Artists : You’re a Pop Artist--The Museum Says So : Seven of the subjects in a Pop Art exhibition agree discuss the curious ways of art history

Talking with seven of the nine artists included in “L.A. Pop of the ‘60s,” one gets an eye-opening lesson in the less-than-perfect ways in which art history comes to be written. On view at the Newport Harbor Art Museum through July 9, the show was curated by Anne Ayres, includes work by Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Vija Celmins, Robert Dowd, Llyn Foulkes, Joe Goode, John Baldessari, Wallace Berman and Phillip Hefferton and is described in a press release as attempting to “reveal a distinct and significant vision which differs from the British/New York variants of Pop, a vision which grew out of the L.A. ‘pop’ life style and was colored by California artistic concerns.”

This came as surprising news to the seven artists interviewed (Wallace Berman is deceased; Phillip Hefferton was unavailable for comment), several of whom weren’t even aware of who else was included in the show. Others were convinced they didn’t belong in the show, yet all shared a similar laissez-faire attitude towards the context in which their work is shown; they seem to feel their job begins and ends with the making of their work. They leave the theoretical hairsplitting to others. Their remarks:

JOHN BALDESSARI: I didn’t want to be in this show. I had no connection with any of the other artists in the show. In fact, I wasn’t even in L.A. during the ‘60s--I was in San Diego. Beyond that, Pop concerns have never been central to my work, and I don’t think there was an L.A. Pop movement--the only person in the show I’d identify as a Pop artist would be Ruscha. It seems to me that they’re trying to build a case here that has yet to be demonstrated, and I told them they should make it clear in the catalogue that I don’t feel I belong in the show. But ultimately, my basic feeling is yes, I did these works--any case you want to make is fine.

Pop was and still is enormously popular because it uses familiar imagery and has a reactive appeal. You can only talk about God and the sublime--popular themes in art--for so long before you want some relief. A lot of young artists today--people like Jeff Koons--are using the Pop vocabulary, and they’re not even putting any kind of new twist on it. It’s a cyclical thing, and as ‘60s Pop was a response to ‘50s Abstract Expressionism, ‘80s Pop--which is steeped in an identical sense of irony--is a response to the breast beating of the Julian Schnabels.

BILLY AL BENGSTON: There is a West Coast aesthetic but it’s not about Pop, and I never considered myself a Pop artist. The only art movement that had a big impact on me was Abstract Expressionism--that’s where my teeth were cut, and my subject matter has never had anything to do with popular culture. My motorcycle paintings (in the Newport show) had nothing to do with Pop. They were totally esoteric paintings about a specific piece of hand-built equipment. There wasn’t another one in existence, so you can’t call that Pop.

I told one of Anne Ayres’ assistants, I hope everybody else is represented by a larger span of work than I am, because the work you’re including represents a 20-day period in my life. I don’t disavow the work, but it isn’t by any stretch a manifesto--that’s evident in the way I came to do it. What happened was, Irving Blum was laying on me to have a show of the Chevron paintings, which I’d been working on for two years, but I told him I wasn’t ready. I was sharing a studio with Kenny Price at the time, and we made a deal where I did the spray work on some of his paintings in exchange for some blank canvases--thinking I’d use them to whip up a show for Irving. My plan was to do paintings of Kenny’s ceramic pieces, but when I proposed that to Kenny he said he’d prefer I didn’t do that. That left me pressed for time, and the only thing I could think of that I knew as well as Kenny’s work was my motorcycle. That’s how those paintings came about. I certainly wasn’t thinking about Pop issues when I made them.

I never even spoke to the curator of this show--curators don’t ask what you think of the theory they’re enlisting your work in support of. They never have, and consequently history is written in a very flawed way. That said, I don’t see anything wrong with what this curator is trying to do. How else can you get shows funded and off the ground? This is about museumship and how to move things, and you can’t move an exhibition by calling it West Coast art of the ‘60s. People need a word to latch onto and people will go see Pop. It’s always been a popular style because it’s an easy thing for journalists to get a handle on. As opposed to non-representational art, which is very hard to be literate about, you can talk about Pop and it allows you to wax poetic about all kinds of things.

LLYN FOULKES: I was never taken in by Pop art and as far as I can see, Pop never really happened. It was heavily hyped by the galleries and the art magazines, and was more about marketing than art. Warhol was the epitome of combining those two things and he’s the only Pop artist who still looks good to me. The rest of them look pretty mediocre. His work endures because of its social relevance, and its ability to heighten our awareness of the way we perceive mass media.

As for the Newport show, that’s all old stuff and I don’t like to talk about that work anymore. That’s a whole time passed. As to the legitimacy of the idea behind the show--they gotta band somebody together to make a show, and I guess this is as good a premise as any.

ED RUSCHA: I don’t even know who the artists in the show are so it’s hard to know what to say about it. I do know there is no regional L.A. Pop style. I don’t know if I’m a card-carrying Pop artist--many people say I am--but the way history tends to work is, whoever is included in the museum shows is considered part of the movement. I wasn’t included in the early Pop shows, with the exception of Walter Hopps “New Paintings of Common Objects” show at the Pasadena Museum. During the ‘60s I was exploring new uses of popular and commercial imagery, but the Pop Movement was centered in New York, so I was pretty much out of it. I basically just fell off the turnip truck when I did the things in the Newport show, and that work represents a real early chapter in my life.

Artists don’t care what theories their work is enlisted in support of. I’ve had people see things in my work that I didn’t know was there, but you can’t write your own history. Most serious artists just stand and deliver. We take our lunch pails to work, and as to how the work comes to be perceived--that’s the way it crumbles. I’ve got no great bitch about this show because frankly, I’m so involved in the work I’m doing now, I haven’t given it much thought. If I sat down for 10 minutes I could probably come up with a list of people who might be a better addition to this thing, but I don’t really know what case they’re trying to make. I’m just participating.

VIJA CELMINS: I’ve never been fond of Pop art and never considered myself a Pop artist--in fact, I’m not even sure what Pop issues are. Whatever they are, I wasn’t thinking about them when I did the work included in this show. When I first heard who was in this show I said well, you obviously can’t put me in. The paintings in the show represent an extremely short period of my life and I never thought of the work in any kind of Pop context.

Most of the artists of my generation came of age trying to paint like De Kooning, Pollock and Rothko. I’d been doing big Abstract Expressionist paintings, and the paintings in the Newport show (images of small common objects) represent an attempt to abandon the loftier ideals of Abstract Expressionism--which had sort of made me lose my way--and return to the simple act of seeing and having my hand record what I saw. Towards that end, I began painting the things I saw in my studio, and in retrospect, I see that work as a regression to a more old-fashioned, childlike state. I was beginning to mature as an artist and was searching for a connection that felt more real to me. The work was occasionally misinterpreted at the time. I did this big comb--which is not in the Newport show--that a lot of people thought of as an Oldenbergian sort of thing, but I thought of it as a tribute to Magritte.

JOE GOODE: I think there was a regional L.A. Pop style--I’d characterize it as having a much cooler look than New York Pop. It was also more esoteric and lighthearted--the lightheartedness had something to do with the fact that L.A. artists didn’t take Pop too seriously.

My milk bottle paintings (in the Newport show) are usually described as Pop, but they’re actually highly personal paintings. One night I came home after being in my studio all day. My wife and I had just had a baby so there were all these milk bottles lined up on our porch, and that image triggered those paintings. They had nothing to do with Pop theory. My work has always been of a personal nature and has never been about selecting an object with Pop appeal. I’ve always considered myself an abstract painter, but I came to be known as a Pop artist because, coming after Abstract Expressionism, any art using recognizable imagery got labeled Pop. When I became clear on what Pop concerns were, I realized those weren’t my concerns. Nonetheless, I was included in several Pop shows and became associated with Pop, partly because I was just starting to show my work in the early ‘60s, and if someone said we want to show your work, I never questioned what their premise was. I just wanted the work to be seen.

Artists don’t have any control of how history is written. If you look at the structure of the art establishment, the collectors have the control. Collectors are courted by curators and dealers, and the artist is at the bottom of the totem pole. History is written with the dollar bill--same as it’s always been. As an artist, all I worry about is doing good work. As to where it fits into the scheme of things--it’s somebody else’s problem to figure that out.

ROBERT DOWD: One of the striking things about this show is the fascination people still have with Pop. I remember talking with other artists during the ‘60s about how amazingly rapidly Pop art was consumed, as compared with Abstract Expressionism, which was around for quite a while before the general public accepted it as legitimate art. Pop, on the other hand, was picked up on by the media virtually overnight. I remember being arrested by the Secret Service for the paintings of money I was doing at the time (in the Newport show), and being taken to the Federal Building. Down at the Federal Building they had a stack of magazines--things like Life and Time--all with articles on Pop art. Pop made it from the inner sanctum of the art world to the Federal Building in an incredibly short time. That kind of exposure, plus the fact that Pop employed recognizable imagery made it unusually accessible to a non-art audience.

As to quibbling about being in this show, when Anne Ayres explained her idea, then told me who she planned to include, I was a little surprised. But I think her premise--to study artists who had a peripheral relationship to Pop--is a legitimate one. Back in the ‘60s I was convinced there was a regional L.A. Pop style, but now I’m not so sure. I find it hard to detect regional connections in the work in the Newport show, but I’ve never had a problem with any kind of label that came to be attached to my work. As the artist, I do the work and it leaves the studio. How critics and those involved in creating a history of art see it is how they see it. Maybe they have an overview that I lack. It takes time to sort these things out.