[Nietzsche Circle][Hyperion]

The Picturesque Element in American Pop Art

or The Media in Disguise

Page III

Pop Art is at the other end of the spectrum. It is an art that likes to please by presenting the images of beautiful people, attractive celebrities, and common objects.

This makes Pop artists, especially Warhol, present an idea of beauty that is mainly decorative. As such, it is an art more concerned with entertaining than with understanding what it means to be human, or overhuman.

The tragic Dionysian element that is a component of the sublime does not have any role to play in Pop Art, which prefers to present glossy images that can be easily compared to the similarly glossy photographs of magazines. The sublime demands more than a quick glance, because it explores the most profound aspects of a world in which the extraordinary and the uncommon predominate. Nor is the sublime close to the picturesque, the artistic style that finds in the present a way of gratifying the public, ready for a mitigated form of realism. However, inasmuch as Pop Art relates to a reality available to all, it cannot be considered nihilistic in the full sense of the word. That would be a negation of the human need for visual stimuli. All art, in the end, negates—to a greater or lesser degree—the potentially nihilistic tendencies of the human will. At the same time, art, whatever its style, does not and should not simplify reality. If truth is destructive, art’s function is to attenuate the impact of destructive, abysmal truths. Tragic art, then, although not salvific to the end, represents a response to life’s extreme experiences.

Thus, art is future oriented and has a salutary role to play in life even when it causes distressing feelings to the viewer. Self-congratulatory art may be satisfying for a given artist, but it reveals the weakness of its conception. It will not be remembered for long, and the future will not sanction it. Although Pop Art narrates its own time, and so lacks a specific futural dimension, it will most likely continue to captivate the public because it—like the eighteenth-century Picturesque art—speaks of a significant historical period that addresses a class of people in search of reassuring, recognizable, and pleasant emotions. By addressing a wide public, Pop Art presents a conventional side that coincides with its chosen themes; yet, its images are convincing in that they present beauty in its manifest artificiality rather than in its less inventive forms.

Having examined the affinities between the categories of the sublime and of the Dionysian, we can still consider Pop Art not so much as a decadent form of art but as the result of an encounter between rhetoric and directness. This art only touches upon some of the aspects of the sublime that were prevalent in the past, especially in the nineteenth century, so it is worthwhile to ask why such repudiation of the sublime is the result of a change in the role of the artists themselves, who, in a society already flooded by media images, add those of their own making. By presenting what is already given in society, Pop Art is a period style that disowns the Dionysian sublime. It changes the traditional canons of high art to include and extol the well-known aspects of a society fascinated by artificiality. It also adds a sophisticated touch that distinguishes its works from the represented objects.

The Picturesque landscape paintings of the past and the picturesque of Pop Art’s “transfigured” billboards are indicative of the human inventiveness that has appropriated nature in the former case and industry in the latter. As an artistic movement, Pop Art is an expression of these artists’ attachment to a specific place and world in which they feel at ease because they have chosen a popular, reassuring, and non-elitist style. Such an approach does not detract from their originality, which is apparent in both their techniques and subject matter. A Brillo box on a silkscreen is not exactly the same Brillo box that a customer buys in a store; at the same time, reiterating that image is a way of bringing to mind the repeated gestures of customers who habitually purchase that same product.

Repetition, which is the opposite of novelty and of renewal, is, however, an old topos, a mythical element that may sound incongruous if applied to Pop Art. But this mythical theme is reminiscent of rituals that are not extraneous to popular culture. What emerges, then, is a persuasive mannerism ingrained in a world that is not in the making, that does not look at the future. Such mannerism suggests a utopia that considers itself already realized and, as a consequence, reiterates itself in the conviction that there is little else to express other than the polished, and at times gloomy, events displayed for the benefit of a public that fully participates in its own time.

William Butler Yeats’ famous saying “a terrible beauty is born” does not apply to Pop Art, but would, instead, apply to the Dionysian, where the terrible mingles with the unexpected, and the sublime mingles with the mesmerizing awareness that an unrepeatable fusion of compelling emotions has been experienced. Pop Art’s response to the sublime is a polite detachment even in the face of disasters. Tragedies happen, but their touched-up photographic images have already been seen so many times that they do not elicit surprise or shock, even though they may be viewed with disquiet. History itself is a spectacle.

Pop Art differs from the sublime even when depicting themes that have a tragic resonance in the world, such as the silkscreen photographs of Jacqueline Kennedy after the murder of her husband. Similarly, the oversize paintings of James Rosenquist, who mixes the banal—a lipstick—with a war plane, are saying that high and low themes can coexist, with the consequence that the tragic loses its particular character of being terrible. Still, to be admired is the broad range of Warhol’s themes, from portraits, flowers, and Brillo boxes to his acrylics and silkscreens known as “Disaster” or “Catastrophe” works. His movies must also be mentioned as representing an additional artistic activity that made him the most accomplished representative of the Pop Art movement.

But considering now the overall significance of Warhol’s “Disaster” silkscreens, we find them puzzling and difficult to reconcile with his better-known works. It is difficult to detect in them any emotional participation: they are cold and icily detached. These images, such as the electric chair in bright green and orange, or the explosion of an atomic bomb repeated many times, seem little more than documents on the silkscreens. There is no participation, no frenzied passion. Although they speak of tragic events, they do not elicit strong emotions.

If music is the most sublime and Dionysian of all the arts, paintings also can be sublime. Those of Caspar David Friedrich not only represent nature in its dreadful and tempestuous aspects, they are also remarkable because the human figures are invariably seen from the back—the faces are never visible. The figures appear to be saying that the face is not in itself as sublime as nature can be; the face can only be beautiful. Indeed, one can hardly imagine a painting of a movie star from the back. As such she would no longer be what she is. By being unrecognizable, she would lose her public, and personal, attributes.

The celebrities so often portrayed by Warhol give pleasure just by looking at them; and pleasure has been the response to picturesque artworks for centuries. In the case of Warhol’s portraits, the pleasure is double: The movie stars are beautiful to look at, and in addition they remind the viewers of the entertaining films they have seen and admired. This additional element makes Pop Art even more innocuous, and in doing so it dissociates itself from the tragic to embrace a conception of beauty that sweetens and does not raise doubts about the predominance of the Self. By relating to a social reality and expressing their participation in it with a touch of picturesque artistic means, these painters combine art and life, art and movies, and thus highlight desirable and sometimes irreverent images that remain within the limits of their own period style. In other words, Pop Art is an art that rejects a philosophical stance, in that it is anti-intellectual by definition. It is popular and superficial in the sense that it dwells on the surface of things, their appearance, whether depicting consumer objects or commenting on contemporary events. Still, the human tendency to simplify could be approached in a less frivolous, playful manner.

To determine what is important to art, so that the endeavors of artists become relevant to the public, it is appropriate to ascertain how art has changed in the course of history. Philosophers ask themselves this question, and in a Nietzschean aesthetic vein, one can conclude, perhaps temporarily, that the sublime is going through a crisis from which it has not yet emerged. Putting Pop Art in a historical context, it becomes clear that it mainly addresses themes limited to the glorification of the present. As such it seems to be an isolated phenomenon, circumscribed in a given geographical area, and that, from the strict aesthetic viewpoint, has not brought about momentous future developments. Even so, the overall assessment of this style cannot be entirely negative in that it brought with it a new colorful vivacity, and had the courage to present ideas and new images to a general public that, in the 1960s, was untouched by art. At the time of the Picturesque art of the eighteenth century something similar had happened, but given the distance in time, the specific contents and images of their paintings were bound to be different.

Favoring the prosaic and the corporeal, no object is lost, and with a hint of irony and satire these artists oscillate between the two opposing moods of the serious and the facetious without adopting either posture entirely. In this respect, Pop Art is more intellectual than it might appear at first, even though it remains within the boundaries of the immediate and the immanent. In this sense, it looks neither beyond itself nor at “auratic” manifestations.

These artists are at one with their world and with the advantages offered by urban life. It is living in an urban community that has favored the development of Western art, whether symbolic, classical, or romantic. In the case of Pop artists, the industrialized urban environment predominates to such an extent that nature loses its relevance in favor of narratives that relate to the world through the mediation of the media. Schiller’s lament that timeless nature had disappeared to make room for artificiality is true even now, and consistently, Pop artists glorify it to the point of no return.

As mentioned, Pop Art’s chosen themes spring from specific ideas about the home and the city, places that can be so abstract that it is unnecessary to add to them a metaphorical dimension. By insisting on themes reminiscent of domesticity and the quotidian, Pop artists contributed to a change in the sensibility of the public, but its overall significance is related to a way of life that has no resemblance to the chaotic, sublime Dionysian world, nor to the formless chaos of primordial times prior to the Demiurge. Considering that the sublime is one of the “forms” of the über, Pop Art remains within the domain of the human without venturing “beyond,” even though it does not limit itself to portraying joyful visages or to painting commercial items.

Its originality rests on the fact that it broke with tradition in more ways than one. Indeed, it took courage to paint the “portraits” of a Campbell’s soup can or a Brillo box as Warhol did, and no less courage then to tell the public that art is renewable with some degree of novelty. In order to bring forth novelty, it was crucial to present in a new way familiar experiences and themes, and to bring to fruition the formal aspects necessary for any art to be taken into consideration. Pop Art’s images satisfy the basic desires of “normal” viewers—a well-established, yet captivating familiarity that satisfies their desire, most likely subconscious up to that moment, to have their taste elevated to the rank of art. This is why the collective aspect of this art makes it not only picturesque but also typical. There is something typical in these artists, even in the less typical ones of this “school,” because they typify a social reality in such a way that the images brought to the surface are not only accessible, they are also persuasive because they “speak” a casual and even redundant language. The results resemble what is broadcasted in the media; glamour, publicity, portraits, sexuality, violence, and politics are deliberately presented to the public in a matter-of-fact manner to the exclusion of the sublime, which would be too dangerously close to the Dionysian.

Pop Art, with all its pleasant traits, sends a message of enjoyment and even cheerfulness, but its impact must not make us forget that beauty had known better times, by which I mean that Pop Art has brought about a simplification of the concept of beauty. To a great extent, if looked at historically, Pop Art has eclipsed the aspiration to the sublime, which brings to art the highest level of intensity. To back away from the sublime indicates a loss of totality, both in art and philosophy, and, perhaps, in life itself. What prevails now, instead, is the fragmentary nature of reality, or if not of reality per se, of the way it is lived. A totalizing view of reality and a subsequent totalizing narrative are hardly in sight, even though what is in wait for us in the future is only an object of speculation.

But leaving aside a final verdict on history, art history, and philosophy, it remains true that the concept and the ideal of artistic beauty are still with us. It has become a matter of mere enjoyment and not so much—or not any longer—a crucial value for every artist. Artistically, the tragic has still a role to play, but so has the comic. Pop Art stands in-between the tragic and the comic without being either. It is an outlook that puts the viewer in an ambiguous frame of mind, since Pop Art is an invitation to play with images and word ad libitum.

Whereas the sublime can leave us speechless, Pop Art encourages us to recognize the newly established interchangeability of words and images. This last aspect of Pop Art is a contribution to the art scene of the present, characterized by a passion for videos, photography, and installations. Even without calling for a predetermined reaction from the viewer, Pop artists advocate an art that is indefinitely accompanied by pre-established commonplace desires. Their motto could have been “repetita iuvant.” A suitable maxim, and highly applicable to our contemporary, organized society.

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, April 2009)

To download the entire essay, Open PDF: | “The Picturesque Element in American Pop Art”

| page up |