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| Robert Indiana, Sculptures, Tate Modern, London, July 2019 |
A slightly concerning slump in my general energy levels, and an attendant apathy regarding social media upkeep (remember when we didn't have to bother with all this striving for attention?), make this my first post of the month. Only a Doctor might ultimately reveal if my physical lethargy represents anything more sinister than the creeping passage of middle age, and I guess it's ultimately up to me to decide about what I can and can't really be bothered with, digitally. But, for now, let's persevere, and keep the pot at least simmering with a slight return to my last trip to London, in July. In particular, this post relates to the pleasurable hour I spent with Tate Modern's current Pop Art display.
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| Robert Indiana, Sculptures, Tate Modern, London, July 2019 |
I definitely enjoy the way the Tate constantly reshuffles and recontextualises its permanent or loaned collections - not least because it makes each repeat visit a potentially stimulating new experience. Sometimes this leads one to discover something completely new, but this time it was also an opportunity to revisit some perennial favourites in a new configuration. I remain a sucker for a bit of Pop, and am often surprised to discover how, in the case of the best examples at least, the genre's self-proclaimed superficialities haven't faded, anywhere near as rapidly as one might expect, over the years. Some of this stuff is certainly very familiar, and has been rendered pretty ubiquitous through repeated mass-media regurgitation, but there is something quite appropriate about that, after all. In reality, I still find much of it can still raise a smile, when encountered at first hand.
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| Robert Indiana, Sculptures, Tate Modern, London, July 2019 |
This time round, it was intriguing to witness how the Tate had juxtaposed certain American 'classics' with much less well-known, stylistically sympathetic examples from the other side of the Iron Curtain. There's clearly plenty to consider regarding the apparent critique of Pop's embrace of Capitalist aesthetics, from opposing sides of the Twentieth Century's ideological divide, and perhaps that's something this post might have been about. Instead, it's really about how I was more self-indulgently distracted by two of my old Pop favourites - and by certain correspondences between their work, and my own.
I've long been a fan of Robert Indiana - not least for the elegant, emblematic qualities of his work, and the elegance with which he incorporated textual elements into his visual statements. This is all very familiar from his crisp two-dimensional works, but it's also there in his frequent forays into sculpture. Best known of those are the welded steel 'Love' monuments which still crop up in various international cities, and have continued to proliferate in a variety of media and formats, over the decades. But, here at Tate, I was delighted to discover a cluster of his slightly less familiar, herm-like totems, occupying the centre of a large room.
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| 'Sentinel' Sculptures, 'Visions Of A Free-Floating Island', Surface Gallery, Nottingham, September 2018 |
I've always loved these, not least for their formal clarity, but perhaps most of all - for their distinctly human qualities. It's difficult not to regard them as standing figures, I feel - and also not to notice their formal similarity to certain, far more ancient statues. I'm also prompted to marvel at how Indiana was able to adapt the glib, monosyllabic invocations of commercial signage or labelling, to further suggest, something intrinsically human (either physically or emotionally). Like all the best Pop Art, they allow scope for philosophical meditation, whilst retaining a formal accessibility. Most importantly - they are distinctly witty.
And, of course, it's now impossible not to admit that they were clearly in my mind (either consciously or otherwise) as I was constructing my 'Sentinel' sculptures last year. The scale, format, and resulting figurative characteristics of those, make the connection pretty obvious - as do my similar attempts to apply apposite textual excerpts to a sculptural format. Also, they seem to be equally 'of the street' in their use of low grade, found materials. There's even a submission to the somewhat corny, in at least one or two of the 'Sentinels' - although I certainly don't claim to have got away with that, with anything like the knowing cool of Robert Indiana.
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| 'Sentinel 5', Salvaged Cardboard Boxes, MDF, Adhesive Tape & Paper Collage & Acrylics, 2018 |
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| 'Sentinel 2' Salvaged Cardboard Boxes, MDF, Adhesive Tape, Paper Collage & Acrylics, 2018 |
Anyway, when not revelling in Indiana's statues, or struggling to find clear camera angles in what was a very popular gallery space - I was equally pleased to revisit two works by Roy Lichtenstein, hanging on the wall beyond. As icons of Pop go, they don't get much more archetypal or over-familiar than Lichtenstein's 'Whaam!'. In many respects, it could be said to encapsulate everything that's most resonant about American Pop Art. Relish for the immediacy and mass-appeal of commercially motivated imagery - tick. Exploration of the visual and formal tropes of mechanically reproduction - tick. Dialogue between 'high' and 'low' art and the translation of imagery between certain media typical of them - tick. Juxtaposition of the candy-coated blandishments of consumption-driven affluence, and the darker aspects of actual history - tick. Exploitation of the potential of key imagery to both insulate the viewer from uncomfortable reality, and simultaneously open-up avenues of internal philosophical debate - tick. Perhaps never were existential inconveniences (i.e: war and human slaughter), rendered quite so superficially cheery in a piece of gallery art. And, perhaps most impressively, given its perennial recycling and possible slight fading of pigments - it still feels almost as crisp, fresh and provoking, as it must have in 1963.
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| Roy Lichtenstein, 'Whaam!', Acrylic & Oil on Canvas, 1963 |
Three years later, Lichtenstein made his own excursion into the third dimension, in the adjacent wall-mounted relief, 'Wall Explosion II'. By extracting the already frozen and formalised emblem of the explosion, from 'Whaam!', and then rendering it in welded steel, he further pursued the idea of the instantaneous moment made tangible (or consumable - even). Again, there's something both eloquent and undeniably 'Pop' (almost literally so) about the translation of a moment of destruction into a reproducible, and thus - marketable, commodity. And his use of perforated mesh to allude to the ben-day dots of halftone reproduction, or even the stencils he might himself use to emulate them in paint, is just too damn clever for words. Those are the same halftone dots I've tried to suggest or even collage into more than one of my own works, in recent years - but never in quite such a sophisticatedly oblique manner as Lichtenstein did here - sadly.
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| Roy Lichtenstein, 'Wall Explosion II', Enamel on Steel, 1965 |
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