Pop Art was certainly instrumental in the process of blurring, perhaps even ending, the distinction between high and low art, and in this way Pop Art sometimes plays a double game. Many of Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings, for example, are in some sense about important subjects: love, marriage, parental conflict, war. Take, a painting like Whaam (1963), which shows one jet fighter shooting down another. Now, the horrors of war are a perfectly valid subject for great art — it was good enough for Goya, after all — but this subject matter is apparently neutralized or trivialized because Lichtenstein takes his image from a cartoon, albeit an especially striking and well-drawn cartoon. He then raises the stakes again, and transforms this trivial cartoon into high art by making it into a huge painting on canvas, over 30 feet by 14.
The opposition between high and low, between great themes and the banal depiction of them, remains in a sort of balance or oscillation, and this playful ambiguity is at the very heart of Pop Art. It always challenges the viewer to decided how fax it is serious and how far it sees seriousness as absurd.
The way the American Pop Artists viewed their own culture was necessarily different from the way it appeared to outsiders. For English Pop Artists, for Peter Blake and David Hockney, say, American culture was alien and exotic. American cars, food and household products were literally unobtainable in austere post-war Britain. In America this was clearly not the case. A Cadillac was obviously not available to everyone, but at least it was familiar, it was an object that you could see as part of your own world.
Warhol’s impoverished, immigrant background placed him in a special, though not uncommon, relation to that culture. Yes, the American dream asserted that wealth and success were potentially available to everyone, but how exactly might a poor, not especially well-educated young man in post-war Pittsburgh participate in that dream? Consumption was one obvious solution. And if one couldn’t afford to buy an all-American Cadillac, you could certainly afford to drink all-American Coca-Cola, or to eat all-American Campbell’s soup.
One of the joys of American democracy, as asserted by Warhol himself, is that the Coke bought by the rich man is every bit as good as the one bought by the poor man. In the matter of soft drinks, at least, money cannot buy you an advantage.
There is always the question of whether an artist chooses his subject matter or whether the subject matter chooses him. It has been said that the young, aspiring Andy Warhol constantly asked everyone he met for ideas that he could use in his art, and yet clearly he did not accept any and every suggestion. Selection was everything. In selecting soup cans, Coke bottles, Green Stamps or dollar bills, he was making aesthetic decisions and favouring ubiquitous American images, and although these images can be read as having great symbolic weight, Warhol uses them lightly, perhaps even frivolously. Certainly he makes Jasper Johns’ reworkings of the American flag, for instance, look decidedly ponderous.
Sometimes Warhol’s choice of subject matter may be deliberately banal but it is seldom innocent. In the cases of the Coke bottle and the Campbell’s soup can, for instance, both are highly successful pieces of industrial design. Indeed Warhol had to come to a financial arrangement with both companies to avoid copyright problems. The Brillo box, which he turned into a sort of replica sculpture, was, by a strange irony, actually designed by a painter called James Harvey, an unsuccessful Abstract Expressionist.
Warhol’s subject matter then, like that of most of the other Pop Artists, is so to speak quoted. It is put in inverted commas. It is, if you like, ‘found’. And although you might argue that a can of soup is no less (or more) suitable as a subject for art than, say, sunflowers or waterlilies, the fact remains that Warhol is not selecting subjects in the way that Monet or Van Gogh were. He is creating a work of art out of a product that has already been created by someone else.
In this he is pursuing a line of artistic practice that probably starts with Marcel Duchamp. In 1917 Duchamp signed a urinal with the name R. Mutt, called it Fountain and originated the concept of the ‘ready-made’. Whereas a collage appropriates an object from the world and incorporates it in a work of art, Duchamp asserts that a thing is art simply because an artist says so. Indeed, after Duchamp it might appear that the artist’s chief function is to point at just about anything and call it art. Warhol was not averse to doing that.
However, Warhol did not simply sign existing soup cans. Initially at least, he actually painted them. It is worth noting that some of Warhol’s soup can paintings are a lot less deadpan than is often supposed. They are stylized. They are appropriated but they are transformed too, sometimes made cartoon-like, sometimes shown with a peeling label, sometimes crushed or with a can opener stuck in the top, sometimes given false or arbitrary colours. When seen up close, they have a handmade look to them.
In any case, not all Warhol’s subject matter is banal at all. After his early success creating art with more or less ‘neutral’ subjects, he selected subject matter that was heavily loaded. His Death and Disaster series uses images of race riots, car crashes, the atom bomb, the electric chair, the John F. Kennedy assassination. These things are anything but banal, and Warhol’s attitude may be detached but it is hardly indifferent.
How could an artist be indifferent to the Kennedy assassination? You might argue that multiple representations of it lead to indifference, but that is Warhol’s point too. Equally, you might well wonder how an artist could turn the Kennedy assassination into art without seeming sanctimonious or sentimental. The answer is that Warhol addresses the subject obliquely and brilliantly, by concentrating on Jackie Kennedy, the presidential widow. In a variety of works, with titles like Jackies, Nine Jackies, Sixteen Jackies, Warhol shows multiple media images of her, some grief-stricken at the funeral, some of her smiling long before the assassination. The images coexist and clash against each other. They show life in the midst death, death in the midst of life, and are surely some of Warhol’s most humane works.
It is hard to tell whether Warhol’s taste for what might be called ‘tabloid’ subject matter was natural and instinctive, or whether he deliberately chose lurid subjects in the knowledge that they would endear him to a mass audience while simultaneously annoying the pious world of high art. Sometimes he literally reproduced the front pages of tabloid newspapers, in works such as A Boy For Meg (1961) or 129 Die in Jet (Plane Crash) (1962).
But whether instinctive or calculated, his fascination with fame, money, glamour, violence, death, consumer products and sexuality made him not only a man who was in touch with his own times, but also an artist who was able to predict the coming media saturation and the attendant cult of celebrity. His obsession with movie stars, some living, some dead, seems especially prophetic.
When Warhol came to make his portraits of Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe, it was essentially no different from making an image of an atom bomb explosion or the Kennedy assassination. He had access only to extant, mass media images. These were iconic but they were also constructed. Popular culture carefully manufactures its myths and icons. It finds them, modifies them, packages them and sells them. The movie star is as much of a product as a can of soup. If this sounds a fairly trite observation today, it must be said that it is the work of Pop Artists in general, and Warhol in particular, that has made it seem that way.