POP ART: ROY LICHTENSTEIN IS NOW!

POP ART: ROY LICHTENSTEIN IS NOW! By John G. Kays First Edition

*(Note: I keep saying to myself that I will rewrite this piece & make it better. I never seem to get around to doing that, so i`ll just give it to you in its lumpy state.)

'The insistent dramas of love and war interest Lichtenstein less than ‘the formal problem…Once I`ve established what the subject matter is going to be, I`m not interested in that…I think of it as abstract painting when I do it .Half the time they`re upside-down anyway when I work’. Most Pop Art is essentially emblematic in its conjunction of word and image. Lichtenstein shares with ‘post-painterly abstraction’ his enlarged scale, broad flat forms on colour fields, carefully depersonalized line, reductive composition, and expanded forms that seem to exist beyond the framing edge.' Pop Art-page 125-Lucy R. Lippard

I like to walk around the Austin Museum of Art fairly quickly and glance at all of the prints in order to get a pristine impression. I love the Lightning Bolt Banner Felt from 1966 and the Explosion from the portfolio lithograph from 1967.Lichtenstein was daring, innovative and defiant. He is seemingly anti-intellectual, cartoon-like, but at second glance reshaping images from the past to ‘something new!’ How can a catalog image be so unusual…Seven Apple woodcut Series simple and fresh. Apple and Lemon looks real as if you could eat it. Pyramids from 1969 an Egyptian lithograph clear and direct. Cathedral and Haystack Series laughs in the face of Monet…Seuratesque and yet not. Modern Head series from 1970 gets more and more abstract….

The American Experience through Roy Lichtenstein is an intensively narcissistic voyage ; he takes you on a winding boat ride past the collective ephemera of Americana; it is shimmering like a lit-up, neon-glowing Times Square on New Years Eve! Roy invented Pop Art, perhaps subconsciously, in concert with several other likely heroes, traditional listings include: Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and Claes Oldenburg. He attempted something novel and fresh and invented new techniques of expression by combining alternative printing media; he defied the ISMs but was studied in the printing craft and practiced the wisdom of ‘know thy enemy.’ The processes of printing confidently defines the content; I can only intuit this not prove it, although here is some reinforcement. ‘Everyone had to agree with Greenberg when he declared that “Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cezanne, derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in. The excitement of their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors”.- Pop Art by KlausHonnef-page 14. An element of mechanization existed in this new form and the idealism of Abstract Expressionism was abandoned. Content, per se, was secondary for Pop Art, but in the context of the 1960s the popular masses freely contrived meaning and/or symbolism within its frames. Ironically, these artists picked the most prosaic of materials, brillo boxes come to mind, then the audience sublimated these items as icons worthy of worship; this indulgence was unbeknoweth to Roy and Andy and Tom. The masses longed to glorify secular images, suc h as Chairman Mao, Elvis, or Liz Taylor for no particular reason other than their sheer elusive star magnetism or lack of it. This carried over in Pop Music where people would see extraordinary meaning in lyrics-you may remember the controversy surrounding the Kingsmen`s smash hit Louis Louis. The popularity of Pop Art is hard to explain, but perhaps people needed a sensational relief from monotony of daily life.

Still colliding downward from the happening of Pop Art…churnin` & yearnin`, yawnin` & dawnin`, rippin` & trippin`, thinking` & blinkin` Lincoln…where did you go Peter Blake?. Feel the energy rushing to my toes! Bought the lumber, picked up the art catalog, photographed the Roy prints, had visions of its outcome, went to Walgreens and created 25 pristine prints, trimmed and mounted them on maple, used about half a tube of 16 ounce Elmer`s, stirred two tubs of acrylic latex paint, one deep blue, the other off yellow, then used a stick and dripped oodles of pain-paint, undulating randomly, on the wood plate, glued two Andy Warhol refrigerator magnets on the surface, glued three randomly self-made Roy snaps on afterwards, including my favorite of Chairman Mao (an evil tyrant), tossed it right in the center…Will touch it up with acrylic paint dabbles and will call it a day. Purchased a two-inch stencil at the Hobby Lobby and plastered the logo to the top of the wood. Pop Art is now, wow, cow, unplanned, nerve-taxing, spiritual, a dichotomy of plagiarism and spontaneity, reaching for the stars but not getting there, pretty paper with poetry & pomp or circumstance, pusillanimous pussyfooters puffy and percolating… no-wheres-ville that is sparkling and catchy, will make you famous, will make you rich, will titillate the crowds, shown in the street galleries, forever young and alive! Good lovin`, goodness gracious great balls of fire, great Caesar`s ghost, and the Virgin of the Guadalupe, all in one bundle, visits us daily! Need to meltdown from pungent AGED SUMATRA Lingtong Peaberry Blue Batak bean soon! Let go, uptight out of sight, chitty chitty bang bang, coffee beans roll across your taste buds and paint pours on cloth in random patterns of crystal clear inspiration…huh!! What! Who says! Will beaucoup layer-cake `til the end of time! Blue Meanies yank you away to concentration camps for the incorrigible IF kids…which is just about anyone who likes to be free…see what I mean, I am paranoid `cuz the ‘American Dream’ is in peril, and I don`t want to be swept away in a maelstrom ….I like the world of the early sixties and try to remain there. Read this and be free. Free you, free me…censorship is not to be! Okay…I got a little carried away, this is not journalism. Maybe I will be more analytical tomorrow…but who really is going to care? Final product Luv Pop Art and rocks your world my pretty?

Moonscape (from 11 Pop Artists, Vol I), 1965 is an early screenprint that is dreamy and very blue and suggests a romantic, untamed world where the universe is in fluctuation, with undulating plasmas and gases in motion. Things are a bit balmy like a London fog o`er the Thames or a perfect storm brewing in the Florida Keyes. Van Gogh`s Starry Night surfaces, but this is more of an earth science thing that includes bubbling lava and some cacophonous skies of an angry Zeus spitting out torrent- pellet moisture in an isolated speck of the shoreline…in no particular point on the globe. I walked by it several times and returned with glee, but was shrouded with blues and raw energy, primordial feelings of forlornness and misgiving. This work led to Lichenstein`s tendency to publish whole portfolios of prints that would be one continuous series, that show the stages of the process. His model here is the Impressionist master Claude Monet, who liked to capture on canvas different measures of daylight reflecting on, say a cathedral or a haystack. Roy too alters common images through synthetic stages that mutate a popular icon a million-fold until it becomes a rather transformed creature. Like the Warhol Marilyns, it becomes its own object of worship. For me, this is the way that matter decomposes and changes in a possibly scientific and/or historical fashion, sometimes organic and often man-made. I do not need to know every nuance of Roy`s method to see what he is up to. Roy disguises plagiarism through crafty mutations that alter popular cartoon graphics and catalog snaps into new being; he does it with humor and panache extraordinary! He is the most original plagiarist ever, an oxymoron that works for him!

‘One two three four five six seven, all good children go to heaven. One two three four five six seven, all good children go to heaven. Pop anthems come from Pop art too. Batman lunch kits and cape crusaders costumes adorn my collection. Pop art entertains, it cajoles, it caresses, it flirts with the icons of posterity, it teases and pleases…sends us skyward, we`re Superman flying through outer space on his way to nowhere? Borrows from want ads, purloins sneakily from magazines, mocks the Abstract Expressions who mock the Impressionists…Pop! Bam! Zapp! Whish! You are in the Now, the in-crowd of the cow! Lucy Lippard is evangelical art critic for Pop art…her 1966 book Pop Art a dictionary of definition for me. The eyes are assaulted with absurdity. Rhythms are broken, calculus comes in play, an` extra texture is all around. Andy loves cows, Roy loves cows. Anti-war message in the blast of bombs! Brushstrokes are the DNA of an artist. ’

Paintings Series: Two Paintings: Beach Ball, 1984 catches the eye then tosses it to some giggling zephyrs blowing confusion boats pall mall to distant lands. The top image is an anti-cubist girl, the remnants of an earlier cartoon girl, possibly the one Girl With Ball, 1961, that launched Roy Lichtenstein to fame. I have been fond of this one for years, and use the postcard as a bookmarker. In Pop Art by Lucy Lippard, a very helpful primer on this subject, you can see the clipping from the resort section of the Sunday New York Times, 1963, where Roy got his idea for Girl With Ball. In the 1984 version she is abstract and resembles a Picasso, but the beach ball is recognizable and the frame is prominent bordered by diagonal lines that are reflected within the frame as well. The frame is part of the total work; it is as if we are staring at two painting in an arbitrary gallery, and our imperfect eyes can only see two portions of the respective pieces; the subjectivity of viewing art is suggested as a twist of larkish lime.

‘In Lichtenstein the prosaic becomes the profound; that is. there is no message, just a visual image to latch on to. There is no message in a bottle, no metaphor, no symbol, just a fun little construction project. Is there some subliminal voice beaming from the canvas?…no! The images are not real…the Rouen Cathedral has been done before…the Haystack Series has been done before…the bulls get more and more abstract…the Pyramids are not from the Old Kingdom…no real human being lives in the Interior Series… the couches are unreal, the lamps are mirages from an Industrial catalog…the painting fakes…the reflections in the mirror illusions of the mind…why does Roy make these prints? Because THAT IS WHY HE IS ON THIS EARTH!’

Reflections Series: Reflections on Conversation, 1990 uses a number of printing modes, including lithograph, screenprint, woodcut, and metalized PVC collage with embossing. The signature Benday dot pattern is employed as well. Just how Roy combined these media remains a mystery for mr presently. The observer is peeping into a room where a couple is talking, possibly through Venetian blinds, so there is an element of scandal or compromise. That is, we feel particularly guilty, because we are intruders to the singular intimacy that prevails. I immediately thought of the movie The Conversation with Gene Hackman, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, that expresses the paranoia of electronic surveillance via the Watergate scandal of that time. We feel guilty because we are doing something that we should not be doing; we are Peeping Toms to a piece of art, now isn`t that funny? The Reflections Series has been portrayed as a narcissistic indulgence where Roy and the viewer are misremembering his early cartoon pieces. In this light, we are looking into the past, and maybe experiencing a dialogue about art and hence where one may travail in the bigger picture of things. One interpretation is that we are looking into a window of the past and witnessing the actual finalized plans for Art and its history! It is an inside joke for those that are on a pedestal, such as the New York school.

Cubist Cello, 1997 is just a screenprint and this is print 41 of an edition of 75; sure wish I owned one! This would come in the same year that Roy died, and so evokes a stack of experience and expression, a crescendo to a fruitful career in print production. It take the shape of a collage with profiles of a woman, a musician, a bird, and a cow, all staring in disparate directions, all unaware of each other, yet they miraculously impersonate an oddball ensemble…a platoon of hummingbird harmony. There is an abundance of balance here, the lines define simple objects in space, the dots and stripes are measured out in equal quantities, and the colors are simple yet faded, but the lines are sharp and suggest separate planes in space. The question arises: why are animals and musicians together here? The answer is for NO real reason at all. The cello instrument presides right in the center, and a portion of a flute player occupies the lower left-hand corner. The cellist with the marine-blue cap strikes the strings with bow while the merry flutist blows melody into the pipes. It is anti-cubist, anti-Picasso…but pays tribute with irony and gusto to that school of art. Its narcissism to the history of art is pungent, yet it`s delicate and catchy, defiant and funny, teeming with tones and geometric fragments…melodies and pastels sing out against colliding mathematical design, shades of earthen brown and grays, the lightest of yellows. Benday dots, bars and stripes…contours of mental memories; the band plays on. The Andantino of Symphony No. 3 by Aaron Copland is piping in my ears as I drink the cello print and remember its placement on the wall at the Austin Museum of Art. The composition is sound and classic, centered and serene; its methods are both in check with the ISMs of art school and in defiance towards them, a rejection of the past yet a winking to its inkings!

There`s a black hole in my soul but Roy makes it better. I`m supposed to report to Mr. Bellamy, I wonder what he`s like. Pop art is just intended to titillate, nectar for the eye…please enjoy my Luv Pop Art, I can do it too. Just innocence, a narcotic effect. Buy American People!