ABJECT

SEXUALITY IN POP ART Joe A. Thomas Erotic art has long comprised the secret museum of art history because societal taboos and restrictive cultural mors have created an awkward and embarrassing atmosphere around human sexuality, at least in the west. Similarly, some writers and viewers have considered Pop Art as something of an embarrassment in the history of art. Seen as selling out modernism, its popular and economic success helped to spur its general critical rejection in the art world of the early sixties. Pop was seen as thumbing its nose at serious modernist art for many reasons, but among the least discussed of its artistic transgressions has been the consistent use of sexual and erotic imagery. In a sort of artistic patricide, the Pop artists used erotic images as part of an overall strategy to establish themselves as the new avant-garde while distancing themselves from the oppressive weight of the Abstract Expressionist art establishment. In 1939 Clement Greenbergs Avant-Garde and Kitsch codified the almost sacred separation of modernist, highbrow culture and art from popular, lowbrow products. In Greenbergs view whatever held popular appeal for the masses was by definition lowbrow kitsch and artistically insignificant. Kitsch was thus defined by its designated site in popular culture. Greenberg was not alone in his opposition to mass culture; commercial art and popular media were widely considered artistically insignificant. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, discussing mass culture in 1957, expressed the accepted opinion that art was the counterconcept to popular culture and that a genuine esthetic (or religious or love) experience becomes difficult, if not impossible, whenever kitsch pervades the atmosphere.1 When Pop artists began to appropriate popular culture by using commercial images and styles, they defied Greenbergs artistic hierarchies and consciously sought out the abjectrelative to their own art-historical context. While some recent psychoanalytic theory projects many complex layers of meaning onto the term abjection, I prefer a less labored definition. Websters dictionary defines abject as miserable; wretched or lacking self-respect; degraded. It derives from the Latin verb abjicere, which means to throw away. The modernist imperative included an unspoken rule
The Free Press, 1957), 10.

1 Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (London:

that the radicality of the art would produce an underlying sense of the abject, hence provoking negative reactions of shock from an uninformed public. Pop Art, however, redoubled and redefined the modernist affection for the abject. Even the self-styled avant-garde saw it as miserable and wretched. Max Kozoloffs famous 1962 article derided the emerging style for its metaphysical disgust practiced by new vulgarians.2 Paradoxically, Pop artists had turned to popular culture largely because they felt such intense pressure to conform to modernist standards of the avant-garde. Andy Warhol well illustrated this impulse. As he began to seek a high profile in the New York art world, he visited the art-lending gallery then offered by the Museum of Modern Art. Upon seeing a collage by Rauschenberg, Warhol remarked with disgust, Thats a piece of shit. Anyone can do that. I can do that. His friend Ted Carrey responded, Well, why dont you do it? Well, Ive got to think of something different, was Warhols response.3 The Pop artists effectiveness in conveying their radical status was instantaneous and profound. Thomas Hess reported that a leading modernist painter, upon seeing the watershed exhibition of Pop and other art at Sidney Janis Gallerys New Realists show in November 1962, exclaimed, I feel a bit like a follower of Ingres looking at the first Monets.4 In fact, the disgust of the modernist establishment was such that Janiss entire stable of Abstract Expressionists (except Willem de Kooning) left his gallery.5 Erotic and sexual contentwhich could increase the arts wretched and degrading connotationswere among the Pop artists most effective tools in establishing their avant- garde credentials. All of the major Pop artists involved themselves with such imagery to some degree, particularly those whose work commented on the mass media exploitation of female sexuality: Tom Wesselmann and Mel Ramos. Typical of Wesselmanns work is Great American
2 Max Kozloff, Pop Culture, Metaphysical Disgust, and the New Vulgarians, Art International 6 (March 1962): 34-36. 3 Patrick Smith, Art in Extremis: Andy Warhol and his Art (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1932), 468-69. 4 Thomas Hess, New Realists, Art News 61 (December 1962): 12. 5 Barbara Haskell, Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance, 1958-1964 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with W. W. Norton & Co., 1984), 86; Calvin Tomkins, Profiles: A Good Eye and a Good Ear, Leo Castelli, The New Yorker, 26 May 1980,62.

 Nude #55 of 1964. All of the elements of the painting are simplified into flat areas of commercial-looking, bright color, except for the tasteless, leopard-print spread on which the nude lies. The artists characteristic emphasis on erogenous zones by the use of contrasting colors is heightened in this work by the use of collaged hair. Interestingly, in explaining his artistic strategy the artist revealed an odd conflation of formalism with a realization of the abject quality of the subject. He stated (not referring specifically to #55) that he found the emphasized pubic areas blatantly erotic and consequently visually aggressive. A shaved vagina had the same vividness and immediacy as a strong red.6 Mel Ramoss most famous works are probably the paintings of 1965-66 in which nude centerfold girls were paired with common commercial products (usually food, but always something consumable). In Val Veeta a nubile sixties sex kitten sprawls on a giant box of Velveeta cheese spread. Ramos customarily played with the title in order to alliteratively connect the womans name with the corresponding product. The painting equates the highly processed and artificial erotic image of the nude woman with the similarly processed and

artificial food product. The sensual aspects of the food parallel the sensual aspects of the nude. The extensive finishing and processing that such a nude model would undergoincluding later airbrushingmade her a product as far removed from a real woman as the rubbery, glutinous Velveeta is from real cheese. Both were meant to be consumedone by the eyes, the other by the mouth. Ramoss smooth brushwork in Val Veeta imitates the airbrushed perfection of Playboy centerfold models and recalls the slick technique of advertising illustration. Both in style and subject, the painting embodies some of the most reviled and abject features of popular culture: blatant consumerism, the sexual sell, crassness. Oddly, Ramos has never acknowledged any such purposeful strategy, however, maintaining that he is just a figure painter.7 In contrast, Claes Oldenburg explicitly related eroticism to the transformative nature of his art. As he said, My work is always on its way between one point and another.8 The points in his particular artistic geometry usually encompassed mundane objects at one end
6 Slim Stealingworth [Tom Wesselman], Wesselmann (New York: Abbeville, 1980), 23.

7 Mel Ramos, interview by the author, 30 May 1991, Oakland, California, Tape recording. 8 Lawrence Alloway, American Pop Art (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 101.

and sexual organs or erotic symbols at the other. Falling Shoestring Potatoes (1966) illustrates the fluid mutations Oldenburg saw in objects. Ostensibly it is a giant bag of French fries spilling onto the gallery floor. But as Lawrence Alloway has explained, in a sketch for the piece Oldenburg wrote that an electrical plug equals legs, which then equal shoestring potatoes. The potatoes resembled both legs and the prongs of the plug, while the sack/skirt from which the potatoes/legs protrude was the plug itself; the French fries were thus a metaphor for legs under a miniskirt and an electrical plug.9 Oldenburgs vision of a pansexual world correlated with contemporaneous psychoanalytic theories that posited sexuality as being at the root of our perception. Oldenburg was a fan of Norman O. Brown, an early sixties writer and thinker who believed in the renunciation and repression of logic in a favor of a return to the polymorphous perversity of infancy as described by Freud.10 There is often a grotesque quality to Oldenburgs transmutations: for example, in a musing written in his notebooks, ice cream = God = sperm.11 Such polymorphous perversity would have created a sense of abjection in a typical squeamish 1960s viewer. Almost as soon as James Rosenquist turned to painting Pop works, erotic elements began to appear. I Love You With My Ford has probably received more critical attention than any other Rosenquist painting except F-111. Gene Swenson wrote in 1962: The upper section, an obsolescent 49 Ford, comments on things which change (car models), or persist (making love in cars). The progressive enlargement of scale in the three sections parallels the increasing loss of identity in the sexual act.12 Or as Simon Wilson saw it, . . . the Ford phallic symbol looms over the face of the girl, her eyes closed and lips parted in ecstasy, while below the consummation is somehow symbolized by the writhing, glutinous masses of spaghetti.13
9 Ibid., 104. 10 Barbara Rose, The Origins, Life and times of Ray Gun, Artforum 8 (November 1969): 57; Barbara Rose, Claes Oldenburg (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 64. 11Ellen Johnson, Claes Oldenburg (Harmondsworth and Baltimore: Penguin, 1971), 24. 12 Gene Swenson, The New American Sign Painters, Art News 61 (September 1962): 60-61. 13 Simon Wilson, Pop (Woodbury, NY: Barrrons, 1978), 24.

 Rosenquists title perhaps suggests that commodity exchange involving objects such as this

will replace physical affection (and its accompanying messiness and complications). The artist depicted the sexual act on three levels corresponding to the three horizontal bands of imagery. On top is the car itself, a representation of consumerist societys love affair with the automobile. The middle register conveys the romance of the sexual act as immortalized in films and advertisements: the idealized embrace of a white, heterosexual couple, reduced to the acceptable synecdoche of faces pressed together. In the lowest register, the spaghetti refers to the actual, sensual, physical experience of sexual intercourse. The symbolic consummation of the spaghetti refers to the most abject attributes of the sexual act: the friction of mucous membranes and the secretion of bodily fluids. The softly modulated contours of Rosenquists billboard-inspired brushwork increase the sensuality of the spaghetti and the embracing couple above it. As with Oldenburgs work, there is a grotesque aspect to Rosenquists metaphorical conjunction of the most base and physical aspects of love with American commercialism. Andy Warhol went far beyond the teasing, often subliminal sexuality of advertising and mass media by dealing with sex more candidly than any other Pop artist. Among Warhols earliest, widely-noticed works were silkscreened images of Hollywood sex symbols such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. However, the very first of these images, made in limited numbers during the summer of 1962, depicted the male actors Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty. Thomas Crow has demeaned these works as dead-end experiments,14 but their erotic content is significant. While the open recognition of male sex symbols was largely taboo in normative straight culture, Donahue and Beatty would have been widely and openly renowned as desirable sexual objects by Warhol and others in New Yorks gay subculture. As Warhol told an interviewer regarding Donahue, He was so great. God!15 In 1963 Warhol first announced his intention to make pornographic pictures using black lights so that the canvas looked blank under normal gallery lights. If the show was

14 Thomas Crow, Saturday Disasters: trace and Reference in Early Warhol, Art in America 75 (May 1987): 134. 15 Smith, 944.

 raided by the police, the lights would go on and the evidence would disappear.16 Such a painting finally appeared in October 1966 at Sidney Janis Gallerys Erotic Art 66 show.17 Seemingly derived from a soft-core pornographic nude, in his usual serial fashion Warhol repeated the image of a womans stomach and breasts. Art critic David Bourdon recalled that the image was repeated on many panels that covered a wall, and that a special switch was available for the viewer to turn on the ultraviolet light,18 just as Warhol had earlier planned. Interestingly, the eerie glow of the ultraviolet light in the darkness and the flicking off of the lights before the show starts is also reminiscent of the peep shows and porno arcades of 42nd Street, with which Warhol was certainly familiar. Warhols forays into filmmaking were startlingly sexual almost from the beginning. In

fact, we might even say that Warhols entire film career was predicated on sexuality. The first film for which he became widely known, Sleep, depicted Warhols then-crush, the poet John Giorno, sleeping for hours, variously repeated into a six-hour film. The reels focused on Giornos nude body and created a teasing nudity and subtle eroticism. Only a few months later in January 1964 Warhol filmed another, more explicitly sexual work, Blow Job. The camera never left the face of the still-anonymous Factory visitor who was the films focus; it simply documents the varied and sometimes hilarious expressions that passed across his face. If not for the title the nature of the activity would be difficult to determine. Such films, which engaged eroticism through allusion, were a far cry from slightly later works such as Couch, explicitly depicting random couplings on a couch in the silver Factory. With connotations ranging from pornography to homosexuality, the sexuality of Warhols oeuvre was probably the most threatening of any Pop artist to the sixties establishment. Pops obvious connections to quickly shifting trends in mass culture often resulted in the two being directly confused with each other. Max Kozloff reported in 1965 that media had started to connect art with other aspects of popular culture because of a confusion between behavior at openings (or at independent film showings or discotheques) and works of art.19
16 Gene Swenson, What is Pop Art? Part I, Art News 62 (November 1963): 60-61.

17 New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Erotic Art 66, Exhibition 3-29 October 1966.

18 David Bourdon, interview by author, Tape recording, New York, 15 May 1991. 19 Max Kozloff, Art: Review of the Season, The Nation, 7 June 1965, 623.

Gallery receptions could be news for the society page. Art became fashionable and hip in a way it had not been before. Pop Art rapidly became connected in the public mind to a variety of simultaneous cultural trends. For instance, the art world and the public often associated Pop with the burgeoning interest in the camp sensibility, exemplified by the publication of Susan Sontags Notes on Camp in late 1964.20 The conflation of the two even resulted in a wave of accusations that Pop Art was a homosexual conspiracy to ruin the art world.21 Warhols importance in this phenomenon cannot be underestimated. Although he was the last of the major New York Pop artists to have a solo exhibition, he quickly became the most famous of the group because of his purposely outrageous lifestyle and his clever manipulation of media. Starting as a commercial artist, then moving to paintings, films, nightclubs, bands, and becoming a semi-professional party-goer, Warhol both epitomized and spearheaded the blending of genres at the time. His undisguised homosexuality added a good deal of verve to his public image as a shocking sexual rebel. His retinue of pill-popping drag queens, gays, lesbians, and others of varied sexual orientations completed the outrageous picture he sought to portray. By promoting a bandthe Velvet Undergroundopening a nightclubThe Exploding Plastic Inevitableand attending (often crashing) society gatherings, he associated Pop Art with everything trendy and fashionable. Sexuality involves an element of pleasure just as popular culture does, and the pleasurable aspects of Pop also played an important role in both its initial critical rejection and its association with the abject. Dick Hebdige pointed out that critics summarily dismissed Pop Art as empty and shallow, but that Pop actually set out to blur the distinctions and overturn the suppositions that provided the very foundations of this critical attitude. By way of explanation Hebdige quoted Pierre Bourdieu, who described the traditional antithesis between culture and corporeal pleasure (or nature if you will) that was expressed by a social relationship: the opposition between a cultivated bourgeoisie and the people. In other words, critics rejected Pop because of its association with the pleasurable, which was by

20 Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp, Partisan Review 31 (Fall 1964): 515-16, 530.

21 Most notably seen in Vivian Gornick, Pop Goes Homosexual: Its a Queer Hand Stoking the Campfire,

The Village Voice, 7 April 1966, 1, 20-21.

 definition common and kitsch.22 The Pop artists easygoing personalities and commercial success, their arts obvious humor, and their use of eroticism all emphasized the pleasurable aspects of their art and a consequential association with the non-elite masses that were the intended market of the creators of Pops original sources of imagery. Little had been more reviled, repressed and kitsch in America than the open,

pleasurable enjoyment of sexualitythe reaction to the publication of Kinseys famous works was proof enough of that. Sex was an integral part of popular culture, however. Pinups, pornography, and comic books: all of these utilized eroticism, and all were at the bottom of the kitsch barrel. Pop artists initially sought a variety of kitsch imagery from popular culture as a revolutionary alternative to modernist abstraction. But if an artist really wanted to turn his back on modernist formalism, he could do more than just copy a comic bookhe could copy an erotic comic book. By injecting elements of sexuality, the Pop artists were able to increase the trashy connotations of their work and begin the overturning of modernist dogma that was eventually to create a basis for postmodernism.

22 In Paul Taylor, ed., Post-Pop Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and Flash Art Books, 1989), 94, 104-05.