06.11.1997

Power and profundity

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997)

The late Roy Lichtenstein might well have expressed a wry grin at Waldemar Januszczak’s utilisation of his Keds, a 1961 depiction of a pair of sneakers, as witness to the “critical point at which still life ceases to admire simple things, and becomes a celebration of shopping” (‘Still life, but not as we know it’ The Sunday Times October 12 1997).

Lichtenstein had argued back in 1964 that it was precisely this (then) contemporary meaning - intrinsically related to his ‘pop’ subject matter - which would vanish, the formal content of his work becoming steadily more apparent. In fact, the exact opposite has happened: the oppositional meaning of a whole range of cultural artefacts from the 1960s has been eroded, to the point at which they become the neutered vehicle for a sanitised collective memory.

Lichtenstein was one of a number of US artists who began to experiment with the use of commercial subject matter in the 1950s and 60s - often referred to as the ‘pop art’ movement. Although Lichtenstein spoke of such groupings as fundamentally ‘amorphous’, he did concede that

“there does seem to have been some critical point demanding expression which brought us to depart from whatever directions we were pursuing and to move toward some comment involving the commercial aspect of our environment” (C Harrison and P Wood Art in Theory, 1900-1990: an anthology of changing ideas 1992, p734).

Critics such has Robert Rosenblum have constructed an overtly subject-orientated Lichtenstein to produce a protagonist of the ‘realist revolt’ (ie, pop art) slotted neatly alongside the crumbling dogma of the abstract expressionists and the ‘realist tradition’ of the 19th and 20th centuries. To include Lichtenstein’s brutally executed imagery under this particular guise of realism is to misconstrue its latent meaning. As Lichtenstein remarked himself, “The closer my work is to the original, the more threatening and critical the content” (J Coplans [ed] Roy Lichtenstein New York 1977, p52). This is best exemplified in a cartoon composition like the elegantly crass  OK hot-shot (1963), a depiction of a fighter pilot in battle, which utilises Lichtenstein’s familiar mix of stark black outlines and tacky figuration (witness a gaudy explosion with its Voomp! expletive), with the contorted face of the pilot exhorting his comrades - ‘Okay, hot-shot, okay! I’m pouring!’ Lichtenstein’s construction is almost excessively unified, its directness nearly impossible to gauge.

What is so haunting about this, and similar images, is the impeccable sense of context. They provide a near perfect example of the manner in which (to utilise Pierre Macherey’s methodology) certain artistic forms can break the naturalised headlock of the ideological, by fixing such relations within a definite spatial dimension.

Of course, the best guarantee of such an epistemology is, in Lichtenstein’s words, a purposeful fusion of “two 20th century tendencies: one from the outside - the subject matter; and the other from within - an aesthetic sensibility” (Lichtenstein in Harrison and Wood op cit p734). As we have seen, certain strands of criticism make Lichtenstein a prisoner of the commercial subject, although to be fair the artist was on occasions himself prone to such delusions. For example, in a interview with G R Swenson for Art News in 1963, Lichtenstein defined his practice, bizarrely enough, as anti-experimentalist. When confronted by the assertion that his art was not fundamentally transformative, Lichtenstein seemed content to flirt on the boundary of the anti-aesthetic:

“Transformation is a strange word to use. It implies that art transforms. It doesn’t, it just plain forms ... I think my work is different from comic strips - but I wouldn’t call it transformation; I don’t think that whatever is meant by it is important to art. What I do is form, whereas the comic strip is not formed in the sense I’m using the word; the comics have shapes but there has been no effort to make them intensely unified” (Coplans op cit p54).

By 1966, Lichtenstein was proclaiming to Alan Solomon that “much of what is done today, in pop and other styles, apparently does not yield to the influence of other parts of the work and does not in a way seem to be involved in sensitivity to the aesthetic problem, although it really is” (Coplans op cit p66). At least Lichtenstein’s peculiar brand of iconoclasm (ie, apparent anti-sensibility) has the advantage of warning against the reified mores of the ‘given’ meaning.

One can only hope that in the following months, when Lichtenstein’s legacy will no doubt be trampled over by legions of critics, the temptation to equate his output with any truncated (and ultimately passive) sense of ‘realism’ will be resisted. Only then are we in a position to view an artist of real power and profundity.

Philip Watson