London Review of Books, Vol. 34 No.

19 11 October 2012, pages 24-25 | 2621 words

Tomorrow is here again

Anne Wagner
The First Pop Age by Hal Foster
Princeton, 338 pp, 20.95, October 2011, ISBN 978 0 691 15138 0

When Hal Foster uses the word first in the title of his confidently
focused study, he means to start us thinking about Pop now and then.
It is a reference to Reyner Banhams Theory and Design in the First
Machine Age (1960), which argued that modernisms prewar optimism
was over and done. We have already entered the Second Machine
Age, Banham declared, and can look back on the First as a period
of the past. Pop artists thought the same: like Banham, who was to
become one of Pops champions, most were between thirty and forty
when Theory and Design was published; the Second World War was
behind them; economies were at last expanding; non-stop shopping
was the engine of the new prosperity, and Pop artists were determined
to keep up. For them, tomorrow had arrived; for Foster, it is here again.
Like Banham, Foster writes with the conviction that he can look back.
Pops irrevocable pastness, he suggests, lies in the fact that something
decisive has changed since its salad days in the 1950s and 1960s,
something concerning the look and feel of screened and scanned
images, the capacity of consumerist and technological worlds to be
represented, and the formation of subjects in a media environment.
We can now see, he argues, that Pop was not merely an inventory of
the promises of postwar plenty, or a survey of the spanking new
products available for consumption. It also managed, against all the
odds, to establish these new commodities as icons of desire. Movie
stars are one thing, but it cannot have been easy to fashion a fetish
from a can of soup or from car tyres, vacuum cleaners and golf balls.
Roy Lichtenstein even reworked the iconic potential of a standing rib of
beef: he painted it raw.
Fosters book offers the most sustained demonstration to date of the
once contested belief that, far from merely reproducing their source
materials, Pop paintings reinvent them. They assume a complex visual

presence as immediate as that of the Byzantine icons often cited as

their prototypes, and, paradoxically, as distant. But if these effects are
not the result of mimicry alone, how do they come about? For Foster,
this question can be answered only by attending to Pop as painting,
with visual operations all its own. The result is an inquiry into Pop
aesthetics, rather than the anaesthetics it was initially thought to bring
about. Pop Art, the critic Hilton Kramer complained in 1962, does not
tell us what it feels like to be living through the present moment of
civilisation it is merely part of the evidence of that civilisation.
What is Pop art? G.R. Swenson asked in 1963. He pressed Andy
Warhol on why he painted soup cans (Because I used to drink it. I used
to have the same lunch every day), asked Robert Indiana if Pop was
easy art (Yes), and sought Jim Dines views on whether Pop offers
social commentary (Im certainly not changing the world if its art,
who cares if its a comment?). He also asked Lichtenstein: Is Pop art
despicable? Briefly dispensing with the tough-guy deadpan of his
fellow painters, Lichtenstein answered with a justification of Pops
tactics: in engaging commercial imagery, it was taking up the most
brazen and threatening characteristics of our culture, things we hate;
taking them up, and accepting them, as being there, in the world.
Today, as we stand knee-deep in Pops sequel its Second Age the
difficulty lies instead in the fact that the present-day media explosion
invites amnesia where media themselves are concerned. Today we
communicate through means whose speed, disposability and sheer
pervasiveness seem to matter less for the images they generate than
for their celebration of communication itself. It is beginning to seem
that iconic images are something we can do without. This was not
always the case. It is sometimes hard for art historians to remember
that in the 1960s ambitious art could still justify its reliance on painting
(rather than light works or earthworks or sheer emptiness) precisely
because it was the medium most able to concretise the contemporary
image world: Foster does not make this mistake. Nor does he fail to see
that the 1960s painters were well aware of the way their pictorial
practice (as they probably would not have called it) engaged the
ordinariness, the everydayness, of the image world a world which,
despite its immateriality, was by then insistently there. The majority
of the names that stand out in Pop painting among them not only
Lichtenstein and Warhol, but also Richard Hamilton, Gerhard Richter
and Ed Ruscha, each the subject of one of Fosters five chapters were

collectors, even connoisseurs, of the omnipresent image: they

assembled examples of its endlessly mundane oddity in files and
scrapbooks; they deployed those motifs on large-scale canvases,
effecting the transfer with opaque projectors, slides and silk screens,
sometimes dissecting then reassembling the salient parts. The result in
the eyes of doubters, the poet Stanley Kunitz for example, was an art
not of transformation but of transposition, when transformation is
arts proper aim.
Transposition of what? Foster begins his book with the pronouncement
of the architects Alison and Peter Smithson: Today we collect ads. For
the first Pop artists this was an article of faith. Avid bottom-feeders,
they scraped up regular doses of tabloid violence and pulp
pornography, raiding the corner shop for its comic books and scouring
flea markets for amateur snapshots capturing the shapelessness of life.
So eager were they for raw material that even the bland pages of their
own family albums werent safe from their ravages; the most out-offocus snapshot of a long-dead relative (including, notoriously, Richters
smiling Nazi uncle, Rudi) was subject to cropping, masking, dodging
and burning. Such tricks, which professional designers and
photographers routinely used to manipulate their source images
efficiently (Warhol picked them up during his years as an adman on
Madison Avenue), made for consistently high productivity (Warhol is
again the outstanding example: he seems to have averaged a bit more
than a painting a day, which says nothing about the prints and
multiples the Factory turned out). The most significant predecessor and
rival to Fosters Pop painters in using such tactics was John Heartfield,
whose near-weekly montages in aid of European communism in the
1930s came from his own mastery of the image world, a pictorial
literacy otherwise unmatched, at least until the First Age of Pop.
This is one reason Foster speaks as much to Pop images as to Pop
paintings. In his eyes, the very idea of the image has a double valence:
on the one hand, image refers to the works the artists produce; on
the other, to a larger phenomenon: the unprecedented and still
growing saturation of contemporary visual experience by
mechanically produced and reproduced emblems, tokens or signs. A
horseman on the mesa or a glamour girl in a convertible: these too are
images; they say logo or lifestyle, beauty or travel, often standing
in for language while dispensing with words. Image, then, as in image
world, the title of a 1989 exhibition at the Whitney. Foster embeds the

concept ever more firmly in an understanding of the recent practice of

art.
Fosters choice of terminology here contrasts with his work in the
1980s, when the bases were covered by picture instead. In those
days, he wrote as a partisan of the Pictures Generation, the group of
mostly New York-based artists (Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and
Louise Lawler among them), so-called postmodernists who made their
own uses of found or borrowed imagery. Their preferred medium was
photography, which they used to secure the effects that gave pictures
their pictorial look. Sometimes these pictures resembled movie stills,
sometimes old masters or centrefolds, modernist icons or museum
interiors. The choices always mattered, but the most important thing
was that it remain clear to which category or genre the source picture
(or pictorial type) belonged. A Pictures picture must be both formally
and conceptually governed by identifiable conventions; these make it a
whole, which an image by one of Fosters Pop artists need not be.
Instead, Pop pictures assemble motifs and fragments selected from
several sources, as in Hamiltons images; their composition can be
incomplete and episodic, as when Lichtenstein extracts motifs from
classic cartoons and canonical paintings, Monet and Czanne among
them, and redevelops them as signs; they can stutter under an
overload of repetition, as Warhol so insistently showed us; they can
lose their focus, devolving into a distancing blur, as in Richters woozily
photographic illusions. And as Ruscha demonstrates in his landscapes,
Pop pictures can be so insistently mundane that place fails to figure
as anything more than a cipher, a sign which, when that sign reads
Hollywood, is precisely the point. All this goes to say that the Pop
image may seem all too recognisable, yet it still manages to operate as
a visual and interpretative construction, a critical artefact.
Image and picture, and ultimately for Foster, the academic tradition of
the tableau: historians of 20th-century art deploy this terminology so
as to locate their objects of study in terms of high art the ancient
purpose of the artist, in Hamiltons phrase and the compositional
unities that governed it. There is little doubt that this tradition did bear
down on Fosters artists, with Warhol the possible exception, though
here there is room for debate. Certainly he seems to have been well
aware that he was engaging, and sometimes countering, arts dearest
traditions point by point. He was, after all, a producer of portraits, still

lifes, landscapes and even history paintings; he knew what an icon was
and how it functions; and he was entirely capable of producing
allegories of artistic convention. In his hands, studio became factory,
motifs were always borrowed, brushes yielded to squeegees, and the
artists role was merely to choreograph the spectacle and make sure
the goods got made. No matter how coyly he played the part of
onlooker, nothing could conceal that he was really the star. No wonder
that in Richters view Warhol was in essence a cultural symptom, a
proxy or substitute for an artist who blessedly made no art. Yet
Warhol also legitimised the mechanical, as Richter put it: Warhol
showed him how it is done this modern way of letting details
disappear into erasure and blur.

The pages devoted to Warhol are the conceptual heart of Fosters

book, yet the most engrossing chapter may be the first, about Richard
Hamilton, who insisted that the contemporary artist cannot help but

turn to mass culture, to plunder the popular arts to recover the

imagery which is his rightful inheritance the imagery of modern life.
Hamilton was a finicky thief as particular, Foster says, about terms
as about images and concerned to unite the visual and the verbal
in his signature tabular pictures. Foster shines here too. His great
pages on $he (1958-61, pictured) are unmatched in their grasp of
tabular painting as an accumulative strategy, an overlapping of
presentation styles and methods, as the ever-meticulous Hamilton put
it, all inscribed on the blank tablet, the table, that is the picture at its
start (Hamilton often chose to paint on panels rather than canvas).
More than this, Foster lays hold of the erotic excesses these
accumulative strategies wrest from the figure of the woman, whose
body is cut back, only to reappear, associatively, in the pinks and reds
that wash down the fridge door onto the table top, and whose plastic
lenticular eye (a last-minute addition) opens and closes, as a fridge
does. The picture both disperses and reifies the female body,
presenting it as both painterly performance and mechanical thing.
What Hamilton means by presentation styles and methods we would
call media: the same image can be processed through photography,
printing and finally painting. Put another way, the images in a tabular
picture can be developed through processes that are serial and
exchangeable, and which accumulate to give it what Foster sees as its
interpretive depth. Above all, he writes, Hamilton holds on to depth
depth that is at once pictorial, psychological, hermeneutic and
historical whereas his American colleagues tend to dissolve it. Foster
does not mean to suggest that American Pop paintings are inferior to
British Pop, but Hamiltons conviction that, in Fosters words, painting
remains the best way to reflect on new media as they emerge, does
make his work and thinking a dominant presence in the book.
Foster too is determined to hold on to depth, and that effort ultimately
results in what we might call the books recessive trait or, if not
recessive, less than fully expressed. This is the question of Pops
politics. For although Foster begins by puzzling over the political
valence of Pop art, he ends up not quite sure where he stands on this
issue. What gets in the way? The problem may be the artists
themselves. Ultimately, Foster does not seem to trust how they feel
or perhaps better, trust everything they feel about contemporary life.
On the one hand, he sees their works as offering moments of
criticality he means something like fleeting political insights and

he is well aware of having privileged those moments at the expense of

Pops sheer delight in popular culture. But should we discount the
political possibilities of that delight? These, after all, are the artists who
at last were able to bring the image world into aesthetic view. What
they saw there transfixed them: sex and death, of course, but also
everything high art seemed to lack boundless energy, absurdity,
familiarity and the canned comforts of shop-bought soup. What they
saw, in other words, was the horrifying marvel of a society saturated in
everyday violence and routine seduction, oblivious to waste, yet
irresistible all the same. No wonder they want to stop and look.
Perhaps at their peril: think of Lots wife. In any event, for Foster, Pops
delight in its parent culture should only ever be intermittent. Fair
enough: I wouldnt have it any other way. But I am less certain that
such delight as seems possible cannot play a role in politics, whereas
for Foster, it leads to politics lite.
Yet Pop, Warhol said to Swenson, is liking things. And in an ideal
society everybody should like everybody. The remark does not appear
to make for a trenchant critical or political moment, but it does dovetail
with Fosters concluding view on where Pops politics can be found. It is
lodged in the image world itself. The politics in Pop, Foster writes, is
pitched differently, centred on its commitment to what is held in
common, including our shared image world understood (perhaps
perversely) as a newfangled commons. Newfangled, perhaps, but
already threatened, like the commons of old, with enclosure. A politics
of sharing need not be one of liking, but surely keeping it available
begins with a notion of likeness within difference, even of delight in
the common good. To live in the Second Pop Age is to acknowledge
ones own position in that commonality; neither the distance of
connoisseurship nor the thrill of bottom-feeding will do. We will need a
common idea of the commons if we are to find a way towards a
political realism capable of facing up to the range of emotions
consumer culture inspires. Love and hate are the closest of neighbours,
as are high and low.