?

op Art is: Popular

lesigned for a mass
tldience)· Transient
'short-term solution)·
=xpendable (easily­
-rgotten) · Low cost·
lass produced· Young
aimed at youth). Witt~-
~exy· Gimmicky·
~lamorous· Big
usiness· This is just the
• •
~eglnnlng ...
- "'~ " ; "1! L ,,;, ~ r to Al i son and Pe t er Smithson , 16 J an ua ry 1957
]n t he beginning Pop artwas an Anglo­
Am erican affairthatthrived in the latitudes
of London, New York and Los Angeles, the
primary capitals oftheconsumer society
that developed in the West after World War II.
Originally 'Pop' referred to this popular
culture at large, not to any particular style of
art. The term was first used in this general
sense in the early 1950S by the Independent
Group (I.G.) in London, a motley milieu of
y'o ung artists, architects and critics (chiefly
Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham, Toni del

enzio, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson,

Jo hn McHale, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison
and Peter Smithson and William Turnbull),
w ho explored the implications of popular
culture as a dissident movementwithin the
Institute of Contemporary Arts, which was
otherwise focused on the legacies of pre-war modernis ms .
Only in the later 1950S and early 1960s did 'Pop' begin to
signify a style of art that drew on popular imagery from
co m i c s, ad ve rt is em e n ts and the I; ke. It was a p p lied i nt h i s
specific manner first to former I.G. artists such as H am ilto
and Paolozzi and then to a subsequent generation of Britis
artists trained mostly at the Royal College ofArt (primarily
Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty, Patrick Caulfiel d
David Hockney, Allen Jones, R.B. Kitaj, Richard Smith and
Joe Tilson) and ofAmerican artists based mostly in N ew
York (chiefJy Allan D'Arcangelo, Jim Di ne, Robert Indiana ,
Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Mel Ramos, James
Rosenquist, AndyWarhol, John Wesley and Tom
Wesselmann). Other figures sometimes associated with
the style emerged at this time in France (e.g., Arman, Al ai
Jacquet, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri) and a little later i n
Los Angeles (e.g., Billy AI Bengston, Joe Goode, Ed Rusc ha
and i n G e r man y (e. g., G e r h a r d Ric h t e r, Si g mar Pol ke) . 1

However, these artists often diverged from the first two

waves of Pop artists, especially from their mostly affi rma t i\'e
posture vis-a-vis consumer society.2
The contexts of Pop art were different enough in the U n ite
Kingdom and the United States alone. In the early 1950S
 · ai ~ remained in a state of economic austerity that made the brash world ofAmerican
c s meris m appear seductive and exotic and I.G. artists treated its images accordingly,
: a: is, as so much cult cargo . For the American artists who emerged ten years later, this
: : s meri st landscape had become almost second nature and they often treated it
s~2 ssionately ('the death ofaffect' is an important topic in Pop art) . This difference
erspective underwrote others. The Brits were attracted to new commodities as
-:=' TDin gers ofthe future, while the Americans sometimes represented products that were
-_ g Iy dated, al ready touched by nostalgia . And wh i Ie both grou ps were trai ned in art
ols, several Americans also worked as commercial artists: Warhol was an acclaimed
ra o r, Rosenquist a billboard painter, Ruscha a graphic designer and so on - and
- seemed to transfer such techniques to their art rather directly. As might be expected,
:re ,Warh ol and company faced some resistance from an art world dedicated to the lofty
i les ofAbstract Expressionism and yet the opposition encountered by I.G. artists

~s eeper still. For British Pop was a 'long front' in a general war between new and old

: : res while American Pop was already at home, so to speak, in the commercial look

~ e land, if not in the restricted discourse ofthe art world. 3 (The Los Angeles evoked

-ch a, for example, appears as ifit were always already Pop.)

at unites the different strands of Pop art might be found right here as well: in
o n recognition that consumerism had changed the appearance ofthe world,
aps even the nature of appearance, and that art must draw on new contents and
::: elo p new forms accordingly. (I ronicaliy, this imperative came at a moment when
a: s ract art had won general acceptance forthe firsttime - another point of resentment
some artists and critics opposed to Pop.) Semblance as such appeared to be mediated
;: Pop found its primary subject in this new look ofthe world, in an iconic visibilitythat
2 _ J eared to transform select people and products into so many personalities with
: :;lecial powers. The consumerist superficiality ofimages and seriality ofobjects also
affected the mediums of painting and sculpture structurally
and Pop registers these alterations as well. For instance,
much Pop painting manifests an utterconflation ofthe
painterly and photographic, the handmade and the ready­
made, in which the modernist opposition ofabstraction
and figuration is also greatly complicated. For all its visual
immediacy, the typical Pop image is usually produced through
various transfers of images and mediums (usually from
magazines, comics or news photos to painting, collage or
assemblage) that involves still othertechniques (such as
projectors and sil kscreen s) in a com plex layering ofdifferent
sources, formats and effects. juxtaposition remains central,
but the Pop image rarely possesses the material hetero­
geneity of a Dadaist collage (e.g., a Kurt Schwitters) or a Neo­
Dadaist assemblage (e .g., a Robert Rauschenberg) . Often in
Pop art collage is rendered photographic, painterly or both at
once: a diversity ofi mage might be maintained, but usually
within a consistency of surface.
The greatest achievement of Pop art lies in its various
transformations ofthe pictorial image under the pressure
ofsocio-economic changes at large. Here, then, 1will focus
on a few models ofthe Pop image developed by key artists
from the early 1950S to the early 1970S. Such a view comes
with its own costs, such as a scantingofsome painters (e.g.,
Blake, Hockney, Rosenquist, Wesselmann) and a bracketing
of all object-makers (e.g., Arman , Dine, Oldenbu rg, Spoerri);
but the gain in concentration may compensate a little for the
loss in coverage (certainly such figures are represented
elsewhere in the book). What 1propose is a partial typology
ofthe Pop image, not a comprehensive history of Pop art as
such. Mydiscussion is alsoframedwith brief remarks on
design, since Pop emerges in a new space ofcult ural
presentation entailed by a new mode ofeconomic produc­
tion. Near the begin n ing ofthe period, the I.G. ri ngleader
Reyner Banham imagined a Pop architecture as a radical
updating ofthe modern design ofthe 'First Machine Age'
under the changed conditions of a 'Second Mac hin e Age'
in which 'imageability' becomes the principal criterion_
And near the end ofthe period, the designers Robert Ve- : /
and Denise Scott Brown, who were influenced by Pop a. _
advocated a postmodern architectu re that returned th is
imageability to the built environment from which it arose_ ~.
effect Pop exists in the interval between those two morrer :o ­
between the decline of modern art and architect ure o n lC " C" ;:
hand and the rise of postmodern art and architectu re 0"" :" '=
other. Distinctive in its own right, Pop is thus also a CJU
between two great epochs oftwentieth-century cu lture.
Reyner Banham, the Independent Group and Pop Design
1n [\1 ovemberl956 the I.G. arch itects AI ison a nd Pete r
Smithson published an essay that included a little poe"'­
of early Pop: '[Walter] Gropius wrote a book on gra in si ~ _
Le Corbusier one on aeroplanes and Charlotte Pe rria
brought a new object to the office every morning; bu ite:::"
we collect ads.' The point here is more polemical tha
historical (Gropius, Le Corbusier and Perriand were as:;.
media-savvy). The Smith sons want to mark a di fferer,ce.
to open up a space: they, the old protagonists of moae rr ' ~­
design, were cued by functional things, while we, the roe
celebrants of Pop cu Iture, look to 'the throw-away obje
the pop-package' for inspiration. This is done partly I ~ : e'~ -­
the Smithsons suggest, and partly in desperatio n: 'Toc a'
are being edged out of our traditional role [as form- give r 5: .:;
the new phenomenon ofthe popular arts - adve rti sing ._
must somehow get the measure ofthis intervention if Yo ': .:i'c
to match its powerful and exciting impulses wi th auro
Th is was one battle cry of the 1ndependent Group, \', :>!:: ­
formed as an informal laboratory dedicated to cultural
research through private seminars and public exhibi: 'cf 5
The seminars focused on the effects of science, tech no'Gt:
and media, while the exhibitions consisted ofcollabo rat\ e
displays ofoften found images and objects, where the i d e ~5
..:. ::- = _:::;fO in th e seminars were put into practice. The crucial
5 vere 'Parallel of Life and Art', directed by Paolozzi,
-- ::. - ....- · ~ -son s and Henderson in 1953; 'Man, Machine and
-~ = •orod uced by Hamilton in 1955; and, most famously,
- , sc '50 orrow', which grouped artists , architects and
..:.= : ::: "'€ in twelveteams in 1956. By this timethe I.G. had
~-.: ~ C ' leSS dissolved in order that its members might
=:= :: ooth eirwork individually. In January 1957, two months
=..:..= -" eSmithsons published 'ButTodayWeCollectAds',
- =~ : responded with a letter that sum med up the
:,,: "c.errsofth e I.G.: 'technological imagery' (as explored
achin e and Motion'), 'automobile styling'
a-s £ressed by Banham), 'ad images' (as investigated by
::-,,_~ :::-: . cH ale and the Smithsons), 'Pop attitudes in
_ .. . . c design' (as exemplified by the House ofthe Future
-: :: :::5 = :>yth e Smithsons in 1956) and 'the Pop Artj
:. gybackground' (the entire I.G., especially in
arrow') 8
~ '" .G. is known for its clai m that these different
; YnS'on s are roughly equal in value, that culture is no
_ ",era ierarc hical 'pyramid' of high and low arts, but rather
-' r ::- ::0 a l 'continuum' ofcultural practices. 9 This quasi­
0-: r. x>logical view, which anticipates some aspects of
. :..<;1s di es today, was championed in print by Alloway,
..=. _ _ 0 larized the term Pop, as well as by Banham, who
- ~ :: .: :.ed a Pop Age.,oThis egalitarianism ofthe I.G.
~= e both the elitist notion of civilization (as represen­
.= J e nn eth Clark) and the academic status of modernism
;:5 re =resented by Herbert Read); it also rejected the
.".... : rren ta l regard for a folk worker culture (as represented
: - . ' : ard Hoggart). 'American films and magazines werethe
e cultu re we knew as kids,' Banham once remarked of
~, .G. associates. 'We returned to Pop in the early fifties like
.3<="' ~ "' 5 going to Dublin orThomases to Uaregub, back to our
~: e literature, our native arts .'" This comment captures
~ :: :>arad ox ofl.G. members: they launched a return to
_ _ "'f
American Pop as if it were their mother-tongue and in doing
so they signalled the partial displacement of ,folk' by 'Pop' as
the basi s of a com mon cu Iture." For better or worse, the I.G.
was near enough to this American culture to know it well, but
also distant enough to desire it still, with the result that they
did not question it much. And th is appa rent paradox poi nts
to another also indicated by Banham: that the group was both
'American-leaning' and 'Left-orientated'.'l
'We have already entered the Second Machine Age,'
Banham wrote in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age
(1960), 'and can look back on the First as a period ofthe
past."4In this classic study, first conceived as a dissertation in
the midst ofthe I.G., Banham also exploited his distance from
the initial framers of modern design such as Gropius, Le
Corbusier, Siegfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner (his
advisor at the Cou rtauld Institute). He challenged the
rationalist biases ofthese figures - that form must follow
function andjortechnique-and recovered other imperatives,
especially Expressionistand Futuristones, neglected by
them. In doing so Banham advanced the imagingof
technology as a principal criterion fordesign - ofthe First
Machine Age certainly, but also ofthe Second Machine
(or First Pop) Age. According to Banham, the modernists
had taken the machine as a model of modern architec­
ture, only to smuggle in a classical aesthetic in the
process - a move evident, for example, in Vers une
architecture (1923) where Le Corbusier juxtaposed a Delage
sports-car with the Pa rthenon. For Banham th is was abs u rd:
cars are Futurist 'vehicles of desire', not Platon ic type-objects,
and only a designer who thri lied to the machine as 'a sou rce of
personal fulfillment and gratification' could capture its spirit.'s
In th is regard Banham the Pop prophet was not at odd s
with Banham the revisionary modernist. In the 1920S and
1930S a passion for an industrial America ofFordist produc­
tion had influenced much modernist art and architecture;
in the 1950S and 1960s this was gradually supplanted by
a fascination with a consumerist America of imagistic impact,
sexy packagi ng and speedy tu rnover that was inci piently post­
Fordist. These qualities became the design criteria ofthe Pop
Agefor Banham. Far from academic, then, his revision of
architectural priorities sought to reclaim an 'aesthetic of
expendability', first proposed in Futurism, forthe Pop Age,
where 'standards hitched to permanency' were no longer so
relevant.'6 More than any other critic, Banham led design
theory away from a modern ist concern with abstract,
machinic forms to a Pop language ofcommercial, mediated
images and this was in keeping with a shift in influence away
from the architect as a consultant in industrial production
to the ad-man as ani nstigator ofconsu merist desi re o'The
foundation stone ofthe previous intellectual structure of
Design Theory has cru mbled.' Banham wrote in 1961; 'there
is no longer universal acceptance ofArchitecture as the
universal analogyofdesign."7
Yet Banham did not regard the passage from the First to
the Second MachineAge as a complete break: 'The cultural
revol ution that took place arou nd 1912 has been superseded',
he wrote in Theory and Design, 'but it has not been reversed." 8
Rather, a dialectical transformation of technologies had
occurred: from 'the age of power from the mai ns and the
reduction of machines to human scale' (as in the transition
from public trains to private automobiles) to 'the age
ofdomestic electronics and synthetic chemistry' (as in
televisions and plastics), technologies had become both
more popular and more personal. 'A housewife alone often
dis poses of more horsepower today than an industrial worker
did at the beginning ofthe century,' Banham argued. '9And
if arch itectu re was to remai n relevant in this world - where
the dreams ofthe austere 1950S had become the products of
the consumerist 1960s - it had to 'match the design of
expendabilia in functional and aesthetic performance': it
had to go POp. 20
Initially Banham supported the Brutalist architecture of the
Smith sons and James Stirling, who pushed given materials
and exposed structure to a 'bloody-minded' extreme.
'Brutalism tries to face up to a mass production society', the
Smithsons wrote in 1957, 'and drag a rough poetry out of the
confused and powerful forces which are at work.' '' Yet perhaps
this very insistence on an 'as found ' aesthetic rendered
Brutalism too modernist to serve for long as the model style
of the Pop Age. As the Swinging Sixties unfolded (in part
d riven by the tech nological investments ofthe La bo ur
Government under Harold Wilson), Banham bega n to StI__ _
imageability and expendibility above all other values. For
Banham Archigram (Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, De nni s
Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and Michael Web:)
best fitted this revised bill and in 1963 th is adventu rous g.u ..
did proclaim 'throwaway arch itectu re' as the futu re of d.es~g'"
Archigram took 'the capsule, the rocket , the bathyscope. : ~ ~
Zipark [and] the handy-pak' as its models" and cele brate
technology as a 'visually wild rich mess of piping and r :;;
c
and struts and cat-walks'.') Its projects might appear
functionalist-the Plug-in City (1964) proposed an i mrr. e ~"5"
framework in which parts could be changed accord ing lO
or desire - but, finally, with its 'rounded corners, hip, g~ ,.
synthetic colou rs [and] pop-cultu re props', Archigram was ­
the im age business'. '4 Like the Fu n Palace project (1961-5-;
proposed by Cedric Price for the Theatre Workshop ofJ o ~ "
Littlewood, Plug-in City offered 'an image-starved world a · _
vision ofthe city of the futu re, a city of
components ... plugged into netwo rk s a'l;}
grids' .'1 Herein lies the ultimate impe ra t~e u'
Pop design for Ban ham: that it not only eA:J r= =, ~
contemporary technologies but als o ad .cre e
them, however delirious the effects m ign: =---=
Richard Hamilton and the Tabular Image
Ifthe Smithsons, Archigram and Price 'got the me as ure'
of Pop cultu re in arch itectu re, who did so in art~ What ar: s.c _
reflected on the shift from an ind ustri al vocabu la ry of'~ra .­
silos and aeroplanes' to a consumerist idiom of 'throwa .... ~ .
objects and pop-packages ' ? One I.G. member 'to co l l e~ ~~
early on was Eduardo Paolozzi, who called the co ll ages ~ ;:~
from his collection oHragments ' Bunk' - perhaps in ar
ambivalent homage to Henry Ford, who once rem arkea : 'Ei:
'H istory is Bun k' .26 Many post-war artists refashio ned : r ~
pre-war device of collage, such as Rauschenberg with - 's.
'com bi nes' and si Ikscreens oHou nd objects, art images. ,, " :
print reproductions, as well as the dicol/ageistes (e.g..
Raymond Hains, Mimmo Rotella and Jacques de la V;" ~ ~
with their layered and lacerated posters taken directly :rc­
the city streets . Yet in these instances collage evoked a
distracted mind bombarded by media messages, Where o.5
Paolozzi deployed collage to make specific connections
within Pop culture, especially between product sa l e s m c:.~ s.- l-
=- - .: ,;~x ap peal. In one early work, IWas a Rich Man's Play
5 (1947), a cover girl of Intimate Confessions magazine
~_ - ars on the same plane as ad fragments for Coca-Cola,
-:: =:::. Cold fruit juice and cherry pie. The sexual innuendos are
s enough, as is the phallic bomber below the woman
: Its inscri ption 'Keep' Em Flyi ng'. Paolozzi keys the
",5 ,, _ ': l a ions among consu mption, sex and war by the little
':- : osion ofthe gun pointed atthe cover girl: 'The "Popl"
~ ~ -" ot cements these terms into equivalence,
~:Er an geability', the critic Julian Myers has argued.
-eoody is a commodity; advertisement is propaganda;
_ :-:ganda is pornography.")
- ,., s pinboard aesthetic' was also practised by others within
_ _ :'.(Henderson,Turnbull,McHale ... ),butitwasPaolozzi
fie ni ght in April 1952, projected his ads, magazine
~ :~ gs, postcards and diagrams , in a catalytic demon­
:--= : - r th at underwrote the disti nctive method ofthe I.G.
r S to come: an anti-hierarchical constellation
II,.,
I j :
: - .: ' : r al images that are at once disparate and con nected.
=::r r "dowed in summerl951 when Hamilton projected
e photographs of natural structu res in the show 'G rowth
m' , this collage principle was foregrounded in the
= :.1 nof1 953 when Paolozzi, the Smithsons and Henderson
:or:: .:. :ed roughly 100 reproductions of modernist paintings,
: ~3 a I children's drawings and hieroglyphs, as well as
':" -" "'u;:>ological , medical and scientific photographs, in
" '" el ofArt and Life'. However, the epitome ofthe pinboard
::: :i:r E: ic wa s reached in summerl956 with 'This is Tomorrow',
- - r ich Ham ilton constructed his famous little collage,Just
;1: is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?
e r arged in black and white, it served as a posterforthe show).
s own words, the work tabulates the Pop iconography of
,; . Voman, Humanity, History, Food, Newspapers,
_ r ema. TV, Telephone, Comics (picture information), Words
: .Jal information), Tape recording (aural information), Cars,
_ :-""'estic appliances, Space' (Richard Hamilton , Collected
Words: 1953-1982, 1985, 24; hereafter CW). Clearly indebted to
the' Bu nk' collages of Paolozzi,Just what is it? also prepares the
distinctive version ofthe Pop image soon developed by
Hamilton : a spatial compilation offound figures, commodities
and emblems that is 'tabular as well as pictorial' (CW24).
Whereas Paolozzi stuck to the material heterogeneity of
collage, Hamilton exploited the fetishistic effects of painting,
which he used to mimic the lush surfaces of media images.
These interests and strategies guided h is great suite of tabular
pictu res that followed: Hommage cl Chrysler Corp ., Hers is a lush
situation and $he.
Hommage cl Chrysler Corp. (1957) takes up the automobile
as core commodity ofthe mid twentieth century, but as a
metamorphic 'vehicle of desire' ala Banham, not as a
Platonic type-object as in Le Corbusier. '[The car] adopts its
symbols from many fields and contributes to the stylistic
language of all consumer goods ,' Ham ilton wrote in 1962.
' It is presented to us by the ad-man in a rounded picture of
urban living: a dream world, but the
dream isdeepandtrue-the
collective desire of a cultu re
translated into an image offulfill­
ment. Can it be assimilated into the
flneartconsciousness?' (CW35)
Hommage is his first attempt to do
so; it is also an early instance of his
'ironism of affirmation', a phrase borrowed from his mentor
Duchamp, which Hamilton defined as a 'peculiar mixture of
reverence and cyn icism' (CW 78). Here th is mixture is not as
paradoxical as it sounds , for Hommage is so affirmative of
automobile imaging, so mimetic of its moves , as to ironize its
fetishistic logic - that is, to expose the manner in which both
bodies on display, the newChrysler and the vestigial showgi rl,
are broken up into sexy details whose production is obscure.
Not only does Hamilton associate body parts by analogy (the
breast, say, with the headlight), but in doing so he
demonstrates a conflation of com modity fetishism with
sexual fetishism , as the two bodies exchange properties (as in
commodity fetishism according to Marx) in a way that
charges them with erotic force (as in sexual fetishism
accordingto Freud). Foreseen in Surrealism, this doubling
offetishisms is foregrounded throughout POp.'8
Signal cha racteristics of the tabula r picture a re an nou need
in Hommage. First, the composition is 'a compilation of
themes derived from the glossies ', several images each for
thecar, thewoman and the showroom (CW31). Not just
broken up, the car is also rotated for purposes of display
(headlight and bu mper from the front , fin and fender from
the rear). This manipulation is practised on female figures,
too, in other pictures such as $he, as if Hamilton wanted to
suggest that the skill of Old Master drawing had become a
device of semi-pornographic presentation. And in Hommage
he is fetish istically specific: 'pieces a re taken from Chrysler's
Plymouth and Imperial ads ; there is some General Motors
material and a bit of Pontiac' (CW31). Atthe same time
Hamilton also smoothens these parts into near abstraction:
ifthe woman caresses the car in the painting, so too does he
caress both figures in paint. Like the car, the woman is
reduced to charged parts within a curvaceous line, to breast
and lips (which Freud counted among 'the secondary sexual
characteristics'), here represented by an 'Exquisite Form
Bra' and the big Ii ps ofone 'Voluptua' , a star ofa late-night
• bride'? Unlike Duchamp, who
,/
American TV show at the time. This is representation as
fetishization, an almost campy version of what Walter
Benjamin once called 'the sex appeal of the inorganic'.'9
Such is the fetishistic crossing ofthis tabulation - a car is
(like) a female body, a female body is (like) a car - and the two
commingle in this chiasmus as if naturally. (This crossing is
also suggested by the sexist lingo of the time: 'nice chassis ',
'great headlights' and soon.)
Everything here is already designed for display: 'The main
motif, the vehicle, breaks down into an anthology of presen­
tation techniques ' (CW32) and Hamilton does highlight, in
paint, the print effects ofglossy car panel and shiny chrome
fender. They appear as al ready screened by a lens , as though
there were no other mode of appearance but a mediated one.
Space is also thus transformed : it has become display-space
alone, specifically a showroom based on 'the International
Style represented by a token suggestion of[PietJ Mondrian
and [EeroJ Saarinen' (perhaps in the vestigial grid and the
curvy lines respectively [CW32]). In this showroom no:, ~~
have traditional line, colour and modelling beco me rr ea:-,
of product display, but so too have aspects of modern '" c: ,,;-. :
architecture become devices of commercial ex hibitior ,,~a
'Mondrian ' and 'Saarinen').3°This is another key in s i gr- : - ~
Pop: that avant-garde and mass cultures have inte rs:: c:::G
indeed converged. (As we will see, Lichtenstein shows j~
a modernism appropriated by the media, in his case ir + =.
comics.) Hamilton also mentions'a quotation from I';, =r ::,
Duchamp' in Hommage and at the time he was b usy\''' : '-~' ­
translation of the Green Boxof notes that Ducha mp ha
prepared for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bache lors, E... ?
(a .k.a . the Large Glass, 1915-23). Perhaps, like the Large C _- !~
the conjunction ofChrysler and showgirl in Homm age
produces a kind of'Bachelor Machine', a categoryofava - ­
garde representation in which woman and machine , se c.C·.·.U•.
and commodity, are bound upwith one another.)' But if
Hommage is a pictorial updatingofthe Large Glass, whi c~ s
'the bachelor' and which is 'tne
keeps the two figures sepa rate.
Hamilton lets them meet, as if:
suggest that consumeris m had
transformed the very rapp ort 0 -'"
male and female, the very nature
of (heterosexual) desire. 3~
In his next tabular picture, Hers is a lush situation (19S8
Hamilton actually commingles the body parts ofwo m a ~ ~~ :.
car: the curves of the implicit female driver become one
the lines of bumper, headlight, fin, windshield and whee
Another tabulation of magazine images , the paintin g ic;
generated from a sentence in an Industrial Oesign reviev.
ofa Bu ick : 'The driver sits at the dead cal m centre of al :.- IS
motion: hers is a lush situation' (CW32).3J Perha ps this
painting marks the next stage in the Pop evolution of"- o
Bachelor Machine, one that here aligns Ham iIto n wim :1'" t:
Surrealism of Hans Bellmer, for Hers is a lush situatioll ca r :~
seen as a graphic updating of Machine-Gunneress in a S; _I;~
ofGrace (La Mitrailleuse en etat de grace , 1937), whe re Be ~ ""
renders woman and weapon one. 34 But what is still pe rve~ :,
in Bellmer has become almost beautiful here : a lus h s t'~ = ;- =---.
not a surreal threat. Although Hamilton works to 'assi
design into 'the fine art consciousness' , the flow can rur '~
the opposite direction too and Hers is a lush situatio n doe ­
 ~ r~ genre of the Odalisque subsumed in an ad for a
3 1th at remains of the nude, as with the Cheshire cat,
s -o ile) as if a nude by Mati sse were here reworked by
I not breast and lips as in Hommage, but eye and hips. As in
:; - c j ~ o bil e styl ist. I n the process Ha milton presents line,
~ :- ' sstill individual and expressive in Matisse, a medium
-.: --s::!}ort between artist and model, as almost engineered
; ~ =- ;;-a:lstical: for all its lushness, 'line' has become 'the right
-e :~:H _he new line' of Buick.
; -e is revalued here, so is plasticity, in a way that makes
--= ;~ ' mat e and the inanimate difficult to distinguish. 'More
" -" a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite trans­
::. rr =~'on , ' Roland Barthes wrote in Mythologies, his
:= ::= "on of critiques ofconsumerist 'myths' published in
• ::~ - a ear before Hers is a lush situation was painted; 'the
orl d can be plasticized and even life itself .. .'35 'Sex
s= '" .here', Hamilton argued in 1962, 'symbolized in the
; ;:-':: ... r of mass-prod uced Iuxu ry - the interplay offleshy
-:: =0: ( 2nd smooth, fleshier metal' (CW36). This erotic
-: ==~ ~ . -sa matternotonlyofcharged details butalsoof
~: ::7~= an alogies: it is as though Hamilton wanted to track
: ': =- ~;::ro ' S eye in its saccadicjumps across associated
-- s. Togeth er these two operations inform the hybrid space
: .a:. ar pi ctu res: specific yet sketchy in content, broken
='~ :.=:.r- Iess in facture, collaged yet painterly in technique.
r : !:ombin ation of effects is again atwork in She
;j..:. - ': -'. hic h Hamilton describes as another 'sieved
....=- ,: ~' J "1ofth e ad man's paraphrase ofthe consumer's
: ~= ~ OV 36).lfamagazineimageofaChryslerprovides
" ~= = =-~: of Hommage, here it is one of a Frigidaire: the home
::s :lee-ome another kind of showroom. Hamilton lists no
36
,, ::s ~ ,. =.r en sou rces, all cred ited to particu lar des igners and
:: -c r : S. !"or the fridge, the woman a nd the hybrid of toaster
; r :: -" co..urn cl eaner below. Yet, like Hommage, She draws
- r :: =. y on t hemagazinegenreofthewomanorwifewho
r _ -=e s:: e vehicle or appliance; here, however, it is the
:- -~~== :02t seems to sell the person (that she has
commodity status is also signalled by the dollar sign in the
title). Thewoman is again reduced to an erotic 'essence'­
Hers is a lush situation, the hips are in whitened relief, while the
eye is a plastic one taped into position: like painting, relief and
collage are exploited for fetish istic effect, not the opposite.
The eye opens and closes like the fridge, turns on and offlike
the toaster: apparently in the animate world of Pop products,
things can look back at us, even wink at us. 3)
What a re the im pi ications of the tabu la r pictu re? 'Tabu la r'
derives from tabula, Latin fortable, but also for writing-tablet,
in which, in antiquity, both painting and printingfigured as
modes of inscription. This association must appeal to
Hamilton, who has used both techniques in large part
because he finds them, already combined, in the media.
'Tabular' also invokes writing, which Hamilton has involved
in his lists and titles. Moreover, his pictures contain traces
of the visual-verbal hybrid characteristic ofthe magazine
spread and the tabloid layout (perhaps 'tabular' connotes
'tabloid' as well), a hybrid that anticipates the mixed sign that
pervades electron ic space today - all the 'icons', 'pop-u ps'
and other lush images that carry insistent directivesYAgain,
some of these pictures are tabular in another sense too­
generated by a table ofterms, as withJust what is it?, or of
images, as in Hommage and She, or of jingles, as in Hers is
a lush situation or Towards a definitive statement on the coming
trends in men's wear and accessories (1962), where the title
derives from a Playboy review of male fashion.
More directly, 'to tabulate' is 'to set down in a systematic
form' (OED) and Hamilton is often concerned with an
'overlapping of presentation styles and methods' - styles
and methods that are at once commercial (as in the various
di splay tech niques that he evokes), modern ist (as in the
various abstract signs that he cites) and modernist-turned­
com mercial. I n his own words, 'photograph becomes
diagram, diagram flows into text' and all is transformed
 by painting. At the same time Hamilton wants 'the plastic
entities [to] retain their identity as tokens' and so he uses
'different plastic dialects', such as photography, relief,
collage, 'within the unified whole' of painting (CW 38).
Like an ad-man , then, he tabulates (as in correlates) different
media and messages and tabulates (as in calculates) this
correlation in terms of visual appeal and psychological effect.
It is not always clear when this redoubling of images is
analytical and when it is celebratory- in Hamilton in
particular or in Pop at large. Yet one thing seems clear
enough: his pastiche is not disruptively random, as it is in
much Dada and Neo-Dada work. Another insight of Pop
(or 'Son of Dada' as Hamilton calls it) is that 'randomizing'
had become a media device, a logic within the culture
industry.J9Sometimes he pushes this logic ofthe random to
a demonstrative extreme; at other times his tabular pictures
are logical in another sense, that is, typological : for example,
rTROOPERl ... I CAN SEE THE
wHOLE ROO/M····AND
THERE'S NOBODY
IN IT/
coming trends ... is a 'preliminary investigation into specific
concepts of masculinity' (CW 46), here typified by President
I(ennedy, a Wall Street broker cum American football player,
a weightlifter cum track athlete and astronaut John Glenn,
each ofwhom is wired to a particular mechanism of sport,
entertainment or media.'oSuggestively, the word 'tabular'
refers not only to graphic inscription; in ancient use it also
connotes 'a body of laws inscribed on a tablet ' (OED). Might
these tabular pictures be seen then as investigations into
a new body of laws, a new inscription of subjects, which the
society ofthe First Pop Age requires?
Roy Lichtenstein and the Screened Image
Hamilton intimates a historical convergence between
abstract painting and commercial design." Similarly, Roy
Lichtenstein suggests that, in composition and in effect, the
differences between a grand painting and a good comic or ad
have narrowed and, like Hamilton, he exploits this diminished
difference nonetheless . If Hamilton drewon gloss)'
magazines for his images, Lichtenstein turne d to t2
newspapers, a tawdrier resource: in 1960 he began toC?~ ~Z
cartoon characters such as Mickey and Popeye and ge - cr. :
products such as tennis shoes and golfballs (AndyV.'cr- ':·J'': :':
much the same thing, first independently, at much [he S? ,.....~
time). Almost immediately Lichtenstein was cha rge
superficiality; and when he moved to comic strips, mas: '
of romance and war, the accusations grew more shrill : ( 'e ::
the apparent banality of his work threatened the ass um-­
profu ndity ofart - of its cultural significa nce and its eth: ca
effect."" His cold surfaces seemed to mock the feverish
gestures of Abstract Expressionism in particular and ma
stream critics, who had come to appreciate such pa inting
were not happy.') In 1949 Life magazine had showcased
Jackson Pollock with the not-yet-convi nced question
' Is He the Greatest Livi ng Pai nter in the United States ?'
In 1964 the same magazine profiled Lichtenstein unde
_~ ·· oi
the not-altogether-ironic
/., (]f .
--.
11/1' heading 'Is He the Wars:
11,",,(
.Jr list Artist in the U.S)'
The ch arge of bana li .
centred first on co nten;::Jc-·­
appeared to overwhe rr ~" =
art with commerci al de'S £~
Modern artists had lor f
sam pled popular cu Itu re (posters in Tou lou se-La utrec
paintings, newspaper fragments in Picasso collage s a~Q s c­
on), but they did so mostly to reinvigorate staid forms ", -: r
feisty contents. With Pop , on the other hand , the low see .....,e,3
to overrun the high - despite the fact that, like Ha mil ror
Lichtenstein on Iy wa nted to 'assi m ilate' his ads and car:!': r r ­
into fine art. The accusation of banality also concern e·
procedure: since Lichtenstein seemed to reprod uces
images directly, he was branded with a lack of ori gin;: ;. I' ,.
and, in one case at least, accused of copyright infringe!!,,,.-:
(I n 1962 Lichtenstein adapted a few di agrams of p ortr2 '~s :::
Cezanne made by an art historian named Erie Loran in l :;;~~
Loran surfaced to protest loudly.) Lichtenstein di d cop; . ,.
course, but in a complicated fashion. In the case ofthe
comics , he would select one or more panels from a str'p.
sketch one or more motifs from these panels, the n proiB..
his drawing (never the comic) with an opaque projector;
next he would trace the image on the canvas, adjus t itto ~r. "-
-;: =-, r~ 0 an e and finally fill in with his stencilled dots, primary
=: =.. 1"$ and thi ck contou rs - the light grou nd ofthe dots first,
nlack of the outlines last. Thus , while a Lichtenstein
: =. - :- g mi gh t look readymade, it is actually a layeri ng of
erlical reproduction (comic), handwork (drawing),
anrc al reproduction again (projector) and handwork
~ ~=. r racing and pai nti ng) , to the point where di sti nctions
:"'::- -=en and and machinearedifficultto recover. 44 Again,
- ~~ tOil, Warhol , Rosenquist, Richter, Polke and others
Jee related conundra ofthe painterly and the
graph ic; it is a prime characteristic of Pop art.
e stein 's work abounds in manually made signs of
...... ~r.a icali y reproduced images, but it is his signature dots
: ':: ~ stalli ze the paradox of 'the handmade readymade' .
- - =5e stencilled marks are a painted depiction ofa printed
:: ce : e Ben-Day dots devised by Benjamin Day in 1879 as
.2 :==r iqu e to reproduce an image through gradations of
,:r E': ngt a nslated into a system of dots. The Lichtenstein
-----,
:-~ ;:: "1 oithese dots underscores the transformation of
~-;: : = aran c e under mechanical reproduction into screened
-i' ;:S - pri nted , broadcast or otherwise represented
:-~. : r" and. As we saw with Hamilton , this too is a central
: -- ~ of Pop, with significant variations again wrought by
:o ,r , Rosenquist, Richter, Polke and others. Butwhere
.: : ::': :.. . e art ist as creator stand in th is world of rep rod uction?
-;::. 'chtenstein appropriated product images, he effaced
: ~ :: :: .." d ames (bycontrast Warhol retained 'Campbell's',
•a d so on); as the critic Michael Lobel has argued, he
pristine plus-and-minus abstractions that Mondrian painted
_ ::- :ensteinized' his sources in order 'to make the comics
forty-five years before. On the one hand, the near abstraction
. e his images'.4 s This tension between traces of
~ ~_ orshi p and signs of its eclipse is pronounced in
_-= '" .enstei n, but it was not very anguished for hi m. ' I am
~ :agai nst industrialization ', he remarked modestly in 1967,
-:: ~ : ' t mu st leave me something to do ... I don't draw a picture
!:If er to rep rod uce it - I do it in order to recompose it. Nor
.ryin g to change it as much as possible. I try to make the
min im um amount of change.'46 This is the ambiguous line
that Lichtenstein hewed: to copy images from print media but
to adaptthem to the parameters of painting; to recompose
them in the interest not only of pictorial unity but ofartistic
subjectivity; or, more precisely, to recompose them in such
a way as to register these values of unity and subjectivity­
to register them precisely as pressured.
The other charge of banality, the one concerning the
content ofads a nd com ics , is more d ifficu It to deflect, but
here too the Lichtenstein case is not as simple as it seems .
His lowly subjects did offend aesthetic taste attuned to
Abstract Expressionism , but, formally speaking, Lichtenstein
did not put his content to very contrarian purposes. In fact he
worked to show that comics could serve some ofthe same
lofty ends set for high art from Rembrandtand Jacques-Louis
David to Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman: not only pictorial
unity and dramatic focus (as advocated since Diderot and
Lessing, if not before) but also 'significant form' and 'the
integrityofthe picture plane' (as urged by Clive Bell and
Clement Green berg respectively) . Jasper Joh ns had
played a similar trick with his paintings offlags, targets
and numbers ofthe mid to late 1950S : those works met
the Greenbergian criteria for modernist painting (that
it be flat , self-contained, objective and immediate) by
mean s that Greenberg fou nd utterly alien to such
painting (the kitschy images of mass culture) ."
Lichtenstein pushed together the poles offine art and
commercial design with equal force: his comics were almost
as flat as any flag or target and more vu Igar to boot.
Thus Lichtenstei n seemed to challenge the oppositions on
which pure painting was founded : high versus low, fine versus
commercial, even abstract versu s flgu rative . Consider GolfBall
(1962), a circle outlined and dim pled in black on white - to
signify shadow and light - on a light grey ground . A golfball is a
prime object of suburban banality, but here it also recalls the
ofGolfBall tests ou r sense of realism, which Lichtenstein
shows to be a conventional code, a matter of signs that
sometimes possess only scant resemblance to actual things in
the world.4 s On the other hand, when a Mondrian begins to
look like a golfball , then the category of abstraction is surely in
trouble too. Modernists like Mondrian worked to resolve
figure and ground in painting, to collapse illusionist space into
material flatness. Lichtenstein gives us both the impression of
space and the fact ofsu rface (as do most com ics) and ifthere
is a radical edge in his Pop it lies here: less in his thematic
opposition of low content and high form and more in his
structural superimposition of cartoons and commodities with
exalted painting. One can see why, when Mickey and Popeye
popped up in the metaphysical space once reserved forthe
numinous rectangles ofRothko and the epiphanic 'zips' of
Newman, art lovers were rather upset.
In this way Lichtenstein performed a visual short-circuit:
he delivered both the immediate effect of a modernist
painting and the med iated look of a pri nt image. Consider
49
another early work, Popeye (1961), which shows the s pinach­
strong sailor knocking out his rival Bluto with a roundhouse
left, like a Pop upstart taking a tough Abstract Expressionist
to the canvas with a single blow. Most im porta nt here is the
blow: nearly as impactful as a Pollock painting, Popeye smacks
the viewer in the head as well. (Lichtenstein liked to
underscore this blow with the onomatopoeic terms of
the comics: his punches go 'Pow', his guns go 'Blam',
'Takka-Takka', ' Brattata'.)SOThus atthe level ofeffecttoo,
he suggests that Pop is not so different from modernist
painting: they propose a similar viewer, one that is projected
as all eye, one that takes in the image in a single flash or
'pop',s' But to what end is this demonstration made? For
the most part Lichtenstein put high and low together less
to undo the opposition than to reconcile it; he was proud
ofh is formal sense, his tasteful abil ity to ma ke good painti ngs
out of mawkish stuff. Yet this 'reconciliation' was hardly his
doing alone; like Hamilton, Lichtenstein registered a
convergence of old binaries of high and low, modernist and
mass, a historical process that transcended all the Pop artists
as individuals (perhaps the implaca bi lity ofthis process ca n
be sensed in the impersonality of their canvases).
Li chtenstein was well prepared to gauge the convergence
!'t..jgh a nd Iowa rts. In the 1950S, fi rst in Cleveland a nd then
in upstate New York, he worked through several styles -"
modernism: he painted along Expressionist lines , the - I I"" 3
faux-naifmanner (in which he adapted America na ther-es _~
in Washington Crossing the De/aware, I, c. 1951) and brie:" ~~
abstract mode. In other words, he became adept in aVe --.:­
garde devices, not only the expressionist brushstfOl<e a'- - -r =
cubist play with signs (black Ii nes to signify a shad ow, a ... .- c..
patch to signify a reflection and so on), but also the
monochrome painting, the readymade object an d the rmr=­
image, all of which he received as second-hand (so met i ~- s
literally so in art magazines). These devices appear in his. ... ·­
in the same way, as mediated, as if quoted; and they are he ::;
together by the icon ic shapes suppl ied by the ad or the co'"
that is , ironically, by the very representational mode tha
avant-garde art had worked so hard to overthrow. This is.
another aspect of his Pop that retains a critical edge - cr"Lei.'
in the sense that a historical condition is revealed to us
through the very form ofthe work.
Like Hamilton, then, Lichtenstein derror ­
strates a commonality between the codes 0 [",,':: 5
and comics and the styles of the ava n t -ga 'c ~_
'Mine is linked to Cubism to the exte nt cr..: .
cartooning is,' Lichtenstein once re marke ::
of his pictorial language . 'There is a fel at ~or'5 - '7.
between cartooning and people li ke U0 3(
and Picasso which may not be u nderstooc :,¥ . ,~ .:.
cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the earf'Y D r<:;r ;
He might have added Matisse, Mondrian and Fem ar G _tog;;;"
(among others), forthey all appea r in his pai ntin gs, rea
through the language of the comics: the ambig uous 5:5- >::=
light and shadow in Picasso, the bold but suave conto..;'" r
Matisse, the strict primary colours in Mondrian , the a fi:,,::
semi-cartoonishflgures in Leger. Ofcourse, these e l e lTe- ~
are put to different purposes: ifin Mondrian the prirnaricc
signify pure painting, in Lichtenstein yellow mi ght a l s o s -::; r ~
a beautiful blonde, red a flashy dress, blue a perfect sk't <: '-:
so on. Certainly he recomposed his ads and co mics in s_.c- =:
way as to fit them to the picture plane, but, more impor:::;-:
he did so both to expose and to exploit these mo demis:
connections Y One can draw a dire conclusion from th'"
commingling of modernist art and comic strip: that b
early 1960s most devices of the avant-garde had becorr e :-:.~
more than gadgets ofcommercial design, This is a predica­
ment for Pop, indeed for any post-war avant-ga rde: aga;­
: 0"l1 e of the anti-art measures of old avant-gardes like Dada
:L become the stuff not only of the art museum but of the
=oJ : 're ind ustry. Or one can take a benign view ofth is
~ :_lado n: that both fine art and commercial design benefited
thi s exchange oHorms in the interest ofvalues that, in
:r :: en d. are rather traditional- unity ofimage, immediacy of
~=ect and so on. Evidently this is how Lichtenstein saw things .
_ichtenstein was adept not only in modernist styles but
,: s in different modes ofseeing and picturing, some of
~ ich date from the Renaissance, if not antiquity - adept in
,JeCi{i c genres like portraiture, landscape and still life, all
=:- .nich he Lichtensteinized, as well as in general paradigms
::-' ainting, such as painting as window, as mirror and
-. in modernist art) as abstract surface. Not long before
. Rauschenberg and Johns had suggested a further
:::a adigm , 'the flat bed picture plane' (as itwas termed by
_:: o Steinberg): the picture no longer as a vertically oriented
-:...ame to look at orthrough as on to a natural scene, but as a
horizontally worked site where
different images might be
brought together textually,
a 'flat documentary surface
thattabulates information' .'4
Lichtenstein proposed his own
variant of this model: the picture
as an already-screened image
c. r • 3S such, a telling sign ofa post-wa r world in wh ich
,:: erythi ng seemed subjectto processing through mechanical
"e - rod uction . This screening bears on the actual making of
"- ' 5 art, its commingling of handmade and readymade; yet it
" -o addresses the mediated look of the consumerist world at
-3'ge. which affects perceiving and imaging perse. Emergent
re e, then, is a mode ofseeing that has become dominant
cnly in o ur own time of the computer screen, in which (as we
sa' vi th Hamilton) reading and lookingtake on the hybrid
c aracter of scanning. (Lichtenstein often chose comic-strip
!"igures pi aced in front of gu n sights, televisual mon itors,
indsh ields and dashboards, as if to 'compa re or correlate
the surface of the canvas' with such screens.) SS Todaythis is
how we are trained to sweep through information , visual,
verbal, or both: we scan it and it scans us, tracking keystrokes,
counting web hits and so forth. Might Lichtenstein have
sensed this shift, both in semblance and in seeing, already
latent in the com ic stri p?
SURVEY
AndyWarhol and the Seamy Image
Andy Warhol also drew on comic strips and newspaper ads,
but to different effects. If Lichtenstei n worked to recom pose
his Pop sources in the interest of pictorial form, Warhol
tended to decompose such form through repetition and
accident. Moreover, when Lichtenstein put Popeye in the
place of Pollock, itwas a lite sort ofsubversion; when Warhol
repeated photographs ofgruesome car crashes or poisoned
housewives in the exalted space of such pai nting, it was
scabrous and it remains so forty-plus years later.
For all his radical ity, Wa rhol is the one Pop artist whose
name resonates well beyond the artworld (he has Pop status
in th is extended sense too). From his rise in the early 1960s to
his death in 1987, he served as the often-still centre of various
sub-worlds ofart, advertising, fashion, underground music,
independent filmmaking, experimental writing, gay culture
and star cu ltu reo Along with art work that ranges from the
extraordinary to the bathetic, Warhol made movies that are sui
generis, produced the first album ofThe Velvet Underground
and founded Interview magazine, among many other ventures
(his studio was appropriately dubbed 'The Factory'). He
exploited a new way ofbeing in a world of commodity-images
where fame is often subsumed by celebrity, newsworthiness
by notoriety, charisma by glamour and aura by hype. A native­
informant in this spectacle, Warhol had a look of blank
indifference that concealed an eye for killer images .
Born in 1928 in Pittsburgh to immigrants from eastern
Slovakia (his father worked in coal mines, then in construc·
tion), Warhol studied design atthe Carnegie Institute of
Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon). In 1949 he moved to l ev.
York, where he achieved early success as a commercial a rtist
with magazine ads, window displays, stationery, book covers
and album jackets for a range of classy clients from Vogue and
Harper's Bazaarto BergdorfGoodman and BonwitTelier.
He had money enough to buy work by Duchamp, Johns and
Stella before he could sell his own art; and he collected all
kinds ofother things as well: everyday was a time capsule fo'
Warhol (he left 612 boxes ofephemera at his death). He did
his first paintings of Batman , Nancy, DickTracy and Popeye
in 1960, theyear before he saw Lichtenstein canvases with
similar subjects; yet whereas Lichtenstein was clean an d ha d
in his copies ofcomics and ads, Warhol initially played with
manual mistakes and media blurrings. His wonder yea r was
1962-63: he did his first 'Campbell's Soup Can ' and 'Do It
Yourself' paintings , his first silkscreens of Elvis , Marilyn and
otherstars, his 'Death and Disaster' images and his first films
(Sleep, BlowJob and Kiss , the titles ofwhich declare about all
the action that appears on the screen) . In 1963, too , Warhol
used a Pola roid for the fi rstti me and he moved The Factory
to East 47th Street, where it became a notorious hangout for
bohemian scene-makers and wannabe 'superstars ' (the term
is anotherWarhol invention).
His greatest period of art work occurred between his first
si lkscreens in 1962 and his near-fatal shooting in 1968
(on the third ofJ une, two days before Robert Ken nedy was
assassinated, Valerie Solanas , a Factory hanger-on , shot
6
Warhol several times) .5 Most important readings focus on
this early body of images, especially on the' Death and
Disaster' silkscreens , which are based on news photographs,
often too gruesome for publication , of car wrecks and
suicides, elect ric chairs and civil -rights confrontations .
These accounts tend either to connect these images to actual
events in the world or, conversely, to propo se that the world
of Warhol is nothing but image , that Pop images in general
represent only ot her images. Most readings of Wa rhol­
indeed of post-war art based on photography - divide some­
where along th is line: the image is seen either as referential,
a document t ied to the world, or as simulacral, a copy without
an apparent original in the world.
The simulacral readingofWarholian Pop is advanced by
critics for whom the notion of the simulacrum is cruc ial to
the critiq ue of representat ion as bound di rectly to the world.
'What Pop art wants ', Barthes writes in 'That Old Thing, Art'
(1980) , 'is to desym bol ize the object ' , th at is, to relocate the
meaning of the image away from any deep significance
(within the image, beyond the image) towards its own blank
surface. In the process, Barthes argues, the artist is also - '
repositioned: 'The Pop artist does not stand behind his w; ':k
and he himselfhas no depth: he is merely the su rface of his
pictures, no signified, no intention, anywhere.'57I n this
account referential depth and subjective interiority are aL
victims of the sheer superficiality ofWarhol ian Pop.
The referential view ofWarhol is advanced by critics base!:
in social history who relate the work to diverse pheno m er ~
such as the civil rights movement, gay culture , the fas hior
world and so on . In 'Saturday Disasters : Trace and Refere--=::
in Early Warhol' (1987), Thomas Crow disputes the si mu i2c"".=
account of Warhol as impass ive and his images as ind i s cf~ .
in ate. Underneath the glamorous surface of commo di'l
fetishes and media stars lies 'the reality of suffering an
death' : the tragedies of M ari Iyn Mon roe , Liz Taylor and )2C-"
Kennedy prompt 'straightforward express ions offeeli ng' C
the artist. Here Crow finds not only a referential object for
Warhol but an empathetic subject in Warhol and here he
locates the artist ' s criticality as well. For Crow th is crit i c a l: ~
lies not in an attack on 'th at old th i ng art' made th rou gh c',
embrace of the simulacral commodity-image (as Barth es
and others would have it); rather, it rests in an expose of
'complacent consumption' made th rough 'the brutal :-,, ::
of accident and mortality. In this way Crow pus hes W::.';-.:
beyond humanist sentiment to political engage ment. '1..: ..
was attracted to the open sores in American poli ticallf.e
Crow writes, in an interpretation of the electric- c ha irirr cg~
as agit-prop aga inst the death penalty and of the race-' c:
images as a testimonial fo r civil rights . 'Far fro m a pu re : =:
of the signifier liberated from reference ', Warho l belo nf:i ~:
the popular American tradition of'truth-telling' .!!
I n part this reading ofWarhol as empathetic and e g,,:­
is a project ion, but so is the account ofWarhol as s up€ ~ 1(. ~
and impassive, even though Warhol seemed to agree t-'"'"- -- ;.
latter view: ' Ifyou want to know all about Andy WarhOl .... 0
look at the su rface of my painti ngs and fi Ims and m e 2 r~ ::-:: -:c
I am . There ' s noth i ng beh i nd it.'59 Wa rhol was ve ry saw J a ::-: .;.
th i s process of projection , of the way th at we fa bricate s cars
and celebrities through our idealization of their iconic {on:::
I n any case, neither argument is wrong; in fact they are : o~
 £' . : ~ - s early im ages ofdeath and disaster are both
=':-:0 _- . 31an d simulacral, connected and disconnected ,
=-::_ __ eand affectless, critical and complacent.
o be a machine' is a famous utterance ofWarhol
.:,,_ .: .s usually taken to confi rm the blankness of artist and
=:-c:" e. But it might point less to a blank subject than to
= ~.,:::< ed one, who takes on what shocks him as a defence
=. ;"- r,st hi s same shock. 'Someone said my life has
:. .:~ . ated me,' Warhol told Gene Swenson in an important
~ =-:: ·e" of 1963 . 'II iked that idea. '60 In this conversation
~ '~ol clai ms to have had the same lu nch every day for the
".0: : . ven ty years (what else but Campbell's soup?). Together,
. ~". e two statements suggest a strategy of pre-em ptive
="'- ra ce ofthe very compulsive repetition that a consumerist
!c::..:-ery demands of us all. Ifyou can't beat it, Warhol implies,
~ II '-;more,ifyouenterittotally, youmightexposeit;you
= reveal its enforced automatism through your own
=I ..::~s j v e example. Deployed critically by the Dadaists vis·
s - e military-industrial catastrophe ofWorld War I, this
::::-"os:egy of 'capitalist nihilism' was performed ambiguously
a hoi vis-a-vis Cold War consumerism after World
2( II.­
- '"' ese remarks reposition the role of repetition in Warhol.
e boring things ' is another signature saying. ' Ilike things
;: e actly the same over and over again.' 62I n POPism
:;80) Warhol glossed this embrace of boredom and repe­
: ' I don't want it to be essentially the same - I want it to
::.e exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same
e actthing, the more the meaning goes away and the better
".0 - d emptier you feel .'6J Here repetition is both a draining of
s gnificance and a defending against affect, and this strategy
~ ided Warhol as early as his 1963 interview with Swenson:
hen you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it
_o-esn't really have any effect.' 64 Clearly this is one function
r repetition in our psychic lives: we recall traumatic events
orderto work them into a psychic economy, a symbolic
'E -.. VEY
order, a life narrative. Yet the Warhol repetitions are not
restorative in this way; they are not about am astery oftrau ma,
for his repetitions not only reproduce traumatic effects but
sometimes produce them as well. Thus several contradictory
operations can-occur in his work at one time: a warding away
of trauma tic significance and an opening out to it, a defending
agai nsttrau matic affect and a produci ng of it.
Repetition in Warhol, then , is neither a simple represen­
tation of a worldly referent nor a sheer simulation of a
superficial image. Often his repetition serves to screen
a reality understood as traumatic ('screen' in the senses
of both 'view' and 'filter') ; but it does so in a way that po ints
to this traumatic reality nonetheless. In Camera Lucida (1980)
Barthes calls this traumatic point ofthe photograph its
punctum , which he locates strictly neither in the image nor
in the viewer. 'It is this element which rises from the scene,
shoots out of it like an arrow and pierces me,' he writes. ' It is
what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already
there.' 'It is acute yet
muffled, itcriesoutin
silence . Odd
contradiction: a floating
flash.' 6s Barthes is
concerned here with
straight photographs
and so he relates the
effects of the punctum to details of content. This is seldom the
case in Warhol; yet a punctum does exist for me in the
indifference ofthe passer-by in White Burning Car, III (1963).
This indiffer-ence to the crash victim impaled on the
telephone pole is bad enough, butthe repetition ofthis
indifference is gall ing and th is points to the distinctive
operation ofthe punctum in Warhol: it works less through
content than through technique. Often it appears in the
'floating flashes' of the silkscreen process, in the repetitive
'popping' of the images: it is in these ruptures and repetitions
- these nasty seams - that a traumatic reality seems to poke
through . In th is way different ki nds of repetition a re put into
play byWarhol: repetitions that show a traumatic reality, that
screen it and that produce it. And this multiplicity makes for
the paradox not only of images that are both affective and
affectless, but also of viewers who are made to feel neither
whole (which is the ideal of most modern aesthetics : the
subject composed in contemplation) nor dissolved (which
is the effect of much popular culture: the subject given over to
the dispersive intens ities ofthe com modity-i mage). 'I never
fall apart', Warhol remarks in The Philosophy ofAndy Warhol
(1975), 'because I neverfall together.'66This is often the effect
of his work as well.
The punctum is not only a private affair; it can have a public
dimension too. Indeed, the breakdown ofthe distinction
between private and public is also traumatic and no one
points to this breakdown as incisively as did Warhol. 'It's just
Iike taking the outs ide and putti ng it on the inside', he once
said of Pop art in general, 'or taking the inside and putting
it on the outside.'67However cryptic this remark is, it does
suggest that a historically novel confusion between private
fantasy and public reality is a primary concern ofWarhol ian
Pop. Clearly he was fasci nated by the su bjectivity produced
in a mass society. 'I want everybody to think alike,' Warhol said
in 1963, at the height ofthe Cold War. 'Russia is doing it under
government. It's happening here all by itself.'68 'I don'tthink
.~
art should be on Iy for the select few,' he added in 1967. 'I thin k
it should be for the mass ofAmerican people.' 69 But how does
one represent 'the mass ofAmerican people'? One way at
least to evoke this 'mass subject' is through its proxies - that
is, through its objects ofconsumption, as Warhol did in his
serial presentations ofCampbell's soup cans, Coke bottles
and Brillo boxes from 1962 on, and/or through its objects of
taste, as he did th rough h is kitschy flower paintings of1964
and folksy cow wall papers of1966. But can onefigure this
mass subject-that is, give it a body? 'The mass subject
cannot have a body', the critic Michael Warner has argued,
o
'except the body it witnesses.'7 This pri nci pie suggests why
Warhol evokes the mass subjectthrough its media icons­
from celebrities and politicians such as Marilyn and Mao to all
the lurid people that he placed on the covers of Interview. At
the same time Warhol was also concerned to specify this
su bject, often along subcultu rail ines: the Factory was a vi rtual
workshop of queer reinventions of heart-throbs such as Troy
Donahue, and portraits ofcriminals such as Thirteen Mo5/.
Wanted Men (1964) can be double entendres for gay viewers.
However, Warhol did more than evoke the mass su bject
through its kitsch, commodities and celebrities. Parad oxica
enough, he also represented it in its very absence and
anonymity, in its very disaster and death, the democratic
levellers offamous media icon and unknown mass subject
alike. Here again is Warhol in the 1963 interview:
'I guess it was the big crash picture, the front page ofa newspap'!r
129 DIE. Iwas alsopainting the Marilyns. Irealized that
ellerything I was doing must halle been Death. It was Christmo5
or Labor Day - a holiday - and ellery time you turned on the
radio they said something like, '4 million are going to die.'
That started it. '7 2
And here is Warhol in a 1972 conversation:
'Actually you know it wasn't the idea ofaccidents and things Ii,,~
that ... I thought ofall the people who worked on the pyram ids
and ... Ijust always sort ofwondered what happened to them ...
Well, it would be easier to do a painting ofpeople who die d i
car crashes because sometimes you know, you neller know
who they are ... ' 7J
Here his primaryconcern is not disaster and death so
much as the mass subject in the guise of the anonymous
victims of history- from the drones of the pyramids to the
statistics ofthe highways. Yet disaster and death are
necessary to evoke th is mass subject, for in a society of
spectacle this subject often appears only as an effect of the
mass media (e.g., the news paper), or ofa catastrophi c fa · .;re
oftechnology (e.g., the plane crash), or, more precisely. o~
both - that is, of the news of such a catastrophic fa ilu re AI ~
with icons ofcelebrity such as Marilyn and Mao, repo rtso(
disastrous death such as '129 Die' is a pri ma ry way th at I <iSS
subjecthood is produced.
For the most part, then, Warhol evoked the mass subjec:
in two opposite ways : iconic celebrity and abstract anony
But he might have come closest to this subject throu gh a
: ~~ '" £ome\' here between celebrity and anonymity, that is,
- - "::5 -: e fi gu re of notoriety, the fame offlfteen minutes
- ::! r a a _her famous remark, Warhol predicted for us all.
':::: - : e - his implicit double-portrait of the mass subject:
anted men and the empty electric chairs , the first
_ ~ : ,:} C merican icon , the second a kind of American
: .. .: - - :Vhat mo re exact rep resentation of the dark side
. - -- ~ vbl ic sphere at this time could there be than this
g of iconic criminal and abstract execution?74
ard Richter and the Photogenic Image
points to an unexpected discovery of Pop : affect is
r c: : -ccessarily blocked by banality; in fact a traumatic charge
~ - ~~ : :Je conveyed through banality. This effect is probed
:~r: - "" by Gerhard Richter, perhaps the greatest art ist
~~ : -'·<Ledwith Pop outside its main axis of London, New
.: r. ",,- d Los Angeles. Born in East Germany in 1932, Richter
==: ~ : ,, ' ed in Socialist Realist painting at the Kunstakademie
>:':':'J en . In 1959 he travelled for the first time to West
.: : ~ ....... "' ... . ....here he visited the international survey of
: : - :~ ~ JO ary art, documenta 2, in Kassel ; there hewas
e gestu ral abstractions of Pollock and Lucio
~: :=.. =.amon g others . Two years later Richter moved to
in orderto retrain in such modernist art at its
_ 5.:-= -'s de ie (he began to teach there a decade later);
~:: s: e e met Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke and Bl inky
s~Jd e n ts ofthe charismatic Joseph Beuys, who was
~ !e in Fluxus performance. Richtercollaborated
: l ueg and extensively with Polke in various events
- es du bbed 'Capitalist Realist' or 'German Pop'.
::.s :.- _s in a double crucible - of East and West and of
~ .; .: :r.. ing, Fluxus performance and Pop art - that
: .:.i: de elop ed his com plex aesthetic.
: -":er e compasses not only different styles, from
7::. -:se~ !ati o nal to abstract, but also diverse classes of
-~;~_ - , uenced byWarhol in particular, many of his early
c:.es are blurry renditions of banal photographs of
-: e - ay li fe, such as newspaper photos , magazine ads ,
-=. - s nap s, soft-porn shots and aerial views ofvarious cities
.e is best known for these images) , while many of his
a vases recall the old genres ofacademic painting seen
--
_ ~ -
J
g a fu zzy optic: stililifes, landscapes, portraits, even
aintings . Richter does not collapse low and high
=-=::=?:>ries, as many Pop artists do , so much as he ranges
from low to high and back again - back again in so far as
his high genres , the landscapes in particular, sometimes
approach low forms once more, such as the pretty postcard
orthe sentimental photo .
In this way Richter places photography and painting at the
same level ('I consider many amateur photographs better
than the best (ezan nes,' he rema rked in 1966), even as he
also affirms the fragile autonomy of'traditional art' as such
('in every respect, my work has more to do with traditional art
than anything else,' he commented in 1964, not long after the
blurry representations first appeared).75 Along similar lines
Richter shows contradictory allegiances to divergent
traditions ofart, historical and avant-garde, with echoes of the
romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich as well as the
conceptual provocations ofDuchamp, of the colour-field
abstract ions of Newman as well as the murky media images
of Warhol. It is as though Richter wanted to run these different
strands together, to put the exalted pictorial formats of the
'Northern Romantic Tradition ' from Friedrich through
Newman through the anti-aesthetic paces ofWarhol ian POp .76
'All that I am tryingto do in each picture', Richter has stated in
a characteristic manner at once modest and grand, 'is to bring
together the most di sparate and mutually contrad ictory
elements, alive and viable, in the greatest possible freedom '
(Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice ofPainting: Writings
1962-1993, 1995, 166; hereafter DP). Yet to what ends does
he juxtapose painting and photography, handmade and
readymade, abstraction and figuration? Often his Pop peers
seem to celebrate the convergence ofthese terms; Richter
also registers th is convergence, but on Iy to compl icate it-
as if to demonstrate that lyrical painting can still exist not only
after Auschwitz but after Warhol as well.
Richter presents not only different kinds but also great
numbers of images . In 1962 he began to assemble his Atlas ,
a vast compendium of public a nd private photos, a fraction of
which has served as the basis of his paintings . In 1989 Richter
described the Atlas as 'a deluge of images' with no 'individual
images at all ', that is, as a compendium whose sheer number
of pictures relativizes each one (DP 199) . Benjamin Buchloh
has written incisively ofthis archive as an 'anomic' repertoire
without apparent law or rule and , except for an early
juxtaposition ofconcentration -ca mp and porn photos, it does
not contai n much in the way of sign iflca nt montage ." 'It's not
a just image', Jean -Luc Godard once remarked, famously, in
his 1970 film Vent d'est, 'it's just an image'; and throughout
his early period Richter seemed to participate in this same
questioning ofthe truth-clai m s of photographic represen ­
tation. In 1964, for exam pie, he a ppea red to su bscribe to a
Warholian aesthetic of indifference: ' Ilike everything that has
no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my
paintings' (DP3S). And in 1972 he spoke of the photograph
as a 'pure picture' 'free of all the conventional criteria I had
always associated with art: It had no style, no composition,
no judgment' (DP 73) . This indifference was a common
stance in the 1960s a nd it was often approached through
'deskilling' operations , such as the appropriations of media
images in Pop paintings ; the use of everyday photos was a
related move. 'I hate the dazzlement of skill,' Richter stated
in 1964; painting from photos was 'the most moron ic and
inartistic th ing that anyone cou Id do' (DP 23) . At the same
time, ofcou rse, he is a vi rtuoso painter and his pai ntings are
painstakingly produced. Thus Richterworked not to undo the
truth-claims of representation so much as to suspend the
Godardian alternative mentioned above - to make 'a just
painting' (a la Lichtenstein perhaps) that is also 'just a
painting' (a la Warhol perhaps).
More is involved in Richter, then, than the cool pose of
the typical Pop artist. For one thing he regards the partial
disconnection between work and self effected by his found
images and mechanical facture as a kind of protection.
Th roughout the 1960s he spoke of his encou nter with
photography in traumatic terms: ' For a time I worked as
a photogra ph ic laboratory assistant: the masses of photo­
graphs that passed through the bath of deve loper every day
maywell have caused a lasting trauma ' (DP 22). The trauma
here is not simply the photographic usurpation of the
representational function of painting anticipated long ago
by Baudelaire; in fact Richter unsettles the certainty ofthis
historical fact. Nor is it quite the psych ic shock delivered to
the subject by the camera as described by Barthes in Cam era
Lucida. Rather, the trau ma of photography for Richte r lies or'-'­
in its sheer proliferation ('the masses of photographs') ana
in its transformation of appearance ('the bath of deve lope
As Buchloh has suggested , this reaction brings him close r
to Siegfried Kracauerthan to Baudelaire orto Barthes.
'The world itselfhas taken on a "photograph ic face", '
Kracauer wrote in his great essay on photography (19 27):
'It can be photographed because it strives to be absorbed into ~r~
spatial continuum which yields to snapshots ... That the wort,
devours them is a sign ofthe fear ofdeath. What the photograpnr;
by their accumulation attempt to banish is the recollection of
death, which is part and parcel ofevery memory image. '7&
Like Warhol, Richter documents the ' photographic face'
the modern world disclosed by Kracauer; in some ways he
accepts the Kracauerian opposition between the photog ra~ ~
and the 'memory image'. Yet, intermittently, Richter als o
works to reveal the deathliness of this photographic face. t
overcome the apparent opposition of photography and
----. memory, indeed to renderthe photograph
mnemonic in painting, as painting.79 For instance. r s
1988 suite ofi mages concerning the dem ise of tile
radical Baader-MeinhofGroup, 18. Oktober1 977,
revives, however momentarily, the old categorvo
history painting, for here Richter effectively
transforms ephemeral media photographs into
potent memory images . These paintings reveal a
historical condition of post-war Germany - that these radicas
remain 'unburied ', that the question offascism persis ts.
How are we to understand his intimation of both a
traumatic dimension in photography and a protective po··
ential in pai nti ng? For Richter the trau ma seem s to in volve
banality - this is a key concern of his Pop too - which he trea:s
both in content and in form . One instance of banal co nten: 's
the candelabra in Flemish Crown (196S), an epitome nota
of a homey th ing but of petit-bou rgeois taste at its ho melies:
Yet Richter is also interested in banality that is formal, sua: ",5
when a camera turns us into an image, congeals our life. be; ~g
into a cliche. This banalization occurs in the existen tial
flashing of the camera stressed by Barthes, but also, even
before, in our automatic posing in front of the apparat us ­
that is, in ourformal conformity with the photographic face
of the world . Richter has long tracked ou r self-fash ionings
accord ing to stereotypes, someti mes ina ma n ner that
borders on artistic travesty. For example, his can-can
S~ Ii . =
34
Ballet Dancers (1966) and soft-porn Bathers (1967) are
degraded descendants of related subjects by Degas and
Cezanne and the travesty is patent in the young strip-teaser
of Olympia (1967), which updates and transplants the Manet
prostitute to the middle-class home. This formal banality is
most evident in Eight Student Nurses (1966), his Warhol ia n
rendering of the young victims ofthe serial killer Dr Richard
Speck who were al ready 'shot' serially in the n ursin g yearbook
that Richter used as his media source. Yet such banality
is perha ps most chilli ng in Three Sisters (1965): posed in
matching dresses on a family couch, these girls appear
nearly cloned, as if conform ity in appea rance were the
only way for them to attain social recognition, to be seen,
at all.
'It's all evasive action,' Richter once remarked of such
banality in his art (DP62). Perhaps its role, then, is defensive
as well as traumatic; and perhaps the same holds forthe
function of photography in his art. Paintingfrom photographs
freed Richter from 'conscious th inki ng', he wrote early on;
it is 'neutralized and therefore painless' (DP 30). Again like
Warhol, he transforms the photograph, the very vehicle ofthe
traumatic threat here, into a defence againstthis same threat;
certainly the greys and the blurs in his painting, both ofwhich
register as photographic, can be muting in effect. Ofcourse
these elements can function in other ways too: the greys can
suggest both the material actuality of paint and the mediated
appearance of print, and the blurs can evoke both a memory
and a fading of memory, both an obscene scene and an
occluded one a nd so on. Yet, however different these effects,
they are all common aspects ofthe photographic face ofthe
world: they suggest how our very perception, memory and
unconscious have become, at least in part, photographic in
semblance, and again this is a fundamental demonstration
of Pop. For Richterthis photographic semblance produces
a form ofdoubt (epistemological, even ontological) that his
painti ng also works to register: 'My own relation sh ip to real ity
SURVEY
.. . has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty,
transience, incompleteness' (DP74).
'All that is, seem s and is vi si ble to us because we perce ive
it by the reflected light of semblance. Nothing else is visib le.
Painting concerns itself, as no other art does, exclusively with
semblance (I include photography, ofcourse) , (DP181). For
Richterthe photograph cannot deliver semblance because
'the camera does not apprehend objects, it sees them'
(DP 35). That is, he regards photography as too im pi icated
in contemporary semblance to capture it on its own; indeed
it provides the very consistency of'reflected light' that it is
the task ofthe painter in turn to reveal; and it is this 'photo­
genesis' ofthe world that Richter strives to pai nt. So Th us
his art is less a critique ofspectacle than a phenomenology
of mediated appearance, of a world become Pop. The
sembla nce that concerned the Roma ntic pa inter Fried rich
is of a pri ma ry nature still iIlumi nated by the Iight of God ; t is
light is still numinous. The semblance that concerns the Po ~
painter Richter is ofa second nature bathed in the glow oc ~ "'e
med ia, a culture of vi sual ities that a re photograph ic and
filmic, videographic and electronic. 'Photographs are al 0 'S :
Nature,' Richter has commented (DP 187) and many ofh i5
natural subjects are presented as already mediated - th 0 ; ,­
magazi ne ads, tou rist scenes and otherworldly landscapes
such as h is brill iant Moonscapes (1968), images th at exi st
in the first instance only as relayed.
The penetration ofappearance not only by photograp
but by the commodity-image is a given ofthe Pop mo men,
out of wh ich Richter developed . Just as Min imali st art ofte
adapted the serial logic of industrial production, so Pop a
often adapted the simulacral nature ofthe commodity-i age.
As we saw with Warhol, such simulation is often taken to
trump representation, to undercut its referential claims.
Yet, like Warhol, Richter does not simply surrender painti ng
to the simulacral order ofour image-world: just as he
sometimes wrests an auratic uniqueness from tacky
 reproductions, so too does he sometimes restore a piercing
includes Europe (Ruscha travelled there in 1961 , only to
referentiality to flimsy representations . Even more than his
remark, rhetorically, that 'there was no art anywhere excel:
Pop peers, then, Richter insists on painting as the medium
in America ' -Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the SIfT'-1
that ca n still reflect on sem blance. 'I n order for history to
Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, 2002, 121; herea ft er LA) ar :.
present itself', I<racauerwrote, 'the mere surface coherence
it was indeed in L.A. that the two events most formative to " :,
offered by photography must be destroyed.,g, Similarly for
art occurred: the first Warhol exhibition at the Ferus Ga e
Richter 'the picture is the depiction and painting is the
summer 1962 (where the full array of single 'Ca mpbell's
tech n ique for shatteri ng it' (DP 227). In other words, the
Cans' was first exhibited) and the Duchamp retros pec(·.e
photograph del ivers a resembl ance that the painti ng in
curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Museum ofArt
turn must open up, even break apart, in order that semblance
in the autumn of 1963.84 An earlier catalyst was his disco... :€
- the characteristic natu re ofcontemporary appearance­
ofJohns (specifically Flag, 1954-55, and Target w~ h FO!'r ~,,--

might be revealed to us. In Richter Pop art reflects not on lyon

1955) in Print Magazine in 1957; tell ingly, th is infl uence carr.':'
how appearance is transformed in consumer society, but also
to him through reproduction.
on howwe can see, even understand, this transformation:
During this initial period Ruscha worked as a grapnlC
here Pop becomes a philosophical art.
artist: he designed ads briefly, then book covers an d maga2 '"E

layouts (i ncl uding Artforum from 1965 to 1967). Whil e otc: C' <
Ed Ruscha and the Cineramic Image
Pop artists used fragments of print sources, Ruscha ofter
Ed Ruscha also reflects on a world transformed in appearance,
adapted an entire graphic look. As a result some of his ea r
pai nti ngs, such as Annie (1962), partake eq ually of
abstraction (two broad fields of primary colours - ye
above, blue below) and ofdesign (both the name oftr '=
Little Orphan and the plump font of hereom ie, here ir
ii i on the yellow field). In his formats Ruscha registe rs 2
convergence between abstract painting and co mmerc ~

design that is even more thorough than in Ham ilton or ...

but in his case the primary medium ofthe transform-ation is
not the magazine, the comics, the news photo or
the snapshot, but a combination of the automobile, the
storefront, the bi II board and the ci nema, or rather the effects
of thi s combi nation on the distinctive vi suality of Los Angeles,
the ca pital of spectacle in post-war America. Ru sch a varies
some themes of his Pop colleagues and invents others : like
Lichtenstein, he presents banal subjects, but with an
enigmatic twist and, like Hamilton, he superimposes design
and painting, but with an apparent integration that seems
finally to resolve seeing and reading into one form of
scanning. 'I began to see the printed word', Ruscha once
remarked, 'and ittookoverfromthere.'g,
Born in 1937, Ruscha left Oklahoma in 1956 to attend
Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. Duringthe
Depression and after World War II, Okies often struck out for
California, buta,rtists have tended in the opposite direction,
towards New York .g) His relative di si nterest in the East
Lichtenstein. Yet in his procedure there is no such
convergence at all: 'Abstract Expressionism co II apSe(Hlle
whole art process into one act' , in a manner foreig n to tee
methodical calculation ofdesign work, Ruscha has
suggested; 'I wanted to break it into stages, wh ich is ..... lI d .
now' (LA 228) .
His work is indeed premeditated, especially the pho
books, wh ich incl ude Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1 962)
Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), Every Building on rr.e
Sunset Strip (1966), Thirtyfour Parking Lots (1967). NiT
Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968) and Real fstQC
Opportunities (1970). 'I don 't even look at it as photogra;: '"
Ruscha com ments; 'they're just images to fi II a book' (L!. __ ~
the parameters of which are set beforehand. Alt hough
the subjects are hardly random - several books s urvey
characteristic spaces ofL.A - the presentation is as
'neuter general' as possible: 'they're a collection of "facts
a collection of"readymades'" (LA 40,26). Like Wa rhol a
Richter, the young Ruscha dampened his style and staterr ::r";
 • 'mportantwho took the photos' - LA 25) in a way
. -: ' ,. ::-"'etheless conveys ad isti nctive vers ion of both .
- : "'=-= ;:oanness - fu nny, desolate, us ually both - is conveyed
- ~ '::: namely shots of solitary gas stations, the aerial images
-=-:-z.~-~ parkin g lots and so on; and the apparently arbitrary
. ~~- :::e"'s (why exactly nine pools?) only add to the effect
:.::- :. ~r<absurdity.
- :.- ough his designs are predetermined, an ambiguity
~ -=-.e E Istswithintheimagesorthewordsor(moreoften)
:-= ~ O'er th e two: both the photo-books and the paintings can
~ :: - _ce 2 fla t sort of enigma (here too one feels a con nection
nos) . Ruscha speaks ofthis effect as 'a kind of "huh?" ':
:c a ays had a deep respect for things that are odd, for
:'" r~: v.hi ch can not be expla ined ' (LA 65, 305). Often the
-~,. s:em s from his use ofwords, which, as in a ' misspelled
_ sign ', might appear both obvious and incorrect, as
:...: ~an)' 'i ncomplete sputterings' or noisome puzzles (LA 91 ,
e-Al ain Bois has underscored how often Ruscha is
REAL
ESTATE
OPP ORTUNITIES
.:.~ .. _0 'noi se', to cracks in communication, and some of
_ =r:l31wo rks do evoke the poetic figure ofthe calligram ,
- :r the shape ofthe text is designed to reinforce the
·.=c " -r g. only to unravel th is figu re altogether (as Michel
=.: ::::- ... on cearguedthatthewordpaintingsofRene
c&. i: -::e do as well) .85 In Ruscha images a nd words do not
:::.~ SJpport one a nother; rather they sta nd apart or even
- ::nositi on and these crossings cross up the viewer as
.:: _ - requ ently his words are as suspended in meaning as
- ~ are in space. In 1985 he did a painting for a library rotunda
-a i th at borrowed a line from Hamlet: 'words without
.Jg t s neverto heaven go'. This might be taken as his
::0, mi nus the possibility of heaven.
- e interest in the odd thing began as an appreciation
.:. -- ~ recom m on thing. Early on Ruscha painted some objects
~-- ..I.e. size' (as they are often painted in folk art). For
;. :: ...... p e, in Actual Size (1962; see page 91) a fiery can ofSpam
-- :s ~ rou gh the space below, while the word 'Spam ' appears
in yellowon dark blue in the space above. This image renders
the common odd, to say the least (it is als o a joke - early
astronauts were called 'spam in a can' - that takes on
additional meaning with junk e-mail today), and its ambiguity
persists: one reason why Ruscha depicts words is that they
'exist in a world of no size' (LA 231) and his juxtaposition of
'actual size' and 'no size' renders the pictorial space very
uncertain. Does the lower space of Actual Size suggest outer
space? Does the upper space convey commercial space?
How do the two spaces, with paint d rips from the upper to
the lower, relate to one another?
The potential role ofthe common as an ambiguous term
somewhere between the folk and the Pop is important to
consider here . ' Duchamp discovered common objects'
(LA 330), Ruscha has suggested and , like Johns, Ruscha
made them 'the foreground central subject' of his art
(LA289).87 Hedid so, moreover, in a period when the
comm on had become ever more commodified , the ordinary
ever more standard . (Warhol once suggested the term
'Common ist' as a replacement for ' Pop ', as if a collective
viewer might still be wrested from consumerism .)88 Like
Hamilton, Lichtenstein and Rosenquist, Ruscha also plays
with reified language -with slogans, jingles and the like. He is
drawn to term s that hover on the edge ofcl iche and
sometimes he paints them as if to pull them back from this
condition via ambigUity and sometimes to push them over,
once and for all, into the status ofa logo or a brand, along with
'Standard' , '20th Century Fox' and the other trademarks that
he has depicted. Occasionally, too, Ruscha underscores the
paradoxical an imation that word sand th ings assu me as they
become reified in this way: he presents them, sometimes
keyed up like special effects, as ifthey were the only public
figu res left to portray, the truly dom ina nt features of the
landscape , an d in LA this some-times seems to bethe case
(the famous Hollywood sign that presides overthe city recurs
in his work). Ruscha is attracted to hybrid word-images, or

what he calls 'the icon/logo concept' (LA 275); perhaps, like
Ham iIton, he antici pates ou r contem pora ry vers ion ofthis
mixed sign in the computer icon and pOp_Up.89 Ruscha also
depicts other th ings in the gri p of com modification; indeed,
he renders landscape in toto as so much real estate (e.g.,
'some los Angeles apartments'). Perhaps in landscape
painting, at least since Thomas Gainsborough, land has
appeared as property, but with Ruscha landscape becomes
real estate tout court: in some ofthe photo-books it is even
gridded and numbered as such (e.g., 'every building on the
Sunset Strip') . 90
Ruscha often features structures typical ofl.A., that
'ultimate cardboard cut-out town': 'los Angeles to me is like
a series of storefront planes that are all vertical from the street
and there's almost like nothing behind the fa<;ades' (LA 244,
223). Th is flat frontal ity ma kes his strange photo-books Iike
Ellery Building on the Sunset Strip sudden Iy a ppear to be
obvious ways to presentthe materi al (here the even bu iId ings
appear ina stri p along the top edge ofthe book a nd the odd
appear, upside down, along the bottom edge). His lA is also
a city of billboards and Ruscha seems to fashion his painting
after these large screens suspended in the landscape too. Like
a painting, Ruscha comments , a billboard is 'paint on a lifted­
up surface', 'a backdrop forthe drama that happens' and this
is how the s pace in his pai nti ngs often serves as well (LA 165,
265). Certainly his focus on storefronts and billboards implies
an automotive point of view and as Rosalind Krauss has
suggested, the car might be his primary 'medium', the unseen
vehicle ofthe l.A. paintings that depict various signs at
different scales amid broad horizons and vast skies. The car
is also 'a missing link in the [photo] books', Henri Man
Barense remarks , 'the conduit between the pools, apartments
and, of course, the parking lots and gas stations' (LA 213).
'I think of your work', Bernard Blistene comments to Ruscha,
'as a huge field in which you drive - and ofthe canvas as a kind
of windsh ield' (LA 304) 9 ' Along with the billboard, Ruscha
-~
does rethin k the old window model of painting in terms 0 : : ~,e
windshield. More than most cities, los Angeles is a horizor :.z.
expanse across which one drives from horizon to ho rizo
'It's the idea ofthi ngs ru n n ing horizontally and tryin g to
take off, ' Ruscha remarks. 'The scale and the motion bo
take pa rt in it' (LA 161) .9' Th is spatial ity is a pri me s ubject
of his art.
Ruscha also evokes a design culture characteristic ofL
'''Hollywood'' is like a verbto me,' he has commented .
'They do it with automobiles, they do it with everyth ing tha ­
we man ufactu re' (LA 221). Clea rly such con noisseu rsh ip oT
car models, surfboards and the like is important to Rusch<.
(among his studio notes is this one worthy of Ban ham or
Hamilton: 'Core of my aesthetic is the shape of48 Ford
gea rsh ift knob vs 48 Chevy gea rsh ift knob' - LA 39 9)-;'
Yet even more than this customizing of special cons umer
items , Ru scha d raws on the specific visual ity of ci ne ma, ' : 5
'cell uloid gloss' a nd space (LA 277). Th is vis ua Iity is at once
deep and s uperficia
illusionist an d flat:
the movies spaee is
su rface a nd vice verse.
and the words (as ; ~
credits and subtit ,es
can appear in the s dJY ~
register as the imagc_
This is to say, simply, that film is projected space and Ruse, ,,,
intimates this space often in his work. In Large Tmdema
Eight Spotlights (1962) the yellow spotlights see m to or ig ' ~:=:: =
in the distance, cut diagonally across the deep space tOW ,""':'5
us and arrive on the picture plane as though on a movie
screen: the lights align with its surface, around the emb e
of 20th Centu ry Fox, wh ich also a ppea rs to be projected ­
as if pictorial light and space were here subsu med by the
cinematic versions of these qualities. 'I've been in fl uem:c
by the movies, particularly the panoramic-ness ofthe wiCe
screen,' Ruscha has remarked. 'Most of my proportlonsa.-e­
affected by the concept of the panora m a' (LA 291 , 308).
Committed to the landscape mode, he shows us horizor :cl
spaces transformed by Cineramic spectacle, with brillia-­
sunsets and vast dimensions that often convey a 'deep
Cal ifornia n version ofi nn nity'. 94 'Close your eyes and wha,
does it mean, visually?' Ruscha asks about this Ho llYWOOd
Sublime; 'it means a way of light.' It is a light that is true ar c::
 at o nce, the stuffof Hollywood dreams : ' If you look
:;~ -~= 20th Century Fox, you get this feeling ofconcrete
orr ~ ality' (LA 221) _Yet at the sa me ti me Ruscha presents
ea rn -space as thin and fragile (one of his stretch
: 4 ~ 5 e _ 5co ntainsthewords 'eternal amnesia' in small print
.=: : -re bottom) and sometimes there is a hint ofcatastrophe
~r r.:.sh' in his pictures too (LA 214)- Like Nathaniel West and
_~.- Didi o n, Ruscha suggests that Los Angeles is a mirage
:= - Ca lifo rn ia a myth - a fa<;ade about to crum ble into the
eser: _a set about to liquefy into the sea_
Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and the Postmodern
vocabulary was viablefor a Modern architecture ofspace and
_sorption of Pop
industrial technology 40 years ago ' (LV 90).
-- :.1' .. 5 - a regi sters how the nexus of cars, com mod ities,
:: -: er:-s in g and movies had transformed the built environ­
~- ~-: - th e moment of Pop , RobertVenturi and Denise Scott
j 'n tu rn assume this transformation as the basis of
~_ ~- ", r archi tecture and urbanism . Ifh is Complexity and
~: ;rc;:1iction (1966) was an early critiq ue ofthe apparent
::. ~: : .... ection of modern design from society and history
- ;: :I1 eir Learningfrom Las Vegas (1972; hereafter LV) was
~ r ::.~ ad ocacy of postmodern design as a rapprochement
-- :>oth. and Pop influenced their thought (Learningfrom
....-:.:. ~ga s cites Ruscha in particular).95 Accordingto Venturi
:- S-:ott Brown, modern design lacked 'inclusion and
-= -, 5 r ' - inclusion of popular taste and allusion to
.=.-::- :ec ural tradition - and postmodern design came into
-.;. .-g:o correct these fau Its . Above a II, the fail ure of modern
.= f - - ~ecture stemmed from its refusal of'symbolism', or
- s:orical ornament, in favour of 'expressionism ', or the use
-:: .2rchitectural elements ' alone to convey the meaning ofa
.J~ :l ing (LV101).ln this way, they claim, the modern
::;: it'J igm of 'the duck', in which the form expresses the
~ _ j . g abstractly, must cede to the postmodern paradigm
-- ed ecorated shed', a building with 'a rhetorical front and
ell ional behind'. 'The duck is the special bUilding that
is a symbol,' Venturi and Scott Brown write in a famous
definition ; 'the decorated shed is the conventional shelter that
applies symbols ' (LV87).
Learningfrom Las Vegas originated as a studio , conducted
atYale and in Las Vegas, in autumn 1968. Like Banham a
decade before them, Ventu ri and Scott Brown ma rk thei r
difference from the modern movement through a strategic
turn to Pop imageability:
'We came to the automobile-oriented commercial architecture of
urban sprawl as our sourcefor a civic and residential architecture
ofmeaning, viable now, as the turn-of the-century industrial
Yet Banham soughtto update the expressionistic imperative
of modern arch itectu re vis-a-vis a futu ri stic com m itment to
tech nology - as such h is position is tru Iy Pop . For thei r part
Venturi and Scott Brown shun both the expressionistic and
the futuristic; indeed they oppose any 'prolongation' ofthe
modern movement and as
such their position is
distinctly postmodern (LV
xiii) . They accept, not only as
given but as desired, the
identification of'the civic '
with 'the commercial':
however 'ugly and ordinary'
the stri p and the s u bu rb are , they a re taken not merely as
normative but as exemplary. In short, theirs is an
architectu ral-u rbanist apologia for the consumerist
landscape produced by the nexus of car, commodity,
advertising and movies.
'Architecture in this landscape becomes symbol in space
rather than form in space,' Venturi and Scott Brown declare .
The big sign and the little building is the rule of Route 66'
(LV 13). Given this 'rule', Learningfrom Las Vegas often
conflates trademarks with public symbols: The familiar Shell
and Gulf signs stand out like friendly beacons in a foreign
land' (LV52). 96 It also often leaps to conclusions: given the
vast and fast 'autoscape ', only a scenographic architecture
can 'make connections among many elements , far apart and
seen fast' (LV 9) . In effect, Ventu ri and Scott Brown tra nslate
important insights concerning this 'new spatial order' into
an affirmation of 'the brutal auto landscape of great distances
and high speeds' (LV75). This is to naturalize a landscape that
~ .. =====:::
is neither natural nor necessary; it is also to instrumentalize
a sensorium of consumerist distraction in design, as they
urge architects to th ink in terms of'a sequence played to the
eyes of a captive, somewhat fea rfu I, but partly inattentive
audience, whose vision is filtered and directed forward'
(LV 74) .97 Here the M iesian motto of modern ist clarity in
architecture - 'less is more' - becomes a mandate of post­
modern ist di straction in design - 'less is a bore' (LV 139).
Despite its critique of modern architecture, Learningfrom
Las Vegas draws its strategy from Le Corbusier. Again, in Vers
une architecture and elsewhere, Le Corbusier juxtaposed
classica I structu res and machi n ic com modities, such as the
Parthenon and the Delage sports car, in orderto advance the
new monumentality ofthe Machine Age. Here, unlike
Banham again, Venturi and Scott Brown propose a series
of related analogies and they are not altogether ironic:
'Las Vegas is to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza' (LV18);
billboards punctuate Las Vegas as triumphal arches
punctuate ancient Rome; signs mark the Strip as towers
mark San Gimignano; and so on (LV106, 107, 117).
(I s it coi ncidental that Venturi and Scott Brown favou r the
Rome ofthe Counter-Reformation, the capital of churchly
spectacle?) IfLe Corbusier moved to classicize the machine
(and vice versa) in the First Machine Age, Venturi and Scott
Brown move to classicize the commodity-image (and vice
versa) in the First Pop Age. Sometimes the analogy between
Las Vegas and Rome slips into an equation: the Strip is our
version ofthe Piazza and so the 'agoraphobic' autoscape
might as well be accepted (LV 49). 'Americans feel uncom­
fortable sitting in a square,' Venturi and Scott Brown tell us;
'they should be working at the office or home with the family
looking attelevision.'9 8
On this point Learningfrom Las Vegas is nothing if not
straightforward: Venturi and Scott Brown wish to 'enhance
what is there', that is, to affirm the common-as-commodified
- a slight yet sign iflcant difference from the 'Com mon ist' Pop
ofWa rhol, Ruscha and others (LV 3). And here they quote : - ":
developer Morris Lapidus as a guide: 'People are looking =-u
illusions ... Where do they find this world of illusions? ...
Do they study it in school? Do they go to museums? Do the .
travel to Europe? Only one place - the movies . They go to : '"i:
movies. The hell with everything else' (LV80). A new mooe
of social inscription is affi rmed here, one th at Pop wo rks to
explore , if not critically, then at least ambivalently (as we
saw with Hamilton especially). For its part post modern
architecture a la Venturi and Scott Brown is placed in its
service - to design its appropriate byways, in effect. Here.
too, the postmodern critique of cultural elitism beco m es
a problematic form of manipulative populism. And yet ho
popular, let alone sincere, is this populism~ If Ham il ton
practised an 'iron ism of affi rmation' , Ventu ri and Scott Bn
propose an affi rmation ofi rony: 'I rony may be the to ol wit;-­
which to confront and combine divergent values in
arch itectu re for a plu ralist society' (LV 161). Butth is 'dou :I:oc,­
functioning ' of postmodern design is actually a do uble­
coding of cu Itu ral cues - 'a II usion' to arch itectu ral t rad it"or­
is offered to an educated elite, 'inclusion' of comme rcial
kitsch to everyone el se - that reaffi rms rather tha n over­
comes class lines. This pseudo-populism only beca m e
dominant ten years later under Ronald Reagan, as did the
neo-conservative eq u ation of political freedom a nd free
markets presented in Learningfrom Las Vegas. 1n this rega rc
Venturi and Scott Brown do count as an avant-garde, buta­
avant-garde ofthe Right.
Venturi and Scott Brown cycle Pop icons backto the
consumerist environment from which they first emerged ­
they are bu i It back in, as it were, structurally. Here, t hen. Po c:
becomes tautological and the popular no longer cha ll enges
the official. I n the form of postmodern design , Pop becorr E­
a recipe of accom modation to the' ugly and ord i na ry ' relie-. c:,
aga i n for elite taste , by a spici ng of historicaI all us ions . A: ,T "
point Pop loses whatever edge it had: in its postmod ern
make-over it is a style ofthe status quo.
5 ~' o; . :
 and theAesthetics of Plenty', ICA,
London, '990; 'Pop Art: An
International Perspective', Royal
Academy of Arts, London, 1991;
'Hand-Pa inted Pop: Amer ican Art in
Transition 1955- 1962' , Museum of
Contemporary Art , Los Angeles,
'993; ' Les An nees Pop', Centre
Georges Pompidou, Pa ris , 2001 ;
and 'Pop Art: US/U K Con ne<tons,
- . a beginning. For 1956-1966', Menil Collection,
re.c "5s oftni s text I thank Houston, 2001. Besides thecatalo­
=i'"" ,a.-,..: :'ark Fran cis. gues ofthese exh ibitions, the key
:. r.JC:...,IZI rUe of French histories and sou rce books (again in
subjugation as much as control.
20 Banham in 1960cited inWhiteley,
Reyner Banham, 162.
21 Alison and Peter Sm ithson,
'Thoughts in Progress', Architectural
Design (April 1957). "3·
22 Peter(ook, 'Zoom and "Real"
Archi tecture' , Archigram, 4 (1964).
23 Reyner Banham , Megastructure:
Urban Futures a/the Recent Past
(New Yo rk: Harperand Row, 1976) ,
17·
24 Banham in Peter Cook, ed .,
Archigram (London: Studio Vista,
Manet the art museum becomes the
instit utiona l frame of painting, and
Benja min that Its primary value
becomes exhibition value; with
Ha m ilton th is frame is more purely
one of exhibition - the showroom­
and exhibition value is pushed
towards co nsum ption value . See
Michel Foucault, ' Fantasia of the
Library' (1967), in Language,
Counter· Memory, Practice (Ithaca:
Cornell Universi ty Press, 1977).
Benjamin writes of exhibition value.
of course, in the 'Artw ork ' essay
werelikecollages' (in David
Robbins, ed., The Independent
Group: Postwar Britain and the
Aesthetics ofPlenty [Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1989!
21). On the culture industry see
Theodor Adorno and Max Ho rkhe·
mer, The Dialectic ofEnlightem>ur :
(1944), trans. john Cumm i ng (N""
Yo rk : The Seabury Press, 1972)­
40 Perhaps m ore than any o thers. tJ-~1
images recal l the m edia coll a geso~
Rauschenberg, yet the tabul ar
picture should not be confus ed .... i.

_ ~- : 'lists. Ifsome Eng lis h alo ne) inc lude : Lucy R.
Lippard, ed., Pop Art (1966; revised
1970); john Russell and Suzi Gablik,
eds, Pop Art Redefined (1969); Simon
Frith, Art into Pop (1987); Paul Taylor,
ed., Post-Pop Art (1989) ; Marco
Livingstone, Pop Art: A Continuing
History (1990; revised 2000); Steven
Henry Madoff, ed ., Pop Art: A Critical
History (1997); and Cecile Whiting, A
Tastefor Pop: Pop Art, Genderand
Consumer Culture (1997) .
Al ison and Peter Smithso n, ' But
Toda y We Collect Ads' , Ark, no. 18
(November 1956) . Also see Beatriz
Colo m ina, Privacy and Publicity:
Modern Architecture as Ma ss Media
(Cambridge, Massach uset ts: MIT
Pres s, 1994) .
Richard Hamilton, Collected Words
'953- 82 (London: Tha m es &
H udson, 1982), 28; hereafter
abbreviated CW
Alloway, 'The Long FrontofCulture'
10 Banham revised the notion of a
cultural continuum slightly: he
thought in terms of a plurality of
hierarchies, which safeguarded
critical judgment . For an excellent
account see Nigel Whiteley, Reyner
1972),5.
25 Reyner Banham, 'A Clip-O n
Architecture', Design Quarterly, no.
63 (19 63),30 .
26 Paolozzi also made a collage titled
Bunk! Evadne in Green Dimension
(1952), which looks ahead tothe
famous Hamilton collageJust what is
it that makes today's homes so
different, so appealing? (1956); it also
seems to include the image of a
Ford. To say 'history is bunk' might
be, here, to suggest that 'h istory' can
also be made from 'bunk' - i.e., from
the apparent 'nonsense' (one mean ·
ingof 'bunk') of media images .
27 julian M yers, 'The Future as Fetish',
October. 94 (Fal l 2000). 70.
28 For an early criti que of thi s doubling
offetishisms - as a compoundi ng
rather tha n as a critique - see Laur a
Mu lvey, 'Fears, Fantasies and the
Male Unconscious, or "You Don't
KnowWhat is Happening, Do You,
Mr jones"", in Spare Rib (1973) ;
reprinted in Laura Mulvey, Visual and
Other Pleasures (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, '989) .
Alongwith the institutional
inequality of the art world at the
(1936) and alludes toconsumption
value in other notes
31 See Michel ( arrouges , Les Machines
ct libataires (Paris : Editions Arcanes,
1954) ·
32 Perhaps Hamilton also had in mind
another note concer nin g the Large
Glass in which Duchamp speaks of
'the interrogation of the shop
window' and 'the coition through
the glass pane.' Ifthis is the case,
then the 'interrogation' here
becomes the enticement of the
showroom , a total environment.
See The Ess ential Writings ofMareel
Duchamp (London:Thames &
Hud son, 1975), 74 ·
33 Ban ham ci ted th is line in 'Vehicles of
Desire'
34 The tabu lar pictures also suggest an
updati ng of The Story ofthe Eye
(1928), where Bataille plays w ith
differe nt conjunctions of sexual
objec ts, hu m an and not.
35 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957),
trans. Annette Lavers (New York:
Hill & Wang, 1972), 99. The relation
here is one notof direct influence
but of parallel responses to similar
changes I n the object-world.
his ' fla t-bed picture plane', as e<
Steinberg termed it in 'Other
Criteria' (Other Criteria INewYor c
Oxford University Press, 1972]) ­
Both types of picture m ight be
'horizontal' in operation, not or:1, -
the practical sense that th ey migl'\;
be assembled on the studio Awr
but also in the cultural sens e th a!
they might scan across 'lhefiM/
art continuum' (asAliowaycalleo'
in 'The Long Front of Cultu re').
Nevertheless, as Hamilton st ates 11
early asJust what is it?, the tabula.
image remains pictorial : it is S[ I I;:
vertical picture of a semi-lIIusio, _
space, even though this ori enta
might be associated with the mag>'
zine la yout as m uch as wi th the
paint ing rectangle (this aSSOCi al-~
might also be di stincti ve of Pop
especially in Rosen quist and
Rusch a) . Moreover, the tab lar
pic ture is iconographic in a way, r
Rauschenberg images are nO!· a~t
in keeping with th e I.G ., it is also
comm un icative, almost pedag-c;­
cal, again as Rausc henbergs are r. . .
Further, thedesirouseye tnat .­
ton charts in h is pictu res tS d a'=-l:

Banham: Historian ofthe Immediate
Future (Cambridge, Massachusetts :
M ITPress,2002) .
11 Reyner Banham , 'Who is This Pop"
Motif, no . 10 (Wintefl962-63), '3
12 One exception here is folk music, the
basis o f much pop music an d
co mmon culture fro m Elvis to Dylan
and beyond.
'3 Reyner Banham, 'The Atavism ofthe
Short·Distance Min i-Cyclist ', Living
Arts, no. 3 (1964) , 92. The second
paradox is only apparent in the
sense that the embrace of American
culture was construed as a cr itique
time, this hyper-feti shism might
account for the scarcity of Pop
artists who are women, though , as
Surrealism suggests , women can
also produce feti shistic
represe ntati ons of women. One can
count prominent fe m ale Pop artists
on one hand : Pauline Boty (whose
life w as cu t short by leukemia in
'966) , Niki de Saint Pha lle, Mariso l
... Perhaps the economic
redom esticatio n of middle·c lass
women as housewives after the war
also made Pop representat'lons of
consu m ption less availab le to
36 Perhaps not coincidentally, the
famous 'Kitchen Debate' between
Khruschev and Nixon at the Moscow
World's Fair occurred in 1959.
37 In th is way Hami lton evokes a world
in which artistic aura, fetish objects
and the gaze ha ve become
confused . For a discussion of this
confu sion emergent in Su rrealism ,
see m y Compulsive Beauty
(Cambridge, M assachusetts: MIT
Press, 1993), 192-206.1 stress the
fetish istic use of relief and co llage
here because, in the different
context of Constructivism after the
from 'the vernacu lar glance l-- ~
Rauschenberg evokes In ~,s
collages. For further discuss
Rauschenberg see Bra nd~ !.
joseph, Random Order: Rob<~
Rauschenberg and til, No",,"'...,..;·
Garde (Cambridge, Manaer_=-'"
MIT Press , 200)) an d Brandl!­
joseph, ed ., Robert Rau,"'.""''''
(Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Press, 200 2) .
41 Also in 'O the r ed t. "a' St•• n :~"
argu es that, for all its claim :o
autonomy, late-mod ernist .2: -stl'ZZ .
ion (e.g., Kenneth Noland a--" 0 -0

of high art and to this extent 'Left­
orientated'.
14 Banham, Theory and Design, 11.
15 Reyner Banham, 'Vehicles of Desire' ,
Art, no. 1 (1 Septembe(1955). 3;
women. There is, however, the
partial exception of wome n who
were designers - though the best·
known, such as Alison Smith son
and Ray Eames, were partn ered with
Russian Revolution, they were taken
up precisely to defet ishize the
'bourgeois fetishism' of painting.
38 See T.j. Clark, 'Modernism,
Postmodernism and Steam',
Ste lla ) is in forr.led by a log""'­
design , in fact by the 'Jery log : 0-+=
styling so adm ired by Banh. ·- .~::
Hamilton - again, Imagistl[ - ;0=
fast lines an d speedy turnova. - -;0::

useum,
The 50 Sand
-,>" ~re .,, ' 987; 'The
':-e".G: _D- j ostwa r Britain
Theory and Design, '32.
16 Banham, 'Vehicles of Desire', 3·
17 Reyner Banham , 'Design by Choice',
The Architectural Review, '30 (july
1961) , 44.1 am indebted to White ley
on this point.
18 Banham , Theory and Design, 12.
19 This senten ce appears in the original
introd uction to Banham, Theory and
Design, 10. Banham betrays little
sense tha t this shift might involve
their husbands. See Cecile Whiting,
A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Genderand
Consumer Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge U niversity Press, 1997) .
29 Walter Benjamin, 'Paris , the Capital
of the N ineteent h Century' (1935), in
The Arcades Project, trans . Howard
Eiland and Kevin Mc Laughlin
(Cambri dge, Massach usetts:
Harvard University, Press, 1999) , 8.
30 Fouc ault once remarked that w ith
October, 100 (Winter2002). Earlyon
Hamilton calls this hybrid 'a poster'
(CW104)·
39 As William Turnbull recalled in 198):
'Magazines were an incredible way
of randomizing one's thin king (one
th ing the Independent Group was
interested in was breaking down
logical thinking) - food on one page,
pyramids in the desert on the next, a
good-looking girl on the next; they
is, he suggests that under Ih.
historical pressure of co nsu ·nf­
society an iron ic ident ity was ~
between modernist pa intin g 2.....;0.
mass ·cultural other, whethenT ~
other is called 'kitsch ' (Gree-- k ­
'theatrical ity ' (Michael Fried) o'
'des ign' In this regard wlm
Greenberg and Fried theorize as::
strictl y optic al space of pure
pain ting, Ham ilton pictures.5;
 ~

octl)' scopophi lic space of pure
i ' E'1 ; and wha t Greenberg and
~ theo rize as a mode rni s t
, ":' . fully autonomous and
-=: ~. alert . Hami lton projects as
~ :: :t..afent opp osite , a fetishistic
" "':1. openly desirous .
· -ie'.:) 'Is a li gh tni ng-rod term of
~:- -~: wit ness the controversy
r ..~ b y Hannah Arendtwith her
~, il Eichmann on Trial (New
", jng Press, 1963), of'the
:j ofevil'.
~:3 f"" 05 t American Pop artists
~.:.e'erential to the Abstract
, ,,,",sionists , whom they felt they
,,,,-orkth rough, which they
- ",'mes did by way o f John s.
~,.,<" •• I Lobel, Image
... ,-o:or: Roy Lichtenstein and the
'S.,,'" of Pop Art (New Ha ve n:
. ,,>ersit)' Press, 20 0 2) ; and
I ,,:Ritch..r, 'Teaching the Late
~:=!'. - Arti s.t From Mnemonics to
l - . dmology of Gestalt' (PhD.
Ui'i IOO , Graduate Cen ter, City
, "S .ty of New York , 1989).
' c '."age Duplicator, 47.
. c.,te nstein in John Coplan s,
-~ with Roy Licht ens tei n',
'.", (MaY 1 967), 34·
S-'. - be rg, 'Jasper Johns: the
~~ er; Years o( HisArt', in O ther
:5: f~S p€'C1 Li chtenstein is
1 v,-rth th e invest iga ti on of
'Oxidations' (1978) , to name just
two series, are mag nificen t.
57 Roland Barthes , 'That Old Thing,
Art', in Pa ul Tay lor, ed., Post -Pop
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Pres s, 1989). 26. Wi th variati ons this
reading is repeated by ot her
theor ists suc h as Miche \ Foucault,
Gill es Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard.
58 Thomas Crow, 'Saturday Disasters',
in Annette Michelson, ed . Andy
Warhol (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT Press, 2001) , 5', 55, 58, 60.
59 Andy Wa rhol in Gretche n Berg,
'Andy: My True Sto ry', Los Angeles
Free Press (March '7, 1963), J
60 Andy Warhol in Gene Swenso n,
'What is Pop Art? Answers from
Eight Painters, Part I', ARTnews, 62
(Nove mber 1963), 26 .
61 Cynical art ists such as Jeff Koo ns
and Damien Hirst have since
exhausted itvis·a·vis our own
hyperconsu mer·ist moment. On
'capitalist nihilism' see Benjamin
Buchlo h, 'The Andy Warh ol Line', in
Gary Ga rrel s, ed ., The Work ofAndy
Warhol (Seattle: Bay Pres s, 1989)
and my'Dada Mime', October, 106
(Fa il 2003) .
62 AndyWar hol , un dated state me nt
cited in Kynas ton McShine, ed., Andy
Warhol: A Retrospective (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, '989),457.
63 Andy Warh ol and Pat Hac kett,
POPism: The Warhol 60S (New York:
World's Fa ir in New Yo rk, me n in
power - such as Governor Nelson
Rockefeller, Com missio ner Robert
Moses and elite architect Philip
Joh ns on, who not only helped to
design the SOC iety of the spec tacle,
but also sough t to rep resent it (in
symbol ic events slJch as th e World's
Fair) as the fulfilment of th e
Ame rican dream of success and self­
rule - could not tolerate it. Warho l
was orde red to cover up the imag e,
litera lly to repres s it (whic h hedid, in
mockery, with his signature s il ver
paint) and they we re not amused
when he o ffe red to su bstitute a
portrait of Robert Moses ins tead .
75 Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of
Painting: Writings 1962-1 993. ed .
Hans·Ulrich Ob rist, tran s. David
Britt (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT Press /London : Th ames &
Hudson, ' 995). 55, 23; hereafter
abbreviated DP in the text. I am
indebted here, as all engaged
viewers of Ric hter are , to the writings
of Benjamin Buchloh on the artist.
76 See Robert Rosenblum , Modern
Painting and the Northern Romantic
Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (New
York: Harpe r& Row, 1975). Especia l­
ly in his colour·chart pai ntings
Richter seems to fold the etio lated
tradition ofconstr uctivist painti ng
(e.g., Max Bil l) into his mi x as well.
77 Benjamin Buchloh , 'Gerhard
California with mattresses on th eir
ca rs rath erth an stay in Oklaho ma
and stanve. 1faced a sort of black­
and·white cinematic ide ntity cris is
myse lfin this respect - sort ofa
sh owdown wi th myself - a littl e li ke
trading dust fo r oranges. On the way
to California I disc overed the
im portan ce of gas stati ons . They are
like trees because they are there .. .'
(LA,250).
84 The ret rospective co in cided with the
second Warho l show at Ferus
Ga llery, which incl uded silkscreens
of El vis and Liz. At th is time Ruscha
als o met Richa rd Ham ilton) who
was in town for the Duchamp show.
85 Yve-Alain Bois, 'The rmom eters
Should Last Forever', in Ed Ruscha:
Romance with Liquids 1966-1969
(New York: Rizzol i, 1993); Mich el
Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, trans .
Richard Howard (Berkeley: Univer­
s ityofCalifornia Press , '983) ,19-31.
Ruscha is sometim es called 'the
Mag ri tte oftheAmerica n Highway'.
86 Even his early paintin gs th at spell
out onomatopoeic utterances like
'oof' and 'smash' do not app ear
motivated or grounded .
87 Above I suggested a shift from folk
to Pop as the basis of a com mon
culture; althoug h first gli mpsed by
Banha m, thi s process was more
pronounced in th e US than in the
UK. It is registered, for exam ple, by
tha t they seen., to ..", ..e J
(LA,304j ,
93 Oraga ln: ' I b«lie,,,, - :;'c'
piece of lnd ustf,aJ oes ' ~ " ~':~?;;i::'
you rathtudes o f :rrelllt·c-.··- "; (,..­
story abo ut a guy I',
1965 Mu sta ng, rep-airir:s:r~
carb uretor, ln th e be g, n ~' - g, ~'s.
crude mechanic ; but Jo e u -::e-'~
trans form ati on from bemg :;.s
crude mec hanic to being a Ii!:!
technicia n' (LA, 172) ·f ir::sr­ ~
the artistic versi on oft hi5.
AI Bengston, Ron Daws 31"0 :::::,r L ~
Ka ufmann, to name ont: a f~
experimented wilh laccu ~-s
pol ym ers, fibre glass, P1"",,,;';.HO :
th e like. O n th is cult u,e Q.~CJs:-:,--­
izing see the titl e essa) - T: ,......
Wo lfe, The KO ll dy·Kolord ~"R~~
Architecture ofFo", E",' ~~
York: Harper & Row, 191'
94
and Stains (Cologne:
2000),9. Rusc'>a: 't h .e ••_
10cked"ln a tt l tude~.hc__~ :.-a

.'" :hat Barthes begins to Harco urt Brace Jovanovich, ' 980) , Richter's Atlas: The Anomic John s and, more stro ngly, by thrn gs in a honz onta .....-:~~ I
In th e early 19605 o r, in a 50. Arch ive', October, 88 (Spring 1999) . Rusch a. His first group show, also I'm l uckytha t word5~2:':- ::teC t:..JI!
I=e -a::-­-:\.eln. with that of Ernst 64 Warh o l in Swe nson, 'What is Pop 78 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass curated by Hopps, was calle d 'New ho ri zontal. ' Alre.
: ­'=­ 'U1 , wh ose Art and Illusion Art)', 60. Orname nt, tra ns. and ed . Th omas Y. Painting of Comm on Objects' and it 'eve ry th in g \'!as he' ' Z ~ ~-:;::
;;.:, .-!! ~ ea d at the ti me. 65 Roland Barthes, Cam era Lucida, Levin (Ca m bridge, Mass achu setts: in cl uded other connoisseurs ofthe 300).
,."!'~·;11 see , Ruscha achieves a tran s. Rich ard Howard (New York: Ha rvard University Press, 1995) , 59. common such as his fri end Joe 95 Ve nturi and Scott B·.o ...... ,e. •• -

~ effect with different means. Hill and Wang, 1981), 26, 55, 53. For 79 Perhaps this ambiti on is im plied, Goode . On the affirmat ion of the share les s With RLiSC~-; :i..~ ~~

f.!·~"l!jri kept a hand-w ritte n list an ac count of this co nnecti on cryptic all y, in hi s intent ion 'no t [to] o rdi nary in Ruscha see Dave Hi ckey. Angeles than Wit:" TO)·... \1....: '? .... I!...B
1 :..:'- :erms that begins with between Barth es and Lacan. see use [photography] as means to 'Avai lab le Light', in The Works of Vegas , especiall) tM ~ _i ~~

:;" k' and ends with 'P ok Pok '. Margaret Iversen, 'What is a pain ting but Itol use pai nting as a Edward Ruscha {San Francis co: San of hi s Gonzo jou ma ~ ~' ~

:::;;tentl), he was interested in how Ph otograph)' Art History , '7, no . 3 means to photography' (DP, 73). Francisco Museum of Modern Art , 'Las Vegas (Whati)liis ''''5<5 .c."
tCr .... ~n ·words can also be (September 1994). 80 Fo r Richter the semblance of the ' 982 ), 24. hear you! To o nO lsyJ LZS '~T
.....~fll1o" alized. 66 AndyWarhol, The Philosoph y ofAndy world is not given; the painter must 88 War hol in Swenson, 'Wha t is Pop The Kondy- Kolaud TI1'~
S point see the exchange Warhol (New York: Harcourt Brace 're peat' it or, more exactly, 'fabricate ' Art?', 6o.
""', MIchael Fried and Rosalind Jovanovich, '975), 8,. it in order to capture 'reRected light' 89 As ea rly as 1967 Ruscha depict ed the Ve n!uri made 1ne- cc " - "­
:i-i.S;O Hal Fo ster, ed ., Discussions 67 Wa rh ol in Berg, 'Andy: My True as we experie nce it today, to make it numbers '1984' in a font suggestive in 'A Justification fo'. Po';
: j;<n,porary Culture (Seattle: Bay Story',3· 'valid'. (' I would like to make it va lid, of th e computer to come. In a late Arc hitecture' in AA.!r;;"";;',.
~~ 1387). 68 Warhol in Swenson, 'Wh at is Pop ma ke it visible,' he remarked early text, 'The Infor mation Ma n', he
"'-~f15te ln in Copla ns , 'Talking Art)', 26. on of the photograph, in th e sense moc ks, hil a ri ou sly, an othe r kind o f 'Learnin g from Pop' 0 ( ,

- ~O/li (ht enstein', 36 . 69 Warhol in Berg, 'A ndy : My True less of affirmation than of rein ed language that is s tatistica l 359-360 (Dec e m~~"~
~ begins to Lichten steinize Story', 3· understanding [DP, 33 ].) Se mb la nce and bureaucratic in natu re (see Los 96 One might argue thAI,;"',. :o
: . J1f1 hese masters directly, with 70 Michael Warne r, 'The Mass Public according to Rich ter is th us about Angeles Institute of Co ntemporary Art of tradema ,k a ndou"J •.;~
~· ."tg5 after Picasso, Matisse, and the Mass Subject', in Bruce our apprehension ofappea rance; it Journal, no . 6 Uune-J uly 1975]. 21)
~ "':::nan and others , these Robbins, ed., Th e phantom Public is about huma n perception, 90 Here the suburban, eas tern
;.--~i o ns become too obviou s. Sphere (Minneapolis: University of e m bodim ent , ag ency - not as they com plement oft he real-est ate
.~ - !>erg 'Other Criteria ', 88; also Minnesota Pre ss, '993), 242 . are for all tim e but as th ey are photo-boo ks is the Dan Graham
!.i!: r'O" tt" 40 above. For Steinberg 71 See Richard Meyer, 'Warhol's transformed with social change and piece Homesfor America made for
'S Da, ad 'gm signa lled a Cl ones" Th e YaleJournalofCriticism, technological develo pment. the Decembe r 1966/January 196 7 rad ical in ad e q ua~- c : s.....:.c- i.
.: -xmodern ist' break with 7, no. 1 (1994). 81 Kracauer, The Ma ss Ornament, 52. issue of Arts Magazine. subs tituti on is un de:'"IT!:-e:::
;:;;:,,"is\ models o f picturing (he 72 Wa rho l in Swenso n, 'What is Pop 82 Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information at 91 In at least one instance in Ruscha' s 97 From Don ald Applto·,."
n one of the first critics to use the Art )', 60. the Signal (Cambridge, work a painting shows a rear·view
- cogently). 73 Andy Warh ol in Da vid Ba iley, Andy Massachu setts: MIT Press, 2002) , mi rror perspective, with th e Holly. from the Road (C, ma ' : 5"
"" lobel, Image Duplicator, 11 8-19 . Warhol: Transcript (Lon don, 1972) , 15'; hereafter abbreviated LA . wood sig n seen in reverse at sunset. ,.
~ ;Jggested , Hamilton is als o alert quoted by Benjamin Buchloh in 83 Ruscha: 'I n the ea rl y ' 950S Iwas 92 Also important here is the distracted 98
: ~~ eme rgence ofa hybrid word­ 'Andy War hol's One· Dimensional awakened by the photographs of attention of the dr iver, whic h Ruscha
·.:::ge that we sca n, as is Ruscha . Art', in McShine, ed ., Andy Warhol, Walker Evans and the movies o f John also evokes with details that lea p out
• is not to say tha t w arho l did no 27· Ford, especially Grapes ofWrath from expanses that go by almost 19 66) , '3 .
'
·eat work after hi s shooting: on the 74 When Warhol made his Thirteen whe re the poor 'Ok ies' (mostly unseen: in the car 'things are
JI:'trary, his 'Skul ls' (19 76) and Most Wanted Men for the 1964 farmers whose land dried up) go to automat ic ... They go byyo u so fa st

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