Pop Goes the Easel

Legend has it, half-mistakenly, that Pop Art was a grand gesture of appeasement from the high quarters of culture to the baser ranks of “low” culture and mass media. It was the movement, so we are led to believe, that sought to bring down the barrier. But that isn’t exactly right, and the wisdom of hindsight allows us to recognize the truer relationship.

Consider it a handshake between strata of culture, but one with a joy buzzer involved. And the smile may conceal a sneer. Pop Art, as seen in the fine, if limited, exhibition at the Carnegie Art Museum this month, was a reaction against the subjective and more esoteric work of the Abstract Expressionists.

That story, which began in the ‘60s but is still ongoing in the culture of the early 21st century, is told in a spotty but illuminating way in “Soup to Nuts: Pop Art and Its Legacy,” sponsored by Eastern Washington University and drawn from the collection of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. It’s one of those must-see art shows in the area this year, suitable for the whole family.

We get glimpses at the big shots, including Andy Warhol’s portraits of athlete Wayne Gretzky (fitting, for a Canadian collection) and dancer Karen Kain. It takes us from pioneer-like Stuart Davis, whose jazzy abstractions paved the way to Pop--to the ‘80s postmodern artist David Salle, whose “The Drunken Chauffeur,” from 1983, shows a tangle of imagery with vague suggestions of pulpy activity tucked into the thicket of lines.

We can see the line from Salle backward to Pop Art hero Robert Rauschenberg, whose “America Mix” works from the ‘80s celebrate, with an ironic accent, of course, the great collage of American life.

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These artists who rallied around the loose idea of what became Pop Art eschewed the romantic painting modes of the abstractionists and borrowed directly from the everyday world. Warhol struck a chord with his obsession with household objects and celebrities--as much interested in the phenomenon of fame as its recipients. Roy Lichtenstein read the funny papers and turned the dynamics of isolated comic strip frames into deadpan social commentaries.

Claes Oldenburg, and by extension, Christo, extended their sculptural imagination to confuse our sense of scale and goose the “what is art?” question, as their drawings of epic public projects here show. Behind it all was a dry wit and at least a slight tone of condescension toward the Pop world it was co-opting.

Upstairs, we find works of proto-Pop artist Peter Blake, whose wood engravings of sideshow characters appear to be from an earlier era. Joe Tilson’s odd series of images, “Sun Mantra,” “Sea Mantra,” etc., creates mosaic-like repetitions of those words, playing with language associations in ways reminiscent of L.A.’s own Ed Ruscha. A West Coast artist, Northern Californian William Wiley flings his special brand of poetic vision, partly flecked with beat poet, pre-hippie sensibility, into a work like “Green Shoes State I.”

Another lesser-known but important artist in this broad neck of the fine-art woods is the multitalented Canadian Michael Snow. A hard-to-categorize painter, filmmaker, multimedia artist and fine jazz pianist, Snow is represented here by a quirky portrait of another quirky jazz musician, Carla Bley, in her ‘60s heyday.

One of the works with the strangest and strongest appeal in the show is R.B. Kitaj’s “Bedroom,” a screen print whose first impression is of home-sweet-home warmth and pleasantry. But the longer one looks, the more its strange aspects advance to the surface, from the element of voyeurism involved in peering through a window at someone else’s domestic reality to the peculiar arrangements of beds, which has a surreal logic to it.

The work defines a clever “other” world, closely resembling the one we know and are informed about by the mass media but that really comes from another place entirely. Such is the tacit attitude of Pop Art.

The attitude continues. The lingering aftereffects of the ‘60s movement have been so pervasive that we might not even recognize the link, but Pop Art planted the seed of the new age of irony. We find it everywhere now, including in advertising schemes that proffer their goods in inventive ways unimaginable in the ‘60s, rock bands that reshuffle past material--sometimes literally, with sampling--and the Internet culture with its own brand of in-joking references.

In effect, although Pop Art clearly nudged culture in its current direction, the low culture forces may be having the last laugh. It’s a laugh, of course, tinged with self-knowing irony.

DETAILS

“Soup to Nuts: Pop Art and Its Legacy,” through July 23 at the Carnegie Art Museum, 424 South C St. in Oxnard. Hours: Thursday and Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Friday, 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Sunday, 1-5 p.m.; 385-8157.

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Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com.