Thursday, May 22, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Art: Pop goes the painting

By Gregory Crosby

They snap, they crackle, they Pop. Forty years later, the works of the somewhat disparate group of American painters roped together under the rubric of Pop Art retain their vitality, as ably demonstrated by the third exhibition to grace the steel walls of the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum at the Venetian. American Pop Icons, on display through Nov. 2, brings together a condensed survey of the 1960s tendency in art that turned away from the painterly pieties and spiritual austerity of Abstract Expressionism in search of something more immediate and connected to the everyday.

The key word here is "condensed." Like the soup in one of Andy Warhol's silkscreened Campbell soup cans (of which a suite of four can be found in this show), the contents of the show are as basic as chicken soup: satisfying, and it gets the job done, even if it isn't homemade and chock-full of extra ingredients. Given the Guggenheim Hermitage's small space, a fully representative show would have been difficult to mount, particularly with so many large canvases (the canvas for one of Warhol's hundred repeated images of Marilyn Monroe had to be sent back when it wouldn't fit through the museum's door). At best, the show--featuring works by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselman and Warhol--gives the viewer a highly selective taste from some of the major players in Pop.

The immediate thrust of that taste is to remind one just how disparate the members of the tendency (one hesitates to really refer to it as a movement, except in the broadest sense) were and are. The thread that connects Rauschenberg's combines of urban detritus and image, Lichtenstein's four-color pastiches, Dine's word-and-image pieces, Warhol's re-colored photos and Wesselman's supermarket still lifes is simply mechanical reproduction in its infinite variety. Instead of celebrating the machine as Modern artists had done earlier in the century, the Pop artists celebrated the machine's products, its images disseminated into every corner of industrialized America's physical and mental landscape. It wasn't always a celebration, either--for every pure billboard like Wesselman's monumental "Still Life #34," where photo reproductions of a submarine sandwich and a pack of Pall Malls tower over the viewer, a sort of ur-advertisement, there is the sinister and powerful meditation on man's ability to make nature feed upon and regurgitate itself embodied in Rauschenberg's combine "Canyon," a justifiably famous work that loses none of its power, its stuffed eagle arising from the murky and dispiriting canvas like a harbinger of exploitation.

The strongest representations in the show are clearly Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein. The four Lichensteins selected give a good sampling of his most famous styles: found graphic object ("Compositions II," which reproduces the marbled cover of a school composition book in full detail), comic book panel ("Eddie Diptych") and modernist pastiche (the surrealism of "Girl with Tear 1" and the massive, deliriously Futurist "Preparedness"). In addition to his combine paintings, the glory of the show is Rauschenberg's "Barge," worth the price of admission itself. Stretching some 30 feet across the wall, the black, white and gray canvas acts like the barge of the dead in Egyptian mythology, floating across the viewer's eye with silk-screened images from the whole range of modern American culture and technology, ghosts in the machine of our daily existence. Not that it needs it, but the canvas gains in power from being placed directly across from Warhol's repeated views of an electric chair, "Orange Disaster #5," one of Warhol's most arresting images and one of the few that hasn't lost its relevance and impact.

If there's a disappointment in the survey, its perhaps James Rosenquist's attenuated, trying-too-hard and even dimly surrealist works (one of which, "Time Stream," hangs between two of Oldenburg's delightful and frankly surrealist soft wall sculptures, "Soft Pay-Telephone" and "Soft Light Switches"). If there's a serious omission, it's Jasper Johns, who is represented by mere tokens: the small "Figure 8," a late mid-'80s variation on his flags and the trifle "Flashlight I." The lack of a major Johns to balance out the ones by Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Warhol, even Wesselman, gives short shrift to Pop's most versatile alumnus. But American Pop Icons is still a modest triumph, the sort of focused and well-curated show (as opposed to the famous painter grab bag of the last exhibition) that one hopes will become the Guggenheim Hermitage's guiding principle.