Images: Edward Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Ralph Goings
“Caution: Objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear!”
– Jean Baudrillard
In my youth traveling across the country from the California Bay Area to the flat open fields of Iowa and Nebraska, it was the long car rides that offered many educational, interesting and provocative encounters that fed my imagination. The roadside was full of fanciful visual stimuli - from pink dinosaurs 20 feet in height, to mock tee pees, bold graphic gasoline signs and all manner of advertising signage. In the roadside diners there was the clinking sound of coffee cups and reflective glimmer of napkin holders and catsup bottles that rested on tables. I remember being somewhat mesmerized by these unorthodox displays of a wonderland of amusement park like attractions. I felt conflicted by what I saw - what was real and what was merely theatrical display meant to pull us in off the road. There have been many artists, painters as well as photographers, who experienced the American landscape in such a way that it influenced and directed their work. In this essay I would like to look at these shared experiences, with the hope of understanding their work and get a bearing on mine as well. Artists like Wayne Thiebaud, Edward Ruscha, Ralph Goings, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns whose work has been shaped by American folklore have directly influenced my work.
In looking at post war 1950s America we see the rise of the Abstract Expressionist movement thought to be Americas “first avant-guard movement” which was a direct response to European Expressionism. American avant-guard gave way in the 1960s to more conceptually based works by artists which were a reaction to popular culture, mass media and consumer culture. Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein who painted iconic images of soup cans and comic book characters presented a satirical view of consumerism and commoditization while blurring the lines between fine art and commercial art. It is important when looking at Thiebaud, Ruscha, Goings and Johns to put their work in the context of Pop Art in order to fully understand where their works fit in a historical reference and to establish a relationship between the artist and their work.
Wayne Thiebaud, born in the US in 1920, was encapsulated into the Pop Art movement due mostly to his formalist paintings of display case consumer goods; cakes, cup cakes and slices of pie. The similarities between Thiebaud, Warhol and Lichtenstein exist in the “love hate relationship with commercial art” and bold highly graphic reductive and seductive depictions of common objects. Like Thiebaud, Edward Ruscha was classically trained in traditional graphic design. On several road trips across America Ruscha became fascinated by roadside vernacular and in particular with the overstated grandeur of gas stations signs. Ruscha, who lived in Southern California, was influenced by Hollywood theatricality and chose to cross the lines between bill board mentality and American consumerism by depicting and drawing attention to the graphically flattened highly reductive imagery of Standard Stations that dotted the American landscape. For Ruscha it is the crossing of the line between design and painting that was and is his investigation. Ruscha’s self identification, to this day, has maintained his practice to be that of a painter and it is his distinguishable conceptually based works that are based in response to consumer cultural.
What has and continues to separate Thiebaud from pop artist is the bold brush work and heavy materiality of his paint. Lichtenstein, when talking about Abstract Expressionism, described the differences as “tension between apparent object-directed products and actual ground-directed processes” that “is an important strength of Pop Art.” Thiebaud had a strong kinship with abstract expressionist painter William De Kooning and both painters identified a deep seated love of paint, ground and process. As stated by De Kooning, “painting was a lot more important than art.” Both Theibaud and De Kooning painted from life but more in an experiential way, a way of referencing the real but from memory. The fundamental goal or desire of Pop Art is to “look out into the world” and “if there is a radical edge in Pop it lies here: less in its thematic opposition of low content and high form, and more in its structured identity of simple sign and exalted painting.”
Photorealist painter Ralph Goings and photorealism challenged the very nature of the idea of art and the making of art and its process. Goings worked directly from photographs, projecting the image onto the canvas and painting in an illusionistic manner as to reproduce the photographic quality. “He crammed the paintings with visual effects, featuring extremely neutral even banal subject matter. There exist in them no romance, no hints at intuitive insights, no sensitive brushwork or quirks of drawing.” One would ask why Goings wouldn’t, like Thiebaud, want to convey the feeling or visceral response of the paint to the painting? During the 1960s in the Bay Area and the beginning of photorealism - paintings were intended to go directly against Abstract Expressionism and challenge the idea of art. Going’s idea was “with the personality of the artist taken out of the loop, all that remains are objects and settings harshly and brilliantly exposed under the bright California sunshine. The effect can be unsettling and overwhelming, an invitation to become immersed in the visual wealth and splendor contained in a mundane environment.”
Fredrick Jameson in his discussion on Postmodernisms and the existence of a consumer culture states, “postmodernism is the effacement of some key boundaries or separations, mostly the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture.” It is the blending of pop culture and art that leads authors, song writers, and artist to look at advertising and how that shaped the American landscape, specifically in looking at “heart’s destinations” like Santa Fe and Las Vegas. As Jean Baudrillard has remarked, “Las Vegas is a theme park, like Disney-Land, except for the fact that people live in Las Vegas.” “Often euphemistically called modernization, postindustrial or consumer society, the society of media or the spectacle, or multinational capitalism” this presents a new type of social life or social order, the American Dream or dream of utopia.
Postmodernism, photorealism, and the other influences have shaped my philosophical attitudes and work processes. As a youth I was struck by roadside vernacular: specifically an individual could be enterprising, own their small business - be it a market, diner, or gas station - and successfully live out the American dream by supporting themselves and their family. Just a few short years ago, now as an adult, while traveling in Utah I was struck by the changing American landscape and how that has played out with the advent of the strip mall and chain superstores.
I see my work as more documentary, painting from digital snapshots and appropriated images. Not unlike many artists, Edward Hopper, Robert Bechtel, and Edward Ruscha, my background is in traditional graphic design and painting as visual communication. In my paintings I paint with a measure of restraint, a sense of proportion that I take to be the unspoken vocabulary of the vanishing middle-class.
Today, our senses are so bombarded with technologically enhanced stimuli: email, cell phone calls, text messages and the like. Our sense of proportion so overwhelmed by the scale of materially supersized commodities: cars, houses, televisions, sodas, bodies, etc., and our sense of nature so increasingly disengaged from our sense of self by climate change, genetic engineering, even plastic surgery, that it seems harder and harder to maintain a healthy, normal, measured bearing toward the world. My aesthetic goal is two-fold: to evoke the residue of the past and to provide the viewer with a visual respite from their very busy lives. These two are not as unrelated as they might at first seem. Respite in reflective nostalgia for a simpler world may indeed be a meaningful and resonant social and political position.
Art, or more specifically beauty, has the capacity to not just alter and expand our consciousness but also to connect us more deeply to the world we live in. A good painting or sculpture affects us bodily. Good art is superior magic - a slight of hand that shifts space and bends time. The seductive painterly effects that steal our time and dislocate us are nothing other than precisely what I refer to as the visual respite from our daily lives. Art is the formal corollary of the "American Dream" and "the open road."
Works cited:
Jean Baudrillard, America, Verso Press, 1989, p 1
Paul Fabozzi, Artists, Critics, Context, Readings in and around American Art Since 1945, Prentice Hall Press, p 102
Paul Fabozzi, Artists, Critics, Context, Readings in and around American Art Since 1945, Prentice Hall Press, p 103
Hal foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900, Press Thanes & Hudson, p448
Adam Gopnik, Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, Thames & Hudson Press, p 48
Roy Lichtenstein, Artnews, 1963, What is Pop Art?”, published in Paul Fabozzi, Artists, Critics, Context, Readings in and around American Art Since 1945, Prentice Hall Press, p 103
Hal foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900, Press Thanes & Hudson, p448
John Parks, From Watercolor, Fall 1996, Ok Harris Gallery, Artist Profiles: Ralph Goings, http://www.okharris.com/previous/prev1/pressa.htm
John Parks, From Watercolor, Fall 1996, Ok Harris Gallery, Artist Profiles: Ralph Goings, http://www.okharris.com/previous/prev1/pressa.htm
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and consumer Society, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Hall Foster, The New Press, 1989, p128
Dave Hickey, Dialectical Utopias, On Santa Fe and Las Vegas, Harvard Design Magazine, p 1
Dave Hickey, Dialectical Utopias, On Santa Fe and Las Vegas, Harvard Design Magazine, p 1
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and consumer Society, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Hall Foster, The New Press, 1989, p129
