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HAPPENINGS

As part of the Pop scene, artists like Allan Kaprow and Jim Dine staged happenings, designed to take art off the canvas and into life.

Robert Rauschenberg rented thirty large desert turtles for one happening, “Spring Training.” The turtles roamed a darkened stage with flashlights strapped to their backs, sending light flashing in all directions, while Rauschenberg, clad in jockey shorts, traipsed around wiggling his toes and fingers. Then he and a friend toted each other around like logs. For the climax, Rauschenberg, in a white dinner jacket and on stilts, poured water into a bucket of dry ice harnessed to his waist. Clouds of vapor coiled around him, a finale he later pronounced “too dramatic.” Afterward, returning the turtles in a taxi, Rauschenberg praised their performance. “But the turtles turned out to be real troupers, didn’t they? They were saving it all for the performance. They don’t have very much, so they saved it.”

POP ART

Once Rauschenberg and Johns reintroduced recognizable imagery, the stage was set in the early 1960s for artists to draw their subjects directly from popular (“pop”) culture. With a resounding WHAAM! Roy Lichtenstein’s comics-derived paintings took direct aim at the abstract art of the ’50s. Besides Lichtenstein, artists like Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and James Rosenquist, who all had commercial art backgrounds, based their work on images from Times Square neon signs, the mass media, and advertising.

This return to pictorial subject matter was hardly a return to art tradition. Pop art made icons of the crassest consumer items like hamburgers, toilets, lawnmowers, lipstick tubes, mounds of orange-colored spaghetti, and celebrities like Elvis Presley. “There is no reason not to consider the world,” Rauschenberg said, “as one large painting.” Pop artists also made art impersonal, reproducing Coke bottles or Brillo boxes in a slick, anonymous style. With playful wit, the new art popped the pomposity of Action Painting.

Pop artists blazed into super-stardom in 1962 like comets in a Marvel comic. Pop was easy to like. Its shiny colors, snappy designs — often blown up to heroic size — and mechanical quality gave it a glossy familiarity. Pop became as much an overnight marketing phenomenon as a new artistic movement. Collectors compared the skyrocketing prices of their acquisitions to IBM stock. Meanwhile, galleries chock full of passé Abstract Expressionist inventory were out of the action. One jealously posted a sign next to an exhibit of Warhol soup cans: “Get the real thing for 29 cents.”

For architect Philip Johnson, a Pop collector, the art was more than monetarily enriching. “What Pop art has done for me is to make the world a pleasanter place to live in,” he said. “I look at things with an entirely different eye — at Coney Island, at billboards, at Coca-Cola bottles. One of the duties of art is to make you look at the world with pleasure. Pop art is the only movement in this century that has tried to do it.”

LICHTENSTEIN: COMIC STRIP IMAGERY

Since 1962, American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein (pronounced LICK ten stine; b. 1923) has parodied the mindless violence and sexless romance of comic strips to reveal the inanity of American culture. Lichtenstein said he painted war comics and tawdry romance melodramas because “it was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no one would hang it. Everyone was hanging everything. It was almost acceptable to hang a dripping point rag. [But] the one thing everyone hated was commercial art. Apparently they didn’t hate that enough either.”

Lichtenstein, “Whaam!” 1963, Tate Gallery, London. Lichtenstein’s trademark style borrows comic book techniques as well as subjects. Using bright primary colors with block and white, he outlines simplified forms, incorporating mechanical printer’s (benday) dots and stereotyped imagery. By enlarging pulp magazine panels to billboard size, Lichtenstein slaps the viewer in the face with their triviality.

WARHOL: