THAT OLD THING ART...

ROLAND BARTHES As all encyclopedias remind us, during the fifties certain artists at the the London Institute of Contemporary Arts became advocates of the popular culture of the period: comic strips, films, advertising, science fiction, pop music. These various manifestations did not derive from what is generally called an Aesthetic but were entirely produced by Mass Culture and did not participate in art art at all; simply, certain artists, architects, and writers were interested in them. Crossing the Atlantic, these products forced the barrier of art; accommodated by certain American artists, they became works of art, of which culture no longer constituted the being, merely the reference: origin was displaced by citation. Pop Art as we know it is the permanent theater of this tension: on one hand the mass culture of the period is present in it as revolutionary force which contests art; and on the other , art is present in it as a very old force which irresistibly returns in the economy of societies. There are two voices, as in a fugue- one says This is not Art, the other says, at the same time I am Art. Art is something which must be destroyed- a proposition common to many experiments of Modernity. Pop Art reverses values. What characterizes Pop is mainly its use of what is despised (Lichtenstein). Images from mass culture, regarded as vulgar, unworthy of an aesthetic consecration, return virtually unaltered as materials of the artist's activity. I should like to call this reversal the Clovis Complex: like Saint Remi Addressing the Frakish kin, the god of Pop Art says to the artist: Burn what you have worshiped, worship what you have burned. For instance: photography has long been fascinated by painting, of which is still passes as a poor relation; Pop Art overturns this prejudice: the photograph often becomes the origin of the images Pop Art presents: neither art painting nor art photograph but a nameless mixture. Another example of reversal: nothing more contrary to art than the notion of being the mere reflection of things represented; even photography does not support this destiny; Pop Art, on the contrary, accept being an imagery, a collection of reflections, constituted by the banal reverberation of the American environment: reviled by high art, the copy returns. This reversal is not capricious, it does not proceed form a simple denial of value, form a simple rejection of the past; it obeys a regular historical impulse; as Paul Valery noted (in Pieces sure l'Art), the appearance of new technical means (here, photography, seriography) modifies not only art's forms but its very concept. Repetition is a feature of culture. I mean that we can make use of repetition in order to propose a certain typology of cultures. Popular or extra-European cultures (deriving from an ethongraphy) acknowledge as much, and derive meaning and pleasure from the fact (we need merely instance today's minimal music and disco); Occidental high culture does not (even if it has resorted to repetition more than we suppose, in the the baroque period). Pop Art, on the other hand repeats- spectacularly. Warhol proposes a series of identical images (White Burning Car Twice) of of images which differ only by some slight variation of color (Flowers, Marilyn). The stake of these repetitions (or of Repetition as a method) is not only the description of art but also (moreover, they go together) another conception of the human subject: repetition affords access, in effect, to a different temporality: where the Occidental subject experiences in ingratitude of a world from which the New-i.e. ., ultimately, Adventure-is excluded, the Warholian subject (since Warhol is a practitioner of the

repetitions)abolished the pathos of time in himself, because this pathos is always linked to the feeling that something has appeared, will die, and that one's death is opposed only by being transformed into a second t something which does not resemble the first. Fro Pop Art, it is important that things be finite (outline: no evanescence), but it is not important that they be finished, that work (is there a work?) be given the internal organization of a destiny (birth, life, death). Hence we must unlearn the boredom of the endless (one of Warhold's first films, *****, lasted twenty-five hours; Chelsea Girls lasts three and a half). Repetition disturbs the person (that classical entity ) in another fashion: by multiplying the same image, Pop Art rediscovers the them of the Double, of the Doppenlgnger; this is a mythic them (the Shadow, the Man or the Woman without a Shadow); but in the productions of Pop Art, the Double is harmless- has lost all maleficent or moral power, neither threatens nor haunts: the Double is a Copy, not a Shadow: beside, not behind: a flat, insignificant, hence irreligious Double. Repetition of the portrait induces an adulteration of the person (a notion simultaneously civic, moral, psychological and of course historical). Pop Art, it has also been said, takes the place of a machine; it prefers to utilize mechanical processes of reproduction: for example, it freezes the star (Marilyn, Liz) in her images as star : no more soul, nothing but a strictly imaginary status, since the star's being is the icon. The object itself, which is everyday life we incessantly personalize by incorporating into our individual world-the object is, according to Pop Art, no longer anything but the residue of a subtraction: everything left over from a tin can once we have mentally amputated all its possible themes, all its possible uses, Pop Art is well aware that the fundamental expression of the person is style. As Buffon said (a celebrated remark, once know to every French schoolboy): Style is the man. Take away style and there is no longer any (individual) man. The notion of style, in all the arts, has therefore been linked, historically, to a humanism of the person. Consider an unlikely example, that of graphism: manual writing, long impersonal (during Antiquity and the Middle Ages), began to be individualized in the Renaissance, dawn of the modern period; but today, when the person is moribund idea, or at least a menaced one, under the pressure of the gregarious forces which animate mass culture, the personality of writing is fading art. There is, as I see it, a certain relation between Pop Art and what is called script that anonymous writing sometimes taught to dysgraphic children because it is inspired by the neutral and, so to speak, elementary features of typography. Further, we must realize that if Pop Art depersonalized, it does not make anonymous: noting is more identifiable than Marilyn, the electric chair, a telegram, or a dress, as seen by Pop Art; they are in fact nothing but that: I immediately and exhaustively identifiable, thereby teaching us that identify is not the person: the future world risks being a world of identities (by the computerized proliferation of police files), but not of persons. A final feature which attaches Pop Art to the experience of Modernity: the banal conformity of representation to the thing represented. I don't' want a canvas, Rauschenberg says, to like what it is'nt. I want it to look like what it is. The proposition is aggressive in that art has always regarded itself as an inevitable detour that must be taken in order to render the truth of the thing. What Pop Art wants is to de-symbolize the object, to give it to the obtuse and matte stubbornness of a fact (John Cage: The object is a fact, not a symbol). to say the object is asymbolic is to deny it possesses a profound or proximate space through which its appearance can propagate vibrations of meaning: Pop Art's object (this is a true revolution of language) is neither metaphoric nor metonymic; it presents itself cut off from its source and its surroundings; in particular, the Pop artist does not stand behind his work, and he himself has no depth: he is merely the surface of his pictures: no signified, no intention, anywhere.

Now the fact, in mass culture, is not longer an element of the nature world; what appears as fact is the stereotype: what everyone else sees and consumes. Pop Art finds the unity of its representation in the radical conjunction of these two forms each carried to extremes: the stereotype and the image. Tahiti is a fact, insofar as a unanimous and persistent public opinion designates this isle as a collection of palm trees, of flowers worn over one ear, of long hair, sarongs and languorous, enticing glances (Lichtenstein's Little Aloha). In this way. Pop Art produces certain radical images: by dint of being an image, the thing is stropped of any symbol. This is an audacious movement of mind (or of society): it is no longer the fact which is transformed into an image (which is, strictly speaking, the movement of metaphor, out of which humanity has made poetry for centuries), it is the image which becomes a fact Pop Art thus features a philosophical quality of things, which we may call facticity: the factitious is the character of what exists as facts and appears stripped of any justification: not only are the objects represented by Pop Art factitious, but they incarnate themselves, they begin to signify again: they signify that they signify nothing. For meaning is cunning: drive it away and it gallops back. Pop Art seeks to destroy art (or at least to do without it), but art rejoins it: art is the counter-subject of our fugue. (....more to come....the abolution of the signified...)

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