Pop on the Move

REVIEW ARTICLE POP ON THE MOVE aLeX KitnicK international Pop. curated by Darsie alexander with Bartholomew ryan. 2015–16. Minneapolis/Dallas/Philadelphia. On August 24, 1964, Susan Sontag wrote down in her journal the fol- lowing thought about Pop Art: Pop art: only possible in an affl uent society, where one can be free to enjoy ironic consumption. Thus there is Pop art in England— but not in Spain, where consumption is still too serious. (In Spain, painting is either abstract or social protest realism.)1 There are kernels of truth as well as clichés in this defi nition: Pop is wrapped up with practices of consumption; it is connected to affl u- ence; it is bound up with irony (which is to say, it isn’t “serious”). The terms infl ect each other as well. Irony modifi es consumption, giving it a droll, distant, campy sheen. In many ways this is the commonplace 1 Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964–1980, ed. David Rieff (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012), 21. In “Notes on Camp,” Sontag offers an alternative version of this thought: “Camp taste is by its nature possible only in affl uent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affl uence.” Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Picador, 1966), 289. 82 © 2017 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00190 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_r_00190 by guest on 24 September 2021 definition of Pop most often associated with Andy Warhol; think of the artist’s 1963 statement to Gene Swenson that Pop is “liking things.”2 But mixed in with the canonical parts of Sontag’s definition are some novel ideas about how Pop is tied to local contexts: Pop’s key terms—affluence, irony, consumption—are not universal and global, available everywhere at all times. Rather, they can only be sustained and supported in certain contexts and at particular moments—indeed, in certain bastions of privilege. Different political spaces allow for different ironies and practices of consumption, just as others might bar them from view. In fact, there was a Spanish Pop, but it looked different from what appeared elsewhere. The group Equipo Crónica, founded in 1965, refashioned modernist masterpieces, such as Picasso’s Guernica, with comic book heroes, in order to show what history might look like in the hands of commercial culture. The group’s self-marginalization—they primarily interrogated a history of Spanish art—was meant as a critique of the isolation their own country faced. At the moment of Sontag’s writ- ing, of course, Spain was still firmly in Franco’s grip. (The question of whether or not the country was “affluent” is another one altogether.) An awareness of Pop’s localities (one might even say its provincial- isms or uneven development) is perhaps the great accomplishment of International Pop, an exhibition curated by Darsie Alexander with Bartholomew Ryan, which opened at the Walker Art Center in 2015 and completed its run at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in spring 2016, after a stop at the Dallas Museum of Art.3 For the curators of the exhibition, the word “international” functions as an antidote to the jargon of “the global,” proposing a set of relationships marked by difference. Theirs is a world riven by disconnection over flow, in which migrations and networks are frequently translated, blocked, or interrupted. “Our use of the term international is not intended to imply worldliness and sophistication,” Alexander notes in the catalog’s opening essay. “Rather we chose it to signal [that?] the relationships born of the Pop era were selective, often country-by-country, and largely contingent on which 2 Gene Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Part 1,” Art News (November 1963): 24. One can find many similar examples. “The term Pop art originated in England and reached print by on the Move the winter of 1957–8,” Lawrence Alloway wrote in 1974. “Pop art and Popular art were P both used at this time to refer approvingly to the products of the mass media.” Lawrence Alloway, American Pop Art (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 1. Italics mine. | P o 3 The catalog was published by the Walker: International Pop, ed. Darsie Alexander with K Bartholomew Ryan (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, April 11–August 29, 2015), exhibition catalog. K i t n i c 83 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_r_00190 by guest on 24 September 2021 borders were easy to cross and which types of information could be obtained—and by whom.”4 Despite information’s increasing fluidity, in other words, real barriers—and often those national in stripe—still stood in its way. That said, Pop still appeared to be deeply American: not because American Pop Art was dominant, however, but because the United States as a symbol of political and cultural power functioned as a key factor.5 Fittingly, the International Pop exhibition found its method by exploring not only how a certain class of imagery circulated, but also how it inhabited different political landscapes from Eastern Europe to Latin America; in other words, it looked not only at how messages spread (and how images and artworks signified) but also at the manner in which they were received. The curators’ decision not to include works produced after 1972 was a wise one. (The latest work in the show, Kudo Tetsumi’s Olympic Winners Platform (Pollution Olympics-Pollution Game—L’art pressentiment), 1970–72, replete with decapitated head and dismembered hands, feet, and penis, presents a grisly image of internationalism if ever there was one.) While many artists continued to take up similar themes, such as the mass media and the circulation of images, well into the 1980s and 90s, the exhibition dedicated itself to mapping a postwar moment in which American imperialism only tightened its grip. Perhaps in 1973, with the oil crisis and Watergate, the world’s orientation veered in another direction.6 But did Pop only flourish in affluent societies? If the United States was Pop’s wellspring in terms of imagery, it cast a shadow on parts of the world with far different fortunes. Certainly Sontag’s example of postwar England (which many consider the birthplace of Pop) was more closely aligned with austerity than affluence (which contributed to its lust for American color magazines), and accordingly, Pop might have been more sincere than we have often thought. Irony needs dis- tance, but Pop, especially in its earliest incarnations, often turned on proximity; it styled itself as a handholding of the image when the real 4 Darsie Alexander, “Introduction: The Edge of Pop,” in International Pop, 79. 5 In his catalog essay “Where Is the Light? Transformations of Pop Art in Hungary,” Dávid Fehér proposes a model of horizontal “transfer” as opposed to vertical “influence” that might be helpful in thinking about such questions. International Pop, 131–48. 6 For more on the importance of 1973, see Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: a r g i n s 6 : 3 Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of the Post-Sixties (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), and M Sorry, Out of Gas: Architecture’s Response to the 1973 Oil Crisis (Montreal: Canadian Centre a r t for Architecture, 2008). 84 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_r_00190 by guest on 24 September 2021 thing often seemed out of reach. (The image, after all, might have been the new “real thing.”) Eduardo Paolozzi’s soiled scrapbooks and crinkled Bunk! collages, first presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1952, offer one example of this intimacy, and such a tendency persisted in England throughout the decade; an untitled piece of golden Victoriana by Pauline Boty (1960–61) mixes clipped pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Marcel Proust with sequins and gilt paint.7 An excess of affect pervades this work, as it does many others, which comes across through a process of cutting and pasting that seems notably personal: a montage for bed- room walls instead of political propaganda. Peter Blake’s Locker (1959), one of the earliest works in the exhibition and one of the first objects visi- tors encountered in the show, is a strange totem to such feelings and ideas. A locker is where one typically stores personal belongings, but in an inversion, this one wears its secrets on its sleeve. Nevertheless, some sense of interiority haunts the work.8 Painted in blue trim, the object has been papered with a kind of spolia created from pictures of the French actress Brigitte Bardot striking any number of poses: spread out sideways like an odalisque, or in a white spaghetti strap dress at a party, or on set in a chair with her name on it. We typically think of Pop as flat and one- dimensional, but here we have a complicated subject seen from many angles—perhaps too many. I think we are meant to understand the act of collecting all these images as a creepy activity. Locker is an uncomfortable object, to be sure, an intense monument to devotion and fandom, not unlike Kurt Schwitters’s Merz Column from 1923, which the artist kept tucked away in his Cathedral of Erotic Misery. Though one might find it inappropriate, it would be difficult to call it ironic. Locker testifies not only to the prominence of stars and icons in Pop, but to the variety of images and associated desires they produce. Brigitte Bardot was one of Pop’s most distributed icons, and her image provides a case study for testing different forms of reception.9 Some eight years after Blake’s Locker, in 1967, the Brazilian artist Waldemar 7 The scrapbook flourished in other locales, as well.

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