Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism (Contemporary Artists and their Critics)

289 Pages·2003·2.27 MB·English

by  Sylvia Harrison

Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism
Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism examines the critical re-
ception of pop art in America during the 1960s. Comparing the ideas of
a group of New York–based critics, including Leo Steinberg, Susan Son-
tag, and Max Kozloff, among others, Sylvia Harrison demonstrates how
their ideas– broadly categorized as either sociological or philosophical–
bear a striking similarity to the body of thought and opinion that is now
associated with deconstructive post-modernism. Perceived through
these disciplinary lenses, pop art arises as not only a reflection of the
dominance of mass communications and capitalist consumerism in post-
war American society but also as a subversive commentary on world-
views and the factors necessary for their formation.
A scholar of contemporary art, Dr. Sylvia Harrison is lecturer in art his-
tory at La Trobe University in Australia.
This page intentionally left blank
CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS AND THEIR CRITICS
Series Editor
Donald Kuspit, State University of New York, Stony Brook
Advisory Board
Matthew Baigell, Rutgers University
Lynn Gamwell, State University of New York, Binghamton
Richard Hertz, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena
Udo Kulturmann, Washington University, St. Louis
Judith Russi Kirshner, University of Illinois, Chicago
This series presents a broad range of writings on contemporary art by
some of the most astute critics at work today. Combining the methods of
art criticism and art history, their essays, published here in anthologized
form, are at once scholarly and timely, analytic and evaluative, a record
and critique of art events. Books in this series are on the “cutting edge”
of thinking about contemporary art. Deliberately pluralistic in approach,
the series represents a wide variety of approaches. Collectively, books
published in this series will deal with the complexity of contemporary
art from a wide perspective in terms of both point of view and writing.
This page intentionally left blank
Pop Art and the Origins
of Post-Modernism
SYLVIA HARRISON
La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia
PUBLISHED BY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (VIRTUAL PUBLISHING)
FOR AND ON BEHALF OF THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF
CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
http://www.cambridge.org
' Sylvia Harrison 2001
This edition ' Sylvia Harrison 2003
First published in printed format 2001
A catalogue record for the original printed book is available
from the British Library and from the Library of Congress
Original ISBN 0 521 79115 4 hardback
ISBN 0 511 01624 7 virtual (netLibrary Edition)
Contents
Introduction • 1
PART ONE. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
1 Post-Modernist Assumptions • 11
PART TWO. “SOCIAL” CRITICS
2 Lawrence Alloway: Pop Art and the “Pop Art–Fine Art
Continuum” • 37
3 Harold Rosenberg: Pop Art and the “De-definition”
of Both Art and “Self” • 68
4 Leo Steinberg: Pop, “Post-Modernist” Painting,
and the Flatbed Picture Plane • 96
PART THREE. “PHILOSOPHICAL” CRITICS
5 Barbara Rose: Pop, Pragmatism, and “Prophetic Pragmatism” • 115
6 Max Kozloff: A Phenomenological Solution to “Warholism”
and Its Disenfranchisement of the Critic’s Interpretive
and Evaluative Roles • 146
PART FOUR. “CULTURAL” CRITICS
7 Susan Sontag: Pop, the Aesthetics of Silence,
and the New Sensibility • 171
Conclusion • 208
Notes • 223
Index • 275
vii
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
T
his study is based upon the retrospective and now widespread
identification of American pop art of the sixties as an expression of
post-modernism.1More specifically, this identification concerns New
York pop, the form associated with the leading centre of art in both Amer-
ica and the world during this period. The immediate stimulus for this study
lies in the question: Did the post-modernist art of American pop art in its
initial form in the sixties give rise to a corresponding critical conscious-
ness? In other words, can critical responses to pop during this same period
also be retrospectively identified as post-modernist? This question deter-
mines the central task of this study: the recognition and establishment of
the nature of post-modernist features in the critical consciousness gener-
ated by American pop art during the sixties.2 The retrospectivity of this
endeavour should be stressed. What is offered by this work is a compari-
son between the ideas of a select group of American critics writing in the
1960s in response to the challenge of pop art, ideas that bear a striking
similarity to that body of thought and opinion that is now associated with
post-modernism. Hans Bertens’s history of post-modernism, published in
1995, provides a precedent for this study’s retrospective argument. In ref-
erence to the writings of American literary figures, namely Leslie Fiedler,
Susan Sontag, and Ihab Hassan, as well as the music theorist Leonard B.
Meyer, Bertens claimed that “much of what is now broadly seen as the post-
modernist agenda was already more or less in place by the end of the 1960s.”3
The findings of this study centre on the relevant critical writings of
Lawrence Alloway, Harold Rosenberg, Leo Steinberg, Max Kozloff, Bar-
bara Rose, and Susan Sontag. These critics were all key figures in the New
York art world or, in the case of Sontag, literary world during the period
under review. Collectively, they span a number of generations and encom-
pass two distinct approaches to the theorization of American pop art.
1