LA CIENEGA AREA

Back in the early ‘60s, Robert Dowd’s large-scale Pop renditions of dollar bills and postage stamps led to his arrest by the FBI for counterfeiting. Times, if not art styles, have changed significantly since then, and this retrospective of Dowd’s paintings from 1962-67 is perhaps less interesting for its insights into Pop as a ‘60s phenomenon than for underlining its new role as historical artifact and valuable museum piece.

Dowd came to the fore in 1962 as part of the ground-breaking “New Paintings of Common Objects” exhibition at the Pasadena Museum. Alongside Dine, Ruscha, Thiebaud, Warhol and Lichtenstein, Dowd drew upon the imagery of mass culture, isolating the banal and transforming it, through sheer size, into a monumental statement of kitsch. Unlike many of his peers, however, Dowd was particularly interested in artifice, drawing attention away from mere mechanical reproduction by altering his source material in subtle ways: omitting letters, condensing composition or extracting a minor detail like a treasury seal and making it an autonomous sign--part cultural icon, part emblem of conspicuous consumption.

At the time, producing imagery of currency was loaded with connotations that now seem quite simplistic. Currency/portraiture as art, art/portraiture as currency no longer has the radical import that it had in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, when the pretentious “spiritual” content of “serious” art was a prime target for Young Turk irreverence. Now, with Mike Bidlo appropriating Warhol (the supreme appropriator), Pop has itself become recycled as mannered pastiche. As a result, and perhaps contradictorily, we look at the source material with fresh eyes. Stripped of its resonance as first-generation kitsch, it now exudes the aura of historical masterwork. In short, the ironic copy is now the real McCoy, the counterfeiter the true artisan. Times change indeed. (Terry De Lapp, 800 N. La Cienega Blvd., to June 14.)