2 Lawrence Alloway Pop Art and the “Pop Art–Fine Art Continuum” awrence Alloway, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg are united by a common, if broadly defined, methodological approach to pop L art. It was one that sought to explain the iconographic, stylistic, and formal features of this movement in terms of the deconstructive effect of key technological and economic characteristics of post-war Western urban society: mass communications and capitalist consumerism. In seeking authority for this approach, these critics discredited, if in varying ways, the prevailing modernist paradigm of Greenbergian formalism as well as the traditional representational paradigm in both the art and literature of realism. Within this area of consensus each critic presented a distinct argument concerning the perceived bond between pop art and the deconstructive character of mass communications and consumerism. Rosenberg re- garded pop as evidence of the “de-definition” of art; Alloway saw it as a mirror of the spectrum of visual communications as well as representative of a constitutive channel (painting) and, in its communicative function, as equally “de-defined”; Steinberg identified the “flatbed” picture plane as that characteristic of “post-Modernist” painting, including pop. Steinberg’s case, as with Alloway’s, centres on the pop artists’ use of pre-existing signs disseminated by mass communications in the post-war period as well as on the role played by these signs in the creation of a mediate world. It is, however, more theoretical and more rigorously medium-specific, its cred- ibility dependent on “deconstructing” Greenberg’s distinction between the types of illusion inherent in modernist and traditional painting. It will be argued in this chapter, and those that follow in this section, that post-modernist traits in Alloway’s, Rosenberg’s, and Steinberg’s re- spective critical responses to pop art resulted primarily from their per- ception of the close bond between pop and key characteristics of its Copyright @ 2001. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 37 EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/23/2019 4:43 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES AN: 73971 ; Harrison, Sylvia.; Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism Account: undeloan.main.ehost Part Two. “Social” Critics post-war urban context. Despite the fact that their interest lay, foremost, with the “cultural” (i.e., with art), their methodology is consistent with that employed in recent sociological theorizations of post-modernism and its allied post-modern condition in which “major motifs of [deconstructive] postmodernist thought” are seen to “link the social and the cultural.” The argument, here, is that post-modernism’s deconstruction or elimination “of the ingredients necessary for a worldview,”1 justified, for example, by the tenets of post-structuralism and the closely allied philosophies of pragma- tism and phenomenology, is a logical expression of or, at least, comple- ment to the workings of the social in the post-modern period. Alloway’s perception of the deconstructive workings of mass commu- nications and consumerism and, hence, of the social in its post-war, post-modernist phase, are apparent in his interpretation of pop art’s sub- ject-matter as the spectrum of visual communications. Three of the as- sumptions underlying this interpretation have a direct bearing on the inci- dence of post-modernism in Alloway’s critical reception of American pop art. First, fine art, and thus pop art, can be included in a culturally hetero- geneous field if categorized in a non-essentialist and functionalist manner as communication. Two, the diversity of the communicative field mirrored by pop is tied, in part at least, to a similar diversity in its audience. Alloway understood the audience’s socially and economically constituted role as that of consumer. A defining feature of this role was consumer freedom, one exercised at the level of consumer choice and necessary for the reproduction of the capitalist system in its post-war, consumerist phase.2 Finally, mass communications and its constant “other,” consumerism, have played a pivotal role in the proliferation of signs and symbols in post-war society and, hence, in the creation of a mediate world that is distinct from and presumably obscures or impedes access to that of an “objective” and foundational nature. A further post-modernist feature of Alloway’s theorization of pop art is closer, however, to the philosophical model of deconstructive post- modernism. To the extent that Alloway linked pop’s indeterminacy (or am- biguity) with its depiction of the “mobility of signs, their multiple uses” and this in turn with its depiction of the “human communication” system,3 he linked it, equally, with pragmatist semiotics. Charles Morris’s pragmatist contention that the meaning of signs vary in accord with “the dispositions to behavior which they cause in their interpreters,”4 is consistent with the central (and deconstructive) tenet of philosophical pragmatism. This holds that meaning or significance arises from “man’s behavioral rapport with that which gives itself in experience.”5 Copyright @ 2001. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 38 EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/23/2019 4:43 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES AN: 73971 ; Harrison, Sylvia.; Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism Account: undeloan.main.ehost Lawrence Alloway The formative phase of Lawrence Alloway’s critical philosophy, while by no means immune to American influences, took place away from Amer- ica. Alloway was born in London in 1926. His long and varied career in the visual arts, one that spanned more than thirty years and encompassed the diverse roles of critic, curator, and academic, began in 1948 when he took up the position of Assistant Lecturer at the National Gallery, London. Among the more significant posts occupied by Alloway in the following decade were those of Assistant Director (1954–7) and Deputy Director (1957–9) of the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, British correspon- dent for Art News (1953–7) and Contributing Editor of Art International (1957–61). In 1961, at the age of thirty-five, Lawrence Alloway moved to America where he worked as an instructor in the Department of Art, Ben- nington College, Vermont. In the following year he took up the prestigious appointment of Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, an ap- pointment that marked his entry into the New York art world and that he held until 1966. The more important positions occupied by Alloway after that time included the following: Professor of Art, State University of New York, Stony Brook (1968–81); Art Editor, The Nation (1968–90); Associate Editor, Artforum (1971–6). Alloway died in New York, 2 January 1990.6 Alloway’s formal association with the emergent American pop art move- ment dates from the time of Six Painters and the Object, an exhibition held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1963 prior to the definitive labelling of the movement. Alloway both curated and wrote the catalogue essay for the exhibition that comprised the painters Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and James Rosenquist, as well as the “object- makers” Robert Rauschenberg and James Dine who were represented by works that included only “moderate collage elements, but no three- dimensional appendages.”7 During the sixties Alloway penned a further catalogue essay (Six More8) and a number of articles on American pop art as well as what was, in effect, a history and a pre-history of the British vari- ant for one of the earliest book-length studies of the pop art movement, Pop Art (1966), in which Lippard, the contributing editor, wrote the sec- tion on New York pop.9 Alloway’s fullest account of American pop art (a book-length study en- titled American Pop Art) was published in 1974 in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition of New York and Californian pop art held at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Because of its comprehensiveness, American Pop Art is the prime source of Alloway’s views on pop art for this study – despite the fact that the time of its publication falls outside pop’s time frame of the sixties. In Alloway’s case, this is of no consequence; Copyright @ 2001. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 39 EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/23/2019 4:43 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES AN: 73971 ; Harrison, Sylvia.; Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism Account: undeloan.main.ehost Part Two. “Social” Critics the manner in which American pop art is theorized in American Pop Art differs little, if at all, from that in writings from the previous decade. Much of American Pop Art, moreover, is taken from earlier writings. With only slight amendment, “Popular Culture and Pop Art” (1969)10 forms the first fifteen pages of the general account of the American movement contained in the section entitled “Definition.” This article, in turn, is indebted to the Granada Guildhall lectures in London in 1969 to which Alloway, in the ac- knowledgments of American Pop Art, partly attributed the same