Lately we've been reading a lot about Pop Surrealism and contemporary art. It is one of the major subjects of POMO art experience. I've had a hard time defining what this is - it is rife in painting and sculpture but it remains inscrutible. Everyone seems to know what we're talking about when it comes up, but everyone has a different meaning of it. Henri & I disagree about this quite a bit. His argument is that it is tied to fetishized objects and paintings. I thought it more connected to the lens based reproduction industry. We are both right. Pop Surrealism defined is the fetishization of what Greenberg called kitsch. Pop bringing in the "low" media culture and Surrealism adding a Freudian kick to the underlying meaning of the object or image.

These days its practitioners include a diverse group of artists manufacturing art products for the collecting hordes. The technique is simple. Find some form of commercial product - consumer goods or imagery - then tart it up with an expensive material or manufactured academic technique, add an element of size or luxury material, then recontextualizing the form to create a funhouse surreal experience - the resulting product becomes a fetishized object. Over the years artists have gotten very slick with this manuever - even going so far as to have their art products machined and manufactured outside the studio - basically becoming designers of high end consumer goods or they've become virtuosos of slick technical tropes. These techniques have created an entertainment industry that produces "art like" objects and ties them to a self serving critique of the metanarratives of the very media industries that they mimic - art, culture, consumer goods, cartoons, porn etc. The problem is that these objects (because of the way they are conceived, manufactured, presented and sold) become part of that metanarrative.

By now we all claim to understand Pop art - the usual definition: the Popists were doing 2 things - reacting against the Modernist dogma of Abstract Expressionism and creating a context for exploring the culture around them. The Popists were the first to elevate "kitsch" - Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy.... - into a full blown art form by concentrating on the practices of it's making - bascially lens based reproduction. Warhol concentrated on photographic images, magazine design & layout, Lichtenstein on graphic reproduction techniques and Rosenquist on advertising imagery (among others.) It was deadpan and technical really - they recontextualized media techniques in order to create a fine art form. True to its ABEX roots, Pop visually explored media images' materiality and physicality by obsessively illustrating the techniques that went into creating them. The everday context of print or photography had to be pumped up - usually in the way the media was represented - ben day dots, publicity and advertising photos, graphic schematics, overlays, etc. Popists were aping the manufacturing techniques of lens based reproduction in much the same way that ABEX painters were using the splash and swirl to create pictures. This is the beginning of Postmodernism.

In the 1980s POMO began the mannerist phase that continues today. You might say that Pop had gone to Europe and returned with a fiance. While vacationing in Germany, Italy and France it had undergone a midlife change - gone continental and become the Trans-avant garde. Under the tutelage of Derrida, Baudrillard, Foulcault, Barthes and Benjamin Pop had added a thick layer of Surrealism to its practices. Not only was Pop a materialist critique - it became rife with Freudian implications, cultural subtexts and deconstructive practices. POMO's influence on POP pumped its visual practices into today's consumer high end culture. The idea of "desire" was rife in the art critiques of the day. Desire is the off putting of consumation - it is perpetual adolesence and unfulfilled potential - it is the sustaining of the dawning of sexuality, it is the 40 year old virgin and a room full of unopened toys. Pop became the vehicle for the practice of packaged visual compulsion - ie: Pop Surrealism.

Dekooning famously said that he never completed a painting. It is the idea of visual openness that he was getting at - that the viewers would have to "read" the work before them, understand and come to terms with the overflow of visual ideas - it was a messy intellectual proposition. For POMO artists the visual system is closed, the work inscrutibly finished, complete and unassailable, unreachable and unyielding. The work's indifferent to the viewer, there can be no understanding about the object's meaning - only the unfulfilled encounter with the beautifully designed product (it's part of the reason so much is made of technical perfection.) The sexual charge in approaching the beautiful object is found in its distance - its coldness - its remoteness - its inscrutible lack of information and its inability to reveal meaning beyond its surface implications and manufacture. This is described by McLuhan in his discussion of hot & cool media. Hot media, like reading, means that thoughtful work must be done, in order to understand you must create mental images, question precepts, find understanding - the author explains her thinking. Cool media, like watching TV, requires a passivity and a suspension of critical involvement - acceptance - meaning is subjective and found in your experience - you spin your own meaning - the author explains nothing. POMO tied to fetishized Pop culture and overrun by lens based programming is cool media. Meaning is beside the point in a fun house.

There are many artists today working in this fashion. Koons, Murakami, Currin & Yuskavage are pictured here. We will explore this issue further....

to be continued...