ART REVIEW : The Word’s the Thing at Pomona

Ever since television came to rule communications, concerned watchers have claimed that its pungent pictures are sabotaging the power of spoken and written language. You know the kind of thing. A tough TV reporter asks the President when he is going to stop sending arms to some Third World tyrant. The President pretends he can’t hear over the roar of Helicopter One, smiles and swoops away amid fluttering flags and smiling children. Everybody out in TV Land promptly forgets the tough question, sees the pretty, patriotic picture and imagines all is well in the world.

On the face of it, you wouldn’t think such cultural manipulation would have much to do with the fine visual arts but, on evidence, it does. After all, artists watch the tube too and apparently with some sense of envy and competition. But Arthur Artist knows he can’t beat CBS, so it has become his practice in modern times not to emulate the dominant media but to play the role of its poor relative, taking the dross of its castoffs and attempting to recycle them alchemically into the gold of timeless art. This has been going on ever since Picasso affixed the first popular song sheet to a painting or Kurt Schwitters immortalized a gum wrapper.

So if electronic culture wants to trash the written word, art, by golly, will rescue it.

All that is the subject of “Crossing the Line: Word and Image in Art” at Pomona College’s Montgomery Gallery (to Oct. 14) in Claremont. At least I think it is. With 106 works by 70 artists from Saul Steinberg to John Baldessari, the exhibition is as muddled as it is ambitious. Curator Mary Davis MacNaughton tries to make it cover the three decades since 1960 and in her brochure essay refers repeatedly to the “variety of media, the diverse ways artists have reflected modern experience through the fusion of word and image.” Such Noah’s Ark compendiums have the advantage of open-handedness (as against narrowly focused theme shows that try to indoctrinate), but they are so open-ended that viewers are virtually left to make up their own story. Here, evidence suggests that words crept playfully into contemporary art in the Pop and Photorealist imagery of the ‘60s.

Pop, in its celebration of everyday life, was accessible, witty, entertaining and a refreshing antidote to the bohemian-aristocratic posture of earlier modernism. Sometimes it is revealing of the character of the artist, as in Roy Lichtenstein’s “Crak,” where his use of French predicts his eventual status as the Cole Porter of Pop art. Often Pop had a kind of insidious social insight that now appears downright precognitive. Ed Ruscha’s 1966 “Standard Station” was a red, white and blue celebration of our gas-guzzling, energy-careless culture that looks downright mordant in the light of today’s Middle East headlines. In 1965, Robert Dowd made a lithograph that suggested the face of Vincent van Gogh replace George Washington on the dollar bill, predicting the radical commercialization of great art. Robert Cottingham’s 1975 “F.W. Woolworth” may be the subtlest and saddest of all. It sees the demise of homey dime-store America and is rendered in loving, old-fashioned etching technique. It seems to mourn visual arts that would become progressively less visual.

The pendulum swung in the bleak ‘70s when art became stark, inbred and so conceptual that there was often nothing to see at all except complicated inbred art jokes, like Nam June Paik’s “Prepared Typewriter.” It offers only a few moments of art historical puzzle-solving until we connect it to a covered typewriter by Marcel Duchamp. Lawrence Weiner digests even faster in a work called “Earth to Earth, Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust,” which is nothing more than those words lettered on the wall.

In the ‘80s, all this was reordered into what MacNaughton calls “Neo-Conceptualism,” where images and words combine into various forms of cultural advertising and self-promotion. Mitchell Syrop offers a poster/painting lettered with “This is one of those great masterpieces that will go unrecognized in its own time,” and goes on to urge the viewer to do himself a favor and buy it. Barbara Kruger is represented by one of her yup-pified Russian avant-garde agit-prop posters showing a huge blow-up of the face of Howdy Doody and the motto, “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my checkbook.” It’s at least as amusing as a New Yorker Hamilton cartoon but seems a trifle oblique as the feminist protest it is supposed to be.

One of the insistent mysteries of this show is its inclusion of numerous artists for whom the use of words is not a central issue. Enlisting talents like George Herms, Mark di Suvero, Betye Saar and Roland Reiss seems odd until we realize that they tend to share a common profile as visual poets. Armed with this clue, we notice that the artists represented by the largest numbers of works are Ruscha, Alexis Smith, Allen Ruppersberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. All of them are visually interesting and capable of making rhyming juxtapositions of words and images. The single best unfamiliar works in the show are Ruppersberg’s two big logs, which bear the carved mottoes “Love Unafraid” and “The Three Ages of Love.”

Poetry equates with painting in its ability to evoke pictures in the mind, create physical sensations and suggest the slippery mysteries of real human existence as opposed to the coercive limitations of ideology or technology. Conceptualism lost when it assumed that the pictures on television somehow made artists’ pictures obsolete. TV imagery creates no resonant residue of memory, offers no incentive for repeated contemplation. It cannot study or record the language of the visual with the nuanced care of the fine artist. Intentionally or not, the exhibition broadcasts the message that art still only works as itself.