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A Mini Genealogy of Pop, or: Why Pop Art 2002 ? |
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Ania Mauruschat Although ReDo's world is at home in Germany, it is above all an American world and therefore Pop. Or rather is it Pop and therefore American? Inseparable, say, since the 1776 American Revolution, Pop and the U.S. belong together, in any case for ReDo. But why Pop 2002 in Germany? ReDo, born in 1960 as Udo Rein, had his first sight of the world in the perhaps most important Pop decade. After first beginnings with figurative paintings, plaster and clay sculptures, light boxes with sharks and expressionistic color fields, ReDo finally found his own pop style during the 1990s in the so-called "decade of Pop Modernism" (Tempo) at the time when the pop concept exploded globally at an ever greater breakneck speed and was manifest in all art genres - from music via cinema and literature to theater - and at the same time penetrated the almost completely everyday aesthetics of media productions. Until also in Germany everything seemed to have turned Pop, from Guildo Horn to Guido Westerwelle. And then there's ReDo's birthplace in Heidelberg, Germany's hyper-romantic town on the Neckar, where on nearly every street corner a U.S. flag waves, there to remind us that Heidelberg only survived World War II almost undamaged thanks to the goodwill of tourist-interested US officers. Heidelberg, the European Headquarters of the US Army, here it was that the Geist or spirit of Eichendorff struck up a far-reaching liaison with the spirit of America almost 60 years ago. As is also the case with a grand-cousin by marriage, a GI stationed in Heidelberg, who took a grand-cousin with him to the U.S.A., whom, in turn, ReDo followed to Miami at the end of the 1970s. And that's why Pop? In answer to our question of how he came to his pictures, ReDo answers: "I don't know myself..." And to the question why Pop Art of all things: "That's simply what was inside me." In short: ReDo's Pop Art does not come about in opposition to the American spirit but stems from it. Influenced, among others, by the painter Romann Feldmeyer (a friend of the family's whose sketchbook from Germany's Russian military campaign is now in ReDo's possession), ReDo perpetuates popular art and the American spirit in his painting via Expressionism and pixel aesthetics. Which is why, in the end, they can assert themselves also in the year 2002, that is, at a time when media art, on the one hand, and a repoliticization of art, on the other, has been the state of affairs everywhere. A short excursion into the genealogy of Pop seems nonetheless helpful, so as to better understand the significance of Pop aesthetics in the year 2002 and perhaps also ReDo's art. Pop Art, this US urban phenomenon of the early 1960s, grew up under the capitalist and technological specifics of western industrial society, expressed itself at the first heyday of consumer affluence and very concretely reflected the American lifestyle of the 1960s. Pop Art thematized the close relationship between art and life, referred explicitly to its own historical present and, as a result, always believed euphorically in progress and was, at the same time, implicitly uptight and pessimistic, for the 1960s were - after the paralyzing climate of the 50s and especially in the U.S. - a turbulent decade: 1962 Marilyn Monroe committed suicide, 1963 JFK was shot in Dallas, 1964 the US upgraded its military commitment to the Vietnamese war, 1965 Malcolm X and 1968 Martin Luther King were assassinated, while parallel to all this the civil rights and protest movements gained in strength and expounded the very different concerns of blacks, Indians, women and students. Joan Didion, the famous representative of New Journalism, had in "Slouching towards Bethlehem" - a collection of essays published 1967 in the Saturday Evening Post on the hippies in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco - vividly captured the peculiar mood of the 1960s in America. "The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. [...] It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco. San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves 'hippies'." In addition, in 1960 already 90% of all US households owned at least one television set, and the number of TV channels grew exponentially from six in 1946 to around 500 in 1960. Against this historic background, art developed a new objectivity, an intellectual clarity, a conceptual system and an impersonal depictive style. Artists were now occupied with consumer products and loudly professed the depersonalization and anonymity of art as well as of artists. Thus denying the artist within a mass society the status of genius. Whereby Pop Art as a genuine US aesthetic in the 20th century was at first articulated not in America, but in England as a reaction to the postwar increase in Americanization. So it was that Eduardo Paolozzi in his 1947 collage "I Was a Rich Man's Plaything" first used the word "pop" in an ironic sense as shot or bang. This ironic but also fascinated coming to terms with the American way of life then took place in the 50s in England predominately within the circle around the painter Richard Hamilton, whose collage "Just what is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing?" contained the word Pop printed on a giant lollipop and was the title cover for the legendary 1956 London exhibition "This Is Tomorrow", considered a founding event in Pop Art. Then finally in 1958 the English art critic Lawrence Alloway coined the term Pop Art. When in 1961 the US artists Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann and Claes Oldenburg exhibited their new, pop-type art in New York, the English word "Pop Art" was simply taken over for this new American version. What was or is crucial is that the stance so characteristic for English Pop Art of an ironic and critically distanced engagement with the phenomenon of the United States was negated, since "pop" had, or now took on, a different meaning in the US. Whereas "pop" in regards to American Pop Art can certainly be translated as "bang" and thus reflects the explosive mood of the 1960s, on the other hand in the US, Pop stands, above all, for an abbreviation of "popular", which means "well-loved" as well as "of folk origin". The Munich scholar of American literature, Berndt Ostendorf - in his essay "Why Is American Popular Culture So Popular?"1 - has successfully dissected the complex nature of this pop culture and thus made a clear differentiation possible between the US and Europe. A differentiation that appears to be essential if Europeans want to understand the phenomenon of Pop. On a semantic level, namely, the terms "popular" and "culture" have a completely different meaning in the US than they do in Europe. While in Europe "popular" has a traditionally negative connotation in the sense of "trivial" while "culture" is, on the other hand, understood as a "permanent mission, as the result of education, as an earned proprietorship that marks off the border to the lack of culture and illiteracy of the others", in the US, popular culture has from the beginning been seen as perfectly positive. The political order of the young American Republic is based on a "popular mandate", on the "popular sovereignty" of its citizens who choose a "popular government" in a free election. "Popular" has thus referred to the specific accomplishment of the American revolutionaries who in 1776 achieved political self-determination, thereby confirming the dignity and wisdom of the common man. And this was in no way meant as a class specification, since the educated people overall understood themselves to be "common men". In the US, "culture" is likewise understood to be something very positive, though it is treated as something relatively informal: everyone has culture, if you understand it as that "pragmatic behavioral standard" that in principle all people - not only "citizens", but also Indians and blacks - have always possessed and always used as a natural resource. According to Ostendorf the term "popular culture" can be seen as a synonym for the "total design of a liberal American Utopia". |
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Accordingly, "popular culture" is THE culture in America; there is no other genuinely American one. And this pop culture is grandiose, for it is the culture of the free people of the United States. This freedom is one of the four central dogmas (next to active citizenship, populism and unconditional belief in justice). However "freedom" is meant here in more than one sense. Along with individual freedom and autonomy, freedom of speech and freedom to one's own opinion, it also means economic liberalism, which immediately, via services provided, assimilates every articulation of dissent - that as freedom of speech is an infinitely significant basic right of every American - turning potential criticism into affirmation at its earliest stage. This the critics gladly allow, since they, because they provide services as individuals among the mass, are deliberately courted. American pop culture is articulated perhaps out of a malaise and thus has a critical motivation, but it produces no real scope for development and has, above all, no power in the sense of a revolutionary, political potentiality that could seriously stand up to global capitalism. Instead it is an accomplice. At the same time American pop culture is incredibly effective worldwide, above all because it is so "sexy". It is the aesthetics of a presumed paradise, since the USA believes it is "God's own country", the promised land of universal affluence and of work-alleviating products. US Americans are born-again. On the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York is engraved: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..." Pop culture is correspondingly an "authentic" formulation of this relief from oppression, in which anyone can assumably go from washing dishes to becoming a millionaire: Just do it! Andy Warhol, a classic personification of American Pop Art, very vividly brought to a head - in his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) - the essence of such capitalism packed in an apparently "communist aesthetic": That's what's fantastic about this country. In America it is essentially the case that even the richest consumer essentially buys the same thing as the poorest. You see Coca Cola on TV and can be sure that the president drinks his Coca Cola, that Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola - and that you too can also drink Coke! Coca Cola is and remains Coca Cola and for no money in the world can you get a Coke anywhere that's better than that which the tramp on the corner is drinking. It's always the same Coca Cola and it's always equally good. Liz Taylor knows this, the president knows this, the tramp knows this, and you yourself know it too. However this traditional, American Pop concept has, above all since the 1960s, been opposed to the European, leftist, critical version expressed by Pierre Bourdieu or the Birmingham School, who stood for the position that Pop culture's destiny was to be deployed by the weak, the marginalized and the powerless as a means, via their cultural differences, to create free scope and liberating momentums within the politically and economically dominating system. That this has, since the 1990s, become less straightforward in Europe was noted in detail by the German Pop theorist, Diedrich Diederichsen, in his 1999 book The Long March to the Middle. The Sound and the City in the fifth chapter "The 90s, and Beyond Them Infinity - Is This Pop?"2 There Diederichsen differentiates between "Pop I (60s to 80s, specific Pop)" which was, in the end, somehow the better version, and "Pop II (90s, universal Pop)", which ousted Pop I. From the 60s to the fall of the Berlin wall, Pop I stood "for the renovation of the world that the youth and underground cultures envisioned, especially for that part of the reigning economic order that was manageable and usable: sexual liberation, English language internationality, doubt in the Protestant work ethic and the disciplinary regime it entailed, but also for minorities and their civil rights and the rejection of institutions, hierarchies and authorities. Added to this was a desire for new technologies and the cult of fame per se ('superstars'), especially when prominently staged by Andy Warhol as it had become possible under the conditions of the ever more densely woven web of the international media." Pop in the sense of Pop II, on the other hand, has become "the conceptual passe-partout of an ill-defined society ...whose invasion no terrain can parry," and which, above all, goes along with an "...inclusive but - via heterogeneous forms - ideologically homogenized, new public forum." After his very complex and differentiated analysis, Diederichsen comes to the conclusion, despite all his criticism, that "Pop II is neither good nor bad as such." His bottom line: "Although Pop as Pop II has penetrated all public communication forms, it has however done so only in the shape of a tendency, not as a new totality. What is called for is to become engaged with this tendency in its relationship to Pop I and the old public sphere and to study and reinforce oppositional effects at this new level. Which, however, is hardly possible from outside. There's nothing for it but to go along with Pop II. Never was the production of significance so important, as the raw material of the market as well as the ferment of society - accessible therefore in principle to a new politicization. Yet, at the same time, never was it so unimportant, so expendable, so fleeting, so without resonance." It is exactly at this Pop cultural interface where the American spirit and European social criticism come together in the social immanence of the 90s as a decade of global players in a frenzy of fusion and a demand for thematic formulation and alignment, and it is here that ReDo's Pop Art seems to be at home. Breeching the gap between American Pop Art of the 1960s and a Pop Art of the globalized present seems to be what ReDo is managing to do in that he takes up, carries on and extends the thread. At the time when racial unrest was almost driving the US towards civil war, Andy Warhol in 1964 raised Jane Holzer, a white New York girl from the scene and, at the same time, the protagonist in a Warhol silent movie, to the status of his first "superstar" - out of protest that the underground film could have no stars and in order to outdo Hollywood at least semantically. In the meantime, it is hard to imagine a Hollywood vocabulary without this term. And Tiger Woods, a golf player who is thought to be invincible and who apparently earns considerably more than the Bayern Munich football club and Michael Schumacher together, has long ago been called by journalists a "super-super-superstar": a black American with Caucasian, Indian, Thai and Chinese ancestors, brought up as a Buddhist, whom Nike immediately latched onto as a perfect global advertising figure, since he promised, like no one other, to win over the youths of all ethnic and religious groups to the "just do it" spirit. For this reason, Tiger Woods, like no one else, embodies in such perfection the up-to-the-end-of-the-90s transformation of the Pop concept. The first picture from ReDo's Time Panel series of the newsmagazine's covers that he worked into collages of oil and acryl onto square wooden panels was, significantly, "time tiger tale", a collage of a Tiger Woods Time cover. ReDo takes up, carries on and extends. Instead of Warhol's superstars, ReDo envisions the super-super-superstar. ReDo can no longer produce the title image of a movement, but he can help himself to genuine covers and by this ingenious stratagem lead PopArt directly back to the heartbeat of our time. In the post-human world of a biotech era, ReDo brought to a head depersonalization and anonymity, especially that of the artist and, especially in his Time Panels, wrote his signature in bar codes cut from product packages. At the same time, however, the American spirit is constantly present and ongoing, above all in the form of the American flag, which repeatedly turns up in ReDo's pictures from the past ten years. The flag has even reached Mars, as in the Time Panel "time invasion USA", although its red is surprisingly blurred, almost as if it had burst into flame... Even where ReDo has gone ever more into abstraction, as in "time cholesterol" or in the "stripe series", you feel inevitably reminded of it: action (or "Egg-tion") painting in red, white, blue and yellow - an exploded flag? And how far is it from the "stripes" to the "star series", which were done one after the other? Really once again the stars and stripes? It seems - not only for the viewer of ReDo's pictures - to be impossible to escape from the American spirit. But is it not the case that even after 9/11 we are living in the midst of US Pop culture, even if the center holds even less? We are made conscious of this fact once more by ReDo's reintegration of the American theme of Pop into an art context. Ania Mauruschat |
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1 Ostendorf, Berndt: "Warum ist die amerikanische populäre Kultur so populär?" in Merkur, no. 8, 53rd year, August (1999): 700-715. |
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2 Diedrich Diederichsen: "Die 90er , und dahinter die Unendlichkeit - Ist was Pop?", Chapter 5 of Der lange Marsch nach Mitte. Der Sound und die Stadt, Cologne, 1999. |
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