Ken
Thanks for this exegesis on Pop & Fluxus. Sad to hear how others exploited
experimental artists. I heard this also happens in mail art, but that's
another story altogether.
RA
Ken Friedman wrote:
> 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 Køpcke
> 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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>
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