‘High and Low’ Will Prove N.Y. Critics Wrong

From the way the critics went after “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture” when it opened last fall in New York, you’d have thought it was a wounded wildebeest that had stumbled into a lion’s lair. Across the critical spectrum, everybody hated it.

On Sunday it will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Among the many thoughts it will provoke here in the hinterlands is a wonderment at what weird chemistry works in Gotham’s art world to ignite such savage opprobrium around such a wonderful show.

The exhibition, continuing through Sept. 15, represents the maiden organizational voyage of Kirk Varnedoe as director of painting and sculpture for Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art. Its roster includes about 250 works by 50 artists from Picasso to Jenny Holzer. They encompass key icons of modern art from Fernand Leger’s “The City” to James Rosenquist’s anti-Vietnam billboard “F-111.” There are so many star turns that one might fear the whole to be the artistic equivalent of a telethon--quite meaningless outside its display of megawatt star power.

Instead, it is really about something crucial that is too often left unexamined in the airless precincts of art for its own sake. It is about the conversation that goes on between the artist-inventor and the reality of his culture. In this case, Varnedoe (and co-curator Adam Gopnik, art critic for the New Yorker) looked at the dialogue between what passes for high art and what is too often dismissed as low art--the newspapers, comics, advertisements and everything else that makes up the vernacular visual language of life in the modern city.

Varnedoe has been up to this sort of cultural anthropology before in his work for MOMA on “Vienna 1900” and “Primitivism and 20th Century Art.” Seems eminently worth doing. Maybe the critics don’t like it because the vernacular sources sometimes turn out to have more zing than the art they inspire. This exhibition includes comparative works by cartoon geniuses like Winsor McCay, George Herriman and R. Crumb. They prove that the only reason these guys don’t belong in a museum is because they are hard to read standing up.

The catalogue is literate, probing, gentle in spirit and often funny in facture. It is specific in unearthing exact popular sources for Roy Lichtenstein’s comic strip paintings and blissfully cultivated in general. When we look at Picasso’s snappy Cubist painting that contains the phrase, “Notre Avenir est dans L’Air,” we are reminded that this is connected to the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire. When we see Kurt Schwitters playing word games with U-Bahn ticket stubs, it gets connected to James Joyce. When Jean Dubuffet’s scabrous graffiti-inspired paintings haul into view, we don’t get away without thinking of the plays of Beckett and Genet.

It does not seem an affront to anybody to point out that the arts have something to do with one another or that all draw on reality for inspiration. It is by the study of such combinations that we arrive at both an understanding of the spirit of an artist’s time and his particular interpretation of it. Using similar sources in print media, Picasso found bracing chaos, Schwitters saw poetry in the gutter, Rodchenko flatly joined revolutionary reality. Every artist who went through the portals of popular culture came out a different door.

The show walks us through various existing types and categories. Under the heading “Billboards” we find works by Leger, Stuart Davis and Gerald Murphy. The point is clearly not to stuff these artists in a pigeonhole and leave them there but to show how artists simply will not get stuck with their labels. Leger comes out magisterially muscular in “The City,” Murphy’s “Razor” is as cool, honed and romantic as F. Scott Fitzgerald. Davis’ “Lucky Strike” has a carny’s wit. Talk about the changing meaning of symbols. Cigarettes have gone from macho-cool to memento mori.

The subversive rebelliousness of graffiti stretched like India rubber for artists attracted to it. For Giacommo Balla it represented the erosion of bourgeois civilization. Mimmo Rotella ripped up movie posters to get at its sexy side. Cy Twombly made it as elegant as a handwriting exercise.

Some artists found eloquence in common objects by just discovering them and putting them in galleries. Marcel Duchamp changed urinals, bottle-racks and bicycle wheels into enigmatic philosophical ruminations. Surrealists like Max Ernst looked at illustrated catalogues and saw something eerie in button shoes and thimbles.

In the beginning, artistic uses of popular sources were about spicy transformation. Most of the art made before World War II used Pop to demonstrate serious art’s connection to the revolutionary changes visiting the modern world. It was a form of naughtiness. After the war, British and American Pop artists used common culture as a way to rebel against an art world grown too staid and elitist. Johns and Rauschenberg introduced ale cans and mattress springs to counter the rhetorical metaphysics of Abstract Expressionism.

American Pop was, in the beginning, affectionate and amused. Warhol and Lichtenstein culled back-page newspaper advertisements for obscure illustrations that had an odd awkward energy. Oldenburg got a kick out of supermarket displays exaggerated to the proportions of the monster balloons of 5th Avenue parades.

But what started as celebration gradually turned laconic and a bit sour. More than a hint of social criticism crept into Lichtenstein’s images of crying girls and rapacious fighter pilots. While American Pop culture was being idealized, it was almost unconsciously being questioned. One of the most deft and startling moves in the show is the inclusion of Joseph Cornell’s work in the Pop section. His combination of penny-arcade sleaze and French Symbolist refinement here seems to speak anew of an American longing for a lost European culture.

One of the greatest weaknesses of criticism is its tendency to want its object to be something other than what it intended to be or to do something it cannot. One thing museum exhibitions virtually cannot do is to act as critics of their own contents. All those lenders would be very upset. How can we bite the hand of the donor? It’s really quite out of the question.

That impossibility may bear on a progressive feeling of mustiness and deja vu that lurks as subtext within “High and Low.” It is not the show, it is the art and the impulse behind it. As we go through it, there is a sense of something slowly running down. Individual pieces by, say, Ruscha, Jess and Oyvind Fahlstrom remain bracing as ever, but the whole feels weary and vaguely desperate as if the energy of kicky kitsch, schlock and street art was itself disappearing.

That is, of course, exactly what happened. As time has gone on, authentic popular culture has become homogenized into mass-media culture. There is nothing naive about the art directors for television networks or Madison Avenue ad agencies. These people make careers of cannibalizing the best ideas of the visual arts. Take a look at the institutional spots on MTV. They are virtually indistinguishable in form and sophistication from the hippest work being made in an art world that busily reabsorbs what had originally been cribbed from it. It is repackaged under some impressive label like “Appropriation” or “Deconstruction” and sells itself as a form of social criticism.

“High and Low” was criticized for not including enough latter-day contemporary artists even though that was not what the show was about. There are just three here, Elizabeth Murray, Jeff Koons and Jenny Holzer. All look absolutely splendid. Murray’s work echoes the late Guston’s, which hangs nearby, enlivening his funk with high-voltage tension. Koons’ shiny stainless steel rabbit, train and decanter are as cool, smart and heartless as an inside trader. Holzer’s rumination on AIDS uses an inscribed black granite sarcophagus and an electronic sign to create mournful poetry of unexpected profundity.

If “High and Low” can be legitimately criticized for anything, it is for making present art look better than it is. It is really a kindly exhibition.

But not dumb. Varnedoe and Gopnik signal an awareness that all is not well in the trajectory of the fine arts’ alliance with popular culture by introducing a variation on Marx’s aphorism, “First time tragedy, second time, farce.” The art world’s own need for fresh low-culture stock reflects recent interest in the naive authenticity of thrift-shop art.

It’s being said with some frequency these days that the fine arts have become irrelevant, nothing much more than poorly made status symbols for wealthy collectors to build their social lives around. To whatever extent that is true, in the long run it just means that money and status will keep a flagging genre breathing until it gets on its feet again. Maybe that is the subtext of a rather odd preoccupation with the symbol of a foot that crops up in the catalogue.

Art has been around a long time. It will get better as long as constructive exhibitions like “High and Low” stick around. A little too polite, though. Should have been called “How High Got Low.”