Wallowing in The Mass Media Sea

By ROBERT HUGHES

How you feel about Pop art depends, to some extent, on how old you are. Nobody who was born around 1940 and came of age as a "consumer of images" in the 1960s is likely to react to the big Pop art survey now at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (through Dec. 15) in the same way as someone born after 1960. The oldie remembers the exuberant optimism of art's embrace of the mass media that lay at the core of Pop: superficial, maybe, but promising a fresh world of demotic feeling. The younger visitor, whose baby sitter was a TV set, is more likely to wonder what the fuss was about. Haven't we always been denizens of the electronic empire -- fixated but skeptical, knowing how it cons us, yet unable to jump clear of the game of image manipulation?

Where did the Arcadian side of Pop go? Down the memory hole, into the unrecoverable past, along with the America it represented. The crass, brash commercial imagery that the Pop artists seized on is still there, looming even larger than it did 30 years ago, but it no longer offers art the same possibilities. The optimism of '60s Pop makes it look more romantic than it used to. Having been propaganda for its own culture, some of it has turned into history painting of a quite poignant sort. Robert Rauschenberg's Retroactive II, 1964, with its spaceman and its young, glamorous, dead J.F.K., might well be the last affectionate tribute to a political figure produced by a major American artist -- you can't imagine an intelligent person feeling the same hero worship for Kennedy today, let alone for Reagan or Bush. Much of one's re-encounter with Pop is colored by the pathos of lost illusions.

Pop art, as Andy Warhol said, was "about liking things." Around 1960 -- actually a few years before that, if you date it from the early combine- paintings of Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns' flags and targets and, earlier in the '50s still, the work of Larry Rivers -- a number of young artists emerged in New York City, Paris and London who had little in common beyond their curiosity about the largely disparaged sea of mass media and commercial persuasion: ads, billboards, newsprint, TV montage and all kinds of kitsch. In the '20s Dadaists and Surrealists had been fascinated by this too, but Pop art dived into it with a kind of wallowing abandon.

The show firmly reminds us that although America was where the culture of Pop art triumphed, London was actually where the term originated. Its very first visual use was in a 1956 collage by the British artist Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, in which a body-builder hero is holding an enormous phallic sucker labeled POP, and a blown-up frame from a romance comic -- a prediction of the as yet undone work of Roy Lichtenstein -- hangs on the wall. Nor, just for the record, was this the only time the Brits were ahead of the Yanks. The chrome-plated whiskey bottles and other bibelots that New York's Jeff Koons was doing a few years ago were, as they politely say, "anticipated" in 1966 in a chrome-plated steel cast of a peasant chair by London's Clive Barker.

Pop art was the first accessible style of international Modernism; it dissolved the tensions that had existed, in Europe as in America, between avant-garde art and the general public. Consequently it set in motion enormous changes in the art market and in public attitudes toward the new. It was art about consumption, and it sat up and begged to be consumed. It also fed back, with incredible speed, into the domain of popular culture -- partly because it was so easily, and at times misleadingly, reproducible. (An early Lichtenstein like Masterpiece, 1962, inflates with complications when liberated from a comic-strip frame; reproduced in print, it collapses back into one again.)

This meant that Pop could flood the culture, especially in America, with an / ease that Abstract Expressionism could not possibly rival. The collectors, to quote the English dealer John Kasmin, "found it immediately easy and accessible. Everything added up for them: you make money out of soap flakes, and buy art based on soap-flake advertisements." The difficulties were invented later, mainly by critics who wanted to claim for Pop the depth and resonance of "classical" Modernism. You can't read what some of them wrote about the supposed profundities of Warhol's alienation without wanting to laugh out loud.

Is it an accident that the aspects of Pop that seem to have lasted best are the very characteristics of a work of art that Pop was supposed to have expelled -- namely, metaphor and a certain mystery? Hardly, and this only underscores the dangers of treating Pop art as though it were a homogeneous movement. Mel Ramos' waxen cutie leaning on a tire looks boring today, and the footnotes to Duchamp spun out by French Pop artists and members of the Fluxus group seem inert when they are not merely silly.

But on the other hand, the early work of James Rosenquist and Claes Oldenburg has lost none of its power. With Oldenburg the vitality comes from his wild metaphors of the world as body -- hard things drooping into softness, small things turning mountainous, a vision that seems to reach back to Bruegel and can make a crude enlarged plaque of some cuts of supermarket meat look like the site of a massacre. With Rosenquist, it is the crude oppositions, engrossing in their pure Americanness. The woman's face rising out of an orange swamp of spaghetti in I Love You with My Ford, 1961, remains one of the great dream images of that vanished world in which cars had fins and people read the Saturday Evening Post.

Some artists don't seem to belong in the show at all, or only do so by force of custom. It's a toss-up whether you want to see George Segal's once white, now gray, plaster-cast figures in relation to mass culture; today they seem even more attached to solitude and individual grittiness than they did in the '60s, sculptural materializations of the urban mood of Hopper. You could make some kind of case for that excellent California painter Wayne Thiebaud as a Pop artist because he painted hot dogs and angel-food cakes; but artists have always put the food of their time in their still lifes, whether a jamon serrano by Velazquez or a baguette by Manet, and with Thiebaud the formal qualities of the paint now seem far more engaging than its reference to serial production.

Does Pop still live? Marco Livingstone, who organized the show, believes so. "Pop has lasted," he writes in the catalog, "because of its radical redefinition of the attributes of the work of art . . . In assaulting conventions of taste by subjecting their own sensibility to that of their sources, ((Pop artists)) have in turn modified our own perceptions and created an indelible record of the spirit of our time." It's hard to believe that anyone in 1991 could still speak of "assaulting conventions of taste," since Pop's media-fixated gaze has actually become the main convention of taste in the aesthetic debris left in the '80s' wake. The galleries of Europe and America are stuffed with inert, overconceptualized boilerplate, from Koons to Haim Steinbach, that gets praised for its "criticality" but, as a footnote exhibition at London's Serpentine Gallery shows, is complacent and dull beyond belief. It "addresses" mass media and mass taste, but with a mincing snootiness unknown to Pop in the '60s.

The original Popsters may not have been great artists or even uniformly good ones, but they were Rubens and Poussin compared with these Derrida-spouting midgets. And if the graft of Conceptualism onto Pop has produced so little, it is only because the landscape of mass media presents no challenges to the artist: it is sterile now and incapable of a fresh thought or an authentic feeling. Better real ads and comics than exhausted "fine" art about them. That is one reason why our fin-de-siecle, at least in the domain of the visual arts, is turning into such a cultural fiasco.