Pop Art

(Warning: Cologne nerd post). Tania Sanchez, writing in her magisterial vademecum Perfumes: The Guide, suggests typical steps to perfume nirvana. As I think this applies to many experiences with art more generally, I’ll offer my paraphrase. First one begins experiencing with whatever particular art is at hand – a film, a band or song, etc. Once he realizes he has an interest – or a love – our pilgrim voraciously ingests everything he can get his hands on. Then he believes he is an expert, a connoisseur, and he (often snobbily) seeks out the most niche, the most avant-garde, the most extreme, the most vintage. And finally, nirvana. Our pilgrim realizes life is short, one literally cannot ingest everything, and he settles into the comfortable mode of enjoying whatever movie he wants for the simple reason that it is what he likes.

For the longest time, I was intransigently opposed to “pop art.” Heavily under the esthetic influence of Ayn Rand and Harold Bloom, I wasn’t convinced pop art was even art. This pilgrim was at the third – and most annoying – stage. And yet I remember the first time I saw Warhol’s Marilyn and Elvis, and I keep coming back to pop art.

Similar to my views of pop art – and for similar motivations – I also was very annoyed at “journalistic” photography as an art form for quite some time. Though I appreciated “performative photography,” journalistic photography just seemed like the nightly news in snapshot. Meh. Tiptoeing to the fourth stage, coming out of the shadows of Rand and Bloom and appreciating so much the Goddard approach (ie, art redeems reality), I now tend to view photography as contemporary still life, and still life is a great love of mine.

One branch of abstract expressionism, the so called “Color Field School,” believed it was rescuing painting as an artistic media. Painting, they maintained, had become overly concerned with illustrating figures in three-dimensions. But three-dimensions aren’t possible on painting’s flat canvas. Painting was attempting to be “sculptural,” (since sculpture is properly a 3-D endeavor) and thus an impossibility and a lie. By eliminating figures and focusing on the flat plane of the canvas (think Mark Rothko) the movement was saving painting. I’ll agree that sounds like some hooey. But let’s continue.

It’s intriguing to me to consider pop art as photography, of sorts, of popular culture. And popular culture has some importance. But it’s also intriguing to consider pop art – similar to the color field motivations – as “saving” photography. Photography can never be “purely” journalistic or performative. Pop art manifests, reminds us of, this great truth.

We Built This City

Therefore I put down for one of the most effectual seeds of the death of any state, that the conquerors require not only a submission of men’s actions to them for the future, but also an approbation of all their actions past; when there is scarce a commonwealth in the world, whose beginnings can in conscience be justified. – Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

The Whitney is located in Lenapehoking, the ancestral homeland of the Lenape. The name Manhattan comes from their word Mannahatta, meaning “island of many hills.” The Museum’s current site is close to land that was a Lenape fishing and planting site called Sapokanikan (tobacco field). The Whitney acknowledges the displacement of this region’s original inhabitants and the Lenape diaspora that exists today.

As a museum of American art in a city with vital and diverse communities of Indigenous people, the Whitney recognizes the historical exclusion of Indigenous artists from its collection and program. The Museum is committed to addressing these erasures and honoring the perspectives of Indigenous artists and communities as we work for a more equitable future. – Whitney Museum, land acknowledgment

Someone’s always playing corporation games 
Who cares, they’re always changing corporation names 
We just want to dance here, someone stole the stage 
They call us irresponsible, write us off the page

Marconi plays the mamba, listen to the radio, don’t you remember? 
We built this city, we built this city on rock and roll – Starship

One doesn’t have to share Thomas Hobbes’s foundational premises or political philosophy to note the wisdom of his statement. Unless we go back to the Great Homestead Act of Genesis 1 every nation’s founding occurs in some context of conquest, harm, and displacement of the pre-existing community. That doesn’t mean that all conquest is moral – nor that it is always and everywhere immoral. It is simply a humble appreciation of Hobbes’s right-for-the-wrong-reasons wisdom. Any nation that feels compelled to morally justify its founding in order to morally justify the legitimacy of its current political authority is a very sick nation.