Pop Art was never as simple or unified a phenomenon as it sometimes seems.
There were at least four traditions of Pop Art. One was British, one was
American, one was German, and one was international. Each had its virtues
and its drawbacks.
American Pop is often seen as a reaction to Abstract Expressionism. This is
correct in artistic terms. The development of American Pop was also a
market issue. Paintings by the Pollock generation were simply becoming too
expensive for the growing art market. Pop Art was in part a response to the
changing needs of the art market.
American Pop was bold, brash, and up-front. It had a quick take and a sharp
focus that made it easy to digest and easier still to remember. It explored
the effects of media and paid attention to them. At the same time, it
replaced consciousness with media attention.
American Pop wasn't merely simple but often simplistic, offering a
sarcastic false pragmatism in the place of the straightforward pragmatism
that has been identified as an American virtue since the first writings on
American society in the Colonial era.
Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist were perhaps the best exemplars of
American Pop. Although Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were considered
the best artists of the time during the Pop era itself, Rauschenberg was
always too esthetic and Johns too thoughtful to exemplify the tough,
cynical attitude of American Pop Art. If anything, Johns was closer to
British Pop Art.
British Pop, for those who may have forgotten, was the original Pop Art.
Pop Art began with a charming and subtle collage by Richard Hamilton and
the British art historian and critic Lawrence Alloway gave it a name.
British Pop had one major drawback in a media-inflected world. It had a
diffuse, philosophical focus. That made it hard to remember specific works
and motifs. British Pop was in great part eclipsed by American Pop in an
art world where media attention, critical attention, and even history
writing were driven by the growing New York art scene. The galleries, art
magazines and auction houses simply kept a relentless focus on the stars of
the American scene with predictable results first among collectors and then
among museums. Influential collectors reinforced the markets that
gallerists built. Museums showed the results of their influence. As went
American galleries, museums and art magazines went, so followed the
galleries, museums and magazines of Europe. The result was a continual
pattern of exhibitions and renewed attention that became to the universe of
the international art world of the 1960s and 1970s what background
radiation is to the universe.
Things were much less complicated then. New York was the unchallenged
center of the art market - and of the international art world. New York was
the unchallenged center of the global media complex. America was the
world's richest nation at a time when Europe was still recovering from the
effects of World War II. Moreover, during the Cold War, American markets
were dominant in every place where art was bought and sold.
British Pop was more than the original pop art, even so. It possessed
virtues that were absent in its American counterpart.
British Pop was philosophically subtle, genuinely ironic and it dealt with
the existential issues of the time. Often wry and complex, British Pop
sometimes seemed as literary as it was visual. The key British Pop artists
were Richard Hamilton, Malcolm Morley, David Hockney, and the American-born
R.B. Kitaj.
German Pop was far more thoughtful than either the British or the American
version. Focused both on philosophy and on media, the German Pop artists
somehow pulled off a strange balancing act that made their work both
accessible and deep. The central figure here was Gerhard Richter, but other
European artists such as Wolf Vostell, the German-born Dane Arthur K�pcke
and the German-born Icelander Dieter Roth made important contributions to
German Pop.
As with all things German, the way to lightness was sometimes heavy, and
this led to mixed messages and a confused problematic. At the same time,
German was touched by dialectical subtlety, genuine irony and deep
investigation of issues, including serious reflection on social and
political issues that was missing entirely in American Pop art.
There was also an international Pop Art. According to some, this emerged in
the form of Fluxus and happenings. Norwegian curator Per Hovdenakk was
among the first to point out in essays during the late 1980s and early
1990s.
Al Hansen and Allan Kaprow pioneered the medium of happenings in America
by. In Europe, Wolf Vostell and Milan Knizak filled that role. Today, it is
also forgotten than several Pop painters emerged from the happenings scene,
notably Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine and Red Grooms.
International Pop often took the form of Fluxus and intermedia. Where
painterly Pop made a fetish and an icon of the everyday object, Fluxus
looked into the quiet reality of everyday life and took up dense,
philosophical issues with a playful, Zen-inflected touch.
Both forms of international Pop had a tough time on the market. Happenings
were hard to sell. The street-smart, market-wise artists like Oldenburg and
Dine soon left happenings behind for painting. Artist-philosophers like
Kaprow and Hansen took other paths, Kaprow as a teacher and Hansen as the
traveling Bodhisattva of contemporary art.
Fluxus had its problems, too. One of greatest Fluxus virtues was also its
worst problem: a rigorous, almost scientific program of inventing ways to
approach art. These explorations were part of a broad intellectual project
on which many contemporary art movements and manifestations could borrow.
Given the problems associated with Fluxus, others borrowed Fluxus
innovations and projects, adapting them to many purposes while failing to
acknowledge Fluxus as the source.
Fluxus artists had a second problem. In terms of the art market, it is one
of the worst problems for which an artist can be known. Fluxus artists
tended to be so philosophically complex that they rarely made the most
marketable use of their own work. Other artists made use of their
innovations, adopting the intellectual and artistic contributions one at a
time. The artists associated with Fluxus were rarely able to benefit from
the use of their own innovations. Much of the time, other artists had
already borrowed their idea far more visibly than they themselves had
managed to do. In the art market, first past the post for visible public
credit isn't half the battle. It's nearly the whole. But beyond the
struggle for public credit on what they had invented, Fluxus people also
walked away from much of the credit that might have been theirs. The
experimental sensibility of Fluxus people was so strong that these artists
often lost interest in their own, earlier ideas and moved on.
One often hears of artists whose work has arrived before its time. This is
true enough in the art market. There is a worse problem yet. Nothing is
less forgivable to the powers that move the art market than artists who
fail to repeat their work to feed a market that demands art work after its
time has come.
Like German Pop, Fluxus and happenings often led to abstract and somewhat
confusing messages. These ambiguities made it hard to remember what was
being said. Overall, this art offered a rich vein of dialectical
investigations, as socially conscious as the German work, and often as
politically aware.
The Fluxus artists also tended to cross the boundary between art and life
that so many artists talked about. The more radical artists involved in
Fluxus crossed these boundaries in especially radical ways, among them
artists such as Joseph Beuys, Milan Knizak, Nam June Paik and Ben Vautier.
Oddly enough, these are the Fluxus artists who have had the most profound
impact on the art world, but even the more conservative, art-minded Fluxus
artists crossed the boundaries of art forms, moving with ease between
tactile, musical, theatrical, visual and literary forms.
Way back when, Bob Watts and George Brecht were even exhibited by Leo
Castelli, the high priest of American Pop. Other Fluxus people contributed
to the Pop ethos, or at least its more interesting sides.
Fluxus influenced Andy Warhol himself. His first major film was an
adaptation of a Jackson Mac Low film score in which Warhol simply
substituted a skyscraper for the tree that appears in Mac Low's score.
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management
+47 22.98.51.07 Direct line
+47 22.98.51.11 Telefax
Home office:
+46 (46) 53.245 Telephone
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