Medieval Comic-Books

LAWN FLAMINGOS, McDonald's, split-level late Spanish-American gauche, all have become such standard anathemas--purgative scapegoats in a hundred late-night conversations--that their implications have ceased to be aesthetic and are now political. They are obligatory codewords to be randomly dropped and floridly condemned as a means of mutual identification.

But to those of us foreigners who have luckily escaped being saddled with the albatross of American self-condemnation, the self-flagellating despair of bourgeois life has always been a puzzle. For three decades, we in the rest of the world have watched American movies with mouth-dripping envy, fantasizing about the day when we too will have those shiny Formica kitchens, the big cars with lots of chrome, blinking computers everywhere, Las Vegas, Gary Cooper. It seemed like paradise, but good old Richard Cory just went and shot himself. In spite of its inane aspects, the recent flood of nostalgia is a healthy rehabilitation of national symbols, a growing out of adolescent shame and embarrassment about "home" and a gradual realization that what is commonly thought of as uncultured, vulgar (i.e., new and unEuropean) is exactly what is unique about America.

Aesthetic sense demands ironic distance, be it geographic or in time, because what is unconsciously accepted is often also what is most beautiful. This is not a sociological justification of Lichtenstein; although his blow up paintings of comic-book panels, sandwiches and soda-pop, is as lucid and incisive a reflection of American life as any contemporary art. And portrayal of the culture of its origin remains a justification of art. But Lichtenstein's work stands up on its own in purely sensual terms, and also in formal aesthetic terms.

LICHTENSTEIN attacks the very distinction between illusion and reality, symbol and representation. Even though we know that the comic-book characters in his paintings are charicatures, the sentiments depicted by the disembodied panels are so overwhelming that we cannot help but participate in the drama. Even though we know that the painting of a sandwich and soda pop is schematic and does not even attempt traditional modelling and shading, our first reaction that it does represent the object is so powerful and so instantaneous that it almost actually becomes the subject.

Lichtenstein's prints are like medieval Christian didactic panels. They communicate instantly. Their iconography is easily recognizable, their meaning concentrated and abstracted. It is this element of caricature--caricature achieved by reducing something to its most essential and distinctive elements--that Lichtenstein is trying to isolate, detach and analyse.

Lichtenstein should above all, be enjoyed. For all the reputed sophistication of American youth, they turn out to be a surprisingly conservative and prudish bunch. "This is the wasteland!" the girl beside me at the gallery tsked disapprovingly. Look at the gorgeous colors, I wanted to say, look at the hypnotic use of Rowlux plastic, the bold. creamy black outlines. But the girl had shuffled away mumbling apocalyptically about the fate of modern art.

Certainly a part of this reaction is that Puritan guilt yanking at the American heart strings: art is supposed to be work, back-breaking, meticulous, a blood and sweat document of the starving artist. Lichtenstein seems like the smart-aleck who is getting away with cheating.

BUT THE subject matter is probably as much the cause. Matisse and Picasso got away with graceful, terse summarizations of the female nude. And Van Gogh is said to be the individual talent interacting with the artistic tradition when he hacked out the bad imitations of Delacroix and Rembrandt. But because Lichtenstein glorifies and celebrates the succinct essence of hamburgers, comic strips and warehouses, because he reworks Monet's Haystacks and Picasso's Bull with the slick techniques of modern graphics, he is lowered to insultable altitudes--down from the ivory tower of unintelligibility which protects most artists, thanks to the vanity of a public that does not want to be thought of as ignorant.

DuChamp realized half a century earlier that an authentic aesthetic response is weak and powerless in the face of the pressure of public opinion. To most of us, an authentic aesthetic response is that ineffable "gut feeling," which in this age of narcissistic fiction, is resurrected to onanistic worship. But a gut feeling, exactly because its vague origin, which is so often confused with mystic truthfulness, is associational in its logic. The shudder of revulsion that comes when viewing a Lichtenstein is probably not an artistic response, but an externally motivated one, prompted by the antibourgeois biases of contemporary culture.

The Fogg show includes his earliest comic-book panels from 1963, which first won him his notoriety. Lichtenstein went off on an entirely different tangent in his attempts to convey the wavy fluidity, "the absolute indeterminate essence" of the sun, sky and ocean. He uses a combination of schematic and symbolic lines, actual color photographs, and a shimmering plastic called Rowlux, that in any other context--the plastic body of a comb or a brush, a drug-store display, a hair-salon wall--would be called vulgar. But here it is uncanny in its hypnotic approximation of nature.

A CHILD would appreciate the colors and patterns of a Lichtenstein. The lines are crisp, elegant, simple, classical. The colors are bright, true, eloquent, joyful. They really are a sensual delight to look at. What more appropriate reason for art.

Granted, they resemble slick magazine graphics or modern interior design. But is that necessarily a fault? It is not so much that Lichtenstein is so bad that he resembles commercial art, but that commercial art is good because it has learned the practical lessons of Mondrian, Picasso and modern art. Because of their plentifulness and familiarity we take for granted and deprecate the superb graphics of magazines like Playboy, Esquire, and National Lampoon. But how many boring dull articles have we been snared into by eye-catching graphics? And in a hundred years, how many architecture students will be studying the prefabricated simplicity and functionality of a Jack-in-the-Box?