The new exhibition, "International Pop," on show at the Walker Art Center until mid-August is daunting and, more than a little, exhausting for the viewer. The exhibit seems huge and the art on display is challenging and rebarbative. There are two reasons for this: first, Pop art was originally styled "the new Vulgarism" and the subject matter in the show is relentlessly ugly and banal, commercial imagery of the most obvious kind presented in glaring colors that are without any beauty or sophistication. Second, most of the art has an idea-content that is superficial and, also, without allure -- all of Pop art's ideas were fully developed and exhaustively explored by the master of the form, Andy Warhol. Once the viewer understands Warhol's rather limited repertory of ideas and gestures -- generally something about art as a commodity and the diminution of the "aura" -- there's nothing much more to think about as the spectator strolls the sequence of uphill galleries. Pop Art was conceptual and it's hard to imagine anyone having any affection for these garish and obvious canvases and sculptural assemblages: in film, Pop Art displayed in someone's house is always an emblem for sexual perversion and wealthy narcissim -- Exhibit A in this regard is Stanley Kubrick's use of these kinds of art objects in his dystopian A Clockwork Orange. You can't envision an ordinary aesthete having this kind of stuff on his or her walls. Furthermore, the show is so big and ambitious that it loses its own thread of argument -- the best stuff in the exhibit doesn't seem to me to be Pop Art under any meaningful definition of that term. Consider, for example, a wonderful large painting by David Hockney ("The Room, Tarzana")in the show's last gallery. The canvas shows a young man lying on his belly on a bed in some suburban house -- the young man is naked from the waist down (except for white socks), displayed as a sexual object and the picture is overtly erotic. Hockney's palette is beautiful as always, cool blues and greens, the color swimming pools and shrubbery in the Santa Monica mountains. And the painting itself has an important precursor, an image made by Gauguin showing his teenage mistress lying naked on her belly on a bed, haunted by a terrifying apparition, the spirit of Death -- the picture is called "The Spirit of the Dead watching." Hockney's picture alludes to the Gauguin image -- the young man's nudity is equally vulnerable and the boy turns his head to the side with a look of abject terror similar to that shown in the girl in the Tahitian painting. Viewed in this light, the half-open door in Hockney's picture seems to take on a sinister significance. This is a wonderful image, one of the finest paintings in the show, but has nothing so far as I can ascertain with Pop Art or any of the themes of the exhibit as articulated in the verbose, if helpful, captions on the walls. Echt-Pop Art seems to me to have started as a kind of collage technique, quotidian commercial items made part of the picture, a technique pioneered by Picasso and Schwitters more than fifty years earlier. Ultimately, the artists seem to have decided that the fragments of reality that they were collaging into the image were more interesting than the other parts of the painting, and, so, the school morphed into art that appropriated bits of commerce and advertising but presented them in a heightened form -- the heightening of the form, or is defamiliarization could be accomplished by sloshing the images in paint, as in Warhol's "Sixteen Jackies" or, probably, the best Pop image in the show, his nightmare electric chair images; or the artist could play with the scale of the image, inflating little bits of commercial imagery into colossal murals as in the works of Ron Rosenquist, Tom Wesselman (his huge picture of pop bottles "Still Life") and Roy Lichtenstein ("Look, Mickey!"). Pop Art could be adapted into ice-cold landscape painting as in Ed Ruscha's "Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas", one of the highlights of the show, and in European countries, Japan, and South America, the style generally was used for polemical purposes -- the show has many interesting, although forgettable, images made by Japanese and South American artists that are primarily political in character, mostly obvious and banal attacks on the American enterprise. (Two of these works stand out -- an image of Chairman Mao made from hundreds of tiny, thumb-sized heads and torsos and a South American assemblage, or "combine," consisting of a lurid polychrome Christ crucified on an American fighter jet, this alarming image sharing a dark gallery with Yoko Ono's video "Sky," a work of conceptual art that shows nothing more than a featureless blue sky.) Countries that enthusiastically adopted Anglo-American Pop purported to do so within their own specific traditions and concerns -- but if there are national variants of the style, this is difficult to perceive except in broad strokes: The German works are cerebral and abstract, Japanese pop is relentlessly colorful and "cute," and the South American art joylessly prosecutes local political grievances, manifold, of course, under the authoritarian regimes on that continent. The most alarming thing in the show is Antonio Diaz' "My Portrait," a larger than life-size simulacram of a man's torso and head -- the head is represented as a rag marked with three grisly-looking bloodstains and the torso is a tray of spongy pinkish dough garnished with spike-like hairs; the object is grotesque and looks like one of Philip Guston's late paintings materialized as a sculpture. As you wander these large galleries, the eye longs for something painterly and, predictably, you find yourself lingering in front of canvases that seem to have been made by human hands and, not, stencils and air-brushed paint. In the end, you can reach only one conclusion: to the extent that something is arguably beautiful (for instance, the wonderful works by Jasper Johns, for my money, the greatest living artist) it's not Pop Art.
Also on display at the Walker is a show called "75 years of Gifts". This exhibit is smaller occupying the three or four Target galleries. I wandered into these rooms after spending 90 minutes with the Pop Art show and, immediately, wished that I had reversed my priorities. Although most of the artists were unknown to me in the "75 years" show, the works in that gallery were more interesting and, generally, better than the majority of the objects exhibited in the Pop galleries down the hall. A hyper-realist self-portrait by Chuck Close dominates one of the rooms and it is an astounding work. An artist named Llyn Foulkes is represented by a conventionally sized canvas called "I got a job to do" -- this painting is utterly mysterious, charming and surreal, and more conventionally Pop than most of the things in the International Pop Art show: the picture features a masked older man brandishing boxing gloves and a "Rueckenfigur" of Mickey Mouse seated on an actual log protruding from the picture plane; the image is completed by a painting within a painting a noble-looking Victorian man holding a torch to illumine the darkness. I have no idea what the picture is supposed to represent but it is captivating. As a 60-year old middle-class White man, of course, I despise Kara Walker and understand that the detestation is mutual -- but honesty compels me to admit that her two works in the show are excellent and, even, brilliant in her characteristically perverse manner. Walker seems to have progressed from race-baiting to expressing a generalized contempt and horror at heterosexual relationships -- she has an image of a southern Belle who has slit her wrists, portrayed as a powerful black silhouette, probably stenciled on the wall so that it seems to literally float in the air, sometimes appearing to the eye as a black cavity and other times seeming to be in high relief against the white wall. A large painting by Walker showing a mournful woman between two obviously phallic towers, minaret-style erections with small silhouette figures vomiting on one another while incongruously sporting halos is witty and so over-the-top as to be wonderful in its own exaggerated way. There is a gorgeous Philip Guston abstract work -- Guston was not only the best figurative artist of the sixties and seventies but, prior to that period, the artist who painted the most subtle and delicately beautiful abstractions in the New York School. Finally, there is an amazing large-scale photograph by Alec Soth that is better than anything in the whole International Pop show -- viewed from a distance, the picture looks like a collage including tattered images of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. At close range, the spectator is surprised and entranced by the fact that Soth's image is a photograph, the remarkable collage effect of curtain, window, hat, and pictures within the picture is something he actually found in a Memphis apartment. My recommendation is that you spend the majority of your museum visit in the "75 years of Gifts" show and, then, tour International Pop at a brisk trot.
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