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 Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 1 of 38 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Early Sixties: The Surge of American Pop,” 1988 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) Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 2 of 38 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Early Sixties: The Surge of American Pop,” 1988 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.