Pop Art

What made Pop Art a method rather than a prank was its relationship to the surface of things. Where earlier art had used everyday objects as symbols — a skull for mortality, fruit for abundance — Pop refused the depth charge. A soup can meant a soup can. A comic panel meant a comic panel. The subject was not standing in for something loftier; it was itself, presented at a scale and with a seriousness that forced you to actually look at what you saw a hundred times a day and never registered.

The techniques followed from this flatness. Lichtenstein didn't just draw comics, he reproduced the industrial process that made them — the Ben-Day dots, the heavy black outlines, the cheap primary colors of newsprint. He would project a panel, trace it, then paint each dot by hand, so a mechanical image became a labored, deliberate painting that still looked mechanical. The effort went into erasing the appearance of effort. That paradox was the whole trick.

Warhol took the logic to its literal conclusion. In 1963 he rented a Manhattan loft, lined it with silver foil, and named it the Factory. The name was not ironic decoration. He staffed it with assistants who cranked out silkscreens, films and prints under his direction, and he said, more than once, that he wanted to be a machine, that painting by hand was something he'd rather stop doing. The romantic figure of the tormented genius, alone with the canvas, was being openly mocked by a man running an art assembly line.

The Factory was also a scene — a churn of socialites, drag performers, musicians and drifters that Warhol called his "superstars," many of them filmed in his experimental movies. He produced the Velvet Underground, screen-tested anyone who wandered in, and turned his own affectless public persona into a work of art in itself. The output blurred every line the art world cared about: was the painting the product, or was the whole spectacle around it? Warhol's answer seemed to be yes.

The lasting puzzle of Pop Art is that no one, including the artists, could ever quite say whether it was criticism or celebration. Hold up a giant soup can and you might be exposing the emptiness of consumer culture, forcing people to see the machinery they usually swallow whole. Or you might be throwing a party for it, delighting in the color and the abundance and the sheer democratic cheerfulness of a supermarket. Pop refused to settle the question, and that refusal was not laziness — it was the most honest thing about the movement.

Consider how differently its two anchors read. Lichtenstein's weeping women and exploding planes carry a faint melancholy, a sense that the emotions comics traffic in are as canned as the soup, mass-produced feeling for mass-produced people. Warhol is harder to pin down still. His disaster series — car crashes, the electric chair, race riots, printed in the same flat repetition as the Marilyns — suggests that endless reproduction numbs us to horror as easily as to glamour. Yet he insisted, blandly, that he liked things exactly as they were, that there was nothing behind the surface. The mask never slipped.

The grocer who stacked real Campbell's cans in his window, undercutting Warhol on price, thought he was puncturing a fraud. He was actually completing the joke. The whole point was that the painted can and the real can lived in the same world now, separated only by a shelf and a frame and whatever meaning you decided to bring to the difference. Within a decade, Pop had won so completely that its scandal became invisible; the idea that supermarket imagery belonged on a museum wall stopped being an argument and became a fact.