SearchIn this post: Andrew_Jay “gets” modern art
Released by Andrew Collins
Well, maybe . . .
A couple of months ago I spent a week and a half in the UK to visit my father. While I was there, I did most of the tourist stuff as well, revisiting some places from when I was last there in 2002, as well as checking out a few I had previously missed.
One of these was the Tate Modern, housed in that massive former power plant that sits on the Thames opposite St. Paul’s Cathedral. I spent a couple of hours wandering through, well, I’ll be frank; a whole lot of nonsense, though occasionally experiencing the frisson of seeing the works of Pablo Picasso . . . or the madness of Salvadore Dali, in person.
Then, upstairs, I came across one of the iconic works of modern pop-art: Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam.
. . . and I have to say, I think I might understand it and what makes it “art”.
In Whaam, Lichtenstein has blown-up a comic book panel to monster proportions: 6′ x 12′ and painted it on canvas. The interesting aspect of the painting is that it’s not just a huge comic book panel, but that it is a reproduction of a mass-produced comic book panel. Rather than simply paint a giant comic, Lichtenstein instead recreates the panel as it would be seen in a newspaper or comic book, printed by a printing press.
This immediately raises the question of how we divide “art” from “non-art”. Is the original work of the artist “art”? Some might say so. A comic book is certainly a little low-brow - especially one as pulpy as what Lichtenstein has copied: DC Comic’s All-American Men of War. Things “look like what they look like”. The American aircraft is accurately depicted and reasonably well drawn. The artist has created a colourful explosion with their limited palate. In all, it took a reasonable amount of skill and talent to draw. But is it art? Safe to say that opinion will be divided, but let’s assume that it is in fact art.
Now, what happens when this panel is sent by the comic book artist to the printer’s and reproduced on cheap paper millions of times? Is what comes out of a three-tone printing press “art”? If the original was art, does that hold true for the mechanical, and degraded, copy? Many will say no.
However, in the view of this Philistine, this is where Lichtenstein breathes “art” into the mute facsimile of the original artist’s work. Like I said above, with Whaam Lichtenstein recreates the comic book as it comes out of the printing press. If we were able to look at it in greater detail you’d see, especially in the shading of the closer aircraft, that he has faithfully reproduced that quasi-dot matrix effect that comes from cheap newsprint copies of images. This is not the original panel, but a painting of a comic book.
Where have we seen this before? How about in 19th century pointillism, such as Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which any fan of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off will be familiar with.
In short, Lichtenstein has taken pointillism, a facet of Neo-Impressionism, and has applied it to the low art of the 20th century. Is the printing press, a dumb machine, an artist? What about when its style is recreated by the human hand? Not to mention in a grand scale that explicitly shows-off the pointillism inherent in the modern colour printing press.