Pop Art Is...
Featuring close on 130 paintings, collages, sculptures and photographs, the achievement of ‘Pop Art is …’, the Gagosian Gallery’s dizzyingly rich international survey of Pop art – in which works by contemporary artists on Pop themes were mingled with Grade ‘A’, museum-class Pop classics – was in reminding the viewer of Pop’s enduring modernity and cultural relevance.
In the simultaneously intimate and chilly atmosphere of a major private gallery, where vast sums of money are somehow in the very air (and Pop is both the product and the audit of consumerism), the jaw-dropping configuration of Andy Warhol’s Silver Liz of 1963, for example, with a Jasper Johns Target painting from 1961 and Martial Raysse’s Tableau Cassé (Broken Painting) of 1964, seemed suddenly to strip these epic, audacious, freezing, contradictory, seductive, inscrutable objects of all the somewhat deadening familiarity with which they have become encumbered as contemporary icons.
There was also the double pleasure of seeing work by two significant but undervalued artists – the great Ray Johnson (whose Movie Star with Horse collage, from 1958, was one of the highlights of the show) and Mark Lancaster. The latter – a star pupil of Richard Hamilton at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the early 1960s – was an early visitor to Warhol’s Silver Factory in 1964 and subsequently made work in which the devoted enthusiasm of a fan (a vital element in Pop) was held in cool tension with varying notions of form and interpretation.
The effect of the exhibition ‘Pop Art is ...’, therefore, was that of Pop re-animated: an exhibition in which – to paraphrase the Australian historian Greg Dening – the past was given back its own present tense. The founding works of Pop on display no longer seemed tamed by the necessary and inevitable processes of cultural enshrinement; rather, one would feel the resumption of their low, discreet, ageless pulse. There was thus an electrifying newness to the deft, charismatic charm of Marcel Duchamp’s Signed Sign of 1963, for example; while the tactile, visual and conceptual impact of Richard Hamilton’s enlarged lapel badge bearing the funky request ‘SLIP IT TO ME’ (Epiphany, 1964) seemed still to rehearse, with suave flamboyance, the future concerns of art-making during the infotainment age of the consumer mono-environment.
Three years after Hamilton made Epiphany, John Lennon would ask George Harrison, during their visit to Rishikesh in 1967 to meet with the Maharishi, ‘Did he slip you the answer then?’ And this, in many ways, might be seen as the central question of both Pop art as a historical, amorphous cultural project, and of the Gagosian Gallery’s re-statement in ‘Pop Art is …’, of the movement's founding characteristics.
In its analytical, celebratory and satirical romance with the modern age Pop employs swerves and reversals of expectation, emptying its subjects in order to re-float their significance – and in doing so becomes epic in its inscrutability, a vast mirror to advanced capitalism, hip to our common weakness for the compensatory pleasures of product and glamour. Pop seems to slip us the answer about the modern world, but in a way that anticipates the circumstantial framing of our asking.
The show took the broadest definition of Pop as a form, allowing artists as varied (and at times as seemingly un-Pop) as Jeff Koons, Douglas Gordon, Damien Hirst and Cy Twombly to sit alongside more obvious names. At first glance the configuration in the corner of Gallery 2 of a Damien Hirst cabinet (My Problem Is You, 2001) alongside Hamilton’s Toaster II (1966–2006) and Duchamp’s notorious Fountain (1917–64) may appear incongruous. But look again and this in fact became a valid and interesting way not only of extending Pop’s capacity to conflate question and answer but also of studying the historical course of that conflation.
An element of punning thus arose in the placement and choice of works in ‘Pop Art is …’. For example, the Hirst drug cabinet faced Claes Oldenburg’s gorgeous Soft Medicine Cabinet of 1966, while Douglas Gordon’s Self-Portrait of You and Me (Elvis Presley) (2006) appeared to continue the iconography of Peter Blake’s Shrine For Elvis (Black and White) (2003), placed a few metres away. But such sharing of imagery, in its turn, allowed the exhibition to ask a further question: today, in what feels to be the long fourth act of a seemingly endless condition of postmodernity (all styles served here), how might we re-see Pop-artistic responses to a new age, now 50 years old, of mass production and mass media?
What emerged from the evidence of ‘Pop Art is …’, in its at times audacious mingling of old and new, was Pop’s capacity both to anticipate the reflexive quotation and pre-mediation of Postmodernism and to uphold the unimpeachable glamour of Pop’s source material and founding achievements. In this the exhibition served as a reminder that even during its earliest years there was little shared intent between the artists drawn to Pop. The exuberance of first-generation Pop from London’s Royal College of Art, for instance, was at odds with the intellectualism and interest in Dada and Surrealism of Richard Hamilton.
‘Pop Art is …’ was a show rooted entirely in the present; for if we now inhabit – as Warhol predicted as early as 1962 – a ‘total Pop world’, of product, celebrity, money, sex and technology, then the many intellectual and aesthetic pleasures of ‘Pop Art is …’ lay in their brilliant reassertion of Pop’s capacity to dazzle, questioning as it answers, and answering with more questions.
