Reconsidering the Average Object of Art, 1965-1966

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Gerald Laing and Peter Phillips, Hybrid, 1966. Aluminum, acrylic plastic, white neon. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum. Gift of The Collection of John and Kimiko Powers, 1977.16. Image: http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/art/222151

Reconsidering the Average Object of Art, 1965-1966
Alex J Taylor, University of Oxford

Consider the works of Peter Phillips and Gerald Laing in Primary Structures, the 1966 exhibit at New York’s Jewish Museum. Known as a landmark for minimal art, this exhibition incorporated a much broader range of practices than would usually be associated with that movement. The presence of their gaudy sculptures, with their wiggling tongues of electroplated chrome and candy striped Formica alongside works by Donald Judd and Sol Lewitt goes someway to destabilising the tendency for sixties art to be too neatly categorised, suggesting the more permeable boundaries that existed between kinds of work whose differences now can seem irreconcilable.

The focus of my presentation is a sculpture called Hybrid, a collaboration between Laing and Phillips made while they were in the United States. The fact that it doesn’t look very pop hardly matters given that it is the transgression of such categories that I think is subject of this sculpture. Hybrid represents, I would like to suggest, a strategic and wholesale amalgamation of practically every tendency of the mid-sixties avant garde – pop, op, hard-edge, performance, light and space, finish fetish, art and technology, multiples, participatory art, conceptualism and probably more. Moreover, this is an artwork that directly engaged more critics, curators and collectors than almost any other. These are grand claims, but my goal this evening is to recast this sculpture as nothing less than the proper representative of mid-1960s art.

In Spring 1965, Phillips and Laing hit the supply stores of lower Manhattan to buy the kind of materials from which one might create a work of art. These samples were assembled into a small fitted case made from cardboard. Inside this box we find a treasure trove: bound leaves of various surface finishes, a cube of various timbers, plastics and other solid materials. It was the year of The Responsive Eye, so we find a selection of checkerboard patterns printed on acetate, joined in a long spiral-bound concertina, along with a selection of flat shapes in brushed steel – including a French curve and the outline of an automobile. A stack of lurid Perspex samples, some in the day-glo hues that Judd would favour, others flashier still with embedded glitter, are neatly threaded on a cord. Inside the box is small fluorescent light, which required the whole case to be plugged in. Finally, the box contained overlaid discs of plain and patterned colours that could be turned to produce a multitude of combinations.

Making an identical pair of these kits, Philips and Laing did what any ambitious artists in New York in the mid-sixties might have wanted to do – set up meetings with the who’s who of the artworld. As their original proposal for Hybrid describes, their goal for these meetings was to conduct interviews to create ‘A consumer research project to define the schematically average art object for 1965.’ The pair assumed the corporate identity of ‘Hybrid Enterprises’ for the task. Beginning in March, Laing and Phillips thought that the exercise would take eight weeks – though it ended up taking about six months, and the resulting work would not be exhibited until April 1966. The proprietors of Hybrid Enterprises appear here as a deadpan double act, like travelling salesmen or sideshow hucksters, though it was usually just one artist that conducted each interview. The questions they asked were delivered rapidly, and participants recorded their answers on a branded scorecard. Laing and Phillips aimed to conduct 250 interviews – and though, in the end, they managed a little less than 150, their list still makes impressive reading: Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham, Max Kozloff, Lloyd Goodrich, Leo Castelli, Norbert Lynton, Harry Abrams, Philip Johnson, Robert Pincus-Witten, Peter Selz and over 100 others.

Participants were asked if they wanted a two- or three-dimensional object. Would they like the object open or closed? How high should it to be? How wide? How deep? Figurative or non-figurative? Using the numbered samples in their kit, participants were asked to select those materials in which they wished for the artwork to be made, shading portions of the gridded card to represent the proportion of each material to be used. The final requirement for each of these participants was to produce a drawing to determine the shape of the artwork. As John Canaday’s effort suggests, the idea was to trace around the flat templates provided, though not everyone followed the instructions so rigidly. Lucy Lippard needed to start again, and annotated her final design for added clarity. Notably, only one artist was interviewed – Carolee Schneeman, an interview that, according to the account of Gene Swenson, “failed miserably,” such that no other artists were asked to participate, problems materialised perhaps in the wilfully obtuse shape she left behind.

Tapping into period panic about the loss of jobs to technology, and the extension of such discourses to the arts, the publicity for Hybrid boasted that a computer would calculate the final form of the artwork. Analysis of the archival record however reveals its processing to have been somewhat more rudimentary. Laing’s tabulations of the quantitative data, by which the proportions of the four most popular colours and materials were selected, appear laboriously manual. But the task of defining the sculpture’s shape proved more complex. The artists had been in touch with IBM, but in the end it was Michael Noll from Bell Laboratories that did the calculations. The drawings were split into two random piles to determine the artwork’s front and side profiles – from which Bell Labs plotted composites. The result was 22 pages that took some ten hours of processing time. In any case, they don’t seem to have given Laing and Phillips much to go on, as the existence of all these revised sketches for the work reveals. But the appearance of an art without artists was important, and by the time the sculpture was exhibited, such manual processes were subsumed under the rigorously rational and authorless look of an engineering blueprint.

As Laing and Phillips explained to the New York Times, the work was a “re-enactment of motor industry techniques” – a description that complies with much broader interest in custom car culture across both pop and post-painterly abstraction. This connection between artworld novelty and what Vance Packard had called “planned obsolescence” in the equally fashion-driven auto industry was made explicit by the references of the project’s promotional poster. To reinforce this consumerist framing, Hybrid was made in an edition of two, plus ten smaller models – and all of them were exhibited in the Kornblee Gallery showroom. Though it would be possible to look at this sculpture now and not see the processes of its production, its widespread publicity and rich supporting materials ensured that its patently conceptual goals would have been clear to most period viewers. In Hybrid, thirty years before Komar and Melamid’s more famous ‘Most Wanted Paintings’ series, Phillips and Laing’s adopted the strategies of the market researcher to suggest art’s obligations to the dynamics of consumer demand. As the Hybrid press release explained:

Hybrid is the epitome of art as consumer goods and emulates the Lever Brothers and General Motors approach to the commercial product… In that it confronts the low-brow, Hybrid is “Pop”, in the deliberate acknowledgement of art as goods…

To claim Hybrid as representative of sixties art is then to claim that the thread that draws this art together is the primacy of the market in its creation. The average object of art circa 1965 was, in other words, consumption. This persistent engagement with the commodity form was not limited to pop, and by the mid-sixties certainly included plenty of abstract art. In Hybrid, Laing and Phillips carefully straddle such tendencies, and the result is a biting satire of the sixties artworld. But if that is what Phillips and Laing achieve, what does it mean for their other sculptures? Given that Hybrid opened a matter of weeks before Primary Structures, how might have period viewers who saw both groups of work have understood their relationship? As Phillips and Laing lampooned the art world’s appetite for the latest thing, perhaps that was also just what they delivered.

This paper is a work in progress. Please contact the author with comments or requests to cite – alex.taylor@history.ox.ac.uk / http://www.alexjtaylor.com

Opening thoughts on the first session of Pop Art and Beyond, on the theme of space in Pop

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In 1963, Andy Warhol and a small entourage drove from New York City to Los Angeles. On speeding past the billboard signs in the featureless American landscape, Warhol recalled: ‘The farther West we drove, the more Pop everything looked on the highways. Suddenly we all felt like insiders because even though Pop was everywhere…to us, it was the new Art.’

Pop art is commonly associated with subject matter that is quintessentially recognisable. But, in Warhol’s account, Pop art is forged in the interrelation of empty space and commercial signs not in the crowded metropolis or the supermarket.

By this time Warhol’s paintings of Campbell’s Soup Cans had already bought him his big break. They were the single subject of Warhol’s first Pop exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in the summer of 1962. Crucially they helped define Warhol as a Pop artist distinct from Roy Lichtenstein.

Warhol arrived at his Pop-look Campbell’s Cans only after spending time making paintings and drawings of Soup Cans in intuitive perspectives, as if happened on at the kitchen counter: their lids are sometimes open, some appear buckled and crushed, and, in one distinct grouping, their labels are torn.

These earlier Cans suggest, not just that they are ‘real’ things, but that there is a person with whom their reality was interconnected. In one, a can opener hovers in position, as if guided by an invisible hand. In another, a pencil and water color study, the can is being used to house a wodge of dollar bills. These phenomenological cans, if you like, were superseded by images of cans as kinds of ideal forms, as shadowless, shear commodities. In a similar way Warhol’s ‘hard edged’ and ‘no comment’ paintings of Coke bottles were preferred by his friends over the expressionist, brushy companion works he also made.

These Pop genealogies tell the tale of a systematic nixing of the subject from the painted world and the world of painting.

By the end of 1962 a form had emerged that was fixed enough to be appropriate for duplication. Both the Soup Cans and the Coke bottles featured in multiples on larger sized canvases, in some ways returning to the objects’ original states as mass produced consumer commodities.

Returning to the torn Cans, the flimsy peeling paper in these paintings iterate an epidermal site of the commodity-sign above the can’s metal surface. I see this work as a moment in painting, about painting, that has imagined, because of Warhol’s recognition of the commodity’s ubiquitous presence, a divide between sign and material thing. Painting itself is torn: neither the tatty label nor the plain metal can say much. Warhol uses the commodity to enforce a pressure that leads to painting’s unravelling. Work backwards and re-fuse the two elements Warhol has drawn apart, and painting as it was, and as it was especially for Greenbergian abstraction, is regained: the duality of material self-sameness and cultural signifier in a single whole.

But work forwards and one finds oneself with the metaphorics of the floating signifier, the sign becoming detached, unfurling exactly like the Campbell’s label, and this is a theoretical territory in which Warhol’s work has become a touchstone.

In Warhol’s act of deconstruction painting becomes a frame within a frame from which the commodity appears. There is no longer a coherent image space but one that is screened, layered, a void-space over which the commodity floats. What is abstract we might say is not so much the  ground of painting itself but the relation of this new figure and ground.

As I say, this is, in part, a theoretical proposition, one for which Warhol’s role is as of prophet or pioneer. It is that of the postmodern image economy, the floating signifier, the simulacrum. We can map the signified divorced from the signifier over the top of the dislocation of figure and ground in the Campbell’s painting.

It occurs to me to ask, therefore, if the resurgence in an interest in Pop has something to do with a relaxing of the stranglehold of this theoretical framework, not just as a tool for analysis in itself, but also as dichotomising presence within the discussion more broadly. So today, in attempting to think Pop in a reinvigored way, I want to suggest, using Warhol as a sort of platform, some ideas that I hope might help the conversation get off the ground.

I do not think it is a giant leap to consider the abstraction in Warhol’s work as related to cartoon animation made traditionally with figures on cells separate to the backgrounds overwhich they come to life.  Walt Disney was Warhol’s favourite artist. For this traditional form of cartoon animation there is the same sense that the figure is detached from its ground. And, of course, it is, this is fundamental to the ability to create the effect of movement.

Neither is it a stretch to say that Warhol’s rendering of ‘painting’  as an image space onto which commodities-as-images are placed in  abstract relation is far from the way we commonly encounter images today– on the tumblr stream or google image search. Webspace, as it is presented to us in the form of browser windows, is equally a ground and a framing device but which contains, and represents as commodities, other images with their own grounds and their own frames organised in patterns. Patterns for all of this too are vital, I would say. Repetitious patterns , all at once rather than one after the other, make abstract what had previously been figural, adding another layer or dimension.

Installations by contemporary artists such as Mark Lecky and Camille Henrot too, I think, are working with a descendant of this abstract ground when they respectively green and blue screen the gallery interiors, undoing minimalism’s bid to re-ground spectator experience in the anthropomorphic and quote-unquote ‘real’ architectural framework of the gallery. Both artists activate objects, either by themselves or in relation to each other.

The suggestion in both examples is that the de-realised environments unground and unfix content, but also makes that content more charged, more telling, more palpable, imbued with the same animism that suddenly, in this abstract space, all things seem to have. The screens allow for animation whereby images, indeed whole parallel image worlds, might appear at the intersection of figure and ground and through which foregrounded objects might appear as images. And indeed Leckey is the contemporary artist of animation.

But we should not forget that we arrive here, in art history, after a long pre-history, one with an almost exclusively Pop legacy.

This is one of floating basketballs, balloons, cartoons, inflatables. Pop’s unweighted figures are at once a rebuke to increasingly strained discourses of material reality beginning with minimalism, and at the same time an entrance into a space that is itself defined by abstract properties, be they physical, social or psychic. It is also, thinking of the resurgence of Pop in the 80s, a moment when painting found a new ground with evolution of graffiti in the downtown scene and in painted sculpture elsewhere.

Pop never went away, it just resurfaces when things become unsettled, when we can no longer quite normalise the insanity of our relations to things as they are.

Kenny Scharf, Dino Phone, 1985

Kenny Scharf, Dino Phone, 1985

This is an aside to my the general thrust of what I want to convey, but, above all, it is high time that art history considered the work of Kenny Scharf. I only partly mean this to be in jest, acting as a kind of aesthetic interruption, because Scharf is really the artist to have seen into the future to a present day; to a new machine age orientated around communication, cosmically expanding, emphatically and seriously about real possibility, while at the same time wrapped in a infantile bubble aesthetic. His take on a history of painterly abstraction in his work is to deny it: ‘There’s nothing abstract in my canvases[he says], at most strangely shaped objects. The forms and outlines are softer, more organic, but they are still physical objects and come from the unconscious’

What this wider context, of internet space, cartoon space and floating in space, what it does is it challenges the previous assumption that the economy of the floating signifier was ever one of images rather than objects. That seems to me to be one of structuralism’s major faults, that it is literal about images: or perhaps we, in art history, have been too literal about images following from postmodern aesthetics. The project I am engaged with at the moment is about Warhol and the sculpture he made. It has become fascinating to me the extent of the collective denial there seems to be over Warhol’s extensive and notable body of sculptural work. But equally what I also keep finding is the slippage between the image and the object in his paintings.

Warhol was obsessed, I think it is not an exaggeration to say, with 3D paintings, be they painted boxes, floating silver clouds referred to as paintings, and actual paintings in 3D where the viewer had to wear special glasses. He also experimented with, and moreover fantasised about, the possibilities of holograms, body casts, lenticular displays, transparencies, shadows and even at the end of his life 3D modelling approximate to todays’  now booming 3D printing industry.

He was also a maniacal collector, his town house, office and studio were all full of stuff when he died, he had too much stuff, it depressed him how busy and cramped his environment was. He loved, or at least was compelled, to buy, to collect, but not to cherish or keep on view. He hoped, he wrote in 1975, that one day he could transfer all his things to holographic wafers, so he could keep both his things and live in empty space.

The conclusion I draw from all of this is that for Warhol it was not a question of the image or the object, real or virtual, but a question of there being no feasible space other than image space in which to deal with the reality of things as they exist in the modern imagination. Crucially, this does not mean the work is about images, or that the image is an adequate substitute for imaginative vision.

The influence of Pop’s famous misregistration and clash of register is often considered today as illustrative of a condition of equivalence, as if difference has been sublated to a plane of meta-homogeneity. Part of what I am suggesting is that there is another way of reading this, perhaps a throwback to recalling the potentiality of postmodernism before it all became about media. That the abstraction I have been trying to describe was not a marker for a detachment from reality based on compatibility with the image machine, but that its images were indicative of a relation to things, and to relations themselves, that only found suitable expression in a form of abstraction but was nonetheless phenomenologically apparent. Pop becomes that space of negotiation, a place to accommodate difference, a beyond in itself.

Thomas Morgan Evans