ideological war-paint, on the psychic make. In
a sense, the Pop artist is simply a superior craftsman-a
grandercommercial artist-refining an accepted content into
superior significance, but with no understandingof its actual
significance.
Advertising presupposes ignorance and inexperience; it is
most successful with the uncriticalbeliever. As has been said,
good advertising can sell anything-but only to those who
accept things at face value, and thus who can hardlycomprehend what it means to search out the truth about things. The
magnificent images created by advertising, art, and the
Church are designed to create in the consumer, spectator,
and believer, false consciousness of the reality signified by
the image-a consciousness which is reconciled to it before
it knows what it is. Advertising turns things into signs of
themselves, and then adumbrates these signs so that they
seem attractive, suggesting the ideal. Pop art adumbrates
these signs further, into absoluteness, giving them the transcendence and sanctityof art, makingthem objects of lasting
ratherthan momentary belief-giving them an "eternal present." The Church connects these absolutized signs-signs
with the halo of art around them-to an absolute object,
confirming their divinity. The Church is an institution confirming the "validity"-giving "ontological necessity"-to
artfully conceived reality. Advertising validates, or "institutionalizes," commodities, Pop art validates advertising, and
the Churchvalidates Pop art. As Kaprowsuggests, the proper
name of the Church is capitalism;Pop art confirms its look, it
confirms Pop art's commodity value. The tautologous relation established between advertising, Pop art, and capitalism
is at the core of Pop art's hitherto unqualified success.
Adorno writes:
Wellthen, so the workof artis derivedfromthe fetish-are the
artiststo blameif they relateto theirproductsa littlefetishistically?'3
Adorno has in mind Marx'stheory of the fetish character of
commodities; the work of art is, from an economic point of
Fig. 2. Tom Wesselmann, Bathtub Nude Number3, 1963. Cologne, Wollraf-RichartzMuseum, Collection of Peter Ludwig.
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Fig. 3. James Rosenquist, Lanai, 1964. Privatecollection, New York.
view, another commodity, and as such subject to fetishism.
As Marx writes,
I
i
AmovII
In the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world ... the
productions of the human brain appear as independent beings
endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one
another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities
with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishismwhich
attaches itself to the products of labor, so soon as they are
produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable
from the production of commodities.14
Pop works of art share-to a fault, as I have shown-this
general characteristic of all commodities, as well as of all
religiously conceived productions. But the fetishistic character of Pop works of art goes even deeper-into the narcissistic depths implied by Adorno's wry observation. From an
anthropological point of view, the fetish is an object believed
to have sacred power, as such enjoying a privileged social
position, and treated with special respect. Pop art cashes in
on the dignity given to ordinary phenomena by their mediation; the controlled attention and look they get on the media
seemingly stylizes them. Pop art raises this dignity to the nth
power by giving it the dignity of an art context. Simultaneously, it enhances the dignity of the art medium by appropriating for it the privileged, respected (simply by reason of the
attention they are given)- in a word, fetishized - phenomena
of the mass media. In general, the anthropological conception of fetishism confirms the economic and religious conceptions.
The sexological point of view adds the conception of a
fetish as an object by means of which
the lover's attention is diverted from the central focus of sexual
attractionto ... the peripheryof that focus, or is even outside it
altogether, though recalling it by association of contiguity or of
similarity.15
Sexual fetishization, in other words, gives an erotic charge to
a non-erotic object. Sexual fetishization by contiguity is an
almost standard device in Rosenquist's associations, and by
similarity in Oldenburg's visual punning.'6 Pop art's typical-
Fig. 4. Claes Oldenburg,DormeyerMixer,notebook
drawing, 1965.
if disguised or latent-erotic character is explicit in Wesselmann's streamlining of the female body itself into a sexual
fetish object, replacing it as a "central focus of sexual attraction" with diffuse attention to its form. That is, Wesselmann
deconcretizes the female body, making it into an abstract
form rather than a realized substance (Fig. 2). It is generalized
into a glamorous object, despite the exaggerated, superficially physical specificity Wesselmann often gives breasts
(especially nipples) and pudendum. These seem central by
reason of their exaggeration, yet this same exaggeration
makes them comical and unapproachable, if not repulsive.
Wesselmann destroys them as sites of feeling, and recreates
them as freakish, grotesque phenomena, in no way contradicting his general grotesque objectification of the female
body, on a calendar art model. In general, Wesselmann's
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detailing of the female sexual object is pseudo-sensational. It
seems to exist more to contradict, with an ironical touch of
quasi-raw sexual reality, the advertised slick image of the
female nude which is Wesselmann's point of departure, than
to enhance the nude's allurewith some "excited" imagery.
But more to the point is the sexual fetishization, also
originating in publicity for form rather than substance, of
such non-sexual objects as the automobile (Fig. 3). Until
recently one of the prizes in the American game, it was
worthy of erotic desire, for embracing it was in effect embracing the American dream. Oldenburg was obsessed with
the airflow Chryslerbecause its stream-line gave it an erotic
look, implicitly evoking the female form. The automobile is
openly glamorized in Rosenquist'sSilverSkies (1962),but this
is only to advertise it as it has always been advertised.17One
last point about the sexual fetishization of non-sexual ob-
jects: Oldenburg's food images seem to me a more daring
example of sexual fetishization than any use of the automobile, as does the softness and giganticism of many of his
objects. He, in effect, demonstrates that anything consumable becomes susceptible to sexual fetishization, for it becomes a gross object of appetite which calls for a "consuming" relation with itself (Fig. 4).
In general, Pop art reflects the fact that in capitalist society
publicity attempts to create a consuming relation with commodities, and tends to view every reality as a commodity.
Thus, one is supposed not only to be consumed by publicized reality, but to experience it strictlyobjectively, with the
exaggerated objectivity created by fetishism. This objectivity
is reflected in the presumably"cool" look of Pop art. Such a
look is the proper accompaniment to the apathy, the state of
feelinglessness, that underlies Pop art, having to do with its
Fig. 5. Andy Warhol, LavenderDisaster, 1964. Privatecollection, Greenwich, Connecticut.
37
FALL 1976
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ultimately bland acceptance of the American reality and advertising modes of experience and ideals. This is reflected
perhaps most explicitly in Warhol's "classicizing" of cliches
through seriality, creating a blank wall of monotony preventing any penetration to the reality signified. Warhol, simply by
them ad nauseam and arbimanipulating signs-repeating
trarily-makes us immune to their particular meaning and
indifferent to their larger import, to the context of events and
ideas from which they emerge (Fig. 5). Warhol enforcespolices-our moronization, rather than leading us out of it,
and thus shows a peculiarly technological kind of fascism. As
Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald said, fascism is a
combination of technological methods and socially reactionary attitudes.18 Warhol's mass production of cliches for an art
purpose perfectly exemplifies both. Lichtenstein's art-"organized perception" in no way redeems the neutrality of Pop
art in general, for as Lenin said, there is no such thing as
neutrality, which is the ideology of reactionaries sure of their
power and unconscious of its effect. Pop art shared in the
power of the moronic, mechanical world Lichtenstein noticed was "here," worshipped the bitch goddess of success
William James said was the American deity-worshipped
her
at a time she seemed secure. Pop art was thus part of that
"organization of optimism"19 so essential to consumer capitalist society, and had nothing to do with the derision of that
society socialists
imagined
they saw in it.20
U
1
Lawrence Alloway, American Pop Art, New York, 1974, p. 7. All further
quotations from Allowayare from this source, unless otherwise noted.
2
Jean Cassou, "Artand Confrontation,"Artand Confrontation,Greenwich,
Conn., 1970, p. 18.
3 Linda Nochlin, Realism, Baltimore, 1971,
p. 33. Alloway's definition of
realism, designed to distinguish it from Pop art-which is "about signs and
sign-systems"-conceives it as "concerned with the artist's perception of
objects in space and their translation into iconic, or faithful, signs." Like
Nochlin's definition, this one also ignores the revolutionary and critical
motivationof realism-its preoccupation with ideological issues-and takes
it as essentially descriptive in purpose.
4 Warhol'sview that we are entitled to fifteen minutes of media fame exploits
this expectation.
5 Lawrence
Alloway, "Network:The Art World Described as A System,"
Artforum,Sept. 1972, p. 28.
6 Quoted by Aldo Pellegrini,New Tendencies in Art, New York, 1966, p. 227.
See also John Coplans (ed.), Roy Lichtenstein, New York,1972, pp. 52-53.
7 Quoted Ernst Fischer, Art
by
Against Ideology, New York, 1970, p. 118.
8 Theodor W. Adorno, MinimaMoralia, Frankfurt/Main,
1964, p. 298.
9 Nicolas Calas, "Pop Icons," Pop Art, New York, 1966, p. 170.
'1 Adorno, p. 287.
1 As Lucy Lippard,"New YorkPop," Pop Art, pp. 82-83 notes, the common
complaint against Pop art was that it was too vulgarlyself-evident, and as
such perversely attractive. One knew the subject matter before one fully
experienced the work, and the subject matter predisposed one to take the
work in a set way.
12Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, New York, 1965, p. 25. All subsequent quotations by Ellul are from this source.
13 Adorno, p. 284.
14 KarlMarx,Capital, Chicago, 1933, vol. I, p. 83.
15 Havelock Ellis, Erotic
Symbolism, Philadelphia, 1920, p. 1.
16 There is no absolute
consistency to Rosenquist's associations, but his
poster for his retrospective at the National Galleryof Canada (1968) seems
particularlytelling. The poster superimposes a rose on spaghetti, combining
the romance and the reality of American life-both cliches to the point of
idyllicism. But the combination is also of vaginal and phallic symbols-in a
sense, of the simultaneityof the poetic and prosaic in sex. Classic examples
of Oldenburg's visual punning are his ray-guns, which resemble penis and
testicles, and his conversion of a Dormeyer Mixer into pendulous breasts,
and then into penis and testicles. Itcan be argued that Oldenburghas moved
from sexual to bisexual imagery, in which a work is no longer hard or soft,
but softly hard and hardilysoft.
17 Other key works are Rosenquist's Lanai (1964) and U-Haul-It(1967). An
unglamorous, openly sexual automobile appears in Kienholz's Back Seat
Dodge-38 (1964). Ingeneral, much early Pop imageryinvolvesexplicit as well
as impliciteroticism.
18 Clement Greenbergand DwightMacdonald,"10 Propositions on the War,"
Partisan Review, 8, 1941, p. 271.
19
Fischer, p. 160.
20
E.g., MichelRagon, "TheArtistand Society," Artand Confrontation,p. 31.
Donald B. Kuspit is Professor of Art at the Universityof North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. He is in the process of completing a book on contemporary
Americanart criticism.
ART JOURNAL,
38
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XXXVI/1