The Story of Pop Art, Part 1:

1. Whats, Whens, Wheres and Whys

‘The wondrous thing about art … is that it has a life of its own, and no gatekeeper in the world can successfully force it down a path it doesn’t want to take’

Waldemar Januszczak. Sunday Times Magazine. 15–9–2019.

Where is the value of anything in a world where everything is infinitely reproducible? That mid-twentieth century, post-photography debate has been updated in the 21st century with the irresistible progress of the internet. Now everything is digitally reproducible, alterable and everywhere. The monetary value of original handmade works of art skyrocketed in tandem with the historical reputations of the artists, and the niche value of the art market. Copyright lawyers only realistically pursue cases where there are multi-millions to be made from claims. So what is the difference between ‘normal’ pop and rock and art rock? The shallow answer is in depth. It’s not that art rock is better per se, but it plunges depths and explores extremes that other more audience/convenience-orientated genres are less interested to probe. Art rock proclaims that pop and rock, truly and humanistically expressed beyond the influence of commercialism, ease or convenience, is as important and relevant an artform as any other, easily straddling the permanently, mutually suspicious worlds of high and low culture. Art rock is non-populistic rock with added depths and unexpected strands of culture attached. Various culturally biased critics might deem that view snobbish or elitist, but that only holds if you agree that the Old Proletariat/New Precariat aren’t interested in penetrating depths of art. It’s not a class thing, in other words; it’s an art thing.

The Model by Kraftwerk may seem at first listen like a simple, elegant keyboard-based techno-pop song, and it is — but it also communicates its icy magic on many different levels. The aching dispassion of the vocals is matched by the efficient metronome of the electronic rhythm, and the mix of romantic yearning and jealousy that passive-aggressively taints the arch detachment of the lyrics. The Prokofiev-meets-Beethoven dynamics of the refrain send the listener back to parlour games in Weimar republic reception rooms, viewed through the sanitised prism of an analytical East Berlin laboratory. It’s in these places where Kraftwerk (for handy Teutonic example) nod to pop and then walk assertively away, with just a financially astute glance back over the shoulder.

Why does art become as important for some as belief is for others? Because there is an invisible dance between maker and receiver, the handmade, imaginative ideas or experiments of a person in love with the thrill of creativity reaching wordlessly and eloquently across dimensions, straight into the soul of another. Is that manipulation, or coercion? If it is, it’s of the most benevolent, consensual kind: an acquiescing feint of dominance and submission out of which everyone emerges satisfied. Art is the sensual expression of humanism and human truth, communicated unquestioningly (except by some critics) to simpatico others, those others being a receptive public and other artists. In a time of spiritual scepticism and scientific, factual dominance, art straddles all those worlds of atheism and devotion, pokes a little but generally spreads more of its own kind of love.

The English countryside scenes of John Constable from hundreds of years ago rubbed up (in class terms) against the glamorised animals and tricorn hats of Gainsborough, and his mistily broad vistas. JMW Turner’s stormy ships battered Dover and Doggerland, caught in tempest after tempest, the vortices he captured in the moment as dramatic as George Clooney in The Perfect Storm, or even C.S. Lewis in The Voyage of the Dawntreader. William Blake may have said ‘Damn the King!’ (or words to that effect), seen angels in trees and written the lyrics to Jerusalem, but he was very much also the original Extinction Rebellion Rebel, protesting through sideburns and white painter’s shirts the dark satanic mills of that pesky aspirational northern working class. A couple of hundred years later Patrick Heron simplified psychedelic pebbles on the beach of St Ives, and his friend Peter Lanyon captured the angles and dynamism of the windsurfers, glintingly bourgeois off the peninsula. Ben Nicolson and his sculptor wife Barbara Hepworth simplified and smoothed these natural forms, making sheer permanence where there had been natural chaos; while up in London Francis Bacon scraped oil paint down drunken canvas, making his Screaming Popes of Horror decades before Pope Benedict’s dark, sunken eyes removed any doubt. Lucien Freud was kicking against the reflective work of his grandfathers’ in saving psychological lives, by painting real, physical ones. Undulating flesh, real and alive, flowed from his mixing palette like carbohydrates into a measuring tube as Lucien evidentially failed to keep his trousers up. laying the ground for the eventual #MeToo movement.

David Hockney was working out of both Leeds and Los Angeles and the 1960s, coming from the other end of bespectacled sexual liberation, newly flamboyant in the repealing of the homosexuality law of 1967. Sheer blocked colours and forms blended in Hockney’s happy view to make sardonic pop out of cartoon impressionism, as he handed his brush and sensibility round the back of the canvas to Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, ready to collage with critique mass consumerism. Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin were waiting on the other side of Margaret Thatcher to become the new stars and the story, presenting dissected cows, crystallised sharks and tents as shrines to ‘everyone they’d ever slept with’. Fiona Rae made the hugest canvases since Rothko, smearing blues, yellows and whites over London-shaped blobs and underground signs, the miasma melting in the white cube of the gallery.

Later Banksy barely showed in galleries, more often on CD covers or street corners, by the Wailing Wall or on Bridgend garages, poetically issue-signalling from his palette of templates and spray cans, little girls and gas masks, shopping trolleys and bathos. Lowry’s industrial age matchstick men shows echoed in Pedantry prison practice and early Status Quo, Alfred Wallis’s naïve painting of Cornish fishing harbours bringing a patronising simplicity to cathedrals of complicated snobbery and high thoughts. Gilbert and George smear excrement over stained glass and Pythonesque, Morecambe & Wise-style creep-punk, and Ben Okri opts for the dried version of elephant dung in a painting-destroying comment on empire. Julian Opie cartoonifies the faces of celebrities, Marcus Harvey does the same for enormous killers, as William Hogarth looks forward from a bacchanalian village feast from hundreds of years before, chicken leg in hand and cheek, shaking his head at multifarious British humanity.

A bit soulless, a bit clever, very cool, snappy colours. This description of pop art could easily apply to Brian Eno’s debut album Here Come the Warm Jets, or Bjork’s 1995 sophomore LP Post. Can you hear colours? These records seemed to strive to achieve that, with often the visual schemes of their strong covers influencing how the music was heard. Random stabs of extended synthesisers, weaving chord progressions of mystical intrigue led the listeners’ imaginations down unknown rabbit-holes, new hues and dynamics worming further into the brain (soul?) with each repeated listen. Politics took a tumble too, as the public tires of right and left stances, fake news and Jean Lyotard’s ‘spectacle’ becoming more important than the careerism of politicians and their increasing irrelevance beyond being caricatured figures of fun, pontificating on the news, the cartoonist Gerald Scarfe scrawling manic in the corner of the room. Postmodernism’s forty year or so cultural battle, fought by Lyotard, Baudrillard, Barthes, Adorno et al was looking a bit crusty and out of date.

How can ever-self-reproducing postmodernism be out of date, I hear you wearily ask. The gradual, combined efforts of PJ O’ Rourke, Roger Scruton, Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson (amongst others) had dragged the idealism of the protest-left into the reality-baiting actuality of now. The twisting of language and meaning inherent in postmodernism, the changing of society by the changing of the mind via the language, was in trouble as populist governments all over the world were voted in in an anti-political correctness protest vote against un-mandated globalism. The people had had enough of looking at still cartoons, beds and sharks, and wanted to enjoy themselves with the modern, real-time Shakespeare of reality TV.

Marcel Duchamp was widely considered to be the father of conceptual art, and was particularly active in Paris in the 1910s. Experimenting with cubist painting, rhetorical text and kinetic sculpture, he found his grand display of beauty in his Large Glass (Bride Stripped Bare by Her Brothers). He worked slowly on this for years, between chess games. It consisted of 8ft panes of glass with images of machinery pressed between them, based on the actual objects. The barrels, metalware and pipes made up the people of the title, as Duchamp brought his ready-made objects into a form of two-dimensional representation. Duchamp was always asking the question of what painting was, what sculpture was and what art was. He seemed to conclude on the fact that art was whatever got people talking, as when he presented his signed urinal ‘R. Mutt’ at the Paris open exhibition in those years, titled Fountain. Duchamp had presented the beautiful, functional curved porcelain of a typical public urinal as art in itself; he had elevated it, had celebrated both its purpose and surreal removal from it. This removal set the object up as a work of Dada art — an act of situational absurdism. The fact too that Duchamp was French, with that country’s externally amusing cultural habit of urinating in public, helped to add more nuance to the story. And here the story became more important than the veracity of the piece. Duchamp had thereby demonstrated with cool detachment how the act of placing an object in an exhibition, and the controversy around that, can create the art too: an early act of media art ‘on the wire’. Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin were all watching with excited curiosity from different times, angles and positions.

Have controversial idea, make it; invent a story, present it; get paid, disappear. Duchamp wrote the book on this approach to the art world; the chess players’ version more than Picasso’s more compulsive, inventively rapacious one. Duchamp was as outrageously fresh as The Beatles, if as arguably less charming or tuneful. While that group seemingly grew up on screen and in front of the world’s eyes, Duchamp arrived fully formed and glamorously vampiric in his cynical, Peter Cushing-meets-Bertrand Russell reserve. Entertainment to both John Lennon and Marcel Duchamp consisted of a refreshing and bold challenge to the mind — it was on that point that these two men turned. Duchamp’s earth-toned cubist triumph Nude Descending a Staircase was no less striking and jarringly dynamic in its time than Lennon and the Beatles’ I Am The Walrus — one by eye and one by ear. Until film and video makers began to get involved with The Beatles in the mid-60s, making the promo for Rain, A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine, Peter Blake, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol wrestled with the ghost of Duchamp in the grains between the films.

We remember lyrics incorrectly, or perhaps never even learned them properly in the first place. We are as happy with this consensual cultural dissonance as we are with the contradictions between bible myth and scientific fact. Anything that works for us, and makes our lives better, more comfortable, we all say, despite all those hi falutin’ words and principles. The thing about pop (art) is not so much the content itself as the spirit in which it was made. A staggering number of pop and rock songs revolve around the C, G, Am, F chord sequence, and various arrangements of it. There have been comedy musical skits parodying this fact, but it speaks to the deathless ability for some musical messages to be cyclical, amorphous and not necessarily too challenging.

As Queen Victoria died and the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, Great Britain had a huge navy, empire and reputation, but the United States was becoming no less a cultural centre. Paris was the traditional, gravitational heart of the art world, and it continued to be so, with the upstarts of the new world biting at its heels. Impressionism was a style of painting which captured the moment of action that the eye sees, not that the mind ‘knows’ is there. Late impressionism was dominated by the social scenes of Renoir and Manet, the glanced landscapes of Cezanne and the natural romanticism of Monet and Matisse. Now seen as establishment to the point of being dull, the Van Gogh’s and Bonnard’s at the time were revolutionary in their spontaneous moments of light capture and existential energy. Picasso and Braque, watching Cezanne closely, took his simplified block perceptions and developed the style known as Cubism. Imagine taking a photo of an apple from every angle, then sellotaping all the resulting photos together. It created a new and dynamic way of seeing objects, and pretended the human eye was a camera lens — film was, like the motor car, in the process of being born. Art at its best tends to reflect what is going on in the world of science, technology and politics as much as what is going on inside the artists themselves.

This is not a book about Pop Art in the way you might expect, but that doesn’t stop it being a book about the art of Pop. Warhol and Liechtenstein pointed out the discrepancy between the value we give to visual artistic production in an age of photocopying and mass (re) production. Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe and Roy Liechtenstein might be mentioned briefly, but are not lingered upon. It’s more about intelligent pop music as important artform, from King Crimson to Squeeze to Pharrell Williams. Fact and fiction can be hard to unravel in the worlds of art and entertainment, but we’re aware of the fact that fans and students alike like information as close to fact as possible (and I do try, for my own sanity as much as theirs). In an era of fake news, the last thing we need is to hear that Bryan Ferry didn’t used to be a pottery teacher. You will hear many voices, from every corner of the room and outside it. The commercially successful pop art that lingers in the public imagination is victorious because of that which it critiques.

States of Independence: From Pop Art to Art Rock and Beyond is available here https://www.amazon.com/States-Independence-Pop-Rock-Beyond/dp/B0B45DXC98/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=YHGAQ&pf_rd_p=91202c6f-1c11-4e3d-b51a-3af958cedd30&pf_rd_r=GQJM80XWHWJZ772FE3CJ&pd_rd_wg=jiJlD&pd_rd_r=cab2cef5-4e85-4df1-ba28-aa1d99f13000&content-id=amzn1.sym.91202c6f-1c11-4e3d-b51a-3af958cedd30&ref_=aufs_ap_sc_dsk