Syllabus for Modern Art 426
Text: R. Arnason, A History of Modern Art
Suggested Reading: John Russell, The Meanings of Modern Art,
Further readings in art, literature and philosophy are available for students upon request.
Midterm: Tuesday November 3 at 8:00 AM
Final: Tuesday December 8 at 8:00 AM
Please note that the syllabus for this course and all the slides discussed are available at a Cal-State L.A. website. The website will also connect you to other sites with basic information on artists and styles.
Course requirements: The lectures often contain information that is not in the required text or at the website. You are therefore required to attend class and take notes. The text provides you with the factual and biographical information while my lectures focus on interpreting the conditions from which modern forms and thoughts have arisen. Given the subjective nature and attributes of modern art its philosophical hermeneutics and interpretations may prove to be rigorous and demanding.
Some Important Attributes of Modernism discussed during these lectures
1. History is an anachronism (God is dead).
Examples of this outlook may be found in Yeat's "I spent the close of the last century trying to get out of form, now I have a strange desire to create new form"; Nietzsche's "God is dead"; Marx's "Religion is the opiate of the masses"; Darwin's theory of evolution, Fraser's anthropology; Poe's obsession with death as the final state; Melville's Ahab despising the inscrutabilities of a world no longer meaningful; Manet's transformations of mythic structures into contemporary and quotidian allusions; Monet's dissolution of the objective, consensual and limited forms into subjective, ambiguous and unlimited sensations. Also the Futurists hatred of history and its monuments.
2. Subjective and solipsistic expressions (author as god).
With the dissolution of the collective and consensual realities the creative individual assumed the role of creator. Modernism promises a new center: the individual and his _her individuated language to express the integrity and the essence of personal experience. Signs of subjective and individuated perspectives are evident in Melville's Bartelby the Scrivener where the protagonist's individuation is retreat from the demands of society and eventually his castigation by a conventional society; Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Picasso's insistence on a personal optic; Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian's abstractions to express subjective-solipsistic metaphysical sensations and truths; Lautréamont, Mallarmé and Kafka's personal non-epistemic literary structures and syntaxes; Gauguin's arbitrary colors; Conrad's ambiguity and Joyce's stream of consciousness- also retreat into the vernacular (Finnegan's Wake); Kandinsky, Schoenberg and Stravinsky's chance constructions (improvisations) are all examples of subjective solipsistic expressions in modernism.
3. Purifications and primal visions.
Originality is only possible if the artist can purge himself_herself from memory and return to the primal (to see the world anew as a child). Monet's distrust of memory's eye (he wished he had been born blind and would gain his eyesight in his mid-thirties to see the world without any preconceived notions); The romantic's primal, historically purged visions of Rousseau and Gerard de Nerval; Freud's purifications of Viennese society from sexual repression; Rimbaud's child-like screams of rage; Conrad, Melville, Poe and Mann's descent into the darkness of the unknown; Mallarmé's erasure of memory (see his "tombeau d'Edgar Poe"); Edgar Rice Burrough's primal retreats in his Tarzan stories; Henri Rousseau's primitivism; Picasso's child-like visions; Klimt's decadent sensualism to cleanse his moribund visions of history; Freud's forays into the subconscious and de Chirico's explorations of dreams and the dream world were attempts to eradicate historical memory and discover the fundamental truth of being in nature and man.
4. Reconstructions (structuralism).
Reconstructing the world from its primordial chaos and structuring new epistemologies to define reality with was a central preoccupation of modernism. The many attempts to ameliorate the negative implications and sometimes devastating connotations of a world without God appears in the new epistemic orders of Freud, Marx, Sassure, Levi-Strauss, Wittgenstein and many others. Kandinsky's theosophy and Malevich's Suprematism sought to establish metaphysical spaces where the senses served as a guide to knowledge. Likewise the American Visionaries (Inness, Vedder) with their Swedenborgian gravitations and spiritual-naturalism found nature to be a guide to truth. Hitler's Fascism, Marx's anti-semitic diatribe, Nordau, Munch, Strindberg and Weininger's misogynistic stances were also attempts to bring structure to a world that appeared unbounded and chaotic. To many, such as Toynbee and Spengler, the modern world was a place of apocalyptic reckoning and a state of limbo.
Some important attributes of The Age of Anxiety discussed during these lectures:
1- Eros and Thantos (sexuality and death): One shared characteristic of the arts during the age of anxiety is the treatment of sexuality as a symbol of death rather than love, life and continuity. A disturbed, emasculated and aberrant sexuality marks the mainstream of expressions in literature and the arts. D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Hemingway's The Sun also Rises, Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry, T.S. Eliot's emasculated Fisher King in the Waste Land, Otto-Dix's paintings of the Aged Lovers, Edward Hopper's many nudes in emotionally and physically uninhabited spaces (Eleven A.M.), Dali's and Magritte's Freudian themes of sexuality as seen in Dali's The Enigma of Desire, my Mother, My Mother, My mother and Magritte's The Menaced Assassin, Sir Stanley Spencer's Self Portrait with My Wife" and Christian Schad's Two Young Ladies are but a few examples of this type of expression alluding to despair and failure in the aftermath of World War I. For Freud eros was the only mean of overcoming death. Yet in a majority of the expressions of this period eros is incapable of overcoming thantos, thus death and annihilation is certain. As a corollary to the moot powers of sexuality in the arts of this period we also find themes of Despair and failure to be prevalent throughout the gamut of expression as in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, E.E. Cummings' The Enormous Room, John Dos Passos' USA . trilogy, Hemingway's Farewell to Arms and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Also the paintings of Kahlo, Beckman, Hopper and many more. Freud and Darwin are both very popular during this period as they buttress the notion of man as animal rather than man as the transcendent being.
2-Ameliorations: To rectify the negative and devastating impacts of a war whose unimaginable slaughter had eradicated the hopes and dreams of modernism and partly to escape the animal-man, one evolves only if one exploits, that Orwell graphically describes in the purely Nietzschean terms of "Will to Power" in his Animal Farm, various solutions emerged. One path of amelioration was a retreat into epistemological and orderly systems of the past. At times, as in the case of the Nazis, this regression was enforced with a vengeance upon modernism and the modern age, a target of which were the Jews identified earlier in the century with the rise of modernism and its chaos, relative, of course, to classical harmony. . At other times the epistemological orders of modernism such as Marxism and socialism were adopted with ends that were more in tune with the classical themes of charity, responsibility and altruism. During this period proletarian literature and proletarian art, a corollary to Marxist beliefs, enjoyed immense popularity in the United States and Latin America. Some of the popular proletarian writings were Jack Conroy's Disinherited (1933); Michael Gold's Jews Without Money (1930); Giacomo Patri's White Collar (1940); Tom Kromer's Waiting for Nothing (1935). Other writers such as Lillian Hellman, John Steinbeck and Theodore Dreiser whose works, though not strictly confined by proletarian literary definitions, along with such painters as Ben Shahn, Raphael Soyer, and Jack Levine, photographers Dorothea Lange, James van der Zee and Walker Evans reflected vigorously the social and political concerns of their age. It should be mentioned that the Mexican artists and muralists Diego Rivera, José Orozco, Tina Modotti and David Siqueiros are of great influence upon these American artists.
The theme of regression assumes many shapes and faces in this period. One such appearance is in the adaptation and interpretations of historical styles that convey both escape and, on a deeper level, the essential anxieties of the age. Examples of this type are the Greco-Roman paintings of Picasso, the objectivity of German painters and the semi-classical tonalities of Stravinsky; also the Renaissance inspired paintings of Thomas Hart Benton and Charles Burchfield and the stylistically aggregate compositions of Grant Wood.
One major response to the age of anxiety came from the surrealists. They rejected the transcendent and metaphysical absolutes of modernism (i.e. its abstractions and subjectivity). The "New Absolute" in surrealism returns to nature and acknowledges the object. It does not seek the absolute outside of man and nature but within it. The surrealist absolute is thus physical rather than metaphysical. In other words, speaking in philosophical terms, it is anti-Hegelian and somewhat Marxist. The term absolute was also applied to the physical in order to put an end to all distinctions and thus perceive the essence of the physical being (this principle appears later in the performances of the postmodern artist Joseph Beuys). Andre Breton, one of the founders of surrealism, celebrating the tangible universe, unlike most transcendentalists, rejected the dark and gloomy views of the end of the world and found them absurd. Thus the surrealists hailed the banner of man as animal rather than lament it. Inspired by the late Nineteenth Century writer Lautréamont (Les Chants de Maldoror)and the writings of Freud and Darwin, the surrealists, unlike the romantics who admired only the innocence of animals, also acknowledged nature's so-called ugly and undesirable aspects and celebrated it.
The surrealists sought the truth that lay beneath and beyond the conventional structures of linguistic expressions. They devised a linguistic revolution to change the immutable pictures that the metaphysics of language evokes as truth and reality. In this sense they are the threshold of postmodern deconstruction and anti-structuralism. The atmosphere was also rife for such developments in Philosophy as the writings of Heidegger (destruktion) and Wittgenstein (the poverty of language) indicate. For the surrealists, as Breton's writings powerfully manifest (see for example his Les Vases Communicants dedicated to Freud), the world of dreams was an indispensable dimension of wakefulness. The "Forest of Symbols" (the term is Baudalaire's) became a pathway to the truth of being. Freud, more than any other thinker, offered the surrealists a chance to revitalize matter with deeper and broader levels of meaning. The influence of Freud is readily seen on such film makers as Buñuel and Dali (Un Chien Andalou) and even earlier on Wien's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Among the painters Dali, Delvaux and Magritte seem to have been deeply guided by his ideas and implied views. Freud also influenced the surrealists, especially their leader Breton who had earlier been a student of psychiatry, by making dreams a way of knowing. Dali had self induced dreams, almost always, as Anna Balakian said, driven by the libido. Others influenced by the dream dimension were the writers and poets Robert Desnos, Breton, Tristan Tzara and the Paul Elouard. Another aspect of Freudian influence resulting from his interpretations of dreams resulted in automatic ecriture which became for Breton a basis of surrealist poetry and art. Similarly other forms of Freudian dream experience led to simulations of mental abnormality . Poets and artists, such as Saint Pol-Roux, Breton and Elouard and Dali imitated paranoia, madness and delirium to experience reality beyond the narrow confines of rationalism.
(May 7th Midterm)
Studio 291 founded by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, began to hold exhibitions of modern photography and art as early as 1905. Later, further inspired by the avant-garde, seen at the Armory Show of 1913, Studio 291 became a Mecca for American modernists who had a proclivity for abstraction and also reflected in a meaningful measure the concerns of the American zeitgeist. O'keeffe and Dove are excellent examples of this trait became their abstractions are derived from objects rather than a denial of the object. Also the works emphasize the moods and sensations inherent within nature or its objects rather than those emanating from the observer (see for example Dove's "Fog Horns" with poetic and mystic connotations flowing from the object.) O'Keeffe's abstractions came mostly from magnifications and distortions of size in natural forms. She created metaphysical sensations derived from nature and the object in a purely American context, to which New Mexican paintings attest. Other artists in this group, Weber, Stella, Marin and Hartley, reflected the concerns or permutations of modernist syntax in America.
Other movements reflecting the influences of pre-war modernism were the Precisionists ( painters Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler and for a literary parallel the poet William Carlos Williams) and a number of proto-abstract artists such as Stuart Davis, Morris Graves, Gerald Murphy and Loren MacIver.
The age called the 50s is also known as the beginning of the American Century- a term used by Norman Mailer criticizing such established American authors as Steinbeck, Hemingway and DosPassos whom he said "had journeyed from alienation to varying degrees of acceptance , if not outright proselytizing for the American Century." The American Century began in 1945 with the atomic bombs that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war America benefited from unprecedented prosperity and idealism that was also concomitant with the disquiet of McCarthyism, the Korean War and the earliest battles for racial justice. In the visual arts New York became the new center of culture and arts replacing Paris, London and Munich. Out of this idealism came an exaggerated sense of individuation and solipsistic expressions far surpassing the transcendent expressions of the abstract artists at the turn of the century. Although the term abstract expressionism was first used in 1919 for certain paintings of Kandinsky, its resurgent use by the critic Robert Coates for the paintings of Dekooning and Jackson Pollock was in a different spirit and letter of criticism. The earlier abstract painters such as Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian had always provided a philosophical base to explain their abstractions (theosophy, anthroposophy, Fourth Dimension, etc.) The new painters were more into capturing and expressing the integrity of their own experiences outside of a linguistic or philosophical frame of reference. Abstract expressionism of 1940s and 50s, with few exceptions such as Barnett Newman, was devoid of philosophical foundations.
On the whole, the terms that best describe the abstract expressionist paintings of the period are action or gesture painting used for biomorphic paintings (Pollock, Kline, Gottlieb) and color field painting applied to works with vast fields of color (Rothko, Newman, Reinhardt).
The 1960s: Pop, Op, Minimal, Kinetic and Photorealist arts.
The sixties is essentially the age of Pop Art. Although it is also a pluralistic period in the sense that many other styles of expression such as Op Art, Kinetic Art, minimal Art, Photo-realism and Construction Art, not to mention postmodernism also belong to it. Pop is of the greatest value because it encompasses through its attributes the concerns and outlooks of America and to a lesser extent England of the 1960s. Pop art is often identified with consumer art. But this I believe is erroneous for the art is, through certain shared features, be it in its poetry, literature or paintings a social and political commentary of the most epistemic dimension observed in the Twentieth Century. These attributes through which commentaries are made are:
1- epistemic juxtapositions, namely the assimilation of one contextual or historically identifiable element with another. Epistemological juxtapositions create a narrow or limited field of interpretation. Language is therefore, always directed in Pop art whereas by contrast to abstract expressionism, language operates open endedly.
2- Pop is preoccupied with the mundane and the quotidian. This aspect of Pop art and literature stands in contradistinction to abstract expressionism. Pop unlike Abstract expressionism finds the truth not to be residing in some ideal metaphysical dimension but in the realities of daily life often ignored as meaningful and significant. In other words the ultimate message of Pop is that we are not our dreams and ideals (philosophical, religious and otherwise). We are what we eat, wear and breathe.
3- Pop is a materialization or reification of abstract expressionist ideas and principles. Pop art exemplifies in objective terms the principles that guided abstract expressionist art, namely the prosperity, wealth and idealistic perceptions of the material world. This materialization may well have been a part of degeneration of the abstract expressionist world as the material scrutinizations of idealistic principles by Holden Caulfield is powerfully exemplified in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Another example is Joseph Heller's Catch 22. These idealistic principles, as Ginsberg's Howl also alludes to, reveal themselves to be unattainable and therefore, lies. In the arts the first work that powerfully expresses the reification of the 50s ideals and juxtaposes them with mundane reality is Richard Hamilton's Just What is it that Makes Today's Homes so Different, so Appealing? Pop artists discussed in these lectures are Wesselman, Warhol, Ramos, Dine, Hanson, Lichtenstein, Johns, D'Angelo, Oldenberg and Segal.
Pop art may be distinguished from abstract expressionism in a number of ways. Abstract expressionism represents the author's personal, unique and irrepeatable experiences. The colors and the forms were intended to correlate to the artist's unique experience, clearly an experience that is in the language of abstract art ultimately solipsitic. In abstract expressionism the artist or the author is everything, one may even say god, for meaning is generated by and through their sensations. The abstract expressionists believed that no two sensations were the same, thus to communicate one's feelings with originality and outside of the platitudinous formulas of language the artist had to transcend all conventions (of both language and nature) to make an art that was neither things nor ideas. Abstract expressionism therefore idealized beyond nature. It lives in meta-natural and meta-linguistic domains. Films of the 1950s as well as its paintings, literature and music point this fact out. It is the idealization of all visions, whether good or evil, that does not allow for the period to see itself realistically. Above all abstract expressionism ignored the banal and the quotidian, in fact it disdained it. The artists and the critics of the abstract expressionist period believed, as had Immanuel Kant earlier, that the aesthetic experience derived from art was unique and art should address ideas and sensations that life cannot. This perspective of abstract art explains why Clement Greenberg and Duchamp disliked each other's aesthetics. Duchamp was viewed by the artists of the sixties as the "In Art We Trust Buster" and one who revealed the lies of metaphysical thinking and visions. Duchamp had pointed out the paradox of abstract art, namely that while abstractions seeks to destroy the metaphysical pictures evoked by language, it simultaneously gives rise to a more mysterious metaphysical expression that can only survive in the platitudes of language, though these platitudes are at times very cleverly constructed. Swenson was keenly aware of the abstract expressionist platitudes when he wrote: "How many more times can we see the word 'picture plane', m'odernism', 'crisis', 'new' and 'literary' without flushing?"(G.R. Swenson, The Other Tradition:40)
Pop on the other hand, as its fascination with Duchamp' ready mades and anti-retinal ideas indicates, is not interested in art as a met-physical experience. Much like Jean Paul Sartre's dictum that all metaphysics is a lie, pop believes that the individual is incapable of defining itself outside the spectrum of socio-political and linguistic conventions. Pop therefore begins to pay attention to the most fundemental and banal expressions of the culture or of a self within a culture. Examples of the former are Warhol and Johns while the latter is best exemplified by Segal and Hanson. In pop the author is dead and art is what the exigencies of experience and a culture have made. It is interesting that Barthes' "Death of the Author" coincides with similar expressions in the arts of the sixties. Barthes, like Warhol or Indiana, explained in his "Death of the Author" that it is not the artist but language that expresses. A sentiment that as you know has its most powerful precursors in the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Such Warhol comments as "I want to take away the commentary of the gesture." (Sandler p. 148, n.22) and " I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me....The reason I am painting this way (with silk screens) is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do." (Sandler, p.8) indcate his subliminal and conscious beliefs in the value of the artist only as a mirror of things and also of the impotency of the artist to say anything beyond what the systems allow to be said. Moreover, Warhol's response to the machine-like quality of his advertising art revealed his attitudes toward the futility of expressing ideals and dreams in gesture painting and abstract expressionism. His belief in this futility was twofold: firstly that dreams conceal the truth and secondly that the individual is insignificant in the face of the machine. The following statement by Warhol exemplifies the above attitude: "No, it (advertising) wasn't (machine-like). I was getting paid for it, and did anything they told me to do. If they told me to draw a shoe, I'd do it, and if they told me to correct it, I would.....I'd have to invent and now I don't; after all that "correction," those commercial drawings would have feelings, they would have a style." (Sandler p. 8-9 n. 23)
Pop therefore, as Wesselman's comment, " I am not intersted in brush strokes," indicates is anti-gesturely and recognizes the power of reality in a bracketed manner. Husserlian phenomenology of looking rather than interpreting and Witttgenstein's famous dictum "Look! don't think" is relevant to pop more than any other art in the Twentieth Century. Pop of course labeled objects or codes with clear objective identities because they do not easily lend themselves to personal readings and personal expressions of feelings. Labels fix the work and the banality of the object makes it difficult to read personal metaphysical fabrications over the object's head. The ready made objects of Duchamp stood against the idea of art whereas pop communicates a new notion of art: Art is what we are and have always ignored in our pursuit of nonexistent dreams, art is what we eat and what we wear and how we sleep- not the fantastic assumptions of a transcendent mind-set projected on large movie screens, or in poetic syntax and hummed in romantic tunes.
Pop arrived with Oldenberg's installation The Store in December of 1961. He filled a shop with painted plaster replicas of everday items sold in New York stores. His assault upon idealism and transcendence seen in abstract expressionist art was as potent as J.D. Salinger had been in his mockery of an unreal, pretensious system in his 1951 book, The Catcher in The Rye. Abstract expressionist art had always been the engagement of the high and the noble , the apotheosis of life above and beyond nature. As Robert Indiana wrote "Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades. It is basically a U-turn back to the representational visual communication" (Sandler p.148, n.21). Abstract expressionism is ontological where each expression of the artist is a world onto itself, more felt than understood. Oldenberg's The Store had rejected that heightened view and presented the existence of a reality. Moreover this common, everyday and quotidian reality was bracketed and, therefore, seemingly seen without bias and prejudice. After reflection the Husserilian bracketing magnified the emptiness of our dreams as did the reality in Ginsberg's Howl presenting the futility of the ideal pursuits of the Angel Headed Hipsters of the 50s.
This reality mattered so much that the pop artist no longer acted with the arrogance and the audacity of the expressionist. Indiana saw "impasto" as "visual indigestion.' and Rosenquist was conscious to eschew the romantic qualities of the paint. (Sandler p. 149, n.24-25). In 1962 Warhol's Do it Yourself Painting consisted of a diagram of painting by numbers. Warhol painted Money because he was told to paint what he liked most. His honesty of expression is still met with incredulity by those critics who wish to see metaphorical comments in his art(see for example R. Hughes..)
The irony is that Duchamp's readymades though intending to be anti-retinal and anti-metphysical were ultimately devoured by the metaphysical picture. Firstly because they presented concepts and that these concepts were not spatio-temporally contextulized and were therefore more metaphoric than metonymic (see below). His Urinal (signed R. Mutt, 1917) might say, for example that all art is waste and all artists are jokes. Unlike Warhol's Campbell Soup Can the object cannot stand in for a real equivalent of itself. i.e. the Urinal cannot stand for the bathroom or the wall against which it rests as Warhol's image stands for consumerism, supermarkets, advertising, etc. This also explains why Duchamp did not make the objects but selected them. In Pop the artist says that he should pursue the act of making but what is to be made is already made by the needs of a real world. The artist of pop stands at the threshold of Barthes' "writing degree zero." You must work at it but there is nothing personal to say. Moreover the pop artist contextualizes and thus narrows down the scope of the metaphysical influence and perception. In Duchamp's urinal the concept plays on but in Warhol's campbell soup the culture of the daily needs and dependencies and just living is revealed.
This brings us to another aspect of pop art, namely metaphor versus metonymy. I believe that pop is the only period in which metonymy applies and metaphor is either inapplicable or weakened. In abstract expressionist paintings the painterly and gestural acts serve as similes (metaphors of human feeling and sensation. Metaphor is equivalence by association or proposed similarity such as the phrase "the man turtles along" or "the world is a stage" imply relationships between two diverse and unsimilar entities by the virtue of similarities in one or some of their attributes. As in the above metaphoric associations the movement of the man is equivalent to that of the turtle or the unfolding of life in the world is as theatrical or mysterious or watched or contrived as the one on the stage. Sassure believed that this associative relationship in language was vertical or paradigmatic. Metonymy on the other hand exploits the syntagmatic or the horizontal relations in language and is thus contigious rather than associative. For example "the nation considers new laws" or "White House makes new policy" point to the equivalence of the nation with its congress or a building to its president. In Sassurian terms metaphor is synchronic, meaning that the vertical relations are immediate and co-existent, whereas metonymy is diachronic, meaning that the horizontal relations are sequential and successive. Abstract art generates meaning in language by the way of synonyms, associations and naming. The colors and gestures are guided by similarities of metaphoric operations. For example a bold stroke may be the metaphor of anxiety, bravado, release, identity etc. Thus the metaphors generated are open-ended and may create diverse and often contradictory meanings. The metonymical operations of abstract paintings are limited where the painting may stand for wall decoration or the painter's place in a certain time and context. Metaphors are therefore polysemantic and thus allow for the evokation of feelings. Romantic, abstract and symbolic art and literature are metaphorical and thus emotional in content.
Metonymy on the other hand belongs to realism. It should be remembered that the more distorted a real picture becomes the more it shifts from metonymical signification toward metaphorical and associative meanings. An example is Hard Realist paintings of Pearlstein whose distortions make for associative metaphors of aging, loneliness and sexual inertia. Photo-Realism may seem to be a perfect vision of a metonymical or contigious (syntagmatic/diachronic) operation in the arts. Yet it is not, for the realistic objects of photo-realism are not contextualized (not anchored) into a fixed socio-political, commercial and historical setting. Though exceptions exist, for the most part it is pop art, with objects anchored firmly in the commercially and socially labeled America, that operates metonymically.
Why labor so much to show that pop is metonymic rather than metaphoric? Because although both metaphor and metonymy can operate open endedly, metonymy remains culturally and contextually grounded for it can only shift from one signifier to another rather than from a signifier to an association. While metaphor is more poetic, metonymy is more prosaic, factual and therefore socio-political. In metaphor the individual is allowed to participate whereas in metonymy factual contiguity takes over. Warhol's Campbell Soup Can for example, functions as its equivalents of supermarkets, American diet, commercialism, consumerism, bowls, spoons, etc. but never as a metaphor of anger, loneliness, anxiety, freedom, love, etc. This of course is not true of all pop artists. Some such as Wesselman rely upon a combination of abstract and realistic imagery giving rise to both poetic and prosaic significations.
It should also be noted that in one regard metonymy stands at the gateway of postmodern ideas and perspectives. Metonymical operations also known as metaleptic destroy the very notion of an origin or an originary cause. The cause and effect process is now easily reversible and one may no longer speak of an origin or a linear process. This concept of metonymy also known as metalepsy was explored by Nietzsche when he reversed the hierarchy of oppositions to point out that knowledge is regressive rather than progressive in its operations. Nietzsche's position is antipodal to that of Laplace who as a determinist beleived that he could look forwardly given that he had access to all the variables in any given situation. Pop therefore, in regrd to its bracketing (observation) and anti-epistemic in terms of its ability to predict.
What are the cultural equivalents of abstract expressionist paintings? In other words if these abstractions were reified or given concrete objective forms, what would they correspond to? On the simplest of all levels if, as we have discussed, abstraction is about a denial of the objective (also natural) world and therefore aims to transcend and move beyond the physical then its reifications must also assume similar attributes. Moreover, if abstraction also shuns the collective and the altruistic view of things in order to avoid both history and nature then its reifications must likewise fall outside of the conventional and the natural. The paradox here is that abstract expressionism dwells on the primal be it the issue of racial memory as Gottlieb and Still adhered to or a fascination with primitive art. This dilemma is only resolved if we recognize that the primal of abstract expressionism is more the primal ground from which the genius of the subjective and the solipsistic artist springs forth. Its primal is definitely not the conventional and the collective notion of nature but emphasizes the uniqueness of the artist's experience which ultimately places the artist in a heroic and godly light. This preoccupation with the hero and heroic perceptions also makes abstract art romantic. The difference between abstract-romantic and figurative -romantic lies in the fact that the former internalizes the hero and the latter externalizes the hero. Thus in abstract expressionism the hero is the artist and the mystery of his or her being.
Thus in answer to our question regarding the cultural equivalents of abstract expressionism I must say that the images need be ideal and simulate a denial of nature. they need to transcend the reality of the daily and the mundane and above all they must address issues metaphysically. Therefore the reification of the metaphysical is some heavenly-physical (i.e. the moon or some planet as it appears in Hamilton's collage of Just What is it that makes Today's Homes so Different so Appealing,1956. Other examples would be twin beds as a denial of sexuality, perfect hairdos , affected gestures and poses, superhuman strengths and endurance as seen in the dance sequences of the films in the 50s, singing rather than talking, images of prosperity and idealized sexuality both physically, as it appears in playboy (a quintessential magazine of 1950s attitudes), and spiritually as it appears in the newspaper cartoons, films, literature and the daily representations of reality.
The paradox is that all these reifications and objectification's of abstract principles are themselves banalities for they have cultural forms. An important characteristic of pop is that juxtaposes these reified transcendent images with their real banal counterparts thus creating a field of contrast between the real and the ideal. The result is always supercilious for the ideal. Thus Hamilton's collage, anticipating a style that defines the 60s, contrasts reification of the ideal or abstract or the transcendent image with its quotidian counterparts. For example the image of a moon hovering over a living room signifies the metaphysical-physical juxtaposition. Likewise a female's haughty, mannered and taciturn gesture while conversing on the phone is contrasted sharply with its physical-sexual reality that is itself juxtaposed with a can of ham referencing cultural inequities, habits and desires. In other words the can of ham is a metaphorical-metonymical reference to the sexual functions of a female in at least some American circles and milieus. The newspaper cartoon framed as a painting on the wall (anticipating Lichtenstein?) points to the idealization of the heroes and heroines in cartoons and yet it juxtaposes itself with the mundane and quotidian operations of such cartoons in our daily lives. The juxtaposition of the cartoon with a painting, and this point is crucial, focuses our attention upon the expression of our ideals in the most quotidian corners of our lives. A similar point is made when Warhol juxtaposes advertising of Campbell Soup cans from the 1930s with art. His art directs our attention to the importance of the mundane, and forces us to take seriously what we have always considered unimportant because of their daily functional roles. In other words pop makes us realize that all dreams if they are to exist can only exist in the real world and there is nothing beyond the real world. And this is precisely what the dream wanted to avoid. Thus the reification of abstract expressionist principles shows the real aspect of their operations and ultimately points to the absence of the dream and the dream's absurdity. Ideals always loose their potency when reified, the sheer weight of reality overturns them. In Warhol the representation of a mundane and quotidian object such as a coke bottle creates a profound contrast with the ideal and transcendent beliefs of art.
However if this alone constituted the idea of juxtaposition in pop art we would not be saying anything new for the same contrast and compare principle applies to most other periods and styles. At the heart of pop is the concept of epistemic juxtapositions. namely to juxtapose two contextual and socio-historically grounded objects-often times one of these is a reified abstraction or an equivalent of an abstract principle. These juxtapositions can best be seen in Ramos and Wesselman. In Ramos' Chiquita Banana a sexually ideal image is juxtaposed with a commercially contextualized banana. In Wesselman's Bedroom series a nude female is juxtaposed with color field abstractions that serve to point out the absences of eyes and nose.
Allan D'Archangelo juxtaposes the moon and the Gulf Gas trademark which is itself juxtaposed over the American highway. Note that in pop all the elements present have a cultural and a commercial context. In other words one major distiction between pop and photorealism is that pop is labled either commercially or linguistically or historically. Wesselman's nudes are labled as American nudes and American Bedroom scenes, Ramos and Warhol are almost always commercially labeled. When we speak of a labels we are speaking of definite narratives. Thus in pop the narrative of reality and the objectified meta-narrative of the dream (now itself banalized) are juxtaposed.
Photorealism on the other hand is devoid of juxtapositions. It does not juxtapose diverse epistemic structures to allude to a third layer of epistemological recognition. Other movements of the 1960s such as minimal art, op art and kinetic sculpture represent continuations and permutations of abstract expressionist principles in a pop and socio-political context. Photorealism, as the works of Estes, Goings, Close, and De Andrea exemplify is also, like the genre of still life in Baroque art, preoccupied with virtuosity of representation.
What is postmodernism? The debate is still raging on. I would like to briefly answer some of the foundational questions regarding postmodernism. They are: what is deconstruction and post-structuralism, how is postmodernism related to modernism and is this expression appearing in the visual arts, a harbinger of some cultural truths in our futures? The answers as I see them and put in very brief and abbreviated forms are as follows:
1-Anti-epistemological (anti-linguistic and anti-metaphysical), ontological and magical. Also post-structuralism and deconstruction. Modernism promised individuation and thus originality of expression. Postmodernism recognizes that the process of evaluating originality is a linguistic one and thus the metaphysical (thus universal and ultimately in some circles the platitudinous) operations of language are incapable of recognizing it. So things are out there but it is not possible to say what they are. In other words, the moment that we start talking about them we have started talking about categories. As Derrida shows there are no such things as unique in linguistic descriptions. Joseph Beuys' performances (Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare), Joseph Kosuth's installations (One Chair Three Chairs) or Neil Jenny's paintings (Meltdown Morning) are all anti-linguistic (anti-metaphysical)expressions. For Beuys, far more directly and consciously than Christo (Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay)or DeMaria (Munich earth Room), or Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty)blames the demise of human condition on rationality. Partly it is this attack on rationality (structuralism) that leads to post-structuralist sensibilities of postmoderns. Deconstruction is a corollary to post-structuralism and follows from the realization that the very means of generating meanings and perspectives are flawed and ultimately meaningless. In other words to deconstruct an idea is to show how that idea undermines what it represents. An example is the Nietzschean reversal of the hierarchy of causality. The principle of causality asserts the priority of cause to effect. Nietzsche points out , in what we now call deconstruction, that effect always precedes cause. This idea may not at first excite you, but after some thinking it shows that we are always first subjected to effect and have to search for a cause. Thus thinking (structuralism) is regressive in nature. These are of course expressed subtly and indirectly in the arts for the artists have little or no understanding of the philosophical premises that is guiding their contemporary thinkers. In architecture of postmodernism reversal of cause and effect or a reversal of hierarchical oppositions is seen in the works of Gehry, Israel, SITE and many more. The performances of Bruce Nauman and Nam June Paik are also examples of this hierarchical reversal of opposites. The anti-epistemological directions of postmodernism transform the world into a magical and ontologically perceived domain.
The moderns also believed that the genius of the creative artist or thinker could put forth systems for the recognition and evaluation of the world. Examples are Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss and so on, wherein the thinkers provide views and structured windows through which the world may be known. This is modern structuralism. Postmodernism, on the other hand, as Derrida and Baudrillard labor to convey, believes, much like the large wrappings and blankets of Christo covering certain landscapes, that structuralism in its attempts to know, basically knows its own methodology of knowing rather than the phenomenon. Thus the structure of knowing conceals, rather than reveal, the object of knowing.
2-Absence of originality and originary causes. Also fantastic as banal. Another dimension of deconstruction is a direct result of the failure of modernism's central premise, namely originality. Confronted with the absence of this valuable commodity artists either resort to simulations of violations of what is inviolable in nature or language or the structured genealogy of its system (i.e. a habitable building simulates a ruin or a finished building simulates an unfinished structure). Artists such as Llyn Foulkes and Francisco Clemente and writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Charles Brautigan and architects Frank Gehry and Brian Murphy all simulate the impossible as the possible. This representation of the fantastic as banal is also seen in the movies (Cocoon, Field of Dreams, etc.) where magic rather than reason guides the events. Another flank of postmodernists accepts the impossibility of being original and harps on this issue by reminding us of language's impotency to describe a real picture unless the picture itself is there and then the issue is resolved ostensively rather than linguistically. These artists such as Barbara Kruger, Nam June Paik and many others focus on the metaphysical operations of language and its eventual irrelevance to specific human experiences.