Early Sixties: the Surge of American Pop,” 1988

Home , Barbara Rose, Henry Geldzahler, Idelle Weber, Jean Follett, Marjorie Strider

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Early Sixties: The Surge of American Pop,” 1988

PART 1

MIMI POSER Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Mimi Poser, and I’m very pleased to welcome you here to the Guggenheim this evening. (laughter) Settle in, Henry. This evening’s program has been organized in conjunction with the two exhibitions on view upstairs: Andy Warhol, Cars, and Return to the Object: American and European Art from the 1950s and 1960s. I hope that you’ve all had the opportunity to see them both.

Can we get the mics up a little bit? Is that okay? Is it loud enough?

AUDIENCE (overlapping dialogue; inaudible)

MIMI POSER Okay — too loud? (laughs)

MALE 1 (inaudible)

MIMI POSER Okay. One of the purposes of this evening’s program, The Early Sixties: the Surge of American Pop, is to recall the period: Who was involved; what were the concerns; [00:01:00] what was happening, so to speak; and what did they want to happen? And this evening we have with us what I can only characterize as an august assembly of witnesses, our distinguished panel: Henry Geldzahler, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rosenblum, and George Segal. It’s a roster of very great people.

We are also fortunate to have as moderator for the proceedings, Barbara Rose, the well-known art historian, critic, curator, and author of the recently published Autocritique: Essays on Art and Anti-Art, 1968 to 1987. Miss Rose has also recently added another enterprise to her activities: she’s the editor and chief of the Journal of Art, an international arts magazine, the first issue of which will appear in December. And along with my best wishes for success, Barbara, [00:02:00] I turn the microphone over to you. Please (applause) help me welcome our panel, and Barbara Rose. (applause)

BARBARA ROSE I’m delighted to be here. Actually, I wanted to see all my old friends and they’re all in the panel. So, I am going to just make some brief remarks, about the fact that what we thought we wanted to recreate in some way the ambiance of the early ’60s, which was very special, and very different from the way things are today.

So, when I discussed with Mimi how we might give you an indication of, oh, what people looked like, felt like, et cetera, we decided that we’d show you some sections of a film called American

Art in the ’60s, that recapture, in one way or another, the spirit of the [00:03:00] time. So, let’s see the section of the film.

(video starts) [00:03:06]

FEMALE 1 For American artists, the 1960s was an explosive decade, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg triggered the explosion. Their painterly style came from action painting of the ’50s, but their common subjects were derived from the popular culture of the day. (sound effects start; bells and percussion) Bold, colorful images reflected the optimism of the Kennedy era, while mass media channeled these images back to a public programmed for visual sensation. John Cage’s advice to artists: join the world around them. (sound effects end)

MALE 1 This is 1963, in case this thing is ever found.

FEMALE 2 [00:04:00] I think it’s [perfect?]; I think that [it very?] —

MALE 2 In so-called the joyous time of the ’60s famous for happy rock, you know the Beatles are at the height of invention, and optimism was there.

MALE 3 Yeah, we — I can’t remember (inaudible), a party.

MALE 2 Publicity and fashion and bright colors: entertainment.

(music starts) [00:04:24]

MALE 3 (sung) Oh-oh, this [captain?] talking about / is really some sight to see!

(music ends) [00:04:30]

FEMALE 1 Happenings, theater pieces, and technology, broke down boundaries between the arts. (sound effects start; bells and percussion) New forms, new media, new techniques, established the leadership of the American avant-garde, and many artists became intent on defining their art as uniquely American. Although abstract expressionism liberated American art from Europe, it was left to the artists of the ’60s to consolidate their revolution. The success of the New York school now provided younger, native-born artists [00:05:00] with local heroes.

As art was integrated into American life, it became more difficult to shock the public. Serious, profound, frivolous, absurd, and ultimately tragic, the contradictions and paradoxes of the ’60s were reflected in American art of that revolutionary decade. (sound effects end)

MALE 4 I mean, artists aren’t good people or bad people, but the ability for the work to be able to represent itself, instead of something else, is very critical at this time, because the work begins from one point of view, and is accepted from so many others that the work loses its meaning almost instantly.

MALE 5 I think the most popular [00:06:00] misconception about pop art is that it failed to invent new forms. And not only do I think that the pop artists invented strong new forms, I think what’s yet unknown is the range of the ambition of various, so-called pop artists.

FEMALE 1 A fantastic variety of new images flooded (background music starts) galleries and museums. Artists like James Rosenquist made gigantic paintings resembling giant billboards that were based on advertisements, magazine reproductions, and other commercially generated popular images. Familiar common objects were blown up to room-sized proportions, and fluorescent colors heightened the psychedelic impact. Artists like Jim Dine combined painted backgrounds with real objects. George Segal arranged his plaster sculptures in pictorial groups.

Abstract artists evolved striking new formats: geometric images which gave a greater priority to brilliant, optical effects. [00:07:00] Socially oriented artists like Ed Kienholz created sharp social satire and political criticism in controversial works, while Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg took a more detached attitude to the peculiarities of the American scene. (background music ends)

(video ends) [00:07:20]

BARBARA ROSE Those were the days when you didn’t have to worry about the fact that the picture you were painting was worth $4,700,000 or $3, 800,000 or $17 million dollars, and that liberty, that freedom from money, which is a very big freedom, permitted people to experiment and to think about what they were doing in a very different way, because really, this was a situation in which there were [00:08:00] no financial stakes, and in which the most important things were community, community of the artists and experiment, and the excitement of doing new work, and of sharing that work with your friends. And so, it’s very, very difficult for me, at this point, to even have a sense of what it was like then, although it was something that I lived through myself.

I think one thing that’s important is the difference between the early ’60s and the later ’60s. Before the assassination of President Kennedy, there was an enormous kind of optimism, and we had a young government, and we had young people. We, ourselves, were young and excited about things. And pop art, it was not negative, it was not nihilistic, it was not many of the things that, when it was first seen, people thought that it was.

It was [00:09:00] really, to some extent, a celebration of all these exciting popular images. It was a discovery of popular culture by a generation of people who’d been taught in schools by the

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 3 of 38 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Early Sixties: The Surge of American Pop,” 1988 new critics, and who were tired of this extremely dry and academic approach to things, and wanted to get involved with street people and the street culture. It’s unthinkable that an artist today would want to go out and join the homeless, for example. But this was not the case when, for example, Claes Oldenburg had his store on Second Avenue. It was what was going on in those stores and with all that popular vitality and popular life, was something that seemed much more exciting than the kind of official art that was being seen in the museums.

In order to give you some more of this spirit of the times, we’ve asked [00:10:00] two of the artists, Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg, pioneers of the Happenings, to show you some slides, so that we can take you back in our time capsule to those heady days of the late ’50s, when we were very much outsiders. It was the Silent Generation, it was the end of the Eisenhower era, and artists were part of a subculture of protest against the dominate bourgeois morays, and were involved, as I say, in all kinds of experimental activities, including theater.

The artists’ theater was terribly important. Theater never really pays off because it’s ephemeral, and you do it because you’re involved in it, and as Allan Kaprow said earlier, “The only way you could really get an audience for these things was to invite your friends,” and I said, “Yeah, and as a matter of fact, you got so desperate you had to ask them to be in these Happenings.”

So, Allan Kaprow is going to [00:11:00] show us some slides of his work. He’s now professor at the University of California at San Diego, but in the late ’50s, he was the, I would say, intellectual spokesman for this art of happenings and environments, and it was really his book in 1959, Happenings and Environments, which diffused a lot of this imagery, and permitted people to see these performances which were actually done in very constrained spaces and with very small audiences.

For example, I remember that Claes Oldenburg’s Happenings that were done in the store, the maximum number of people who could attend a performance was 37, which was about the maximum audience that wanted to, actually, at the time. (laughter) So, I now would like to turn over the podium to Allan Kaprow, who is going to show us some slides of his work. [00:12:00] (applause)

ALLAN KAPROW The film that you saw a little earlier had a report that John Cage advised artists, “Get with the world.” I don't remember him saying that, but I’m sure he could have. In any case, it’s a point of view that I certainly had then, and still do, but “getting with the world” was not merely a metaphorical business; it was a physical one too, and that meant being literal about that “getting into the world.”

So, I’d like to show you, just fairly quickly, a number of slides from the period 1957, which includes and begins with this work that I think stretched into ’58, [00:13:00] and then ends about 1968, when the work changed from, as I will say when you see it, from a much more spectatorial and spectacular kind of imagery to one that was almost invisible. But, at this point in 1957, I was experimenting with that part of the world which was the way people, spectators who generally are considered to be passive appreciators, could get involved with the work.

So for example, this, which was intended to be an endless work of generally modular panels of two feet by eight feet, was meant to be put together either horizontally or vertically, or around corners, in any combination of panels that the owner or possessor at the time might want. [00:14:00] So this same work was exhibited here some years later in the Guggenheim Museum, in a kiosk form, with red and white electric lights around the top that blinked.

What you see there are panels on the left; that was plain house paint, white lead, I think. Had I known it was so dangerous, I wouldn’t have used it. The next two panels are tar based, and I regularly swept fall leaves onto the tar, which was fresh, and stood the panels up, and left the ones that weren’t sticking fall off, the idea being that every fall, I would do this, as the painting disintegrated through this rotting of its leaves.

Then there’s a set of panels with mirrors and collage, and then fake fruit on several panels, and another one with mirrors, and another with the tar that I used underneath the leaves at the [00:15:00] end, in that particular combination. So, the “getting with the world” was a way of emphasizing the activated participational role of the usually passive spectator of art.

Okay, let’s go to the next one, please, or can I press this? I guess I can. Okay. That idea of physically getting with it a year or so later led to environmental pieces like this one, which was the backyard of Martha Jackson’s Gallery, uptown around here, and in the 1960 — ’60 or ’61, I can’t remember, where I filled up the entire backyard with used tires, and covered, using tar paper, the unmovable sculpture she had in the garden in its normal phase. That’s why you see these mounds sticking up. I couldn’t move the sculpture, so I simply wrapped them up.

[00:16:00] And, the idea for that was that everybody who came to the gallery in a show of environments, which Claes Oldenburg was also showing at the time, could go out into the backyard, jump around the way I had as a child, throw the tires around — in other words, change the composition which was, and still is, a kind of no-no for most art.

And this is what people tended to do instead. (laughter) It’s amazing; you know, we used to wear suits and ties in those days. (laughter) And I think that these two guys are not so much lacking in agility as they are worried about falling and dirtying their suits.

This is what it looks like from above. I like this photograph because it shows, from an unusual angle, [00:17:00] how closely related the all-over look of this work is to, say, Pollock and other all-over painters of the previous generation. It’s not accidental. (laughter)

And that, in turn, led to much more densely obstructed environmental pieces like this, which was a maze of chicken wire and newspaper and tarpaper, and rags on the floor with up and down lanes that finally led — that’s Jim Dine’s wife there — led through the maze into a kind of sanctum sanctorum inside, where there was a, what I called an apple shrine of several layers or tiers of wire-stretched frames on which there were real and unreal fruits, and with twinkling little Christmas lights, people were advised by the words hung around to “help themselves.”

[00:18:00] That same sense of involvement then led to another environment which consisted of a couple of rooms in which words were provided to be stapled on top of other words that filled the

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 5 of 38 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Early Sixties: The Surge of American Pop,” 1988 walls, and there were four tape machines with recorded poetries and nonsense that could be played singly or together, along with the sounds of the staple guns. And the other, smaller room was a darker one where you could put graffiti all around the place and leave notes, secret or otherwise, for friends.

Just that little area there that you see with streamers in it is the smaller room where people are scribbling all over the walls. And once the walls got filled up with too much muck, we just simply replaced them with another coat of paint, or new words, and the thing kept going until it was virtually destroyed by its participants.

[00:19:00] Then, in a direction that kept getting generally more and more social, I suppose, in keeping with the times, and bigger in scale, I started doing events which would extend over weeks or months, and over many cities, or many parts of cities so that this piece here, which consisted of making identical, huge structures of ice with no openings in them, in I think as many as 15 places in the Los Angeles-Pasadena area, each of which had a whole signed-up team of builders, who then contracted with the ice company to bring loads of ice at certain times, and they elected foremen and forewomen to direct the building of these structures which [weren’t?] completed, were then left to melt and disappear — [00:20:00] all of this very much based on the then-popular analyses of American culture dealing with planned obsolescence.

It also was, as some of my friends know, a kind of in joke, wry comment on minimalism of the day. This was 1967. I figured there’s nothing more minimal than a maximal expenditure and nothing left. (laughter)

So you see the context changing in each one of these while the actual plan stays the same. Very much also a kind of derivative of the implications of Duchamp’s found object ideas, and actions of the earlier century.

This is what it looked like one night, when a Life magazine photographer [00:21:00] came in with lights and lit it all up from inside. You see the mist rising off the cold ice in the warm evening. Then he also asked this very pretty girl to bring an offering of flowers, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the plan. But this sense of social interpretation and individual way of seeing and acting in these works which were now open, away from the art gallery world, was I think a very important part. So while I don’t happen to like — didn’t then — what the photographer had in mind, I would never have dared to say “no.” It seemed to me genuine enough, even if I didn’t care for it.

Let’s see. This is the last sequence. Now this was up on top of a hill above Beverly Hills, and it was, I think, the last structure of the several days of structures. [00:22:00] And the strangeness of this photograph here came about through the many strange events which took place in the course of these public exposures. I’m going very fast so that you — I won’t take too much advantage of the time here, and I’m not telling you all the stories that accompany these events, but this one’s worth summarizing:

We had to fix everything, of course, with insurance policies, and permissions from police, and homeowners, and neighborhoods, and so forth that you don’t just come in with all this tonnage,

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 6 of 38 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Early Sixties: The Surge of American Pop,” 1988 and not have people ask, or get upset, unless you’ve done that. So indeed, everything was taken care of, but a miscommunication, the police department of this precinct, resulted in two very, very nasty, big, black leather cops coming up, [00:23:00] and looking very intimidating, demanding to know what was going on.

All of my helpers, of which there must have been about 40, dived for the bushes down the hill, disappeared, and left me standing there, and my way of dealing with emergencies is to pretend that they’re not emergencies at all. So I strode forth with a big smile on my face. Instead of asking what the problem was to the cop, I asked the cop a question: “Don’t you think it’s great?” (laughter)

And, it was just becoming dark, there was no light inside like this, and one of the cops, of course — I could see just by the flick of his eye — really thought it was, but he acted, (laughter) he acted his part very seriously and demanded to know, and I pulled rank and I said, “Well just call up her, Captain so and so, and you’ll find out that this has all been cleared.”

So indeed, he radioed [00:24:00] down and was told, “Oh yeah, we forgot to tell you.” And, at that, one cop then simply drove off and the one who looked like he was really impressed with it, took off his hat, took off his dark glasses, took off his leather coat because it was warm, and he looked very human, and he said, “Boy, that’s terrific.” And I then got to talking and he said, “You know, I’m an art major at UCLA.” (laughter)

This was the last grandiose piece that I did. There was a big beer party after that. The truckers who had been pretty hostile up to that point decided they liked us, and treated us to a whole night of dancing on top of the hill, with beer.

But a year or so after that, late 1967 or early ’68, I did a piece in the outskirts of St. Louis, which [00:25:00] consisted again of work team routines, that is, how workers get things done. And this one was based on the model of a road, how a road gets made, and I found a road that was just being built out there for a new tract on the outskirts of St. Louis, and decided to sort of mimic the basically three-phase building of real roads. That is to say, they bulldoze and scrape, and then they put a layer of fine pumice or sand on that, then rock or cement, and then if it’s going to be faced, the facing goes on top of those, and usually if it’s cement, they’ll put rags over it, soaked rags to keep it from curing too fast.

So we imitated, over a period of three days with three different phases, the whole process of making a real road on the side of a road that was being made, by using [00:26:00] tarpaper, and putting on top of the layers of tarpaper these blocks in periodic distances, much like the road was being made to its side. And it was exactly a mile long, and we had kids from the neighborhood as well as college and art students who signed up for the work team to do this over several days. It was real cold then, I remember. And then in reverse form, just as they do on the real road, the covers are taken off and disposed of, and so we undid the road by simply removing one after the other in a period of days, the layers that we had just put down.

That’s the new road on the side there which was incomplete. [00:27:00] Around the bend there, you could see just how they were doing it. And here was the last day in which the road was

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 7 of 38 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Early Sixties: The Surge of American Pop,” 1988 being taken away. That is, just like the structures of ice, a great deal of work was done, that ended up with nothing. Thank you. (applause)

BARBARA ROSE It was very difficult to persuade Claes Oldenburg to bring some slides, but he was kind enough to do so, and Claes actually was the person who helped realize my parents’ dream for me, which was, he made a performer out of me, at least once, in one of his Happenings. Henry was a permanent star of the company, Henry Geldzahler, but I did have one cameo role in which Claes, while he [00:28:00] choreographed the Happenings also had the right to determine the costumes, and his idea of a costume for me was to put a cork in my mouth. (laughter) I have a picture of it. (laughs)

Anyway, so again, I ask you to participate in the excitement of what these things were at the time that they were done and the spirit in which they were done.

CLAES OLDENBURG This is a period — now we’re talking about the early ’60s — it’s a very, very complicated, very rich period. It tends to get simplified into the sort of things you saw in the film, where you have Jasper and Bob and then, you have a lot of people dancing, (laughter) and it’s much more complicated than that and it’s interesting that even now, now which is a long time since, there’s been very little research done on the early ’60s and there’s almost no reliable material anywhere. [00:29:00] So, it’s fairly difficult to put it together.

I was asked to bring some slides, and of course, I didn’t want to bring a lot of slides, because the fact is there’s a lot of material that hasn’t been collected and all and I’m just going to show very, very few slides. I should say, these were taken by a photographer named Robert McElroy, who along with Fred McDarrah documented this whole period, and I have lots and lots of slides of Bob McElroy’s covering almost every performance I did and others’ performances as well, and there is a lot of material. What we’ll see here today is just a few of those slides, and I selected performance slides, particularly one performance you’ll see which took place in the Green Gallery in 1962. So, we could have these slides now.

(laughter) This is the famous personage from that period, Henry Geldzahler, in one of his [00:30:00] earliest appearances. (laughter) This could also be seen in a moving version; there’s a film of this particular performance. This took place at the Reuben Gallery, which was a small gallery just off First Avenue down near Houston Street.

I’m going to just push on to another scene from that particular performance. I guess what I could very quickly call attention to here is that there was at least two schools of thought about form at the time: one is quickly represented by Allan’s, which from my point of view, was no form; and my point of view which was to try to give some kind of form to the materials that were coming our way through this identification of art and life, so that I tended to transform things and try to relate them to the tradition of art as I understood it, and this was a line of thinking which was not a very respectable line at the time.

And so I [00:31:00] frequently disguised this by saying that “I wasn’t doing anything; the material was all there, and I just moved it around.” But in fact, I moved it into particular places and did all kinds of things with it which made it look a certain way.

This is a performance again in the Reuben Gallery, and it’s kind of interesting to identify some of the people here. I won’t go into them all, but you can see Mary Frank sitting in the first row, in the center; and that’s Patty Muschinski climbing the ladder. And this is yours truly in the store, which was a very, very small place and rather crowded, as you can see. It was difficult to walk around without knocking things over. I’m presenting there a cake which is, according to me, a piece of form.

[00:32:00] And this was the Green Gallery in 1962, after Patty and I had spent the summer there making a show. Richard Bellamy had given us this space because the spaces that I had downtown were not big enough. And so the place was used as a studio, and then at the end of the summer, the results were presented as an exhibition. And this was the exhibition, and you can see a number of pieces there which have gone to other spaces.

And, at the end of that summer, someone approached me from a camera crew that were filming bizarre events in New York. It was an offshoot of the Mondo-Kana craze, and they thought that Happenings were very bizarre, and they wanted to commission a Happening and film it. So, they gave me $50, and I said, “I’ll get an audience, and we’ll do it at the Green Gallery and we’ll use the props. As props, we’ll use [00:33:00] the pieces from the exhibition, and I’ll add a few pieces.” What you’ll see in the front here is foam-rubber salads and desserts, which were added to the exhibition.

So this is a mixture of performance pieces and the sculptures. The performance began with everybody getting a latest copy of the paper, and you see people look differently there. On the left is Donald Judd, Yayoi Kusama; in the center is Andy Warhol in a business suit. (laughter) It’s exactly that: you had to go out and get the audience, so we just called a number of people and many of them were kind enough to come — not too many, however. (laughter)

That’s Lucas Samaras being dragged in as the performance began.

This is Patty as she does a boxing match with Lucas, while he’s carrying a tray.

[00:34:00] Eventually, everything decomposes, which was what happened in Happenings: things started whole, and they ended by being all in parts and all over the place.

The performance was called Sports, because it involved boxing, and obviously baseball, and Lucas has there a long, soft bat, which was wonderful to see in action. (laughter)

I think that’s Billy Klüver on the left with a paper, [and Signdee?]. Eventually, this bicycle which was covered with plastic bags made of, well, silver, covered with silver and filled with foam rubber, was torn apart.

[00:35:00] This has always been my favorite part of the pieces when they end up in a total, total mess like this. (laughter) The audience is very moved. (laughter) I don’t know what ever happened to this footage, by the way. They actually were filming all of this, and someone told me they had seen it in Greece. (laughter) But, it never showed in the United States.

I think that’s Jackie Ferrara at the back, and other people. John Chamberlain was there. That’s Sam Wagstaff.

Okay, that’s it. Very brief. As I say, there’s a lot of material that needs to be dug into, and a lot of questions that need to be answered, and that, I guess, is why we’re here. So, thank you. [00:36:00] (applause)

BARBARA ROSE I think we’re now going to have a furniture-moving interlude, accompanied by a tape that was made in 1963. Also, I should say that now, I mean, one of the things that perhaps the truth can be told about, some of this research that Claes was referring to was indeed during the Happening that Claes did called Washes.

There was a plot on Henry Geldzahler’s life, on the part of David Whitney and myself, who were yeah, supposed to tow Henry, who was lying in an inflatable raft in a swimming pool in, I believe it was the Ansonia Hotel, and he had his face covered by a newspaper and was smoking, we think, a cigar. But at any rate, David and I had planned to perhaps puncture [00:37:00] the raft, during one of the performances, to see if Henry would sink. But, we didn’t, and so Henry really still is with us, but this is one of the footnotes that perhaps needs to be integrated into the literature. Could we have the tape?

(tape starts) [00:37:14]

MALE — recordings of interviews and conversations with the artists participating in the Popular Image exhibition, at the Washington Gallery on Modern Art were made during March, 1963. On this side of the record, we will hear, in the order of their appearance: Jim Dine, George Brecht, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, John Wesley, and Robert Watts.

(record starts) [00:37:46]

JIM DINE Like I say, it’s obviously that I’m interested in objects, if you want to use that word again. Obviously I am interested in them, but I’m interested in them like I’m interested in a big piece of paint as an object, too. You see, so [00:38:00] I’m not saying that when I made the typings, or when I made tool paintings, or when I make a room painting, that the objects don’t mean something like what they are.

Like that medicine chest certainly has the connotations of the medicine chest; I can’t take away the literalness of that. But I do think that it’s more important — it becomes, as I get involved with a picture, more important as a rectangle than as a medicine chest. Do you see what I mean?

So that eventually, it’s nice to start with some outward idea and turn in, rather than starting with some inward idea and turn out, because that, for me it never works, that inward idea. It’s always, it’s got to be an outward idea that allows me — it’s the same reason that I draw, do all my drawings after I’ve done the painting. It’s like starting, fermenting with an outside idea and then making the big statement in the painting.

And then really, the final combination of the inward statement is the drawings; it’s an intimate act, and that’s what really interests me. [00:39:00] The object or the idea becomes the catalyst, the real idea: the bathroom, the connotations of toilet paper — toilet paper. But once I’ve decided to use it, toilet paper is n—

(break in audio) (record stops) [00:39:15]

AUDIENCE (laughter)

(record starts) [00:39:21]

JIM DINE — altogether, you know. Finally, they are just there, and that’s what they are. You know, four [rooms?], this saw has nine blades. These are pearls. That is a black shovel, with a long handle, that kind of stuff. It’s nothing —

(break in audio)

MALE 6 — that it has to —

JIM DINE Like people in the ’30s, there are certain intellectuals in the ’30s say, in America, confused liberalism with Communism. You know what I mean? They confused it, but those are the affectations that went with that age, somehow. They were like aesthetic a— [00:40:00] (break in audio) You can’t get away from it. It’s unbelievable, everywhere you turn.

So the way it ends up is, my studio looks like my paintings. You know what I mean? And then you sort of, you can’t get away from it so much. This is why I keep them on canvases. It’s the last vestige of unrealism, unreality, the canvas. It’s so unrealistic to put that washstand on that canvas; I have to do it.

(break in audio) [00:40:34]

MALE 7 And, this is sort of the equivalence of... There’s a sort of the equivalence that I see in what happens, that it’s like, (inaudible) is this [to?] sort of a series of events, one after another, and one time, you’re [00:41:00] maybe brushing your teeth; another time, you’re washing a shirt; and another time you’re making an arrangement of objects, an arrangement of [events?], and one doesn’t seem more important or special than another. Events that happen in a theater are no

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 11 of 38 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Early Sixties: The Surge of American Pop,” 1988 more important or significant that the ones that happen anywhere else: on the street, or [in?] my home, or (inaudible).

MALE 8 But by taking this, and sort of making a mural, and you do make a choice and you do (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

MALE 7 No I don’t feel (inaudible). Well, in terms of taking some action, I don’t feel that I own the action, or if I make an object, I don’t feel I own it [00:42:00] in some special way.

(record stops) [00:42:03]

BARBARA ROSE I don’t see microphones. Where can we —

MALE 8 I’m going to put the microphone (overlapping dialogue; inaudible).

BARBARA ROSE Oh, okay. Could you (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

MALE 9 (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) to find the equipment, say that’s —

(tape starts playing underneath throughout, [00:42:18 - 00:44:45])

MALE 10 (on tape) Anyone (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

MALE 9 — this one.

MALE 10 (on tape) (inaudible). The first part of [performance?] (inaudible) —

MALE 9 Seems to me that the work I do now...

MALE 10 (on tape) — village in [1450?]. (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

MALE 9 ...is now concerned with — I don’t know what it’s more concerned with it. It is less concerned with accuracy it’s taken; since there didn’t seem to be any such thing anyway...

MALE 10 (on tape) — first few (inaudible)

MALE 9 ...it’s never achieved.

MALE 10 (on tape) — trajectory of the projectile can be considered [and?] compensated for (inaudible) velocity, wind blowing across —

MALE 9 More recently [too mine?] seems to be [00:43:00] involved with the nature of...

MALE 10 (on tape) — each (inaudible), even gravitational forces [indicates?] [the shell fired?] (inaudible) long period. The study of science (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

MALE 9 ...various technical devices...

MALE 10 (on tape) The control of the [blaster?] [causes?] the projectile to [lose its extremely?] (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

MALE 9 ...not questioning them in terms of their relation to...

MALE 10 (on tape) — justify (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

MALE 9 ...the concept of accuracy. It seems to me that the effect of the more recent work is...

MALE 10 (on tape) — infinitesimal (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

MALE 9 ...that it is more related to...

MALE 10 (on tape) — (inaudible) it’s so short, [it?] becomes almost [flat?] (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) ==

MALE 9 ...feeling, or emotion...

MALE 10 (on tape) — whether we’re using a giant (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

MALE 9 ...or...

MALE 10 (on tape) [In the meanwhile?] [if?] you adjust the explosion (inaudible), or pull it to the right or left, [I believe these?] must be highly trained in (inaudible). There’s also the procedure of firing the [rounds?]. [00:44:00] [It’s possible?] [to be accurate?] (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

BARBARA ROSE This is by John Cage (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

MALE 9 ...let’s say, emotion, or...

MALE 10 (on tape) [Arturo?] was especially adaptable to (inaudible) (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

MALE 9 ...emotional or erotic content, in that there is no superimposition of another point of view, immediately, in terms of a stroke, of a brush. So one responds directly to the physical situation rather than to a complex physical situation, which immediately has to be resolved intellectually, so it seems.

(tape stops) [00:44:45]

HENRY GELDZAHLER [Really fine?].

BARBARA ROSE Again, just to give you a touch of the spirit of the times: Allan Kaprow, you recognize. Next to Allan is Robert Rosenblum, [00:45:00] professor of fine arts at New York University, and the author of the most recent — author of many, many books, but his most recent book, The History of the Dog in Art, has just been published, and is a great Christmas present, for all your dear ones. Next to Bob is Claes, whom you’ve just met. To my right, George Segal, distinguished sculptor, and next to George is star of stage screen and Happenings, Henry Geldzahler.

Henry is wearing probably the two most valuable objects in this room: a vintage Andy Warhol button, and a classic button of the ’60s which says, “Walter Hopps will be here in 20 minutes.” (laughter) Henry, at auction, could probably realize enough to take a trip to Tanganyika on the proceeds. Henry has also brought with him a mystery guest, who perhaps at the end of this [00:46:00] program we could introduce, who was a very vital star of pop art, who is tall, blonde, and handsome, and I won’t tell you anything else about him.

Now, I’d just like to really throw out some topics in hope that we will be able to have a certain amount of dialogue about them. (sound of microphone being adjusted) (laughs)

HENRY GELDZAHLER Long rod?

BARBARA ROSE

Yeah.

HENRY GELDZAHLER Little story I’d like to tell, if I may.

BARBARA ROSE Henry would like to tell a story, yes.

HENRY GELDZAHLER Little story: In 1962, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a panel on pop art, and I came down from Metropolitan Museum to defend pop art against Peter Selz, who was the Museum of Modern Art’s curator, and was the head of the panel. Other on the panel were Dore Ashton, Hilton Kramer, Leo Steinberg, Stanley Kunitz, and me.

It was fairly lively. At the end, [00:47:00] for me, it was a great coming of age, because Marcel Duchamp and John Cage were in the audience. After that, we knew each other. It was a wonderful introduction. George comes up to me afterwards, George Segal, and says, “You look very interesting there. Could I do a sculpture of you?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “You look just like a chicken farmer in New Jersey.” So, (laughter) was very proud of that, after Yale and all.

A year and a half ago, Judy Goldman did a wonderful retrospective show of Jim Rosenquist’s work which opened at the Denver Museum, and somebody had the idea of reconstituting the panel. Now Leo Steinberg was clever enough to refuse, but again, you got Peter Selz, Stanley Kunitz, Dore, Hilton, and me. I don’t know if you can believe it or not, but I swear to you, they spent the entire time congratulating themselves on having been right. (laughter) But it didn’t [end this?] and it was ridiculous and then we e—

PART 2

ROBERT ROSENBLUM — and it really was like the Red Sea dividing. He came up to me behind, and he looked at me because I was supposed to be a respectable, academic art historian. He said, “You’re not for it, are you?” (laughter) And I said, “Well, we’re not talking about for or against probably; we’re just going to discuss it.” But the whole world was divided in two, and life seemed so much simpler then, because you were either with the young or the new or you were against it, with the exception of Hilton Kramer, who hated everything, (laughter) and who (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

BARBARA ROSE Well, pousse à change.

ROBERT ROSENBLUM It was a (laughter) civil war situation, and this is something that we’re all fond of because there doesn’t seem to be as much civil war today so we can be nostalgic about it.

BARBARA ROSE Well, I think one of the interesting things is that Allan said he had done this piece in response to minimal art. Because there was a community of artists, you responded to the other people within that community, and you could be for or against something. One of the problems — I perceive it as a [00:01:00] problem — is the miasma quality of current events in the United States and in the art world where nobody is for or against anything. One of the manifestations of this is that this is the first presidential campaign in which artists had absolutely no point of view. It’s not in my memory, can I remember, a political campaign in which the artist had no statement —

CLAES OLDENBURG Mm, (overlapping dialogue; inaudible).

BARBARA ROSE — and I think that that’s very telling. I have my own sort of little agenda of things that I think are interesting, but they may not be interesting to the other people on this panel.

I was taken by the fact that both Claes and Allan spoke about play, or showed images that were clearly images of people involved in activities that were close to childhood activities of play, and there was a sense of, I think, trying to [00:02:00] recreate the kind of freedom that one had as a child, and after all, one has to remember, this is a context within which philosophies of liberation on the part of writers like Marshall McLuhan, and Norman O. Brown, and Herbert Marcuse, and various others, were the reading matter that we were exposed to, as well as, of course, the philosophy of John Cage, who said that “art and life should be one.”

Claes, of course, argued that “the only pop artist” — I hate that word, anyway: “pop artist.” It doesn’t make any sense. First of all, the artists who are lumped together as pop artists, all worked in very different styles coming from different sources, and the only thing they had in common was the use of recognizable imagery. George’s imagery isn’t even popular imagery. It’s people, or things; you recognize them. [00:03:00] But it doesn’t come through, for example, the filter of reproduction in the way that Lichtenstein’s imagery does, or Rosenquist’s. And so, it’s kind of, one of the things that one doesn’t want to do is flatten it all out and talk about it as if it’s one thing, and since we do have individual artists here who had very strong individual styles, it would —

HENRY GELDZAHLER Is —

BARBARA ROSE — it would be untrue.

HENRY GELDZAHLER There’s also a reason that isn’t often mentioned for the happenings and environments that were very necessary, because after the ’50s, after the hegemony of ethnic expressionism, one had to find a legitimate way to bring the human being back into the equation, and theater seemed to be one of the ways of doing it. By 1959 and ’60, the new figuration, which Peter Selz was crying for, never happened the way he wanted it to, but there was a beginning of it, of — you disagree?

BARBARA ROSE No, it’s just that Peter was German, and it finally happened in zeitgeist, I mean it was a little later, but what he was looking for, actually, he got, a little later in Germany.

[00:04:00] But to return to these early and fermenting years of something that isn’t really — it is historical, and yet I think Claes’s point is very legitimate, very well taken, that it hasn’t been documented, it hasn’t really been explored critically, and I think one of the reasons is because it dealt with a lot of ephemeral material, with performances, with theater. And younger people who are trying to do dissertations on the early years of pop art are obviously going to come up against the fact that, unless you see the movies that were made, for example, of Claes’s performances, or you see the photographs that were done, you’re really left with something which was like trying to write the history of Dada, and Dada, was, I think, a big influence.

Maybe we could talk about that. To what extent did Dada enter your consciousness, or was it important? Allan?

ALLAN KAPROW [00:05:00] See, around 1952, Bob Motherwell’s book came out, was (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

BARBARA ROSE Fifty-one.

ALLAN KAPROW Fifty-one.

BARBARA ROSE The Dada Painters and Poets.

ALLAN KAPROW Yeah. And that was an eye-opener or mind-opener, as far as I was concerned, because I had been an art history student, and that part of history was written off by my professors. It was a bad word you saw in passing, and — I hear a lot of feedback in here. I think that’s a little high.

But, when that book came out, there were original texts, some photographs which were extraordinarily liberating as far as I was concerned and above all, the sense of play which you mentioned, was evident in a good bit of the irreverence that characterized Dada. The texts in there also indicated the serious philosophical implications of some of that work, especially with regard to the notion of where society [00:06:00] was going at that time, the notion among some of the artists that Europe was finished, European civilization was finished, given World War I.

BARBARA ROSE And that one ranks with the fact that pop art never existed as one of the great truths of our time. But anyway. I think Bob Rosenblum is looking for livelier panels, and maybe in the search of trying not to be so academic, I’ll shotgun some questions. For example, Claes, why did you start doing performances?

CLAES OLDENBURG Well, I think that I would have sort of a theatrical interest, and it was stimulated by contact with others who were doing theater, particularly with someone like Red Grooms who also is a very [00:07:00] theatrical figure, and that would be true of Jim Dine, too. I think that if you — well, performances have a range. At one end, it’s Allan’s type of performance, which is, I don’t know how you would characterize it, Allan, but it’s perhaps more objective. At the other range is a very subjective, expressionist type of performance which is the sort of thing that Red Grooms might have done at the time. And in between there are all kinds of shades and combinations that you could make.

I was interested in theater because I think theater is fun, and I had committed myself to being an artist but I missed something, and I saw people doing theater and I said, “Great, I can do theater, especially if I don’t have to say anything,” because my weakness as far as theater is concerned, which is also true as far as writing is concerned, is that I tend to work in images, and here was a theater entirely consisting of images, and if there were [00:08:00] sounds, they were just grunts, or natural sounds, and for me, it was a perfect way to realize the sort of secondary ambition I had, theatrical ambition.

So I just jumped into it, and not thinking too much about theory, but it was an opportunity that existed at the time. Allan had worked out the theory and, if you consulted Allan, you found out why you were doing what you were doing. (laughter)

BARBARA ROSE Yeah, but Allan’s the only one who’s a professor, you see, so that, I mean, early on, a kind — also actually, I met Allan briefly for the first time in Meyer Schapiro’s classes as I recall, and so, having gone on to graduate school perhaps gives you a more analytic turn of mind, I don’t know. I made an assumption earlier which I’d like to ask you whether you agree with or not, in which I said I didn’t think that pop art was particularly critical, and that it was really more a celebration than it was a criticism. [00:09:00] Really, on second thought, I’m not so sure I agree with that.

GEORGE SEGAL I think that this pop art aim is justice. We’ve been hinting and making referrals to certain names like Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. Henry put his finger precisely dead center when he spoke about the hostility of the abstract expressionists toward pop art. I can only speak personally. Let me back up to a couple of years before I met Kaprow, and my meeting with Kaprow I think was mutually —

BARBARA ROSE You could call them out. It’s okay. (laughter)

GEORGE SEGAL — mutually beneficial. You were right, Barbara, about the fact that there was no money in art. My father was against my studying art. He was —

BARBARA ROSE Whose wasn’t?

GEORGE SEGAL He said I was a —

BARBARA ROSE I mean everybody —

GEORGE SEGAL — a disreputable.

BARBARA ROSE — got disinherited, even [and me?], even me.

GEORGE SEGAL Right. Okay, so, [00:10:00] I was at Pratt Institute taking art education, and dissatisfied with the surfaceness of the teaching. I happened to see a student derivative abstract expressionist show at NYU, instantly shot over to there to take courses.

CLAES OLDENBURG Nineteen fifty-five?

GEORGE SEGAL No, it was earlier than that, ’49 or ’50. Baziotes and —feedback? No. Baziotes and Tony Smith were directly my teachers. Baziotes said, “Jump on the bandwagon of the history of art with us, and get five-inch house painters’ brushes, huge canvases.” “What do I paint?” I said, and he says, “I don’t know.” (laughter) And I was in trouble, I was in trouble. (laughter) And, I used to eat my lunch in Baziotes’ classroom, and paint the apples. I was derivative [00:11:00] Cézanne- ish. (laughter)

And then, Tony Smith was remarkable. He was a remarkably civilized fellow. He urged us to read James Joyce: Ulysses, and if you could, Finnegans Wake. And then he’d come in with reproductions of Cubist paintings, and he would push us, and say, “What’s the connection?” So, I’m reading Joyce and everything I read was couched in physical description, except that it telescoped, like, [somebody?] reached up to scratch his head, he saw his frayed cuff, and he described what was out in the water, and he’s remembering his mother at the same time. But everything was rooted in the physical world.

That was incredibly important to me, because I was baffled; I was [00:12:00] full of mixed feelings. I loved the look of the paint, of abstract expressionist painting. I loved the way these men looked in their monastic cells. There was a holiness, a compulsiveness, a dedication. They were about philosophy; they were about religious transcendent feelings. They were anti- materialist. Everything was marvelous, except I had a hard job obeying their rules and regulations, and I figured out that, what was missing for me, was the physical tangibility.

And there was Tony Smith saying, “Oh, you know those silly Hollywood movies that are musicals? Go see those new, realistic, postwar” — it was right after the World War II — “go see those Italian movies.” And, people were dirty, people were talking slang, and there were these

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 19 of 38 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Early Sixties: The Surge of American Pop,” 1988 bombed-out cities, and there was tangible reality, and [00:13:00] I couldn’t accept that disembodied floating. I couldn’t accept the fact that abstract painting was increasingly wiping out all reference to the real world. And, I looked at Picasso, and the abstract expressionist painters who were heroes, with bloody fingernails, trying to scratch a place in the history of art, were rejecting any reference to the real world. Now, I’m trying to get to the heart of the matter.

BARBARA ROSE Mm-hmm. When you’re talking about the rebellion —

GEORGE SEGAL I’m talking about rebellion and love at the same time, because I still haven’t gotten over my love of the look of an abstract expressionist painting.

BARBARA ROSE Well, now, that’s interesting too, because while there is an element of rebellion in the artists of the ’60s, in general, who came of age in the ’60s, there is at the same time a great veneration for tradition. It’s not as if, all of a sudden, burn [00:14:00] museums or, “I’m the first artist who ever existed,” or something like that. I would kind of like, if you would all comment on your feelings about whether there was an element of protest in pop art. Henry?

MALE (overlapping dialogue; inaudible)

HENRY GELDZAHLER It was a specific moment when: 1962. You know the day too because the newspaper has the date on it. I was meeting Andy Warhol for lunch at Serendipity on a Saturday afternoon, and two planes had collided over Brooklyn, and there was a big headline, “129 Die in Jet,” was the New York Daily Mirror. And I brought it along to lunch, and I said, “You know Andy, everybody’s saying that we’re celebrating capitalism. It’s just not true; it’s time for a different kind of subject matter.” “What do you mean?” he said. Out of the paper, he went home and painted that picture, and then the disasters came along after that. That was a specific instance where the whole idea was the celebration and criticism was [a no do?].

CLAES OLDENBURG But wasn’t the point of Andy’s approach that didn’t make any difference what you paint? [00:15:00] At that time, I [always?] (inaudible) put it that way, that it didn’t make a difference whether you paint an electric chair, or (inaudible), whatever. Later on, it began to seem that there was a different intention [involved?].

BARBARA ROSE Actually, it’s interesting. If you look at Warhol’s iconography, consciously or unconsciously, it’s all about death. It’s death from the beginning to the end. And I think that in being a mirror of his time — we look at the ’60s as this kind of terrific, pop-dancing period — at the same time, underneath of it all, it’s quite sinister, and what Warhol chose to see really, when you look at the whole panoply of imagery, the majority of it is involved with death, destruction, race riots, automobile accidents, many people who either committed suicide or OD’d or [00:16:00] it had

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 20 of 38 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Early Sixties: The Surge of American Pop,” 1988 tragic endings, including of course the insanity of the way in which Andy himself died, which was by accident.

ROBERT ROSENBLUM And it also should be said, it’s not only Andy Warhol who was absolutely obsessed with death but the F-111, which must be one of the major horror paintings of the world, according to me, at least, it goes [after?] —

BARBARA ROSE That was —

ROBERT ROSENBLUM — [your amica?], is one of the great statements of the condition of the United States in the ’60s and the sort of grim collapse after ’30s optimism. But looking back at it, it wasn’t all fun and games. Look at your work. I can’t think of anything more depressing for the ’60s than all those lonely Edward Hopper people. But it’s all revived with a new kind of tongue-in-cheek irony, which is much more related to the way we feel now, and it makes the abstract expressionists look as though they are the silliest, naïve, most naïve (laughs) philosophers in the ivory towers.

I was very moved, George, with [00:17:00] what you said because that’s exactly the way it felt, as though all these people had taken vows in the late ’40s and ’50s, and there was such a sense of the distinction between high art and low art, and high, high culture which could in no way be polluted by soup cans, flags, et cetera, and it was really a kind of collision of values and people felt so threatened by it.

But of course, now in retrospect, both the ’50s and the ’60s look like fifth-century-BC Athens. It’s a crazy kind of irony that we have the same nostalgic fantasies about the pieties and the purities of the ’60s or the ’50s that we do.

GEORGE SEGAL Dead center. Isn’t it strange that pop art has the great reputation for being this deliciously witty, ironic, lighthearted, [00:18:00] distant commentary on American culture, ha-ha? And it just plays lightly with low art, with the movies, with kitsch, with popular taste. Now all of a sudden, we’re discussing a strange subterranean river. You characterize that river as obsessive concern with death. Kaprow wrote an article about the implied legacy of Jackson Pollock —

BARBARA ROSE Oh, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” yeah.

GEORGE SEGAL — okay, all right, and where he refers to the 18-, 20-foot length of those paintings as real and implied environment, giving the justification for going into environmental art, going into the real world.

We’ve evoked John [00:19:00] Cage’s name before. John Cage had a piece performed called Three Minutes of Silence, in which the full audience sat, waited; a pianist came out, and bustled, prepared, and sat down; and for three minutes, there was perfect silence on his part, and the only

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 21 of 38 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Early Sixties: The Surge of American Pop,” 1988 sounds made were the real sounds made by the rustling and the whispering of the audience, passing traffic outside, and it was an introduction of real reality, and I think Cage’s influence on this part was about the poetry of reality.

Nobody’s mentioned that. And nobody’s mentioned the fact that John Cage appears as a Zen Buddhist priest, who suspends himself half a mile in the sky and looks down [00:20:00] at the hum of the world, and there’s all that reality, and the distinction between high art and low art disappearing into the hum of everybody’s existence. Now, you have to mesh that with people picking up garbage from the streets, making art that was ephemeral. You’re using street debris.

BARBARA ROSE Also junk was real cheap.

GEORGE SEGAL Junk was real cheap, and the artists were flat broke, so besides [rationally?] doing that, there was —

BARBARA ROSE Everybody —

GEORGE SEGAL — Jean Follett —

BARBARA ROSE — was picking up their (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

GEORGE SEGAL — [Stankevich?], David [Slate?] (overlapping dialogue; inaudible), David Smith —

BARBARA ROSE Dan Flavin’s crushed can phase is actually my favorite period of his art. Junk was it. That was what you had to work with.

GEORGE SEGAL But it had to do with the poetry of the reality of the world.

BARBARA ROSE Well, I think you’ve hit on something important, which is the poetic element in, quote, “pop art.”

HENRY GELDZAHLER I would like to make a quick point [00:21:00] about junk. In 1959 or ’60, there was a small show at the Museum of Modern Art of Polish collage, pieces from the ’50s, and in a Polish collage, there’s not in the least bit funny — by the time something was used up enough to use again in a collage, they were almost rubbed-raw pieces of paper or something. The same time, in America, junk was a new car put together with something else by Claes Oldenburg, by John Chamberlain. The quality of the junk has an incredible amount to do with it. (laughter)

BARBARA ROSE

That’s true.

HENRY GELDZAHLER We had good junk.

BARBARA ROSE No, and it actually, it’s just, no, the quality of the junk was better. (laughter) You spoke about Jackson Pollock, George, and I think that [we’ll?] also try to think of these pivotal years of the late ’50s, early ’60s, Pollock dies in the car crash, again, the tragic accident death, [00:22:00] in 1956. And all of this ferment in the years afterward I think is very much a reaction to the immensity of Pollock’s achievement, and also an attempt to respond.

We saw Allan’s photographs, and he, himself, points out that, well, it really looks like a photograph of a Pollock, and Hans Namuth’s photographs of Jackson Pollock were widely published in the late ’50s, well known to everybody in the art world. Claes’s early reliefs from the store, were as if they were ripped from a context, with drips all over them, but as if in the way the cutout figures function in certain of Pollock’s paintings. George once said, “One day, the figures in my paintings just seemed to roll out and stand up on the floor.”

This literalism, or wishing to be more real [00:23:00] than just a painted illusion, begins really with Pollock, and the incorporation of these literal materials and environmental space, and then, what are you going to do with that, and how do you respond to that, and I think a number of the artists involved with quote, “pop art,” were responding to Pollock and trying to make it more accessible, more human, more down to earth, but really involved in a dialogue with Pollock.

CLAES OLDENBURG Well, and I say that I think that Pollock was one of the first celebrity artists, or one of the first artists to be identified as a celebrity, and that made him someone that one could imitate, and make fun of, and play the roles of. I thought it was a lot of fun sometimes to pretend I was Jackson Pollock, and I never would have done that if Jackson Pollock had not ceased being a real person. He was a kind of a fictional figure, which you could imitate, and you could play around with, and he was one of the first bunch you could do that with, and you could create [00:24:00] variations of Pollock, and it’s a sort of an appropriation kind of thing almost. I think people are engaged in appropriating a lot of things from Pollock because he had an aura about him. He had a certain celebrity aura, a little bit like Andy had.

BARBARA ROSE I was about to say, as you talk, it sounds like you’re describing Andy, and there is this exhibition here at the Guggenheim of Warhol’s Cars, which, well, I don't think we have to talk about that too much. But anyway —

CLAES OLDENBURG Well I think the thing is, you could take from Pollock the superficial things that were Pollock and use them in the context of pop art, like I took those things in the bedroom ensemble, I had —

BARBARA ROSE A fake Pollock on the wall.

CLAES OLDENBURG — fake Pollocks, they were actually bought in a store, but by the time I bought them in the store, there were already appropriations about Pollock which had gone through machinery or fabric design, so that I think the legend of Pollock is a very interesting thing. [00:25:00] I think we were all involved with it in that sense, seeing as I mean you couldn’t — none of the other figures in that, except perhaps Franz Kline, achieved that sort of status, that sort of high celebrity status.

BARBARA ROSE Nobody knew about Franz Kline [anyway?].

ROBERT ROSENBLUM Just about, you know, dialogues with [Parker?] wouldn’t be exclusive, and I just want to say it’s to Henry’s eternal credit that in 1969, he did the exhibition which was called, prospectively, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940 to ’70, the following year, but the point is that Part One, as it were, was not only Pollock but Rothko and all the greats in the pantheon. Then came Warhol, et cetera, and it wasn’t as if there was a drop, or a slag, or this was peripheral; it was just one great generation followed by another great generation which had the same kind of vision and achievement. It looked different superficially but also looked the same, because it was in the same context and the same gallery.

But it was a kind of great continuity between Part [00:26:00] One and Part B, and it had drama and it gave momentum to a younger generation. But all of those ’60s pictures looked as though they were giving a kind of back and forth, yes and no to their ancestors, and that’s what always happens in the history of art. It was like the post-impressionists in the ’80s fighting back and forth with the impressionism —

BARBARA ROSE Do you —

ROBERT ROSENBLUM — it had that great continuity.

BARBARA ROSE Do you feel that way, Bob, about the ’80s and the ’90s? I mean (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

ROBERT ROSENBLUM The 1980s, or —

BARBARA ROSE The 1980s. I mean, or the 1970s and ’80s, I’m sorry. Do you feel that —

ROBERT ROSENBLUM Yes, absolutely, one of the things I find so thrilling about the 1980s is that, with the historicism of this moment, it looks back to the ’60s. One of the more fascinating phenomena now is neo- pop, and everything now has a kind of give and take, an ironic give and take, with the abstract

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 24 of 38 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Early Sixties: The Surge of American Pop,” 1988 out of the ’60s, the pop art of the ’60s, and it’s sort of upped the ante, and I find this is just ongoing history.

BARBARA ROSE I don’t know. In my [00:27:00] view it looks like a camp satire on those (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

ROBERT ROSENBLUM Well that’s what people said in the ’60s.

BARBARA ROSE No it isn’t. No it isn’t. (laughter)

ROBERT ROSENBLUM They did.

BARBARA ROSE They said —

ROBERT ROSENBLUM That’s including, I think, some — well, never mind. (laughter) I remember we were very serious in the ’60s, and you thought that anybody who painted soup cans and [comics books?] had to be camp satire and could not be serious as high art.

BARBARA ROSE No, I’m not talking about —

ROBERT ROSENBLUM But, you know —

BARBARA ROSE — subject; I’m not talking about subject matter; I’m talking about form. There was an impulse, and Claes mentioned it, toward form and formal innovation. One of the arguments I had with quote, “formalists,” was that I did see a lot of innovation in pop, particularly terms of sculpture. My first essay in my book, [00:28:00] it talks about the fact that Claes’s invention of soft sculpture is the first major innovation in the history of sculpture in the twentieth century after welding and assembly. It’s a major new way of doing sculpture.

So that my quarrel with what goes on today is that, I don't think there’s any dialogue. I think that appropriation art, purely [so?], which it doesn’t have within it, any critical distance, and which is simply seen through a technological mass culture, and which is not looking for vitality to the roots of a popular humanistic culture, is something very, very, very different, and particularly when there’s no formal invention whatsoever.

ROBERT ROSENBLUM Well I don’t believe —

BARBARA ROSE

As a subject matter, it doesn’t really move me one way or another.

ROBERT ROSENBLUM Yeah. People thought in the ’60s that pop art, at the time in the ’60s, [00:29:00] didn’t have any formal invention, and now, in retrospect, it looks as though it’s completely complementary to the abstract art of the period; they’re just two sides of the same coin. And that would probably be —

BARBARA ROSE Well I wouldn’t give any points to the abstract art of the moment either, so.

ROBERT ROSENBLUM But anyway...

BARBARA ROSE Well that’s a personal —

ALLAN KAPROW [Speak out?]. Barbara, we haven’t really touched upon a major part of the kind of the ideas —

BARBARA ROSE Into your mic.

ALLAN KAPROW My mic?

BARBARA ROSE Yes.

ALLAN KAPROW Well, it’s not working.

BARBARA ROSE Yes it is, (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

ALLAN KAPROW It is? Let’s hold it up. Can you hear?

AUDIENCE (inaudible)

MALE It’s better.

ALLAN KAPROW I said there’s a major part of this puzzle that hasn’t really been addressed enough. We’ve talked about adherence to the European tradition or reaction against it to the abstract expressionists — John Cage has been part of it — but there’s Marcel Duchamp, and in that connection, when you asked about Dada and its role, I found [00:30:00] Duchamp’s intellectual side extremely

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 26 of 38 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Early Sixties: The Surge of American Pop,” 1988 important. That is, it was a real epistemological bum right there, about the nature of how we construe reality through images, and how these achieve a kind of validation through appearance in framing devices called artworks that we know about.

But the minute you shift, as he did, to an object which is not fabricated as an artwork but is then reintroduced into an art context, you raise all the kinds of questions that I thought were right then and there necessary to raise about the nature of art itself, whether it is identified or proven to be a thing of value by the fact that it’s a painting or a sculpture or a concert piece or a theater piece or something like that.

Whereas, the tire, for example, [00:31:00] in a junkyard, is not, until I moved it adjacent to the Martha Jackson Gallery. That is, Duchamp, and especially in the found objects, not the more hermetic works like the big glass, I think posed that question very, very clearly and so Lichtenstein or Warhol could appropriate non-art aspects much more freely as a result of that. That is the non-art objects of tin cans and Brillo boxes and so forth, but also —

BARBARA ROSE I think there’s a huge —

ALLAN KAPROW — non-art techniques.

BARBARA ROSE — huge, huge difference between the approach of Lichtenstein who was a very traditional painter, and —

ALLAN KAPROW Oh, I know that —

BARBARA ROSE But he was right in the tradition of [legend?] Stuart Davis, and this has been going on for a really long time.

ALLAN KAPROW I know, but that —

BARBARA ROSE And —

ALLAN KAPROW — that, what I’m trying to say is that the foundation for that shift was very definitely strongly committed —

BARBARA ROSE Yeah, I don’t think —

ALLAN KAPROW — [00:32:00] already.

BARBARA ROSE — any of us would disagree with you about the pivotal importance of Duchamp and Cage in refocusing on subject matter of reality.

But anyway, Claes made the statement that he thought that “Andy was really the most radical, because he was the one who most closely approximated this potential for art becoming life and life becoming art, and of living his art.” And I think that’s something that is interesting to talk about, particularly since today, it’s quite the opposite in which artists live in terribly fancy places and then they go to their studios of very elaborate someplace else, and then there’re dinner reservations with a limousine and that kind of thing. This whole idea that art and life are one seems to me one of the huge differences between the ’60s and the ’80s.

ROBERT ROSENBLUM But, if you go to [00:33:00] fancy restaurants and have a limousine waiting for you, and go to see your dealer and your collectors, art and life is one too. (laughter)

BARBARA ROSE I used to call that business. (laughter) (applause)

ROBERT ROSENBLUM As Mae West said, “I’ve been rich and I have been poor, and rich is better,” and we all know that. (laughter) And I don’t want any silly pieties about poor artists, living in lofts and (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

HENRY GELDZAHLER Robert just said my favorite word, which is “dinner.” (laughter)

BARBARA ROSE Okay, just one more question. Okay, dinner, but one more question. Why weren’t there any women pop artists? This is a question I never ask. Why weren’t there any women pop artists?

ALLAN KAPROW There were. Marjorie Strider is one of them.

BARBARA ROSE What happened?

CLAES OLDENBURG Idelle Weber.

BARBARA ROSE What happened?

MALE Idelle Weber?

GEORGE SEGAL

Rosalyn Drexler.

MALE Ah.

ALLAN KAPROW Uh-huh, Rosalyn Drexler.

BARBARA ROSE Rosalyn —

ROBERT ROSENBLUM Isn’t Marisol a pop artist? Marisol.

BARBARA ROSE Okay, okay, Marisol’s still alive; I saw her last night. Rosalyn’s painting. (laughter) But —

ROBERT ROSENBLUM [It’s?] taking us tonight.

BARBARA ROSE The question is, [00:34:00] the kind of prominence you think the great, the pantheon of pop artists, there are really no women in that pantheon.

CLAES OLDENBURG Well, can you explain it? (laughter) (inaudible)

BARBARA ROSE Really, I ask the question because it [interests me?].

ROBERT ROSENBLUM But that’s not about pop art; that’s about the change in the role of major women artists from the ’60s on.

HENRY GELDZAHLER And what happened [to them?]? (laughter)

ROBERT ROSENBLUM That’s a whole —

BARBARA ROSE If we don’t give Henry dinner soon, we are going to have a revolt. So I, let’s see —

CLAES OLDENBURG Well let’s not kill it right away.

BARBARA ROSE No, I was having a good time. But, I wonder if perhaps the audience has some questions for these very distinguished panelists?

HENRY GELDZAHLER Nah... (laughter)

BARBARA ROSE So sometimes, you people ask much better questions than I do. Are there any? Yeah.

FEMALE Would it be possible for each of the panelists just to [00:35:00] make a statement that might happen to be a little more in terms of the subject matter? (laughter)

ALLAN KAPROW It’s about time. (laughter) (applause)

BARBARA ROSE Okay.

GEORGE SEGAL She wants us to make a statement.

FEMALE (inaudible)

GEORGE SEGAL And [somehow?] reason or meaning.

MALE Of what?

GEORGE SEGAL Of —

MALE (inaudible)

BARBARA ROSE Who wants to make the first meaningful statement? (laughter)

FEMALE [On to?] the question.

BARBARA ROSE No, it was a request for the panelists to make a statement.

CLAES OLDENBURG To make a meaningful statement. (laughter) Not just a statement.

ALLAN KAPROW Yes, about what?

FEMALE About the (inaudible) topic (inaudible).

HENRY GELDZAHLER What was the topic?

BARBARA ROSE What was your understanding of the — I thought we were talking about it, but what was your understanding of it, and in what way do you feel that it wasn’t addressed?

FEMALE Well I think that several people [may?] (inaudible) [something?], and interesting remarks, but I don’t think that there were really much of a dialogue of talking about what pop art was, where [and the oracle?] [it fits into this?] into the show here, and I simply —

HENRY GELDZAHLER This is like a final exam, the essay question. [00:36:00] (laughter)

BARBARA ROSE Well Henry, you want to answer it?

HENRY GELDZAHLER What’s the name of this panel? Seriously, what was it called?

BARBARA ROSE It was called the Surge of Pop. It was supposed to be about pop art, popular imagery, and —

CLAES OLDENBURG You made a statement attributed to me, and I don’t know if I remember making it, but it was that “Andy was the most radical of the pop arts.” Now, why don’t we comment on that —

BARBARA ROSE Okay let’s do that.

CLAES OLDENBURG — first.

BARBARA ROSE But this brings me back to the fact that actually, Claes, I recall that when I started to write a monograph, early mono about your earlier career, that you refuted every sentence in it and said that you had never said any of these things and so, we had to start again with tapes, so that when you said that you didn’t say it, I could play the tape back. You did say it, (laughs) but it is very — I did —

CLAES OLDENBURG I may not have been thinking when I said it. (laughter)

BARBARA ROSE All right. Why was Andy the most radical, or was he the most radical?

CLAES OLDENBURG I think that there was a moment, [00:37:00] now, I mean Andy was a radical artist whether he was a pop artist or not, and I saw him, I was lucky enough to see him at the moments when I could call him a radical artist. I sort of lost track of him after the middle ’60s, but —

BARBARA ROSE How do you define radical? (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

CLAES OLDENBURG Well let’s say, all right let’s give —

BARBARA ROSE — define radical.

CLAES OLDENBURG — one example. I was up in the country, I think it was... Well, it was up somewhere near the Connecticut River and there was a weekend, and I was with Jack Smith who was a filmmaker, and they were making a film and so on. And Andy was there, and he had a big bag full of film, and he had a camera, and he said, “I just got this camera and I just put this film in it.” And they took the film, and then he took the film out and he threw it away and he put another film in, and then he shot another one, then he threw that away and he shot.

Now he kept shooting until he had shot all the film in his bag and I said, “I don’t understand what you’re doing.” And he didn’t answer, of course, but I thought that was very radical. [00:38:00] (laughter) (applause)

And another instance: About in 1961, a European dealer named Arturo Schwarz came over, and thought it would be great to do a series of etchings by avant-garde artists, and none of us who were selected, through Billy Klüver, had ever done an etching, and we all tried, and we actually produced etchings, and they were pretty pathetic.

But Andy didn’t bother with that. He just got one of these things from the newspapers, one of these stereotypes, like for an ad, and it was a very beautiful selection, but it could have been just chance, and he used that as the etching. He hadn’t touched it, apparently, but of course he had chosen it, and that was a very Duchamp-esque act and I thought that was very radical, and it looked so good among all these pathetic etchings. (laughter) Now that was a radical [art?].

So, there were a number of things like that that I was fortunate enough to see [00:39:00] Andy doing, and then we sort of lost track of him later, but I think that in that early period, almost everything he did was radical. For example, the balloons, to have a show with Mylar balloons, that was another Billy Klüver-assisted project. And you walk into that gallery, it was just full of floating balloons now, with mirrored surfaces. I thought that was astounding. Or, the day I walked into the Brillo show. All of those things were radical acts, you can’t exactly explain them, but they were marvelous acts. So that’s why I said that —

BARBARA ROSE Okay —

CLAES OLDENBURG — and if I said it.

BARBARA ROSE Does anybody else have a contribution —

ROBERT ROSENBLUM I have a (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

BARBARA ROSE — to Andy’s radicality? No.

ALLAN KAPROW One of the most radical things that Andy as a painter did, it went through all of the films as well, is to introduce the principle of a gridded or repeated image, as a structural device, and then to simultaneously allow informal [00:40:00] technology to imprint this, but his slippages were the way in which our reading habits allowed us to notice very minute changes. For example, in the —

FEMALE Mic.

ALLAN KAPROW — multiple images of —

FEMALE Mic (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

FEMALE Your mic.

MALE Your mic, Allan.

ALLAN KAPROW — multiple images of Marilyn Monroe, (laughter) doesn’t help our narrative. There it is. There’s no way except in real time that we can perceive that as a new kind of portraiture unless we see the grid of repeated images, slipping slightly, from each image of Marilyn which is otherwise the same, so that in one case, her mouth looks as though somebody smeared the lipstick on it; another one, her eyes are black; in another one, her eyes look suddenly as though they were about to laugh.

And that sense of lexicality in painting as real-time reading as we would a book, from left to [00:41:00] right and top to bottom, was reintroduced by him there, whether in this sense that I’m

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 33 of 38 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Early Sixties: The Surge of American Pop,” 1988 explaining it or whether in an intuitive sense based upon comic books and other reading that he’s done, or just coming from commercial art, which, after all, is serialized reproduction.

It doesn’t make any difference, but I think those are, given the free-form background that we had from abstract expressionism, it was a really very distinctive radical move that he brought in, which only the Middle Ages before that had ever recognized.

BARBARA ROSE That’s heavy. (laughter) I know that Andy will be interpreted by deconstructionists soon. It is being interpreted that way, so that’s a kind of interesting preview. But, Bob, you are a great fan of Andy’s and of pop, in what do you see Andy’s radicality consisting?

ROBERT ROSENBLUM Well I’m not interested in terms like radicality, [00:42:00] but both of you, Claes and Allan, pointed out some extraordinary innovations which make him seem like somebody who was breaking every mold in the ’60s, but the way he looks now to me is an absolute classic, a pillar of society in terms of what happened in the ’60s and ’70s. He has the same sort of position to me that Picasso has, Picasso the radical artist who now looks like a classic. And all of Andy’s (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) —

BARBARA ROSE There’s a little more variety in Picas—

ROBERT ROSENBLUM Hmm?

BARBARA ROSE There’s a little more variety in Picasso.

MALE Well that —

ROBERT ROSENBLUM Well, he lived longer.

HENRY GELDZAHLER We think of Andy as being — (laughter) (applause) we think of Andy as being so topical and so ephemeral, then you read in the New York Times a long article about Anselm Kiefer, who was the great metaphysical artist of the day, supposedly, who bases a lot of his theory on Andy’s work, knows Andy can’t be dismissed that easily.

ROBERT ROSENBLUM Well one of the things about Andy — there were so many things and that’s one of the reasons there can be so many symposia on him — [00:43:00] is that his scope is just in terms of what he images, is the vastest scope of any artist I can think of in the last 25 years. Nobody has covered this much territory in terms of just panoramic sweep, and this in itself is pretty amazing, never mind words like “radical.” He just tells the fullest time-capsule story of the last 25 years of any artist I know. I don’t know if that’s good or bad —

BARBARA ROSE Bob Rauschenberg would be so disappointed to hear you say that.

ROBERT ROSENBLUM (laughs) Well...

BARBARA ROSE George? No radicality?

GEORGE SEGAL No radicality.

BARBARA ROSE I should have said that I did notice that we had two mystery guests, and Billy Klüver, who is the other tall, blonde, handsome stranger, his presence should also be noted.

HENRY GELDZAHLER I did a pop art show in Australia for the Museum of Modern Art a couple of years ago. A young lady [00:44:00] in Melbourne, made very beautiful little silk screens of Marilyn, Andy’s Marilyn, on little squares. And I was wearing one one day and I ran into Bob Rosenblum, and I said, What does this make you think of: Marilyn or Andy? He said, I can think of two things at the same time. (laughter)

MALE Very good. (laughter)

HENRY GELDZAHLER That sums it up.

BARBARA ROSE We could have one more question. Yeah. Ah, yes, one of the mystery guests.

MALE Yeah, I saw in a movie and also (inaudible) there seems to be —

MALE (inaudible)

MALE — [odd?] interplay of camaraderie among the artists at the time, it was either as having [to guess at the event happening?] [for participants?] —

MALE (whispers) [Speak up?].

MALE

— in what way did that affect your work at the time [when you?] oh, [contacted other?] [artists of the same period?] [00:45:00] (inaudible)? (laughter)

BARBARA ROSE Actually, I was acknowledging Billy Klüver who was raising his hand to ask a question. I don’t know, can anybody answer that question?

HENRY GELDZAHLER No, let Billy talk.

BARBARA ROSE Billy, would you ask your question?

BILLY KLÜVER Yeah, I had a question for George.

AUDIENCE (groans)

BARBARA ROSE No, I think the question was unanswerable. In other words, these are artists who obviously were terribly influenced by what was going on about, around them; that was part of what they were doing, that was part of their intention. So it’s I think redundant, in a sense, unless anybody has some — does anyone want to answer it?

HENRY GELDZAHLER I know there’s [none of us will?].

BARBARA ROSE Did anybody understand the question? Or won’t answer? Okay.

CLAES OLDENBURG Well, yeah, just to very quickly answer this, [00:46:00] I think that the camaraderie was probably more, it looks like more than there was. The groups were somewhat isolated, and you found out about what the other person was doing largely through hearsay, and reading and so on. That’s always true. There’s always some people that hang out together and some people are alone. In my case, I was in the Judson Gallery in the end of the ’50s, and that meant a lot to me because I was able to meet a lot of people, and people like Allan Kaprow and so on. So, that had a lot to do with it.

GEORGE SEGAL Okay, well, all right, I’ll just toss another answer on to that. There was camaraderie in the sense that there were a small handful of us, and we were thrown together, and most of the world, and even our close friends, thought we were crazy, and we clung together, had some kind of dependency.

BARBARA ROSE And we’d all been disinherited by our parents.

GEORGE SEGAL That’s [00:47:00] true, that’s true. It was a substitute family, in a strange way. But everybody involved was strong minded, and hard driving in their own way, and these ideas that we’ve been talking about, sometimes vaguely, sometimes sharply, tonight, were everybody’s common property, and they were ideas that were formless until each of us, in his or her own way, shaped them in their work. The only artists that survived were the ones that were compulsive enough in their work habits to stay in their studio, and as — (laughter)

So, we were in our twenties, we were thrust together, we kicked around all these ideas, and we plucked out what seemed to apply to our temperament. And, that’s why everybody’s work is so incredibly different. We are connected by [00:48:00] some common attitudes or opinions that we share. My relationship, for instance, with Kaprow, is that we clung together and we argued all the time. (laughter) Yeah, so, and each of us went exactly our own way, but we were together, in a peculiar way, and I think it’s still true. Okay, that’s the end of that question. (applause)

BARBARA ROSE I would like to let Billy ask his question though.

BILLY KLÜVER It’s become obsolete since [I work indoor?] —

PART 3

GEORGE SEGAL — [thing?]. (laughter) And, the newspapers publicized the celebratory aspect of it. The thing that astounds me is the composition of the panel tonight. Between Kaprow and Claes and myself, we’re part of a minority group of passionate expressionist pop artists, and mostly, the critics have been celebrating pop art as this kind of cool, ironic, detached commentary on things, and as the talk seeps around tonight, we discover that, good heavens, Andy is far more complicated than that surface appearance, or good heavens, we can’t [00:01:00] just dismiss Lichtenstein, and comic strips, and newspaper ads.

And in the same way, I don't think that Kaprow has gotten his due in a lot of his conceptions, or his grand scheme of ideas of what this embraces. I think what hasn’t happened is some notation of the breadths of ambition in this group: what they wanted to tackle. (applause)

BARBARA ROSE I know that Henry’s hungry. I know he’s seriously hungry, but could I ask our other mystery guest, David Hockney, to ask a question?

HENRY GELDZAHLER No... (laughter)

DAVID HOCKNEY Well I haven’t been able to [hear?] very well, actually. (laughter) [00:02:00] I’m dying for a smoke. (laughter)

BARBARA ROSE I think we should let David smoke and Henry eat, and thank you all for coming. (applause)

MALE [That’s a crazy?] (inaudible) [isn’t it?]?

GEORGE SEGAL That’s right.

MALE It is something.

END OF AUDIO FILE 9009304_01_9009305_01_9009306_01-The-Surge-of-American-Pop.mp3

The Surge of American Pop, introduction by Mimi Poser / Henry Geldzahler, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Robert Rosenblum, moderated by Barbara Rose. 1988/11/15. Reel-to-Reel collection. A0004. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New Yorks