Pop Art and Beyond: Gender, Race, and Class in the Global Sixties 9781350197534, 9781350197565, 9781350197558

Citation preview

Pop Art and Beyond

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Pop Art and Beyond Gender, Race, and Class in the Global Sixties Edited by Mona Hadler and Kalliopi Minioudaki

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Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Mona Hadler, Kalliopi Minioudaki, and Contributors, 2022 Mona Hadler and Kalliopi Minioudaki have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Tjaša Krivec Cover Image: Yaoundé Olu, Conflict, 1972. Acrylic on canvas. South Side Community Art Center All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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978-1-3501-9753-4 978-1-3501-9755-8 978-1-3501-9754-1

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments List of Contributors Introduction Mona Hadler and Kalliopi Minioudaki 1

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Cults or Subcultures? Reckoning with Collective Creation in the English Pop World Thomas Crow

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The 1960s in Bamako: Malick Sidibé and James Brown Manthia Diawara

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Yugoslav Pop, Female Artists, and the Emergence of Feminist Agency Lina Džuverović

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“Everything for Money”: Warhol, Kant, and Class Anthony E. Grudin

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Pop Art’s Comic Turn and the Stand-up Revolution Mona Hadler

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Tom Max’s “Okinawan Inferno”: Reversion and After Hiroko Ikegami

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Following the Traces of Yemanjá: Pop Art, Cultura Popular, and Printmaking in Brazil Giulia Lamoni

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Facing the Maid: Gendered Shades of Labor in American Pop Kalliopi Minioudaki

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The Commonwealth of British Pop: Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Politics in Frank Bowling’s Mother’s House Series Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani

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10 Market Wares and Trade Marks: Painting Pop in Indian Country, 1964 Kristine K. Ronan

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11 Entangled Mythologies: Race and Class in Hervé Télémaque’s Pop, 1963–5 Marine Schütz

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12 Snap! Crackle! Pow!: Robert Colescott and Pop Art Lowery Stokes Sims 261 v

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13 Against the Heroes: Revolution, Repression, and Raúl Martínez’s Cuban Pop Art Mercedes Trelles Hernández

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14 Myriam Bat-Yosef: World Citizen, Artist of the Pop Era Sarah Wilson

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15 Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow: Feminism and the (Pop) “Image” in Chicago’s Black Arts Movement Rebecca Zorach

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Index

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Illustrations Plates 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Metka Krašovec, Kokošja Juha—Sporočilo (Chicken Soup—The Message), 1968. Vera Fischer, Pasji život (A Dog’s Life), 1968–72. Sanja Iveković, Hrvatsko Proljeće (The Croatian Spring), late 1960s. Sanja Iveković, Dvostruki Život (Double Life), 1975–6. Katalin Ladik, Kraljica od Šebe (Queen of Sheba), 1973. Andy Warhol, Three Marilyns, 1962. Rosalyn Drexler, The Dream, 1963. Gladys Nilsson, Mt. Vonder Voman During Turetrush, 1967. Hervé Télémaque, My Darling Clementine, 1963. Makishi Tsutomu, silkscreens for Commemorating the Reversion to the Great Empire of Japan, 1972. Makishi Tsutomu, detail of The World According to John Lewis, 1967. Makishi Tsutomu, Countdown, 1976. Yêdamaria, Proteção de Yemanjá (Protection of Yemanjá), 1972. Yêdamaria, Yemanjá com luz (Yemanjá with Light), 1972. Anna Maria Maiolino, O Bebê (The Baby), 1967. Wilma Martins, Retorno (Return), 1967. Lotus Lobo, Sem título (Untitled), 1969. Corita Kent, that they may have life, 1964. Rosalyn Drexler, The Syndicate, 1964. Idelle Weber, Lever Building 2, 1970. Martha Rosler, Woman with Vacuum (or Vacuuming Pop Art) from Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain, 1966–72. Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972. Jann Haworth, Old Lady II , 1965–7. Frank Bowling, Cover Girl, 1966. Frank Bowling, Mother’s House with Beware of the Dog, 1966. Kevin Red Star, Plains Indian Medicine Bag, 1964. Kevin Red Star, Crow Saddle, 1964. vii

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28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Illustrations

Peter B. Jones, Joy Bottle, from the Indian Brand series, 1968. Peter B. Jones, Banana, from the Indian Brand series, 1968. Hervé Télémaque, Banania no3, 1964. Hervé Télémaque, Escale, 1964. Hervé Télémaque, Brise, 1965. Robert Colescott, The Colonel Sanders Trilogy: Jemima’s Pancakes, 1972. Robert Colescott, Black Capitalism: Afro-American Spaghetti, 1971–3. Robert Colescott, Café au Lait au Lit, 1974. Raúl Martínez, 9 repeticiones de Fidel y micrófonos (9 Repetitions of Fidel and Microphones), 1968. Raúl Martínez, ¡Van!, 1970. Raúl Martínez, Isla 70 (Island 70), 1970. Myriam Bat-Yosef, Offrande pour le Minotaure (Offering to the Minotaur), signed 1968. Teresa Trujillo dances Myriam Bat-Yosef ’s Eryximaque, 4th Paris Biennale, 1965. Myriam Bat-Yosef, Mirages Suspendus (Suspended Mirages), 1971. Ralph Arnold, Who You/Yeah Baby, c. 1968. Yaoundé Olu, Conflict, 1972. Yaoundé Olu, Super Fly Revisited, 1972. Yaoundé Olu, Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow, c. 1971. Evelyn Patricia Terry, Love, Flowers, War, and More Love, 1973. Evelyn Patricia Terry, Hijack a Plane to Cuba, 1973. Evelyn Patricia Terry, Naked Lady Picture with Dolls, 1973.

Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 2.1 2.2 2.3

Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners, 1960. Don McCullin, Young Mods, London, 1962. Miles Davis, 1960. Lewis Morley, Pauline Boty, September 1963. Doreen Spooner, Two Young People Wearing Skinhead Fashions, Glenda Peake and Tony Hughes, Finchley, 7 October 1969. Malick Sidibé, Au cours d’une soirée, les positions, 1964/2013. Malick Sidibé, Fans de James Brown, 1965/2008. Malick Sidibé, Les Amis dans la Même Tenue, 1972.

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Illustrations

3.1

4.1 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1

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6.3 6.4 7.1 7.2 8.1 8.2 9.1 9.2 9.3 10.1 11.1 11.2 12.1 12.2 13.1 13.2

Olja Ivanjicki, image of the artist next to her work at the Graphic Collective Gallery, during her solo exhibition “Pop Art,” Belgrade, October 1964. Andy Warhol, Feet with Campbell’s Soup Can, c. 1960. Richard Pryor performing at San Jose State University on April 3, 1974. Lenny Bruce being arrested, 1961. Jackie Moms Mabley, 1968. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, CBS Television. Hervé Télémaque, Notes Pour La Piste, 1964. Makishi Tsutomu, installation view of Commemorating the Reversion to the Great Empire of Japan. Okinawa Arts and Crafts Center Gallery, June 1972. Makishi Tsutomu, installation view of The World According to John Lewis, held at the lobby of the building of Ryūkyū Shinpō, May 1967. Makishi Tsutomu, Untitled, c. 1975. Makishi Tsutomu, Left Alone, 1979. Yêdamaria, Yemanjás, 1975. Judith Lauand, Sem título (Untitled), 1970s. George Segal, The Tar Roofer, 1964. Jann Haworth, Maid, 1966. Photograph of Bowling’s Variety Store, 1953. Derek Boshier, Man Playing Snooker and Thinking of Other Things, 1961. Frank Bowling and Mishi Bellamy (née Delderfield) in Frank Bowling’s studio, 1966. IAIA students on a visit to the International Folk Art Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1961. Hervé Télémaque, One of the 36000 Marines over our Antilles, 1965. Hervé Télémaque, Voir ELLE , 1964. Robert Colescott, The Green Glove Rapist, 1971. Robert Colescott, Interior II—Homage to Roy Lichtenstein, 1991. Raúl Martínez, 15 repeticiones de Martí (15 Repetitions of Martí), 1966. Raúl in his home-studio at work on the poster Cuba, 1969.

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14.1 Myriam Bat-Yosef, Fer Femelle (Hommage à Man Ray), 1964. 14.2 Myriam Bat-Yosef, Le Viol du violoncelle (The Rape of the Cello), 1967. 14.3 Myriam Bat-Yosef, Piano Droit Alphonse Blondel (Alphonse Blondel Upright Piano), 1970–1.

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Acknowledgments A complex book such as this one owes its existence to the help of many artists, art historians, gallerists, editors, supporters, friends, and family members. It would be impossible without the artists discussed in it, and we are grateful to each one of them for their outstanding contributions to global art and culture, as well as their vision for a more just world. We are immensely indebted to the authors who contributed to its pages and often supported our research in a collaborative and intellectually stimulating manner. We also want to acknowledge their patience and professional commitment during the unprecedented difficulties of the Covid-19 pandemic. We would like to extend special thanks to Manthia Diawara, who allowed us to reprint his now canonical essay. So much has changed since its promise during Documenta 14 in Athens in 2017, adding significant layers to the resonance of this book and the intersecting inequities and injustices it often contemplates through Pop. We thank all of the artists who gave us and our book’s contributors permission to reproduce their art and, in many cases, granted in-person interviews or answered our many queries through telephone calls and email exchanges. These include: Rosalyn Drexler, Art Green, Jann Haworth, Deborah Kass, Glenn Ligon, Gladys Nilsson, Claes Oldenburg, Martha Rosler, Eli Stein, Hervé Télémaque, and the late Idelle Weber. We are grateful to the galleries, museums, archivists, studio and estate representatives, and collectors who often helped with both research and images: Marc Arranaga, Maggie Birnbaum at Hollis Taggart Galleries, Olivian Cha at Corita Art Center, Rachel Garbade at Garth Greenan Gallery, Garth Greenan, Florence Half-Wrobel, Jasna Jakšić at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Carroll Janis, Jean Françoise and Jérôme Lavantes, Catherine Lhost at Galerie Louis Carré & Cie, Corina Matamoros and the Estate of Raúl Martínez, Rebecca Mecklenborg at Jack Shainman Gallery, Jelena Pazman Cverle, Lucie Pfeiffer at Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, Sabina Povšič at the Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Josie Sommer at the Frank Bowling Archive, Simona Šuc, Maribor Art Gallery, Jacob Vasa at Roberts Projects, and the estates of Glenn Ligon, Elizabeth Murray, George Segal, and Tom Wesselmann. xi

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Family members of artists and authors have been invaluable for this book, providing information and practical help in securing images and facilitating communication. We wanted to particularly thank Alba Borrego, Vesna Džuverović, Alex Johnstone, Makishi Tamiko, Tura Milo Gudmunsson, Frederico Morais, Ana Šalamun, Elodie-Anne Télémaque, Christopher Duva, and Suzanne Weber. While we name those we interacted with, we wish to equally thank all those who helped our authors in ways often unknown to us. We thank as well all the photographers who generously lent images and those whom, despite our best efforts, remained unknown to us. For generous help with the book in multiple forms of support we acknowledge: Andrea Applebee, Jo Applin, Maria Elena Buszek, Susanneh Bieber, Leila Brown, Eddie Chambers, Edward Coppola, Fereshteh Daftari, Miriam Deutch, Johanna Gosse, Branka Hlevnjak, Jessica Horton, Caroline House, Anna Indych-López, Agata Jakubowska, Nick Kastrinakis, Jonathan D. Katz, Liz Kim, Despina Lalaki, Ellen K. Levy, Pely Lioupi, Michael Lobel, Jocelyn Marshall, Joan Marter, Jennifer McCoy, Rachel Middleman, Annika Őhrner, Eto Otitigbe, Antonia Papatzanaki, Vanessa Parent, Sophia Petrides, Archie Rand, Gary Roth, Nadja Rottner, Sid Sachs, Adrien Sina, Basia Sliwinska, Lindsay Smilow, Stephanie Sparling Williams, Judy Sund, Robert Storr, Connie Tell, Krista Thompson, Ellen Tremper, Allison Unruh, George Vernardos, Katarina Wadstein MacLeod, and Leon Wainwright. Pop Art and Beyond was preceded by several panels with important scholars in the field, several of whom are authors in this volume and all of whom inspired our thinking. The speakers who joined two sessions on Pop and Class that we co-chaired at the 106th Annual College Art Association (CAA) Conference in 2018 were: Maibritt Borgen, Hannah Bruckmüller, Johanna Gosse, Sofia Gotti, Anthony E. Grudin, Hiroko Ikegami, Nadja Rottner, and Marine Schütz; and the panelists for Minioudaki and Allison Unruh’s 2012 CAA sessions on Pop Art and Politics: Martin Berger, Grudin, Ikegami, Jakubowska, Seth McCormick, Rottner, and Tom Williams. For a CAA 2020 session on women and stand-up comedy, Hadler thanks panelists Paula Burleigh, Mette Gieskes, Katherine Guinness, and Robert R. Shane. We have been very generously supported by our editors. We thank Lisa Goodrum of I.B. Tauris, who began the project with us, and the staff at Bloomsbury Press, in particular April Peake, as well as Barbara Cohen Bastos and Merv Honeywood, for seeing this book to conclusion. We thank our copy editor, our indexer Kate Mertes for her professionalism in this task, and Baillie Card for her invaluable editorial input.

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For funding, we thank the Professional Staff Congress/City University of New York (PS/CUNY) Research Foundation for two Research Awards and Brooklyn College for awarding Mona Hadler a Tow Faculty Research Travel Fellowship to interview the artist Hervé Télémaque. Both of us thank our families: Mona her husband and two sons, John, Daniel, and Michael Vila; Kalliopi her husband Yiannis Delidimos, her mother Archontia, her brother Alexandros, uncle George Maroulakis, and her summer writing buddy Hermes. And finally, we thank each other. Only having met once before the writing of this book, we took a leap and embarked on countless hours of work, only to find in each other the kindest, most intelligent, and hardworking companion. We proved collaboration to be not only an exciting, tireless adventure, but a productive intellectual dialogue, fodder not only for our book but for a life friendship.

Contributors Thomas Crow is Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, United States. He is the author of The Hidden Mod in Modern Art: London 1957–1969 (2020), The Long March of Pop (2015), The Rise of the Sixties (2005), and Modern Art in the Common Culture (1996). His next book will be The Artist in the Counterculture from Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley (and Other Tales from the Edge). He writes regularly for Artforum, where he is a contributing editor. Manthia Diawara is a writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist, scholar, and art historian. Diawara holds the title of University Professor at New York University, US, where he is the former Director of the Institute of African American Affairs. He is a prolific author, who has written extensively on the films and literature of the Black Diaspora. His books include: African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics (2010), In Search of Africa (1998) and African Cinema: Politics and Culture (1992). He has written and directed several distinguished films, including: Édouard Glissant, One World in Relation (2010), Negritude: A Dialogue Between Soyinka and Senghor (2016), and An Opera of the World (2017) that premiered at Documenta 14. Lina Džuverović is a curator, Lecturer in Arts Policy and Management at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK and co-director of Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture Centre (BIRMAC). Her research focuses on feminist art histories and contemporary art as a site of solidarity and community-building. Previously she was founding Director of Electra, Artistic Director of Calvert 22 Foundation, Curator at ICA, Lux Centre, and has taught at University of Reading, and TU Graz. Select exhibitions include: “Monuments Should Not Be Trusted” (Nottingham Contemporary, 2016), “Sanja Iveković—Unknown Heroine” (South London Gallery and Calvert 22 Foundation, 2012), “27 Senses” (Chisenhale Gallery, London; Kunstmuseet KUBE, Norway, 2009/10), “Favoured Nations” (5th Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, 2009), “Her Noise” (South London Gallery, 2005). Anthony E. Grudin has a PhD in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley, CA, and is a mental health counselor and art historian who has taught

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at University of Vermont, California College of the Arts, and University of California, Berkeley, US. He is the author of Warhol’s Working Class: Pop Art and Egalitarianism (2017), Animal Warhol (2022), and the co-editor of The Present Prospects of Social Art History (2021). His articles have appeared in Warhol: Headlines (2011), 13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World’s Fair (2014), ON&BY Andy Warhol (2016), October, Criticism, and Oxford Art Journal. Mona Hadler is Professor of Art History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A specialist in postwar art and visual culture, she has written extensively on Lee Bontecou, including an essay for the 2003 travelling retrospective of the artist. Her interdisciplinary work includes articles on jazz, comics, boxing, hood ornaments, and demolition derbies. The latter inspired her book Destruction Rites: Ephemerality and Demolition in Postwar Visual Culture (2017), which draws upon such artists as Martha Rosler, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Jean Tinguely. Hiroko Ikegami is Professor at the Graduate School of Intercultural Studies of Kobe University, Japan, and specializes in post-1945 American art and global modernisms. Her main publications include The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (2010) and essays for exhibition catalogues such as International Pop (Walker Art Center, 2015), Robert Rauschenberg (Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016–17), and Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth (Royal Academy of Arts, 2017). She is also a founding member and Vice Director of Oral History Archives of Japanese Art. Giulia Lamoni is a FCT Researcher at the Instituto de História da Arte, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, where she coordinates the Research Project, “Artists and Radical Education in Latin America: 1960s–1970s” (2018–21). Her texts have been published in journals like Third Text, Manifesta Journal: Around Curatorial Practices, and n.paradoxa international feminist art journal, in edited books and exhibitions catalogues from the Gulbenkian Foundation and Tate Modern. She recently co-curated the exhibition, “Earthkeeping/Earthshaking: Arte, Feminismos e Ecologia” (Galeria Quadrum, Lisbon, 2020.) Kalliopi Minioudaki has a PhD in Modern and Contemporary Art from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and is an independent scholar and curator based in Athens and New York. She specializes in postwar and contemporary art from a transnational feminist perspective. Author of “Pop’s

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Ladies and Bad Girls: Axell, Pauline Boty, and Rosalyn Drexler” (2007), co-editor of Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968 (2010), and contributor to Power Up: Female Pop Art (2010) and The World Goes Pop (2015), she has written extensively on several women artists from Pop’s expanded context, including Teresa Burga, Marie-Louise Ekman, and Niki de Saint Phalle. Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani is a postdoctoral research associate at the Yale Center for British Art, US. Her research interests include transnationality and diaspora, and the politics of postwar abstraction and visual culture in Britain and beyond. She has curated exhibitions for the Cleveland Foundation and the Wichita Art Museum, and has held positions at the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; the Ulrich Museum of Art; and Tate Liverpool. Currently, Ohadi-Hamadani is working on two upcoming exhibitions at the Center, a survey of work by Bridget Riley, and an exhibition of prints and drawings from the permanent collection. Kristine K. Ronan specializes in Native American and American art histories and serves as Visiting Assistant Professor in American Art at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, US. Her current research focuses on Native American art in the 1960s and 1970s. A Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities for 2018–19, her scholarship has also been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the National Museum of the American Indian. Marine Schütz is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Picardie Jules Verne, France. She has written several articles and essays on the relationships between art, diaspora and popular culture, and her doctorate dissertation, “Handmade Readymade: Graphic Practices in Pop Art” (University of Aix-Marseille, 2015) will be published by Presses du Réel. She has been a scientific assistant at INHA, at the German Centre for Art History and has taught at several universities, notably in Grenoble and Lyon. Since 2018, she has joined as a postdoctoral fellow the ECHOES research project at the University of Rennes 2. Lowery Stokes Sims, a specialist in contemporary art, craft, and design, is Curator Emerita of the Museum of Arts and Design, US. Over the last fifty years, she has been committed to a more diverse and inclusive art world. Sims also served on the education and curatorial staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as Executive Director and President of The Studio Museum in Harlem. More

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recently, she has worked as an independent curator for numerous exhibitions at various institutions and as Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, US. Mercedes Trelles Hernández is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, and an independent curator. She received her PhD in modern Latin American art from Harvard University. Her research interests center on modern art from the Caribbean and Latin America. Recent publications include collaboration with A-Z of Caribbean Art (2019), Adál, Puerto Ricans Underwater (2017) and the essay, “Pop Art in Argentina,” in The World Goes Pop (2015). Sarah Wilson is Professor of the History of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK. Publications include The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (2010), and Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France (2013). She curated Paris, Capital of the Arts, 1900–1968 (London, Bilbao, 2002) and Pierre Klossowski (London, 2006, touring to Cologne and Paris), and co-curated the Fifth Guangzhou Triennial (China, 2015). She continues publishing on lesser-known women artists (Nadia Khodassievich Léger and Françoise Gilot in 2021). Appointed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1997, she received the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) International award for distinguished contribution to art criticism in 2015. Rebecca Zorach is Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History at Northwestern University, US. She teaches and writes on Early Modern European art, contemporary activist art, and art of the 1960s and 1970s, with particular interests in print media and murals, feminist and queer theory, and the Black Arts Movement. Zorach co-edited The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (2017) with Abdul Alkalimat and Romi Crawford, and is the author of Art for People’s Sake: Artists, Community, and Black Chicago 1965–75 (2019).

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Introduction Mona Hadler and Kalliopi Minioudaki

This volume is driven by our complementary investments in the expanded terrain of postwar art and visual culture that has come to be recognized as Pop, as well as our distinct commitment not only to the voices of those whom our discipline and society silence and oppress, but also to an art history that self-critically speaks to the cultural histories of all. Meant neither to redefine Pop Art, nor to craft a new canon through corrective additions, it began as an exploration of aporias with regard to the roles of gender, race, and class in Pop’s production, meaning and reception. It offers new perspectives on the heterogeneity of Pop and its politics beyond—but also within—its canonic contexts and builds upon important recent revisions of Pop Art in light of queer, feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories. When first called upon to write a book on women in Pop Art, we quickly shifted to a more integrative project. While drawing together essays on men and women artists in Pop, within a global perspective, is not unique to this collection,1 our authors privilege the intersection of gender, race, and ethnicity in critical readings of Pop Art and culture, and flesh out aspects of their intrinsic relationship to class. Pop is examined through an inclusive lens that brings together the work of women-identified, queer, and ethnoracially diverse artists along with radical youth subcultures and a short-lived collective. We, as editors, further propose that in paradoxical contrast to the centrality of racial oppression in the postwar era, and the indelible Black2 presence in pop and vernacular culture, race and ethnicity have, indeed, played a conspicuously limited role both in Pop Art and its discourses—a problem which this book begins to redress.3 For this collection, we heed justifiable suspicions of tokenistic diversity, and look to the literature on intersectionality4 and feminism(s), especially of women of color, and critical race art history.5 We and many of our authors are profoundly indebted to Kobena Mercer’s groundbreaking study Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures,6 which first cast Anglo-American Pop under a transcultural and postcolonial lens, critiquing its racialized ideologies. 1

2

Pop Art and Beyond

All moments of art history benefit from integrative methodologies, but Pop is particularly fertile territory as it addresses the fact of mass audiences, opens itself up to minority and vernacular cultures, is touted for its role in the “ ‘democratisation’ of art and culture,”7 and functions as an “agonistic”8 space for the airing of local, global, and postcolonial concerns. Broad statements about “mass” or “popular” or “local” culture need to be grounded inclusively to ring true and to take into account the politics and subjectivities of difference. The essays included here all engage entanglements of gender, race, ethnicity, and class (or several of these), although with different weight given to the varying elements. Pop, in their light, can resist, critique, or liberate; comment, subvert, or protest. In most cases, they align with Jessica Morgan’s conclusion that in addition to anti-imperialist critique, Pop’s global permutations include, “political opposition, satiric critique, subversive appropriation and utopic explorations of collective and individual identity.”9 Pop Art and Beyond includes fifteen essays on art from five continents that thematically or monographically discuss the work of a large number of artists from a variety of perspectives. Rather than parsing their varied focuses, the chapters are organized alphabetically by author, leaving space for the effects of their intersection to resonate across the rich intermingling of the book’s themes and geographies. Gathering a multitude of artists, whose diasporic and transnational situations make national identifications hard, if not impossible or fruitful to secure, we range from, and occasionally through London, New York, and Paris, to Chicago and Santa Fe, Guiana, Havana and Haiti, Brazil, Mali, Okinawa, and Jerusalem. Even with the best intentions, one collection can present only a sampling of case studies. However, the inclusion of chapters on artists from multiple continents and the diverse (racial, ethnic, and national) backgrounds of the authors and transnational perspectives of its editors themselves10 anchors this anthology’s expanded geo-cultural focus, which counters exclusive angloamericanism with a non-hierarchical bridging of contexts, “eccentric”11 perspectives and manifestations. By looking at Pop both from its traditional national bases and elsewhere, we contribute to a “horizontal”12 exploration of centers and peripheries that in defying the latter’s subordination continues to dismantle and critique mainstream Pop. Our authors engage artists who participated in Pop’s rise, whether embracing or disputing its rubric, or whose brief or lasting dialogue with it wars with their identification with other groupings such as Figuration Narrative, Chicago Imagism, and “Indian Pop,” or their association with the Black Arts Movement (BAM) or feminist art. They deploy a multiplicity of media and modes of display

Introduction

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that range from collage, sculpture, assemblage, photography, installation art, and multimedia performance to painting or printmaking. The last encompasses industrial seriality as well as hand-drawn design, as in Lotus Lobo’s installations reproducing the lithographic trademarks of small rural industries in Brazil; and the personal, as in Frank Bowling’s screen printing of his mother’s house in British Guiana in a series of paintings made in London and New York. We see Pop, untethered from its mythic Anglo-American eruption, as a multifaceted phenomenon (rather than a movement or style), manifesting postwar art’s return to contemporary reality, whether modernist or postmodernist in its experimentation. Pop, in this framework, comprises constellations of diverse, singular practices which variously unsettled the established hierarchies of postwar culture and society—the most evident being of “high and low”— through a disparate resort to everyday culture, extending beyond commercial mass culture. Pop Art’s quick historicization and formalist defense in the mid1960s (mis)construed it as a homogeneous style, its criteria reduced to a coincidence of commercial technique and subject matter, and an impersonal and apolitical approach that opened the door for critiques of Pop’s “both/and” affair with capitalist spectacle.13 Yet, Pop’s iconography, modes of production, sensibility and politics are differently conditioned by an array of contextual, artistic, and sociopolitical factors. Given this broad definition of Pop, we have allowed for the inclusion of artists who stray far from canonical examples, and produced Popinflected work well into the 1970s. Indeed, in the title of our book, the phrase “and beyond” provides the wide net requisite for our project of capturing Pop’s heterogeneity beyond the limitations of its existing definitions and canons, or its “fine art” confines. Pop Art and Beyond: Gender, Race, and Class in the Global Sixties is a title that enters fraught territory since each of its key words is open to interpretation, from “Pop” to “Global” to “Sixties.” While the current consideration of the “global” geo-cultural expanse of Pop was well represented by the exhibitions The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern and International Pop at the Walker Art Center in 2015,14 the word “global” preferred by the former has raised as much justifiable critical suspicion as the blanket use of the rubric Pop.15 Overall, this expanded geo-cultural focus has productively shattered the Euro-North American monopoly on Pop and opened the way for reconsideration of Anglo-American Pop’s own diversity, both projects that this book advances. But the globalizing lens of blockbuster curatorial projects can gloss over all kinds of differences that characterize Pop in various contexts, countering the decolonizing of the narratives of postwar art they purport.

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While the word “global” functions as a marker of our transnational perspective within this moment of Pop discourse’s global turn, we, too, wished to problematize its resonance and impact, by attaching it in this book’s title to “sixties,” rather than to Pop. “Global” therefore imbues the postwar cross-cultural and transnational encounters, exchanges, and “cosmopolitan contaminations”16— across, for example, borders of the First and Third Worlds or the Iron Curtain— with connecting forces, ranging from mass media and wars to social movements, that underpin the contradictory experiences and politics of the 1960s. While we favor “global” over “international,” which is fraught with the Euro-North American-centricism of postwar international art narratives, we at times use “international” as a more historically grounded signifier of the transcendence of borders in this book that acknowledges their importance in this era’s art and politics. We also welcome the diverse ways our authors further the problematic in their choice of words.17 Our concern, however, lies as much with the specificities of each context and manifestation, in all the interdependency of the local/regional with the global that they unveil, and we favored close accounts that while not strictly biographical do “personalise the global.”18 From the influence of the Haitian Carnival’s bold colors and comic sensibility on Paris-based Pop artist Hervé Télémaque, to Raúl Martínez’s engagement with cultura popular in Cuba, the local and the vernacular join forces with Pop’s internationalism. Thomas Crow’s writing sets precedent for this book’s exploration of folk, mass, and vernacular sources that cut across music, local youth cultures and graphic design.19 Giulia Lamoni, for example, in her comparative exploration of the practices of Judith Lauand, Lotus Lobo, Anna Maria Maiolino, Wilma Martins, and Yêdamaria, carefully parses how printmaking in Brazil accorded with both the radical left and progressive supporters of Pop in their turn from folk art, while its craft aspect defied Americanization during the US-backed developmentalism and dictatorship in the 1960s. Our authors also reveal the modernist language of celebrity formation including seriality and image repetition. In this collection, we find these Pop strategies repurposed by artists in a way that problematizes gender, race, and class through an often ironic language of iconic immediacy and mediatized fame. From Raúl Martínez’s subversively feminized depiction of Fidel Castro to Tom Max (aka Makishi Tsutomu)’s portrait of Tōjō Hideki, these new Pop idioms were fodder for activist groups and politicized artists to celebrate their heroes, as in Emory Douglas’s images of Black Panther leaders,20 or to question them, further layering the politics of Pop appropriationism. The mass media circulation

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of collected LPs with memorable covers or iconic photographic portraits of the musicians played a role as well.21 In Manthia Diawara’s essay on Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, Thomas Crow’s on London’s style cults, and Hiroko Ikegami’s on Tom Max in Okinawa—which singles out his installation The World According to John Lewis, 1967 (figure 6.2)—such imagery, in particular the visibility of Black musicians, allowed for agentic identification that challenged the notion of branded American objects and pop icons as solely tools of cultural imperialism.22 The artists within this volume not only reflected the radical changes of the era in their subject matter but also found agency in Pop’s aesthetics. They are often drawn to Pop as a contemporary language that in many instances produces affirmative identity positions through the use of current, cutting edge, variegated aesthetic modes, at times through its narrative or figurative potential or use of readily available mass cultural material. It allowed for a both/and approach to figuration and abstraction endemic to Pop that circumvents limiting mandates to adopt forms of social realism from Communism, Maoism, and even at times from the pressure to forefront ethnic identity.23 In addition, it offered a way for some artists to be modern in the face of a critical demand to render or be seen as the “primitive” or “authentic.”24 Hervé Télémaque’s practice and that of Apsáalooke (Crow) painter Kevin Red Star can be understood in part in these contexts. In her essay on “Indian Pop” artists, including Red Star, Kristine K. Ronan argues that Native American manifestations of Pop unpack racialized and racist notions of authenticity and primitivism endemic to racial capitalism, showing how by intertwining vernacular and tourist production, individual works counter this framework. In communist or former communist countries the contemporaneity of Pop practices takes different meanings but is still subversive.25 Lina Džuverović points to women’s experimentation with Pop Art techniques and everyday material culture as empowering in the socialist context of non-Western consumerism, within the multiethnic Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia of the 1960s and early 1970s, arguing that it harbored feminist“agency” and“articulations” of the complex experiences of being female in Yugoslavia. Whereas, in her essay on Raúl Martínez, Mercedes Trelles Hernández reveals the propagandistic instrumentalizing of Pop’s “modernity” in Castro’s Cuba, where Pop was serviced as proof of Castro’s liberal approach to culture. This collection, in its expanded scope, thus signals new ways that Pop Art’s wide embrace can be seen as an experimentation with contemporary aesthetic practices. Pop Art and Beyond illuminates the backdrop of the turbulent 1960s, with its vast changes that impacted the very issues that are central to this book’s thesis. A

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Janus-faced decade, it witnessed massive shifts from the early part of the decade through the rights movements of the latter half. In the beginning years, female artists, for example, suffered from the sexism of the times but often disavowed identification as women artists or as feminists. Concomitantly, Black artists decried their experiences of racism yet at times shied away from the quest for a Black aesthetic or considered integrationist strategies a fitting riposte to racism.26 But the 1960s saw the rise of Third World liberation movements, Pan-Africanism, Civil Rights struggles, sexual revolution, countercultural revolt, Women’s, Gay and Lesbian liberation movements, Black and Red Power movements, and students and workers’ uprisings that gave rise to identity politics and fragmented the “monocultural consensus,”27 but also changed thinking about difference.28 Stuart Hall’s reminiscence on the postwar end of the essential Black subject and the double inscription of creolization and multiple belongings endemic to the 1960s, resonates here: “The diasporic proved to be the moment when the politics of class, race, and gender came together, but in a new, unstable, unstoppable, explosive articulation, displacing and at the same time complicating each other.”29 Understandably, the artists in this collection give voice to the often fraught politics of identity. The 1960s are frequently mis-remembered for making social difference the fulcrum of progressive politics rather than the “commonality” which distinguished the radicality of decolonization, the Civil Rights movement and, above all, the sexual revolution’s body politics as observed by Jonathan D. Katz.30 It is indeed in this period of contradictions, that the rights movements gave rise to identity politics and politicized difference.31 And it is precisely in this period, that artists found in the immediacy of Pop the agency to speak and/or counter all kinds of power and dominations, including that dominating “matrix”32 of gender, race, and class. In so doing, they often critically exposed the role of representation in reifying the “otherness” that reinforced their disadvantage. Mapping a multitude of radical identifications and disidentifications33 produced in/through Pop iconography and everyday rituals, Pop Art and Beyond troubles rather than fixes difference in Pop. While this book is the first on Pop to include more women artists than men, we acknowledge that neither Pop nor gender are monolithic or stable categories. We include essays that challenge the commonality of experience or oppression among “women” as a unified entity, as for example in Kalliopi Minioudaki’s analysis of the racialization of domestic labor in light of works by Jann Haworth, Martha Rosler, and Betye Saar. We trace the fostering of intersectionality in this era, with the rise of the Black Arts Movement and feminism, as in Rebecca Zorach’s nuanced reading of the body politics of Yaoundé Olu and Evelyn

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Patricia Terry, or Giulia Lamoni’s deciphering of the intertwinement of gender and race politics in the work of Yêdamaria.34 The latter’s Yemanjá com luz, 1972 (plate 14), for example, collaged a circular photograph of Martin Luther King onto the figure of the Orisha Yemanjá, an Afro-Brazilian nature deity traditionally related to the maternal that the artist used repeatedly in collages and prints to advocate for equality for all women.35 As Giulia Lamoni reveals, Yêdamaria thus aligned the agency of the Civil Rights leader with the magical-religious power of the African gods, and the politics of race with feminism, thereby carving also a space for a reclamation of Black women’s (eco)feminist spirituality36 in Pop. Rather than limiting intersectionality to “a feminist theory of identity,” we resort to it as a tool of critical inquiry and “praxis” that, as theorized by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, can battle the “flattening” of differences in all the heterogeneity of their global manifestations.37 It is by bringing together comparative explorations of the inscription of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity or class, and different combinations of the above, in the work of “women” and “men,” that Pop Art and Beyond squeezes out their interaction and furthers an art history of diversity that suspends its separate battles.38 More than race and class, gender and sexuality have been particularly targeted in Pop discourse, as Pop rummaged domains identified with femininity including the domestic, consumer culture and camp aesthetics and delighted at the scopophilia and the combined commodity and sexual fetishism of visual culture.39 In the seminal book, A Taste for Pop, Cécile Whiting first scrutinized New York Pop through the lens of gender, analyzing the hierarchies of taste that Pop challenged and reconfigured. In addition to exposing the masculinist assumptions of the construction of its hardcore canon, she opened the way to understanding how Pop artists reiterated and troubled hegemonic constructions of gender, including how Warhol and Pop sculptor Marisol Escobar unmasked its performativity.40 Broadly speaking, essays in this collection further the discussion on gender and sexuality in Pop expanding notions of radical desire. From Pauline Boty’s “labial” flower in her painting 5-4-3-2-1, 1963 (figure 1.4) amplifying the sexual pleasure encoded in the laughter of a Mod TV heroine41 to Evelyn Patricia Terry’s repurposing of a “centerfold” nude to address alternatively the violation of women’s bodies or (Black women’s) pleasure, to Martínez’s pink boys and Warhol’s queer and working-class vulgarity, our authors problematize alternative— subversive, humorous, deconstructive, emancipatory, and oppositional—erotic Pop gazes.42 In her chapter, for example, Lowery Stokes Sims argues that the Black, White, and multiracial beauties available to multiple masculine gazes in Robert

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Colescott’s paintings capture the paradoxes of desire for both Black and White viewers. This book significantly furthers the feminist revision that has taken place in the past decade,43 in its reclamation of female artists’ long-marginalized intersection with Pop and their radical sexual politics.44 By revealing how many of them appropriated and resignified mass culture for empowerment and/or critique, disrupting dominant understandings of pop culture’s inescapable subjugation of women as objects of the male gaze and passive consumers, it has illuminated the complexity of women artists’ knowing embrace of mass culture and its representation of women. Sanja Iveković’s contemplation of the role of media in the construction of femininity, as in her artist book Double Life, 1975–6 (plate 4) where anonymous media images are juxtaposed to her own photographs, is a case in point. The performative strategies of many of Pop’s “bad girls” in their appropriation and mimicry of mediated “feminine posing” further this interpretive lens. But the fallout from Pauline Boty’s dangerous affair with pop culture, or the transgressive androgyne and psychedelic erotics of Myriam BatYosef ’s subversion of the (hetero)sexism of the Parisian scene,45 capture both the challenges confronted by women artists to voice female subjectivity in Pop and the feminist diversity of their body politics. Pop’s recent feminist revisions have also pointed to the need for further consideration of the situated perspectives and intersectional identities impacting the gender politics of women-identifying artists in Pop, and how aspects of identity were critically articulated in their work.46 To this end, Pop Art and Beyond speaks to the different roles that ethnoracial and cultural difference have played in representations of women by artists as diverse as Vera Fischer, Jann Haworth, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Sanja Ivecović, Wilma Martins, Gladys Nilsson, Yaoundé Olu, Betye Saar and Yêdamaria. This book also makes possible the comparison of the different impact that sexual liberation had on the politics of artists such as Pauline Boty and Evelyn Patricia Terry, as representatives of 1960s London and the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, respectively, in light of their combined but distinct celebrations of female sexuality and critiques of pornography. While further illuminating the plurality of female subjectivities inscribed in Pop, it thereby also makes space for the “differential consciousness” of radical women of color, and the intersection of the deconstructive modality of the oppositional tactics of the oppressed and “US Third World” feminism,47 with the feminist “deconstructive impulse” evinced in Pop.48 Drawing upon the art exhibited at the South Side Community Art Center exhibition Fem-Images in Black, Rebecca Zorach who traces the rise of Black feminism, but distinguishes Pop from radical

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Black women artists’ engagement of (Pop) “images” in the context of the Black Arts Movement, contends that Black women artists were placed in a difficult ideological position.49 Some, such as Carolyn Lawrence, wanted to “uphold” their men, while Yaoundé Olu, in her 1971 painting Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow (plate 45), exposes the problems inherent in mixing sexual liberation and revolutionary politics by warning women of the pitfalls of exploitation by men, including Black activists. As Rebecca Zorach proposes, the sexual revolution could be “counter revolutionary,” for women and men. Its potential for women was also questioned by American newcomer to London Jann Haworth through her practice and iconography, which included aged heroines such as Old Lady II , 1965–7 (plate 23). From Haworth’s soft sculptures to Terry’s body prints and the painted bodies of Israeli “world citizen” Myriam Bat-Yosef, the subject of Sarah Wilson’s essay, chapters of Pop Art and Beyond explore the rise of diverse feminism(s) and feminist practices in the context of Pop. Wilson situates Myriam Bat-Yosef ’s liminal post-surrealist encounter with Pop and counterculture in Paris but expands well beyond to chart the transnational pathways of her experimental interdisciplinary feminist practice and its targets. Bringing traumas and oppressions marginalized in Pop’s canonic geopolitical framing, the degendered painted domestic objects and the pregnant forms of Bat-Yosef ’s antimilitary 1971 Pop Gesamtkunstwerk Total Art (plate 41) in Jerusalem complement the discussions of multiple authors and artists through which this book complexifies domesticity in both feminist and Pop art as well as in the global 1960s. They also foreground the experience of motherhood and maternal sexuality in transnational feminist eruptions in Pop and beyond, in the context of different oppressions and struggles, that, for instance, cut across the antiracist and antimilitary maternal bodies depicted by Jones-Hogu and Martins in the US and Brazil. In regard to gender, it is critical writing on gay artists that had a formative role in shifting the sexual imaginary of Pop, opening the way for the diversity of Pop’s radical politics. Since the early 1990s, the queering of Pop, inevitably marked by the scholarly “decr[ying of] the ‘degaying’ ”50 of Warhol, has foregrounded the intersection of gay identity and Pop criticality.51 Anthony E. Grudin furthers this discourse here in his ruminations on Warhol in light of Kantian aesthetics, profit motives, working-class consumption, and the queer implications of taste and desire. Warhol’s “appetites,” Grudin proposes align him with a multiplicity of marginalized voices all denigrated in this regard. The recent rediscovery by Jennifer Sichel of the censored parts of Warhol’s much quoted 1963 interview by Gene Swenson confirms early acknowledgment of the centrality of (gay)

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sexuality in Pop.52 Jonathan D. Katz, who has systematically scrutinized Pop manifestations through a queer lens, nuances its importance in Warhol’s early work, distinguishing Warhol’s gay erotics and camp from his mechanical “liking” of everything and everybody. He locates the transgressiveness of Warhol’s quintessentially queer Pop mode in the way it dislodges sexuality “as a key marker of social difference.”53 The anti-identitarian vision of sexuality proposed by Warhol’s Pop pan-liking,54 attesting to the radical face of the 1960s, converses not only with non-Pop manifestations of 1960s avant-garde, but with the “transgender capacity”55 of the eroticism and body politics of the work of other Pop figures, from Marisol to Claes Oldenburg. The conditions and experiences of repression, oppression, and liberation for men and women of both hetero-normative and other sexual orientations in the long 1960s—in varying cultural and geographic contexts—prompt attention to the transgressiveness of both queer and straight sexual politics in Pop.56 As Mercedes Trelles Hernández demonstrates in her contribution to this book, Raúl Martínez weaponized the feminine, both “shouldering” the silence and repression hailed on gay men in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, and resisting its chauvinism by “contaminating” the heroic vision of Cuba’s leaders and everyday heroes with femininity and homoerotic desire. In her essay on Chicago’s Black Arts Movement, Rebecca Zorach includes the gay Black artist Ralph Arnold who paired images of Uncle Sam with those of body builders (Who You/Yeah Baby, c. 1968; plate 42), showing that in the 1960s, same-sex love and radical politics were inextricably related, and sexual orientation did matter in Pop.57 The span of normative masculinities that Ralph Arnold portrays speak to the fluidity of gender, establishing his awareness that, in Greg Foster-Rice’s words, “many of the prominent signifiers of blackness, whiteness and masculinity are performative projections rather than innate qualities.”58 He favored collage, a practice central to Pop aesthetics and production and one that facilitated his expression of the complexity of identifications and disidentifications marking his subjectivity “as a” gay and a Black artist in 1960s Chicago.59 Hervé Télémaque, too, uses collage to interrogate Black masculinity, countering stereotypes and “speaking back” with humor like “new” comedians such as Richard Pryor as Mona Hadler argues.60 In My Darling Clementine, 1963 (plate 9), for example, a self-identified cowboy with a wooden leg and straightened hair takes center stage amidst the mass cultural debris of racism ranging from collaged advertisements to a black figurine eating a banana. In this offbeat cowboy, Télémaque, in contrast to the later machismo of Black Power and Blaxploitation movies of the 1970s, offers a droll and fresh look at Black masculinity. As Hadler

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argues, he extends his acerbic wit to Black consumerism as well as it parries with issues of masculinity. On the top left of My Darling Clementine, Télémaque collages an advertisement for Johnson’s hair straightener for men, marketed by a trailblazing African American corporation, with the slogan, “Sa.a.y this is Terrific!”61 The ambiguous embrace of products that often marks Pop is furthered here in a humorous focus on Black consumerism and consumption with its own attendant absurdities, class contradictions, and commercial exploitations. Analogies abound to Lowery Stokes Sims’s trenchant analysis of the ways in which Robert Colescott’s engagement of brand identifications, consumer goods or pop staples of beauty undo the Whiteness of Pop, unveiling the imbrication of racism and capitalism, as in his Black Capitalism: Afro-American Spaghetti, 1971–3 (plate 34). While much has been written on gender in Pop, it is class that is paradoxically the most neglected in the Pop literature, even with major contributions such as those of Thomas Crow and Anthony Grudin. The specter of class has lingered quite unscrutinized in understandings of Pop, yet has been deeply interwoven in its reception and changing discourse through the origins of its protagonists, the problematic of middle- and working-class taste, the culture wars Pop prompted and reconfigured, and the pseudo egalitarianism of the consumerist ethos of the affluent postwar democracies with which it has been primarily associated. In our collection we fill this lacuna focusing less on taste (although that topic surfaces in key essays) and the culture wars (which are amply covered in the literature), and more on class in the context of social relations—in its parries with labor, race, gender, and imperialism. We offer critical understandings of the impact of class in Pop and present class readings of both the form and content of specific Pop paintings and practices. In the United States with the growth of the university and prevalence of neoliberal thinking, class became an unstable position and the seeming eclipse of class differences fed an American Dream that played into Cold War politics epitomized by the famous “kitchen debate” where Nixon faced off with Khrushchev over the presumed availability of consumer goods in the United States. Ambivalence to the notion of class as a dividing factor in society and its invisibility in politics marked the era. As one sociologist contends, “It’s not that society became classless, but that either you were ‘middle class’ or you were poor.”62 The erosion of working-class identity was aided in fact by the purchasing of new consumer goods, so important to a discussion of much of Pop Art. As Anthony Grudin writes in his study of Warhol and class, advertisers promised “access to a world of social mobility, where fixed classes were outmoded and status was as easy to attain as a can of soup . . .”63

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The situation for the rising Black middle class—after the 1964 Civil Rights Act allowed for greater access to education64—was even more complex but visible enough that Malcolm X warned against its pitfalls in his 1965 “Message to the Grass Roots.”65 As Amy Abugo Ongiri argues, the “demonization of the ‘middleclass Negro’” by the Black Panther Party “continues to haunt African-American notions of ‘authenticity.’”66 Moreover class membership—“assigned since birth” and “not changing in the face of class mobility”—has been particularly complicated for African Americans, as argued by Sheri Parks, who prefers the term caste.67 Class was in many ways the “dirty little secret” of American society in the era of Pop despite the euphemisms of postwar rhetoric as Sara Doris contends in her contextualization of Pop’s subversion in the anxious sociopolitical context of the shifting boundaries and signifiers of working and middle-class identities.68 Class was never a silenced topic, by contrast, in British art and politics, particularly after the Second World War with its erosion of some of its strict social divisions and creation of new ones.69 Educational reforms, postwar recovery and decolonization effected change. Yet, the mythic “swinging sixties” backdrop of British Pop also masks the underside of postwar recovery and deindustrialization, or the racialized and gendered social hierarchies reconfigured by the Empire’s collapse, Britain’s demographic change and a new Commonwealth of artists.70 While the changing role of social class, never too far in its distinct “British flavour”71 from the understanding of both pop culture and art in the UK, has begun to be seen through a revisionist lens,72 its role in the Independent Group’s explorations and the antiestablishment vanguardism of London Pop—once described as a “classless commando”73 by John Russell—early on migrated to cultural studies. The self-mythologies of individual artists, like the nostalgic underpinnings of Peter Blake’s predilections and low/working-class origins, were left to carry the democratizing gist of its turn to the popular which masked a racialist nationalism underpinning British Pop.74 In American Pop, class analysis has surfaced primarily in Warhol scholarship due to his immigrant working-class origins and youth in Pittsburgh, or his investment in camp, which Kenneth Silver highlights as the ground where “the working class and the homosexual meet.”75 While acknowledging the bedrock of Cécile Whiting’s deciphering of the intersection of gender with class in Pop’s new hierarchies of taste, and the place of class in Thomas Crow’s past and recent views of the 1960s and Pop,76 it is Anthony Grudin’s thematizing of class in Warhol’s Pop that has challenged the myth of Pop’s middle-classness by retrieving the working-class subjectivities summoned by Warhol’s aesthetics, production mode and thematography.77

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Pop Art and Beyond prompts inquiry into ways of rethinking class in both Anglo-American Pop and beyond. It brings new contemplations of class as, for instance, through the representation of working men and “women’s work” in American Pop and Frank Bowling’s diasporic imagery, or the defiance of class signifiers in London’s postwar youth (sub)cultures. It also explores ways in which class as a political category and socioeconomic stratification mattered to vanguard Pop politics that cut across the work of Tom Max and Lotus Lobo or Katalin Ladik, among others. Artists in this book come to terms with social divisions and national identifications pressured by entanglements of military and cultural dominations as in Okinawa, Brazil, France and Mali, or Cuba, Yugoslavia, and the United States.78 Marine Schütz turns to postcolonial theory and examines Hervé Télémaque’s imbrication of class through the legacy of Marxist strands from Frantz Fanon that align the struggles of the workers with those of the colonized. In her essay on Tom Max, Hiroko Ikegami places his highly political installations in their “contrarian” alignment with American Pop and the international Pop language of protest (rather than “Tokyo” Pop) within the context of Okinawa’s shifting geopolitical status in the 1970s, particularly its occupation by the US military even after its reversion to Japan in 1972. Given their pre-established class divisions, Ikegami argues, the islanders felt a particular affinity with the Black GIs whose long battle with racism paralleled their struggles with the Japanese as second-class citizens fighting for equal rights. Throughout this collection, we parse the multiple ways in which class can impact Pop artistic practices, beyond biographical elements. We address the economic aspects of its means of production, as in Katalin Ladik’s collages of impoverished Yugoslavian domesticity; and the democratizing accessibility of its dissemination, consumption, reception, and iconography, from Corita Kent’s affordable prints to Raúl Martínez’s posters that promoted the Cuban regime’s revolutionary agenda. Figuration and recognizable mediated references aid this interpretive project. We question how, for example, comics, humor, mass culture, or difference in regard to consumption as well as class impacts various artists’ production. In her chapter, Mona Hadler reveals how comedians like Lenny Bruce, Moms Mabley, and Richard Pryor, growing up in challenging economic circumstances (Pryor in his grandmother’s brothel) inspired a language of dissent, by “talking back,” that finds parallels in a wide array of transgressive and idiosyncratic Pop Art. What most current thinkers agree on, as do our authors, is that class matters are never far from those of race and gender. The entanglement of such class identifications underlies much of the Black artists’ Pop imagery in this collection

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as it relates to politics, consumerism and issues of gender and sexuality. Betye Saar’s engagement with the racist “mammy” stereotype and racialized domestic labor; Robert Colescott’s masculinist gaze; for example, all point to the imbrication of class and race in their work. As bell hooks writes, “Within revolutionary feminism a class analysis matters, but so does an analysis of race and gender.” But she warns: “Race and gender can be used as screens to deflect attention away from the harsh realities class politics exposes.”79 Transnational and diasporic identities must be factored in as well. Stuart Hall’s profound thoughts on the multiplicity of diasporic class positions—as he chronicles his liminal but privileged position in Jamaica from a family that “in no sense identified themselves with the Black masses or with an African diaspora”80 to his shift to London and the rise in identity politics—is relevant to many of the artists in this book. From Bowling to Télémaque and beyond, various makers nimbly situated their Pop production within the rocky territory of class differences. Like Ralph Arnold in a 1975 photo collage that gathers twenty-five performative self-portraits, they wear “many hats.” Much of this thinking can also be placed within the complexity of a “post-Marxist terrain.” As Malik Gaines writes, “whether class analysis resists race and gender or expands to include race and gender, in neither case will class adequately stand for race and gender. Negotiating this entanglement of economic and social powers became a primary task of many anti-racist left-oriented projects that gained visibility in the sixties.”81 Hall’s words on the entanglements of diasporic identifications resonate with the multisignificatory capacity of commodities in the postcolonial contexts of Pop examined in this book. Télémaque, for example, employed mediated imagery and commercial culture to critically comment, deconstruct, perform, or repurpose the stereotypes of otherness.82 As a diasporic artist in Paris at the end of the Algerian War, he engaged advertisements subversively by strategically appropriating the language of the colonizer to critically expose the racist imperialist ideology of 1960s France. Marine Schütz, who came to study the artist in part via her own French-Algerian heritage, offers insights on decolonization and the vital links between revolutionary resistance in the Caribbean and in Algeria. As this collection contends products in Pop Art may variously work as active agents that expose the intersecting powers of colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, as well as racism, sexism, and capitalism in their many contradictions. In Cover Girl, 1966 (plate 24), an early Pop painting by Frank Bowling, a Japanese model in Parisian haute couture punctuated by a bold abstract design in primary colors set against the pan-African colors of gold, green, and red is paired with an image of his mother’s dress shop in Guiana, thereby using a Pop idiom and dress

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to reveal the complexity of colonial and postcolonial exploitation of (gendered) labor and (women’s) bodies in the postwar diasporic era of postcolonial market globalization. As Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani and Kalliopi Minioudaki argue in their essays, this expanded focus on commodification and consumerism in Pop disrupts the entrenched White middle-class perspective of its framing to shift from the objects of consumption to the bodies of users, makers and consumers— laboring bodies, labor as a commodity, the bodies of slaves, maids, models, and post/colonialist labor—to make visible the violent power of market frameworks. The chapters by Manthia Diawara and Thomas Crow on the youth in Mali and postwar London, respectively, counter limiting critiques of pop’s false consciousness or complicity with capitalist consumerism in light of the radical politics of Pop fandom and self-representation, and the consumptive practices that shaped them. Revisiting notions of subculture and counterculture via a critical reading of Cultural Studies, Crow zeroes in on select “cults” of 1950s and 1960s London—the Mods and the Stylists—and their impact on the multimedia anti-fine art Pop practice of a short-term collective of Slade students, the FineArtz Associates. Manthia Diawara underscores pop culture’s diasporic reach, redeeming its emotional power and its role in the formation of politically resistive attitudes. Diawara shows that Malick Sidibé’s photos are not only great examples of postcolonial portraiture inflected by the aesthetics of international Pop Art and culture, but also important documents of the limit of nationalism in the face of a broader pan-African or diasporic aesthetics. They are keys to an understanding of 1960s Mali, but also the way African American music, dance, and fashion substantiate the politics and internationalism of a newly configured Black Atlanticism. They expand understandings of art and visual culture within pop manifestations while prompting a fresh look at the relationship between Pop Art and photography. These examples and insights, culled from many equally compelling ones in the book, arise from our authors’ deep dives into the intersectionality of gender, race, and class in a global context. As the prodigal daughter of twentieth-century art, whether the sinner who spent out the riches of Western culture or the doomed rebel who democratized visual culture by going to bed with the enemies of the people—the culture industry and capitalism—Pop Art has returned again and again since the 1980s to the forgiving arms of historians and critics for redemptions that work through the conundrum—if not trauma—of the role of art in capitalist society by retrieving its criticality to diverse ends. We do by now have enough footholds to find the Pop we wish for, with the literature on Warhol having paradoxically opened doors it first shut.83 The anxieties that its original

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trauma sparked continue to speak of Pop’s threat to the fixities of postwar modernist truths and subjectivity in its masculine and White make up, interwoven with the specter of the culture industry and the “mass”—in all its loaded permutations in postwar society from mass murder to mass culture and mass subjectivity. Pop continues to change faces along with that “faceless consumer” that populates its fictions. “We speak for convenience about a mass audience but it is a fiction,” said Lawrence Alloway as early as 1959, contending that: “The audience today is numerically dense but highly diversified. Just as the wholesale use of subception techniques in advertising is blocked by the different perception capacities of the members of any audience, so the mass media cannot reduce everybody to one drugged faceless consumer.”84 It is by looking transversally at gender, race, and class beyond borders that Pop Art and Beyond diversifies the “mass” that Pop spoke through and changes the conversation. Most artists featured within Pop Art and Beyond used the language of the popular, in its mass, vernacular, and everyday manifestations resistively or transgressively, for the agency to speak from and against their complex positions of gender and race, and class during the quite long and tumultuous 1960s. Their voices matter.

Notes 1 We are preceded here by Jessica Morgan and Flavia Frigeri (eds.), The World Goes Pop (London: Tate Publishing, 2015); Darsie Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan (eds.), International Pop (Minneapolis, MN : Walker Art Center, 2015); and Anne Massey and Alex Seago (eds.), Pop Art and Design (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 2 We and our authors will use the terms “Black” and “African American” in this volume, although the first dates to empowerment movements of the mid-1960s and the latter to the 1980s. See Mark Godfrey’s and Zoé Whitley’s introduction in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (London: Tate Publishing, 2017), 13–14. Given the time frame of this book, Black is favored. 3 There is, of course, a literature on race and Pop but one that is ripe for further work. For Frank Bowling in the context of the re-racialized nationalism of Britain under decolonization, see Eddie Chambers, Black Artists in British Art: A History since the 1950s (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), and his Roots and Culture: Cultural Politics in the Making of Black Britain (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017); and Leon Wainwright, “Frank Bowling and the Appetite for British Pop,” Third Text, 22, no. 2 (March 2008): 195–208. In “Black to Front: Michael Lobel on Robert Colescott,” Artforum International, 43, no. 2 (October 2004), Lobel addresses Colescott’s Pop critique of

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6 7 8 9 10

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racism and critiques American Pop’s Whiteness. On music, see Melissa L. Mednicov, Pop Art and Popular Music: Jukebox Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2018); and Johanna Gosse, “Pop, Collaboration, Utopia: Bruce Conner’s BREAKAWAY in 1960s Los Angeles,” Camera Obscura, 30, no. 89 (Fall 2015): 1–27. Warhol’s Race Riot series also has an extensive literature of its own. For the most recent understanding see Okwui Enwezor, “Andy Warhol and the Painting of Catastrophe,” in Donna De Salvo (ed.), Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018). The politics of race in Warhol have been nuanced beyond iconography by Jonathan Flatley, Like Andy Warhol (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 2017). Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA : Polity, 2016). See, for example, Aruna D’Souza, “Early Intersections: The Work of Third World Feminism,” in Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley (eds.), We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, New Perspectives (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2018), 73–97; Chela Sandoval, “US Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” Genders, 10 (Spring 1991): 1–24; Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981); Nina Lykke, Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing (New York: Routledge, 2010); Camara Dia Holloway, in Jordana Moore Saggese, Camara Dia Holloway, T’ai Smith, Tina Takemoto, and Tobias Wofford, “Beyond the Numbers Game: Diversity in Theory and Practice,” Art Journal, 75 (2016): 98–109; Lowery Stokes Sims on marginality in, “The Mirror The Other: The Politics of Esthetics,” Artforum International, 28 (March 1990): 111–15; and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990; New York: Routledge, 2000). Kobena Mercer (ed.), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2007). Ibid., 7. Ibid., 8. Jessica Morgan, “Political Pop: An Introduction,” in Morgan and Frigeri (eds.), The World Goes Pop, 17. Kalliopi Minioudaki was born in Greece and Mona Hadler in the United States. Both come from feminist and art historical studies but have learned from critical race theory. References to Minioudaki’s feminist revision of Pop Art are cited below. For Hadler’s interdisciplinary work on the crossover between art and mass culture in the postwar era—particularly at the turn of the 1960s, a moment which grounds this book—see Destruction Rites: Ephemerality and Demolition in Postwar Visual Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017). In “Baziotes, Surrealism, and Boxing: ‘Life in a Squared

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13

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Pop Art and Beyond Ring,’ ” The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914–1945, 9, no. 1 (December 2013): 119–38, Hadler, using the Senegalese fighter, Battling Siki, as her prime example, places the boxer as a cultural icon in the center of debates on class, race, politics, and sexuality. Hadler’s writing on jazz includes “Jazz and the New York School,” in Krin Gabbard (ed.), Representing Jazz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 247–59. Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy Rowe (eds.), Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 1, reclaim the adjective “eccentric” to account for women artists’ engagements with globalization. See Piotr Piotrowski, “Toward a Horizontal History of the European Avant-Garde,” in Sascha Bru, Peter Nicholls et al. (eds.), Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 49–59. Since the late 1980s, great strides have been made toward transcending the limited understanding of American Pop’s positioning vis-à-vis mass and consumer culture as either/or—affirmative or critical—in its questioning. For an early exchange on Pop’s dis-affective and affective critical theorization, see Hal Foster in, “Death in America,” October, 75 (Winter 1996): 36–59; and Thomas Crow in, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” Art in America (May 1987): 128–36. For an early essay on the political potential and ambiguity in Pop Art’s reception, see Andreas Huyssen, “The Cultural Politics of Pop: Reception and Critique of US Pop Art in the Federal Republic of Germany,” New German Critique, no. 4 (Winter 1975): 77–97. For the role of the “mediated semblance” of postwar reality in painting’s structural transformation and Pop’s commentary on postwar experience, see Hal Foster, The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter and Ruscha (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2012). Aside from the 2015 Tate and Walker Center shows, the curatorial revision of Pop is marked by a series of national and international Pop shows, see, for example: Pop América, 1965–1975 (Durham, NC: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2018); Pop Art in Belgium! (Brussels: ING Art Center, 2015); German Pop (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle, 2014); Pop to Popism (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2014); Ludwig Goes Pop (Cologne: Museum Ludwig, 2014), including its East Side Story sequel in Budapest; Popkunst Forever: Estonian Pop Art at the Turn of the 1960s and 1970s (Tallinn: EESTI Kunstimuuseum KUMU, 2010); Pop Art Italia, 1958–1968 (Modena: Galleria Civica di Modena, 2005); Les Années Pop, 1956–1968 (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2001). See David Joselit, “ ‘International Pop’ and ‘The World Goes Pop,’ ” Artforum International, 54 (January 2016): 230–1; and Piotr Piotrowski, “Why Were There No Great Pop Art Curatorial Projects in Eastern Europe in the 1960s?” in Annika Öhrner (ed.), Art in Transfer in the Era of Pop: Curatorial Practices and Transnational

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18 19 20

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22 23

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Strategies (Huddinge: Södertörn University, 2017), a volume that problematizes the globalizing of Pop in its nuanced exploration of its transfer throughout Cold War era Europe. See also Katalin Timár, “Is Your Pop Our Pop? The History of Art as a Self-Colonizing Tool,” ARTMargins (March 16, 2002), available at: https://artmargins. com/is-your-pop-our-pop-the-history-of-art-as-a-self-colonizing-tool/. For the danger of Westernizing global art history, see James Elkins in Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (eds.), Circulations in the Global History of Art (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). Damian Lentini, “Cosmopolitan Contaminations: Artists, Objects, Media,” in Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, Ulrich Wilmes (eds.), Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 (Munich, London, and New York: Prestel, 2016). See also Kobena Mercer (ed.), Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2005). While the “internationality” of Pop is imbedded in Pop’s exhibition history since the 1962 New Realists exhibition at the Sidney Janis in New York, its acknowledgment is fraught with a marginalization of non-Anglo-American Pop, and a Eurocentric focus. Agata Jakubowska, “Personalising the Global History of Pop Art: Alina Szapocznikow and Maria Pinińska-Bereś,” in Öhrner (ed.), Art in Transfer, 239–65. Thomas Crow, The Long March of Pop: Art, Music and Design, 1930–1995 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). In “Poor! Black! POP!,” a paper delivered at the annual CAA conference on February 12, 2011 (in a session chaired by Anthony E. Grudin, “Pop, Race and Class: Consumption and Contradiction”), Colette Gaiter compared Emory Douglas’s crossover practice to Warhol. For Gaiter on Lichtenstein, see “Visualizing a Black Future: Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party,” Journal of Visual Culture, 17, no. 3 (2018): 305. See Thomas Crow’s Paul Mellon lecture series, especially, “Modernist Faces: Hard Bop and Clean Design,” March 28, 2017, available at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=z8xawcRltVk. For more on record covers and sleeves, see Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993), 237–52. There is a wide literature on the discourse of Blackness or the pressure on Black artists to represent race and identity in visual production in the 1960s and 1970s, dating at least to Frank Bowling’s well-known articles in Arts Magazine from 1969 to 1970, and complexified by recent work on abstraction by Kobena Mercer or Darby English, or on Black artists and Conceptualism by Valerie Cassel Oliver. (For William T. Williams abstract Smokehouse Murals in Harlem 1968–70, see: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/william-t-williams-by-mona-hadler/). Pop Art with its both/and position re abstraction and figuration, belongs in this debate as well.

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24 For a canonical critique of the timeless primitive or the colonization of history, see Olu Oguibe, “In the ‘Heart of Darkness,’ ” Third Text, 7, no. 23 (1993): 3–8. Jack Hamilton in, Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2016), contends that rock music in the 1960s was similarly purged of its Black roots, which were relegated to the past as a dying form, ready to be reclaimed by contemporary White musicians like Bob Dylan. 25 For Pop in Eastern Europe, see, for example, the many writings of David Crowley, Agata Jakubowska, and Dávid Fehér. 26 See Andrianna Campbell-Lafleur’s thoughtful commentary in, “Norman Lewis: Linearity, Politics and Pedagogy in His Abstract Expressionism, 1946–1964” (PhD diss., Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2020). 27 Mercer, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, 10. 28 “What did change in the 1960s were attitudes about difference and strategies of theorizing foregrounding various modes of ‘otherness,’ ” in Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (eds.), Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 20. But it was earlier activisms and writings, such as those of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon, that had set the stage for the radical identity politics associated with the 1960s rights movements, see Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (New York: Routledge, 2012). 29 Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2017), 144. 30 Jonathan D. Katz, “Art and the Sexual Revolution,” (2010), in Amelia Jones (ed.), Sexuality (London: Whitechapel and Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2014), 62–5. 31 When as Mercer in, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994) and Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, points out different social movements activated the “chain of metaphoric equivalences” (in light of Chantal Mouffe’s theorization) allowing the radical trans-coding of Blackness. 32 Collins, Black Feminist Thought. In all her feminist critique of Pop, Martha Rosler eloquently contemplates Pop’s criticality and its limits in the context of 1960s’ liberation movements and their fighting multiple dominations in, “The Figure of the Artist, The Figure of the Woman,” (1983), Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); she discerns the articulation of the social aspect of the self and private life as a project that the feminism of the time shared with Pop. 33 According to José Esteban Muñoz’s canonic definition in, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 31: Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a

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cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. 34 For the difficulties of women of African descent in Brazil, see, “Latinidades: The Black Women’s Movement in Brazil,” in Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, 18–25. 35 Yemanjá is “the archetypal symbol of fertility and motherhood,” according to Robert A. Voeks, Sacred Leaves of Candomblé: African Magic, Medicine, and Religion in Brazil (Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 1997). See Giulia Lamoni’s essay in this volume. 36 To freely evoke the centrality of goddess imagery/spirituality in early ecofeminist art politics as proposed by Monika Fabijanska’s recent research and exhibitions, such as ecofeminism(s), Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, 2020. For Black women’s spirituality, see Sabrina Sojourner, “From the House of Yemanja: The Goddess Heritage of Black Women,” in Charlene Spretnak (ed.), The Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays by Founding Mothers of the Movement (New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1982), 57–64. On Yemanjá and the agency of African religiosity for Afro-Brazilian women, see Jaimee A. Swift, “Candomblé, Afro-Brazilian Women, and African Religiosity in Brazil,” Black Perspectives (June 5, 2017), available at: https://www.aaihs.org/candomble-afrobrazilian-women-and-african-religiosity-in-brazil/. See also Solimar Otero and Toyin Falola (eds.), Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality and Creativity in the Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013). 37 Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, 202–4. 38 Such battle-picking is unavoidable, as argued by Critical Race Art History theorist Camara Dia Holloway, “Numbers Game: Diversity in Theory and Practice,” 106 and 107. 39 See Laura Mulvey, “Fears, Fantasies and the Male Unconscious, or ‘You Don’t Know What’s Happening, Do You, Mr Jones?,’ ” Spare Rib (1973). 40 Cécile Whiting, A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender and Consumer Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also Michael Lobel’s theorizing of the production of gender difference in, Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 41 As identified by Sue Tate in her prolific writings on Boty since the 1990s, and for its latest discussion see, “Evelyne Axell and Pauline Boty: Sisters in Pop,” in Evelyne Axell: Pop Methods, exh. cat. (Namur: Province de Namur, Le Delta, 2019). 42 For the “male gaze” from a Black feminist perspective, see bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992). See also Lisa Bloom (ed.), With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1999). For the diversity and radicality of the female gaze in Pop and

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Pop Art and Beyond its erotics, particularly in the work of Axell, Boty, and Niki de Saint Phalle, see Minioudaki, “Women in Pop: Difference and Marginality” (PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2009) and “Pop Proto-Feminisms: Beyond the Paradox of the Woman Pop Artist,” in Sid Sachs and Kalliopi Minioudaki (eds.), Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968 (Philadelphia, PA: University of the Arts, and New York: Abbeville Press, 2010), 90–141. See also Minioudaki, “Scandalous Bodies and Feminist Art Politics: A Conversation across Time,” in Fionn Wilson (ed.), Dear Christine: A Tribute to Christine Keeler (London: Fionn Wilson, 2019). Following the 2010 exhibition, Seductive Subversion, we note two important exhibitions: Angela Stief (ed.), Power Up: Female Pop Art (Vienna: Kunsthalle and DuMont, 2010) and Isabelle de Longrée (ed.), Pop Impact: Women Artists (Namur, Belgium: Maison de la Culture, 2015). The feminist revision of Pop, marked by the work of several contributors in this volume and the transnational feminist revision of the 1960s, is too extensive to summarize here. For a reclamation of female agency and desire in Pop, see Maria Elena Buszek’s seminal study, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2006) and Minioudaki’s “Pop’s Ladies and Bad Girls: Axell, Pauline Boty and Rosalyn Drexler,” Oxford Art Journal, 30, no. 3 (Winter 2007): 402–30; and “Pop Proto-Feminisms.” For Liliane Lijn’s reaction to the objectification of the female body in Parisian happenings, see Jo Applin, “Mobile Subjects: Abstraction, the Body and Science in the Work of Bridget Riley and Liliane Lijn,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 83, no. 2 (2014): 96–109. Postwar Paris became a site of radical encounters with Pop for a great number of women artists from around the world. See, for instance, Nadja Rottner, “Marta Minujín and the Performance of Softness,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 83 no. 2 (2014): 110–28. See, Kalliopi Minioudaki, “Feminist Eruptions in Pop, Beyond Borders,” in Morgan and Frigeri (eds.), The World Goes Pop, 73–92, and “Other(s’) Pop: The Return of the Repressed of Two Discourses,” in Stief (ed.), Power Up, 135–43. In light of the writings of Chela Sandoval, “US Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” Genders, 10 (Spring 1991): 1–24, and Sandoval (ed.), Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Understood as a critical thinking with and about images and cultural identities, as theorized by Griselda Pollock, in “What Women Want: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Critique,” in Nancy Princenthal (ed.), The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973–1991 (New York: Neuberger Museum of Art and DelMonico-Prestel, 2011), 69, 70, and related to feminist Pop’s strategies and thinking “with and about” images of women by the author in “Feminist Eruptions in Pop.”

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49 See, Lisa Gail Collins, “Activists Who Yearn for Art That Transforms: Parallels in the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements in the United States,” Signs, 31, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 717–52. A focus on the complicated position of Black women within the Black Arts Movement (BAM) complements the recent feminist revisions of Civil Rights history. 50 As put by Jonathan Flatley and Anthony E. Grudin in, “Introduction: Warhol’s Aesthetics,” Criticism, 56, no. 3, Andy Warhol (Summer 2014): 419–25. 51 See, Kenneth Silver, “Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art,” in Russell Ferguson (ed.), Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955–1962 (Los Angeles, CA : Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992); Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz, Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1996); Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Boston, MA : Beacon Press, 2002); and Flatley, Like Andy Warhol, 2017. 52 Jennifer Sichel, “ ‘Do you think Pop Art’s queer?’ Gene Swenson and Andy Warhol,” Oxford Art Journal, 41, no. 1 (March 2018): 59–83. 53 Jonathan D. Katz, “Warhol’s Queerness and the End of Distinction,” from December 2018 manuscript of lecture presented on February 25, 2019, Williams College, extending views first developed in Andy Warhol (New York: Rizzoli Press, 1993), in light of Sichel’s discoveries. For his writings on Pop, see, for example, “The Silent Camp: Queer Resistance and the Rise of Pop Art,” in Kornelia Imesch and Hans-Jörg Heusser (eds.), Visions of a Future: Art and Art History in Changing Contexts (Zurich: Swiss Institute for Art Research, 2004): 147–58; “Dada’s Mama: Richard Hamilton’s Queer Pop,” in Lisa Tickner and David Peters Corbett (eds.), British Art in the Cultural Field, 1939–69 (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); “Two Faced Truths: Robert Indiana’s Queer Semiotic,” in Allison Unruh (ed.), Robert Indiana: New Perspectives (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz 2012), 217–67. 54 Katz, “Warhol’s Queerness.” See also Flatley, Like Andy Warhol. “Liking,” central (in its verbal and prepositional form) to Warhol’s practice, is reclaimed by both authors as a queer strategy for social transformation, in ways that redeem (Warholian) Pop’s depth and politics. Katz focuses on how Warhol’s unmediated, universalizing mechanical “liking” advocates a de-essentialized vision of sexuality and queerness, while Flatley illuminates the affective and relational opening to difference in similarity underpinning the utopian impulse of Warhol’s deinstrumentalized “liking” and activation of alikeness. 55 David J. Getsy, in his seminal Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), argues for the transgender capacity of 1960s abstract sculpture, while positing that the 1960s also saw the transgender sexual revolution. For Marisol’s challenge to a binary understanding of gender, see Rachel Middleman, Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s (Oakland, CA : University of California Press, 2018), 8.

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56 Delia Solomons in, “Marisol’s Antimonument: Masculinity, Pan-Americanism, and Other Imaginaries,” Art Bulletin, 102, no. 3 (September 2020): 104–29, sheds new light on the critical targets of Marisol’s queer eroticism in the context of Cold War politics, inter-American relations, and homophobia. See also Solomons, “Having a Coke with Marisol and Frank O’Hara,” posted by MoMA, at: https://post.moma.org/ having-a-coke-with-marisol-and-frank-ohara/. 57 Given the machismo of Black nationalist imagery and rhetoric, the issue could be a fraught one as in the well-known rift between Eldridge Cleaver and James Baldwin. 58 Greg Foster-Rice, “Will the Real Ralph Arnold Stand Up?,” in Foster-Rice (ed.), The Many Hats of Ralph Arnold: Art, Identity & Politics (Chicago, IL : Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2018), 12. 59 On queer collage, see David Evans Frantz, Lucas Hilderbrand, and Kayleigh Perkov, “Introduction,” in Cock, Paper, Scissors (Los Angeles, LA : ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, at the USC Libraries, 2016), 13, quoted in Foster-Rice, “Will the Real Ralph Arnold Stand Up?,” 32. See also Rebecca Zorach, “ ‘Artist in Chicago (Black)’: Ralph Arnold and Chicago’s Black Arts Movement,” in Foster-Rice (ed.), The Many Hats of Ralph Arnold, 97–105. 60 Télémaque was, however, unaware of the comedians, Hervé Télémaque, interview with Mona Hadler and Marine Schütz, Villejuif, France, May 29, 2018. 61 Johnson Products Company became in 1973 the first African American owned business to be listed on a major stock exchange, Robert E. Weems Jr., Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 94. Richard J. Powell credits Télémaque with raising the subject of racial Blackness well before the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s, in, “The Brown Paper Bag Test: Hervé Télémaque’s Exploded Discourse,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, 42–3 (November 2018): 242. 62 Gary Roth, “The Overproduction of Intelligence: The Reshaping of Social Classes in the United States,” Brooklyn Rail, October, 2015. Michael Zweig (ed.), What’s Class Got to Do with It? American Society in the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), debates the relative importance of birth, money, or power in determining class. 63 Anthony E. Grudin, Warhol’s Working Class: Pop Art and Egalitarianism (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 2017), 8. 64 See Karyn R. Lacy, Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 3. 65 Malcolm X, “Message to the Grass Roots,” in George Breitman (ed.), Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 3–17. See also, Mednicov, Jukebox Modernism, 47–8. 66 Amy Abugo Ongiri, Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic (Charlottesville, VA : University of Virginia Press, 2010), 20.

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67 Sheri Parks, “In My Mother’s House: Black Feminist Aesthetics, Television and A Raisin in the Sun,” in Jacqueline Bobo (ed.), Black Feminist Cultural Criticism (Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 113. 68 Sara Doris, Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 66. 69 See Humphrey Carpenter, A Great Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA : Da Capo Press, 2000), 7. 70 Oliver Peterson Gilbert, “Pop Art Redefined. British Pop Arts of the 1960s: Towards a Social and Institutional History” (PhD diss., University of Southampton, 2015). See Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 75–6, for class in postwar France in relation to Luc Boltanski’s writings and changes in university size and curriculum. For her writing on Pop, see, “Children of Marx and Coca Cola: Pop in a Divided World,” in Morgan and Frigeri (eds.), The World Goes Pop, 113–23. 71 Massey and Seago (eds.), Pop Art and Design, 11. 72 There was a “democratizing aspect” associated with Pop’s I.G. origins and their affinities with anthropological discourse, but the Independent Group was not immune to the accusation “that it risked constructing working-class culture on the colonial model as ‘exotic’ and ‘unknown,’ ” Lisa Tickner and David Peters Corbett sum up in light of Catherine Spencer, “The Independent Group’s Anthropology of Ourselves,” in Tickner and Peters Corbett (eds.), British Art in the Cultural Field, 1939–69, 15. 73 John Russell, “Introduction,” in John Russell and Suzi Gablik (eds.), Pop Art Redefined (London: Hayward Gallery, 1969). 74 See Wainwright, “Varieties of Belatedness and Provincialism: Decolonization and British Pop,” in Tickner and Peters Corbett (eds.), British Art in the Cultural Field 1939–69, 245–63. 75 Silver, “Modes of Disclosure,” 198. 76 See Crow on vernacular subcultures in Los Angeles, The Long March of Pop, 208–31. 77 Grudin, Warhol’s Working Class. 78 From Marta Traba’s and Mário Pedrosa’s consideration of the “underdevelopment” of Colombia and Brazil, class in Latin American Pop has sparked scholarly attention. See, for instance, Sofia Gotti, “Expanded Pop: Politics, Popular Culture and Art in Argentina, Brazil and Peru, 1960s” (PhD diss., University of the Arts London, 2016) and Ana María Reyes, The Politics of Taste: Beatriz González and Cold War Aesthetics (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2019). 79 bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 7. 80 Hall, Familiar Stranger, 48.

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81 Malik Gaines, Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 5. He draws on Frank Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society,” Social Identities, 9, no. 2 (2003): 225–40. 82 For the literature on stereotyping, see, for example: Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 95; Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’ ” in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 225–79; and Cherise Smith, Michael Ray Charles: A Retrospective (Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 2019), who follows the discourse surrounding Black artists and the stereotype to the current day. 83 For the mode of social engagement of the Warholian model of citizenship under consumerism, see Blake Stimson, Citizen Warhol (London: Reaktion Books, 2014). 84 Lawrence Alloway, “The Long Front of Culture,” in Richard Kalina (ed.), Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic (London: Routledge, 2006), 63. First published in 1959 in Cambridge Opinion.

1

Cults or Subcultures? Reckoning with Collective Creation in the English Pop World Thomas Crow

You poor old prehistoric monster, . . . I do not reject the working classes, and I do not belong to the upper classes, for one and the same simple reason, namely, that neither of them interests me in the slightest, never have done, never will do. Do try to understand that, clobbo! I’m just not interested in the whole class crap that seems to needle you and all the tax-payers—needle you all, whichever side of the tracks you live on, or suppose you do.1 This imaginary diatribe comes from the first-person narrator of Absolute Beginners, the 1959 London novel by Colin MacInnes (figure 1.1). Never given a name, this 16-year-old school-leaver, style merchant, connoisseur of the popular, and freelance photographer, plies the London streets on an Italian scooter in pursuit of both his next gig and his beloved but elusive Suzette. MacInnes, then 45, created an enduring prototype for the postwar London teenager, one who leads the reader on a tour from one hip circle to the next, concluding with a Dante-esque descent into the 1958 riots in Notting Dale (the narrator’s beloved “Napoli”), when African and Caribbean migrants (the narrator’s allies) are set upon by gangs of White nationalist thugs. Writing in 1962, the philosopher Richard Wollheim, friend and admirer of the novelist, describes this character, along with the restless youthful cohort he represents, as having “rejected the conception of the city as a solid three-dimensional environment that shapes and enfolds his life, and instead regards it as a kind of highly coloured backcloth against which he acts out, and upon which he projects his fantasies.”2 Wollheim capitalizes Teenager to name the type, but the word in actual use for such a protagonist was Modernist. Most often shortened to just Mod, the 27

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Figure 1.1 Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners (New York: Macmillan, 1960), first US edition. Cover photographer: James Noble. Photograph courtesy of Thomas Crow.

word signified a young man, sharply dressed in a narrow, Italian-style suit, mobile and independent on a likewise Italian Vespa or Lambretta, alert and energized on a Dexedrine high. The funds to support this mode of life most often came from some entry-level service occupation, plentiful in the years of post-war expansion, which permitted the young male products of working-class terraces to escape into this self-invented metropolitan whirl. Their emergence followed the intellectual revaluation of Americanized consumer products by the artists and writers of the Independent Group, whose enthusiasms they appeared to be aligning with an organic class orientation. At the same time, the renowned class of 1959 at the Royal College of Art—David Hockney, Derek Boshier, and

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Figure 1.2 Don McCullin, Young Mods, London, 1962 (Miki Simmonds, Peter Sugar, Mark Feld). © Don McCullin/Contact Press Images.

Peter Philips among them—included Pop practitioners of the same age cohort as the prototypical Mod. By the year of their graduation in 1962, the esoteric sensibility captured by Absolute Beginners began to emerge in the mass media. Ambitious publisher (and future Tory grandee) Michael Heseltine launched Town magazine as a flashy barometer of current London culture. In an early issue, he dispatched a journalist alongside no less a photographer than Don McCullin (fresh from covering the 1961 Berlin crisis) to document the underground notoriety of three top Mods in Northeast London.3 McCullin’s moody shot of the trio (figure 1.2)

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exposes the leather waistcoat of their tacit leader Mark Feld, the pride of his cultivated wardrobe, while inserting the young Mod style firmly in the downbeat London landscape to which the TV films of Ken Loach would shortly afterwards lay claim. Feld (later to transform himself into the Glamrock luminary Mark Bolan) delivered one quotation that has disproportionally colored the image of the Modernist ever since: asked about the still-reigning Conservative Party, he replied, “They’re for the rich, so I’m for them.” The fact that Feld likewise extolled the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has not weighed in the balance, perhaps because he cited its “exhibitionist” character as the reason for his approbation. His Tory quip has anecdotally reinforced the condescending sociological scrutiny of the Mod phenomenon. It has become a common reading of the working-class Mod preoccupation with stylish suiting to see it as aspirational imitation of the English professional classes by school leavers trapped in dead-end clerical or service jobs. One influential formulation characterizes the Mod style “as an attempt to realize, but in an imaginary relation, the conditions of existence of the socially mobile whitecollar worker.”4 From this orthodox Marxian outlook, the outburst scripted by MacInnes for his protagonist would readily be dismissed as classic false consciousness. But that persistent framework (to be examined further below) remains trapped in one-to-one mimetic correspondence of Modernist dress codes to an English stereotype of middle-class respectability. The Modernist templates were trans-Atlantic and trans-racial before anything else, as its deep emotional urgency came from music, from bebop, cool jazz, and the more propulsive hard bop that gained wider popularity among black audiences toward the end of the decade. Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan, the Californian stars of the cool tendency, fostered an imported Ivy League look. Photographs of Baker and Mulligan, as put together as two outlandishly talented young heroin addicts could possibly present themselves, spoke to the coded secret of an outwardly ultra-conformist appearance: two literal outlaws refusing outward markers of marginality. Both musicians enjoyed the added disguise of white skin, their addictions in part an elective solidarity with their black peers who were marginal in the larger society in ways that superior abilities could never entirely overcome. Miles Davis (figure 1.3) was renowned for this, “cool” both in his clear, measured playing and in the understated elegance he cultivated in his dress, inward rage contained by playing down rather than acting out. Mod chronicler Paolo Hewitt puts it well: “By dressing in the clothing of those who fiercely resent their culture, their music, the color of their skin, Miles and his peers are playing the enemy

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Figure 1.3 Miles Davis, 1960. A.F. Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

beautifully, walking amongst them while changing the landscape forever. You think he’s a bank manager, in fact Miles is a revolutionary in silk and mohair.”5 All of this was understood in London and emulated by self-conscious, minority devotees of modern jazz as a wordless form of defiance against the subservience expected of Secondary-Modern products. What the Mods knew, in their discerning fandom, was that a fine suit on an American jazz musician escaped such literal-minded reading of class signifiers. A top Mod was not putting on a disguise as middle class; he understood a certain kind of suit as already a disguise. At the beginning, no more than a few hundred fans in the most discerning clubs opted for this multifaceted style—in the face of relative mobs packing the venues devoted to the revivalist repackaging of prewar New

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Orleans, the so-called Trads (naturally despised by the Mods). Against the middle-class Trad style of university students wearing baggy sweaters, smoking roll-ups, and downing real ale, the Mods transformed their discerning consumption of advanced jazz into their own brand of performance, infused with an equal measure of continental flair, played out, as Wollheim memorably observed, against the lurid illuminations of nocturnal Soho, the city’s traditional quarter for louche amusements. MacInnes offers a ground-level, eyewitness snapshot from 1958 of the two types, side by side inside the 2 I’s coffee bar in Old Compton Street, invidiously rendered by the teenage narrator of his indispensable Absolute Beginners:6 Though both are friends of mine, and, in a way, even friends of each other, these two don’t mix in public, on account of the Dean being a sharp modern jazz creation and the Kid just a skiffle survival, with horrible leanings to the trad thing. . . . i.e., combos of booking-office clerks and quantity-surveyor’s assistants who’ve handed in their cards, and dedicated themselves to blowing what they believe to be the same note as the wonderful Creoles who invented the whole thing . . .

The Dean character went even further in his emulation of the American jazz modernist, having acquired a heroin habit to go with his impeccable turn out, which the narrator inventories: College-boy smooth crop hair with burned-in parting, neat white Italian roundcollared shirt, short Roman jacket very tailored (two little vents, three-buttoned, no-turn-up narrow trousers with 17-inch bottoms absolute maximum, pointedtoed shoes . . .

One “a bum and a bohemian;” the other a “sharp modernist number”: “Compare them,” he triumphantly concludes, “and take your pick!” *

*

*

1963 witnessed a singular instance where the normal cosmopolitanism of the fine art scene—its openness to European avant-gardes and to a self-aware American Modernism—came to be challenged in the name of later counterparts to the “sharp modernist number.” Between 1961 and 1963, Terry Atkinson, Roger Jeffs, Bernard Jennings, and John Bowstead came together as a collective entity they called Fine-Artz Associates, vowing to make and exhibit work under that name alone (and thus jeopardize any of them receiving an individual diploma). Among the group’s four members, Atkinson has enjoyed the greater subsequent recognition—he cofounded the Art & Language group in 1966 and went on to

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achieve a high individual profile on the other side of that landmark ConceptualArt collective. The Yorkshire-born Atkinson took his first degree in studio art at the Barnsley School of Art, on which basis he gained admission to the Slade. Acutely conscious of the leg-up provided to working-class provincials like himself by the 1944 Education Act, he saw the Slade and the Royal College as the twin summits of art education, but soon became sensitive to the differences between the two, the RCA outpacing the conservative Slade in conspicuous innovation. “Insofar as I could without being too intrusive,” he recalls, “I nosed a lot around their various painting spaces at the RCA.” He had known about David Hockney, as he says, “on the Yorkshire art school grapevine.” But that had hardly prepared him for the dazzlingly transformed Hockney he encountered in London: “his presentation of his own body, as Atkinson puts it, “dyed hair, gold suit, etc., presented another kind of relief . . . as inspiring, I do not use the word glibly, as Chuck Berry et al.”7 For Atkinson, to equate Hockney with the first wave of American rock and roll represented his highest possible form of praise, recognition of the advantage held by the Royal College in the role of what he called “receiver and transmitter of Pop art iconography and ideology coming then . . . from the United States.” To bridge the gap, Fine-Artz Associates took the initiative of organizing rock disco nights alternating weekly between the two schools, which led to more serious shared critical sessions off-campus with Hockney and such past RCA receiver/transmitters as Peter Blake, Ron Kitaj, and Richard Smith.8 In 1964, the Slade cohort were able to avail themselves of the RCA’s further good offices in order to present an extensive manifesto in the pages of Ark, the student journal of the College, in order to gain the ground on the plane of polemic that they had yet to achieve in their art. “Our art schools,” they declared, “are everyday sapping our brightest and most creative young minds,” led to “toy with their own subjective meanderings and reduce the impactladen images and ideas of the outside world to worn-out tradition-bound media.”9 Under the heading “What or Who are the ‘Fine-Artz’?” Atkinson, Jeffs, Jennings, and Bowstead sustained a caustic jeremiad somewhat at odds with the coolly professional connotations of the term “Associates.” This they interspersed with clipped illustrations from popular magazines, some mainstream, some directed to niche enthusiasts. One montage sampled the space-themed customized hotrods of Los Angeles car customizer Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. The accompanying text proclaims: “it’s gonna be a fab kandy-colored, leisure-loving kustom built for comfort, super-styled and slickline, bright new world,”10—a

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declaration that pointed directly to the group’s most recent endeavor, their 1963 prototype of a desirably “extrovert” art: Kandilac Kustomized Asterod Action Seat, no longer extant and preserved only in grainy black-and-white photographs. Surviving evidence offers little sense of the imposing scale of the piece, along with its flashing, whirling sound-and-light components, the group’s name rendered in jagged, billboard-scale lettering, which surmounted a large blackand-white photograph of the group members in staged motion as in a popgroup publicity image. The seat itself could be moved via its electric-hydraulic substructure at the direction of the mounted aeronautical joystick. Juror Peter Blake, unbeguiled, banished the apparatus from the painting section of the 1964 “Young Contemporaries” exhibition, in which it had initially been entered.11 The Action Seat, for all the attention and opprobrium it (intentionally) provoked, proved a temporary placeholder, as the group was already announcing via its Ark contributions a cognate project that didn’t then fall under any category of artwork at all, not even under the loosest available definition. The group had identified itself to Ark readers as four ex-painters, but between themselves preferred the term “stylists,” an intentionally anti-fine-art signifier that points the project they unveiled in the succeeding issue of the magazine, “The Fine-Artz View of Teenage Cults,” where they recounted various excursions into what they called “the teenage Netherworld.” They first offer a breakdown of the pertinent nomenclature: Mods, Rockers, Stylists, Mids, and Faces. Quickly dismissing Rockers as utterly past it and despised by all the others, they credit these up-to-date cults with “certain things in common; they are highly fashion conscious, environment conscious, and music conscious; in all these respects, they are extremely selective and sophisticated compared with their predecessors.”12 Among the firsthand observations offered by Fine-Artz Associates is a clue to why they favored the term Stylist for themselves, as the term in their understanding had come to designate the habits and aspect of a mid-1960s cult closest to the original Soho Modernists. As one young female informant told them, “unlike the Stylists, the Mods dress alike,” the latter group having evolved into a much larger and younger formation, with the Stylists being a smaller, trend-creating leadership, older than the newest Mods and thus closer to the artists themselves. Fine-Artz Associates took themselves to Stylist haunts like the East End scooter customizing shop run by Eddy Grimstead. Their conversations with Grimstead revealed to them the volatility of purchasable consumer goods under pressure from a selective and sophisticated clientele: five years before, “he noticed that sales were dropping and decided that the manufacturers were at fault, not having changed

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the styles of their scooters for years.”13 So, he began by stripping and repainting the bodywork of one scooter, then adding aftermarket chrome accessories. The first one sold instantly, so alert was the Stylist network, with a flood of inquiries to follow. A representative from Vespa had been around, he said, and the Italian manufacturer had begun copying his colors for the UK market. A bold color close-up of chrome detailing dominated one page of the Ark layout, an item of Pop art inflected by the authors but originating in Grimstead’s garage reacting to the demands and decisions of hundreds of self-aware young riders. In contrast to the outlook of the Independent Group cohort, Fine-Artz Associates were fascinated less by material accessories and more by the people— often prosaic actors like the club owner whose interview responses appear on the black page—who were making the most of the potential latent in such objects, fostering in the process a progression of charismatic identity formations, stemming from the first Soho Modernists. But to call these groups “identity formations” sounds a bloodless, social-scientific note, against which the FineArtz terms “netherworld” and “cult” seem preferable—not in spite of their gothic and mystery-mongering connotations, but because of them. Such terms acknowledge that there remained much to be learned from these phenomena, that there were enigmas in them. A sense of mystery attended the experiences of those within the netherworld as well, as sightings of strangers possessed as much significance as interactions among mates: a heretofore unknown Bluenote LP seen cradled under an arm, a new arrangement of pockets and vents on a bespoke suit, or a novel ornament on a Lambretta disappearing round the corner. Cults constituted themselves by shared predisposition to alert acuity and perpetual refinement of self-presentation in response to every input of new information. Fine-Artz Associates felt themselves in no position to gainsay the enthusiasms that manifested themselves in the netherworld, ceding sophisticated selectivity to the primary social actors in it. Never demeaning the individual participants they encountered, their project implicitly treated the cults as a network of distributed intelligence, a kind of organic computer for processing the yet unknown effects and possibilities for meaning latent in the economic machinery of consumer-product manufacture. Any given moment of style creation represents just a snapshot of a process typified by high aesthetic selfconsciousness, concern for coherence and contained complexity, and an evolution driven by self-critique, that is, by the core qualities that one expects objects of fine art (or Fine Artz) to exemplify. *

*

*

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Pop Art and Beyond

That valid perspective makes nonsense out of any reflexive accusation that the young Stylists were in thrall to “the commodity”—a perpetually misused term that persists in social theorizing like a zombie hangover from the joyless laments of the Frankfurt School. Everyone needs clothes and shoes; choices can be perfunctory, conformist, or considered as meaningful aspects of a public persona departing from the commercial dictates of the fashion cycle. Indeed, there appears to have been an unspoken collective decision by the core street Stylists that anything marked as trendy be scrupulously avoided in favor of certain distinctive items never originally intended for their use. These were invariably of a style that went back decades in key instances and persist unchanged to the present day; how teenage does a pair of oxblood “Royal” brogues from the Loake shoe company appear, or a Fred Perry tennis shirt, and the Baracuta G9 “Harrington” jacket, that design having persisted unchanged since 1937? But that scrupulous discrepancy might appear to have changed in 1964 when the thrusting, commercial Independent Television network stole a march on the staid BBC with the first television program that channeled Mod tastes for a mass audience. Ready Steady Go made its debut in 1963 and instantly established itself as the prime pop-music showcase in the UK. The performers were mostly respectable from the perspective of discriminating Mod taste, especially with the growing admixture of black rhythm and blues artists from America. The classic pattern of a non-stop Mod weekend now assumed staying in long enough on Friday evening to watch Ready Steady Go before heading out to the coffee bars and clubs (just as the name implies). Beyond its entertainment value, there was real information on dancing and clothes to be gleaned from it. While some original Modernists decried this massification of their ethos, one capital thing that it accomplished, by breaking up their old exclusivity, was to open space for young women to carve out leading roles for themselves in what had been, obviously enough, exceedingly male-dominated territory. The young London artist Pauline Boty occasionally appeared on Ready Steady Go as a dancer, which is just as she appears in a 1963 photograph (figure 1.4) by Lewis Morley in a short dress and short, Courrèges-style boots. Morley had gained fame for his coy nude photograph of Christine Keeler, who subsequently found herself at the center of the seismic political scandal involving Tory minister John Profumo. Morley posed Boty standing between two recent canvases: with her left hand she props up the now-lost Scandal 63, with Keeler at the center of the wider cast of characters; with her right 5-4-3-2-1, those emblazoned numbers in her fairground lettering celebrating the pop hit by the

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Figure 1.4 Lewis Morley, Pauline Boty, September 1963. Bromide print, 74.42 × 90.42 in (29.3 × 35.6 cm). National Portrait Gallery, London. © Lewis Morley Archive, National Science and Media Museum/Science and Society Picture Library.

band Manfred Mann, adopted as the theme song for Ready Steady Go. Her painting supplements the theme’s title with a portrait of the program’s presenter Cathy McGowan (alongside the cheeky inscription “OH, FOR A FU. . .”). The much-loved McGowan had famously been recruited from an office job at the magazine Woman’s Own and almost never made it through a weekly broadcast without flubbing her lines. But her cheerful amateurism, along with the sheer quality of music, helped save Ready Steady Go from being dismissed as a slick show-business sell-out. In the words of Vicki Wickham, then a producer on the show: “She was the perfect Mod.”14 It was with the McGowan phenomenon that a strong female Mod counterpart to the male style could be said to have surfaced—with a markedly different mode of transmission. The original Soho Modernists had picked and chosen from clothing items not designed with them in mind or had their suits custom tailored to their own specifications. No prominent fashion designer emerged from their ranks (the core Modernist never identified with the peacock aesthetic promoted

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by John Stephen, the entrepreneurial “King of Carnaby Street,” nor with the Carnaby scene in general). McGowan, on the other hand, had in her corner the visionary young Barbara Hulanicki, a fashion illustrator turned designer, who had founded her first, mail-order business on the premise that young women of ordinary means ought to be able to afford appropriate, innovative design. “With Cathy McGowan endorsing our clothes by wearing them nearly every week on TV, there was a sort of underground grapevine which was growing everyday . . . throughout the clubs and the offices . . .”15 From the day she opened her first Biba boutique in September 1964, Hulanicki found the premises packed every Saturday morning in the wake of the RSG broadcast the previous evening. That phenomenon might attest to no more than the promotional power of television, had not Hulanicki been offering styles that took the circumstances and outlook of her youthful clientele fully into account. She had the theory that rationing and austerity had ushered a whole new body type into the relative affluence of the 1960s: “the postwar babies who had been deprived of nourishing protein in childhood and grew up into beautiful skinny people. A designer’s dream. It didn’t take much for them to look outstanding. The simpler the better, the shorter the better.” The linear profile of these outfits combined with the severity of Sassoon-style cuts made for a sudden spectacle of the feminine unprecedented in its vividness. In her memoir, Hulanicki describes one night at Biba just before closing: “a tiny blonde girl came in and began taking the clothes off the hatstands. Instead of trying them on behind the dangerously wobbly screens, she stripped off in the shop and proceeded to try on smocks and trouser suits. . . . She was magnetic—her skin was like marble and her features larger than life. It was Julie Christie getting her wardrobe together for the film Darling.”16 John Schlesinger’s Darling premiered in August 1965, its script by Frederic Raphael and title role of Diana Scott played by Christie. Though the film seems rarely discussed or even much remembered now, its story of a trendy model—ruthlessly out for herself and undone by her ambitions—proved a huge international success at the time, exceptionally so for a British film: it gained Academy Awards for Raphael and for Christie in just her third film; Schlesinger was nominated for best director and the film for best picture. Christie’s acting out in the Biba boutique crystalized the release of unsupervised behavior customary in the shop, which served as a music-filled domain for young women largely free of male scrutiny, just as her deceptively diminutive stature and slight frame might have exemplified Hulanicki’s deprivation diagnosis. As Boty painted her tribute to McGowan in 1964, production of Darling would have just been getting underway, and there are

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many ways, despite Christie’s own joining into the positive spirit of young London womanhood, that the film amounts to mordant contempt for just that spirit: a look back along the lines of “What have we wrought?” in allowing a youthful, pop aristocracy to upend the hierarchical order that Oxbridge males took for granted, however with-it they might have sought to appear. Its portrait of the emerging media and fashion complex of London would satisfy the most dour Frankfurt School critic of the “culture industry,” Christie’s personal flair and exuberance transformed by the venomous scenario into Diana Scott’s hard, amoral opportunism leading inexorably to the final ruin of her hopes.17 *

*

*

From the public-school misogyny of Darling to the bombing of Biba by the ultraleft Angry Brigades in 1971, avenues of young women’s self-expression were far more rigorously policed across the political spectrum over and above anything that their male counterparts had had to endure—notwithstanding the mid-1960s tabloid freak-out about the Mod-Rocker seaside battles. Revenge on the male Mods eventually arrived, but it followed a period of apparent stylistic eclipse in the face of the exotic pastoralisms and Victorian/Edwardian revivals of the international counter-culture. Out of this conjuncture came such supreme Pop objects as the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, its famous album sleeve orchestrated by the old Etonian dealer in Pop art, Robert Fraser. The boutiques along the Kings Road now spilled over with velvets, laces, brocades, and feathers, dresses billowing and trousers flaring ever outward. Under that blanket of counter-cultural excess, the continuation of buttoned-down Modernist principles could be hard to discern. Paolo Hewitt writes of the years from about 1965 to 1968 as the phase that lacked a name,“but what this generation signified— consciously or not—was . . . a true return to the Mod principles of exclusivity and secrecy.”18 One variant became so-called “Hard Mods” evolving into “Peanuts” among other names. One of Hewitt’s sources recalls saying to his mates in July 1967, “Look at these Mods here, they’ve got their hair very short now,” adding the observation that preferences in music were driving two factions apart: “You had the people that were Mods and grew their hair and turned into hippies. And the ones that didn’t want to do that turned Skinhead and went into Reggae.”19 Such virtual invisibility to anyone outside their number harks back to the first Modernist principles of the late 1950s, that is, the defiant discretion in dress cultivated by American black musicians on the order of Miles Davis and Lee Morgan, whose coded defiance of racial subordination struck such a chord with their young British admirers. In keeping with this ethic, the contributors to the late

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Mod cults—even prime innovators—remained unknown by name to the wider world. One exception is musician Kevin Rowland, later of Dexy’s Midnight Runners fame; Rowland provides perhaps the richest written memoir of this period in the evolution of Mod, observed from the vantage point of far northwest London. Rowland specifies October 1968—at the crest of the hippie onslaught—as the moment when he first spotted, in his words, “the occasional guy who had this subtle American look.” A few, by the next year, had their hair shaved off completely: “Against the background of London in 1969,” he marvels, “it was completely and utterly outrageous.” The summer of that year Rowland presents as a brief, radiantly remembered moment of teenage bliss: “all the factors came together at the right time,” he declares, “the beautiful clothes, the explosion of all those great reggae records, which we listened to exclusively. That’s when I felt alive, part of something. I was aware this was my time. We danced good—often all in a line, American-style shirts, Sta-Prest trousers with braces and brogues, loafers and Gibsons . . .”20 Then the roof fell in. Late in the summer of 1969, the Daily Mirror travestied the scene under the subhead “What Is a Skinhead,”21 indelibly impressing upon public consciousness what Rowland rues as “the numbskull caricature: . . . a cartoon figure dressed in white T-shirt, braces, jeans, and big boots” (figure 1.5). In a mass media-driven feedback loop, the cartoon created by the press became real: as Rowland puts it, “A slightly younger version of ready-made skinheads— girls too appeared overnight, bless ’em. I hope they felt part of something. But he adds, “what really pissed me off,” is that his own splendid, self-fashioned style current, the last to stem directly from the original Soho Modernists, “died before it had been given a chance to grow. This was the great lost look. The caricatures of skinhead had prevented natural development and destroyed all subtlety, so I guess the whole progression had to fizzle and die.”22 It could also be said that, as the progression fizzled and died, it achieved another sort of shadow life as an object of academic scrutiny under the rubric of “subcultures,” the centerpiece object of inquiry for the emerging discipline of Cultural Studies. The term has been avoided here for a number of reasons. The simplest one is the qualifying suffix “sub,” implying that the entity so designated is no more than a derivative artifact of something larger, prior, and determining. That larger thing tends to be an unexamined mega-structure like “the working class” or the “parent culture.” The social analyst who put this model on the map was the somewhat unheralded Phil Cohen, then doing social work in the East End, who brought a paper in 1972 up to the seminar of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, one he had put together in an effort to

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Figure 1.5 Doreen Spooner, Two Young People Wearing Skinhead Fashions, Glenda Peake and Tony Hughes, Finchley, 7 October 1969. Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock Photo.

comprehend the behavior of the young Skinhead males around him. Others have become more famously linked to the concept but the essentials of the subcultural model were already there in Cohen’s paper, which he says he thought little more about after leaving the Birmingham session.23 He titled it: “Subcultural Conflict and Working-Class Community,” and the quality of the paper merits all the accolades of imitation it has received. In it Cohen lay the ground for a semiotics of the social environment potentially commensurable with the semiotics, the parsing of signs and signals, one might use to render a work of art into an objectively analyzable structure. In a way that remains largely unrecognized, this innovation provided a crucial precondition for the emergence of a credible social history of art in the UK: it offered the possibility of a common mode of analysis that could bridge the gap that had defeated earlier well-meaning efforts to create an adequately contextualized art history, that is, offered a way over the seeming abyss between the object of art, a bounded and relatively miniaturized entity, and the surrounding social world, by many orders of magnitude of greater variety and complexity. The comparatively miniaturized style and ritual syndrome of adolescent Skinheads offered itself as

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a bridge-entity, which possessed a vivid aesthetic order while condensing a larger pattern of social behavior. In light of that conjuncture, Cohen built a far-reaching model that yielded such lasting definitions of subculture as “a compromise [imaginary] solution to two contradictory needs: the need to create and express autonomy and difference from parents and, by extension, their culture, and the need to maintain the security of existing ego defenses and the parental identifications which support them.”24 There are a lot of parents in there: an emphasis on childish dependency that follows logically from the sub- suffix. In the title of Cohen’s seminal paper, it is revealing the adjective “sub-cultural” modifies the disturbing term “conflict”; while “working-class” is attached to the reassuring “community.” One wonders what Kevin Rowland in his golden summer of 1969 would have made of these clinical formulae; though Cohen parries the question in advance by reminding his readers “that subcultures are symbolic structures and must not be confused with the actual young people who are its bearers and supports.”25 Would Rowland have found this relegation any more palatable? Bearers and supports? The language of subordination again, along with investing a provisional, abstract model with a god-like power to direct actual human behavior. And this remained a baked-in feature of Cultural Studies through the 1970s, as these assumptions were taken up and circulated by the Birmingham School as a whole. Cohen is the author of the formula quoted at the outset of this essay to the effect that the original Modernists aspired to the outward trappings of a successful middleclass life as an imaginary solution to the “objective” contradiction between their Absolute Beginner’s self-confidence and the defeating realities of their classbound circumstances. But this thesis on the Mods, however perennial it has become, was more an impressionistic appetizer to the Skinhead main course. To posit that overlapping patterns of evolving, self-organized behavior follow from a simple theoretical model virtually required that those behaviors be drastically simplified to match—and reality appeared to be cooperating. Others besides Kevin Rowland have described the boots-and-braces Skinhead figure as a numbskull travesty of its complex antecedents, which had flourished under necessary conditions of Mod discretion. The last exploitative panic promoted by the tabloids—egging on the Mod-Rocker dust-ups of the mid-1960s—had driven the later Stylists underground; the 1969 Skinhead affair in the press then weakened the more fragile remaining network to the point of extinction. But the reduced form that remained met the needs of the Cultural-Studies template for reductive simplification and for subjects who could safely be anatomized with analytical

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condescension. And that remnant became generalized to stand for the whole phenomenon. The Fine-Artz Associates alternative was to view what they called teen-age cults as art forms constituting a distinctive contribution to British art and in turn a distinctive contribution of the UK to modern art history. And the same can be said of the Reggae music that both served as preferred dancing material in the later-1960s for Mods shading to Skin, faithful to the tradition of refined taste in imported black music. Indeed the most sought-after prize was music so far from commodity-status that was not even for sale: As Nick Knight observes, “Reggae music was not organized like popular commercial music of the big groups and their imitators. . . . Recordings were put out by small companies [and] whitelabel, i.e. pre-release, copies of records were the mark of a skin who knew his music.”26 In the thinking of Theodor Adorno, aesthetic mainstay of the Frankfurt School, or in Clement Greenberg’s fine-art Modernism, the achieved coherence and self-sufficiency of the singular work of art served as a last refuge against the meretricious expediency of the profit-driven Culture Industry. By contrast, Terry Atkinson and his partners opposed the Teenage Netherworld, in all of its shared inventiveness, to the regime of the singular art object and the hierarchical assumptions that went with it: “the eternal gilt-edged security of . . . unique object-worship, as propagated by any connoisseur worth his Côtes–du-Rhône.”27 The cults, as they called them, were not unwittingly acting out in miniature larger social phenomena beyond their ken; their “sophisticated and selective” leaders were perpetually processing, by their own lights, the possible furnishing of life and definitions of self. Fine-Artz Associates enjoyed the advantage of assessing the netherworld near the height of its creative powers, rather than at the beleaguered tail end, as Culture Studies were destined to do. *

*

*

Writer and curator Lawrence Alloway receives significant credit for having either invented or made current the term Pop Art in the later 1950s. He had of course figured prominently in the discussions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts held by the so-called Independent Group, where artists, architects, and designers first addressed with curiosity and sympathy the products of post-war, Americandriven consumer culture. Unlike the rest of them, however, he also kept up with the trim Modernist’s style right into the early 1960s. His old IG colleague Reyner Banham, making a plain allusion to a favored Mod clothier, called Alloway “a phenomenon, sawed-off, dapper (in the Charing Cross mode), with his ginger

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nut cropped close to the bone. . .”28 But nothing impeded Alloway from bridging his London street style to the most intellectually elevated precedents: Reflecting on the pedigree of his own contemporary investigations, Alloway noted in 1956 that: “persistence of visual themes across lines of taste is well known to scholars of the Warburg Institute, of course.”29 Their namesake founder had looked to the gesticulating mummers of Florentine street processions as lying behind some of the most august rediscoveries of classical prototypes in art. For him, the figure in motion, derived from the direct experience of performers in the guise of ancient deities, constituted the true subject of advanced Florentine mimesis in the 1480s. The core Warburgian idea was that the elusive rituals and props of local cults carried a vernacular charge necessary to the achievements of the most distinguished Renaissance art, a potency that lay beyond any merely bookish catalogue of mythological stories and aesthetic canons. To have transferred the word cult to London in the 1960s, as Fine-Artz Associates proposed, made possible a parallel project that seems barely advanced since their dissolution in 1966. Decoding such moments of style creation can become more than clinical exercises by according the cults the same assumptions of intention, intelligence, fine intuition, and self-critique that one would bestow on any certified fine art—but spread across a network far more extensive and democratic than even the most capacious avant-garde collective ever occupied. London ultra-leftists in the 1960s were fond of paraphrasing le comte de Lautréamont (Isadore Ducasse) to the effect that art should be made by the many rather than by the one, but were blind to that phenomenon taking place all around them.

Notes This chapter overlaps with parts of Thomas Crow’s book, The Hidden Mod in Modern Art: London 1957–1969 (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2020). Reprinted with permission of the author and press. 1 This exclamation occurs during an exchange between the narrator, who speaks, and his older, Labourist half-brother, the latter chastising him as a class traitor: Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners (1959) in MacInnes, The London Novels (London: Allison and Busby, 1985), 37–8, quoted at 34. 2 Richard Wollheim, “Babylon, Babylone,” Encounter, 18 (May 1962): 30. 3 Peter Barnsley and Don McCullin, “Faces without Shadows,” Town (September 1962).

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4 Phil Cohen, “Subcultural Conflict and Working-Class Community,” in Cohen, Rethinking the Youth Question (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1999), 58. 5 Paolo Hewitt and Mark Baxter, The Fashion of Football: From Best to Beckham, from Mod to Label Slave (London: Mainstream, 2004), 33. 6 MacInnes, Absolute Beginners, 62. 7 Terry Atkinson, unpublished typescript. 8 See Oliver Peterson Gilbert, “Pop Art Redefined. British Pop Arts of the 1960s: Towards a Social and Institutional History” (PhD diss., University of Southampton, 2015), 196; Peterson Gilbert’s account is based in part on his interviews with Roger Jeffs and John Bowstead. 9 Fine-Artz Associates, “ Fine-Artz? What or Who are the ‘Fine-Artz’?, ” Ark, 35 (Spring 1964): 40; the importance of the Fine-Artz contributions to Ark was first signaled by Alex Seago, Burning the Box of Beautiful Things: The Development of a Postmodern Sensibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 18, 45, 207–8. 10 Fine-Artz Associates, “What or Who are the ‘Fine-Artz’?,” 39. 11 On this episode, see Peterson Gilbert, “Pop Art Redefined,” 203–7. 12 Fine-Artz Associates, “The Fine-Artz View of Teenage Cults,” Ark, 36 (Summer 1964): 40. 13 Ibid., 44. 14 Quoted in Jon Savage, 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded (London: Faber and Faber, 2015), 156. 15 Barbara Hulanicki, From A to Biba: The Autobiography of Barbara Hulanicki (London: V&A Publications, 2007), 79. 16 Ibid. 17 Boty’s friends were, in fact, convinced that the romantic entanglements of Diana Scott had been conveniently transposed from the artist’s life, namely her extended affair with the married television producer Philip Saville, whom she had abruptly thrown over for her future husband, the actor and writer Clive Goodwin. Their conviction on this point did not rely only on those parallels, subtended by the physical resemblance between the two women, as Schlesinger had had earlier professional dealings with both of them. He had asked Boty to audition for the main female role in his earlier 1963 film Billy Liar, and her chances were rated highly enough that both Albert Finney, who had starred in the play, and Tom Courtenay, who would do so in the film, rehearsed with her. But Schlesinger in the end cast Christie, a fresh graduate of the Central School of Art and Speech, in her first film role—to which the director added both tribute and insult to Boty’s rejection by translating the artist’s personal style into Christie’s look and performance. See the unpublished study and biography by Adam Smith, “Pauline Boty—First Lady of British Pop,” 126, available as a downloadable pdf at: www.writing-room.com. 18 Paolo Hewitt, The Soul Stylists: Six Decades of Modernism—From Mods to Casuals (London: Mainstream, 2000), 75.

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19 Ibid., 77. 20 Paul Gorman, The Look: Adventures in Rock and Pop Fashion (London: Adelita, 2006), 92. 21 “No Love from Johnny,” The Daily Mirror, September 3, 1969. 22 Gorman, The Look, 93. 23 Cohen, personal communication. 24 Cohen, “Subcultural Conflict and Working-Class Community,” 59. 25 Ibid., 57. 26 Nick Knight, Skinhead (London: Omnibus, 1982), 14. 27 Fine-Artz Associates, “What or Who are the ‘Fine-Artz’?,” 39. 28 Reyner Banham, “Alloway and After,” Architect’s Journal (December 26, 1957): 941. 29 Lawrence Alloway, “The Robot and the Arts,” Art News and Review (September 1, 1956): 1.

2

The 1960s in Bamako Malick Sidibé and James Brown1 Manthia Diawara

I was looking at a book of Malick Sidibé’s photographs, put together by André Magnin, with my friend Diafode, who has been living in France since 1979.2 As we flipped through the black and white photos of our teenage years in Bamako, Diafode’s attention was suddenly drawn by a photo of a group of boys entitled “Friends, 1969.” “Les Beatles!” he exclaimed, and added, putting his index finger on the photo, “voilà les Beatles” (“The Beatles, there are the Beatles”). I looked closely at it, and before I could even say a word, Diafode started identifying them one by one: there was John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and all the other members of the Beatles of Medina-Coura, one of the hip neighborhoods of Bamako in those days. Diafode and I spent that evening in my Paris apartment, looking at the Beatles of Medina-Coura and reminiscing about our youth in Bamako. Sure enough, I now could see Nuhun, aka John Lennon. He’s wearing a “Col Mao” jacket with six buttons, just like the one John Lennon wore on the cover of one of the Beatles’ albums. Nuhun now lives in Canada. And there’s Cissé, aka “Paris,” with his arm on Nuhun’s shoulder. He’s wearing a tight-fitting shirt, with a scarf à la Elvis Presley, a large belt, and bell-bottom pants. We used to call him “Paris” because he was so elegant and smooth. When he used to live in Bamako-Coura—a neighborhood on the southern tip of the commercial center—and did not have a motorcycle to come to Medina-Coura on the north side, he would walk for forty-five minutes to cross the busy commercial center, under the hot sun at two o’clock, to join the group at Nuhun’s house to listen to music, play cards, and drink tea. The elegance of Paris’s style was also marked by a pack of “Craven A” cigarettes, which he placed in his shirt pocket while holding one unlit cigarette between his lips. He walked slowly through the busy crowd of the Market and across the 47

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railway, without losing his rhythm and without sweating a drop. When he arrived at Nuhun’s place, his shoes were always shiny and his face was as fresh as ever. He would always say, “Salut, les copains” before taking a napkin out of his pocket, wiping off a chair, and sitting down. We used to say that one day, Paris would surely leave Bamako for Europe. With his Craven A cigarette and tailored shirts, he looked like the actors from the Italian photonovellas. Cissé, aka Paris, now lives in Canada too. Other guys in the photo reminded Diafode and me of more Bamako stories. There is Addy, who went to Switzerland to study hotel management and returned to Bamako in 1970 with the first copy of the Four-Way Street album by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. We had organized “Woodstock in Bamako” with Addy’s record collection. Since then, Addy had worked for hotels in Abidjan and Bamako before opening his own business in Bamako. That one over there is Niare, who’s sitting on the floor and holding the album by Sly and the Family Stone that contains “I Wanna Take You Higher.” Niare now works for the Malian government as an accountant. And in the back there, we have Amara, aka “Harley-Davidson,” who is wearing a flowered shirt. In those days, everybody had to have a flowered shirt to feel part of the youth culture, not only in Bamako, but also in Paris, London, and Amsterdam. Harley, who is now an abstract painter and conceptual artist in Bamako, was even in those days a dreamer and a little bit on the wild side. He was convinced that he would seize history one day and become the center of it. Malick Sidibé’s photographs enable us to revisit the youth culture of the 1960s and our teenage years in Bamako (figure 2.1). They show exactly how the young people in Bamako had embraced rock and roll as a liberation movement, adopted the consumer habits of an international youth culture, and developed a rebellious attitude towards all forms of established authority. The black and white photographs reflect how far the youth in Bamako had gone in their imitation of the world-view and dress style of popular music stars, and how Malick Sidibé’s photographic art was in conversation with the design of popular magazines, album covers, and movie posters of the time. To say that Bamako’s youth is on the same page as the youth in London and Paris in the 1960s and 1970s is also to acknowledge Malick Sidibé’s role in shaping and expanding that culture. To the youth in Bamako, Malick Sidibé was the James Brown of photography: the godfather whose clichés described the total energy of the time. Inasmuch as today there is a desire to go back to the music and film of the 1960s and 1970s in order to give a meaning to that culture, we can also go back to Malick Sidibé’s photographs to gain access to the style, vibrancy, and ethos of those times in Africa.

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Figure 2.1 Malick Sidibé, Au cours d’une soirée, les positions, 1964/2013. © Estate of Malick Sidibé. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

So implicated are Malick Sidibé’s photographs in the culture of the 1960s that when we look at them, our youth comes back to life. They are the gateway to everything that was fashionable then; everything that constituted our modernism. They are a document through which one can see the passage of time in Bamako as marked by dress style (from B-boys to hippies), music appreciation (from Latin beat to James Brown), movies (from Westerns to Easy Rider), hair style (from Patrice Lumumba and Marlon Brando to the Afro), and dance moves (from the Twist to the Camel Walk). In Sidibé’s photographs, one can see the turbulence of youth and the generational conflict that characterized the 1960s. The desires of youth are inscribed in most of the photos as a determined break with tradition and as a transformation of the meaning of the decolonization movements of the 1960s

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into a rock and roll revolution. It is clear from Sidibé’s photographs that what the youth in Bamako wanted most in those days was James Brown and the freedom and existential subjectivity that linked independence to the universal youth movement of the 1960s. The photographs show that, in attempting to be like James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, they were also revealing their impatience with the political teachings of the nationalist state and the spirit of decolonization. As Diafode and I looked at these photographs now, more than a quarter of a century later, I felt a strange familiarity, a simultaneous desire and repulsion. I looked intently at every photograph in the book, each more than once, looking for myself, but at the same time dreading the possibility of finding myself there. These photographs are speaking to me now, not only as important aesthetic documents on the culture of the 1960s, but also as documents that both problematize the narrow meaning of nationalism extent at that time, and open the door for a Pan-African and diasporic aesthetics through rock and roll. I am proposing here to go beyond the nostalgic function that the photographs served for my friend Diafode and me that night in Paris. This is not to underrate nostalgia as a significant element in photography and the other arts. On the contrary, photo albums and home videos of weddings and naming celebrations play an important role in the lives of African immigrants in Paris and elsewhere. They protect them from the effects of segregation in the host country by providing entertainment and pleasure. They also constitute a link between the immigrants and their original homes, and thus foster a sense of community culture. But to understand the conditions of emergence and evolution of Sidibé’s formal style in these photographs, it is important to place him in the social and historical context of the 1960s in Bamako. Malick Sidibé was one of the first studio photographers in Bamako to take a lighter and cheaper 35mm camera outside, to house parties and picnics, in order to take pictures of young people. As he followed the youth, who themselves were following a universal youth movement, he discovered his style in photography, which I will call rhythmic or motion photography. But how did we arrive at the finished product that we have in this book today; how did the bodily dispositions and the structure of feeling of the subjects in Sidibé’s photography change from those in the work of his predecessor Seydou Keita? It is important to understand that at the time they were taking people’s pictures in Bamako, neither Malick Sidibé nor Seydou Keita considered himself an artist. It is also important to understand that the types of photos each took

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and the perfection they both achieved in their work were a condition of the demand that existed at their respective times. Photographers in Bamako were no different than the barbers or tailors—they all beautified their clients or provided them with styles for the visual pleasure of people in Bamako. Their success depended on word of mouth, which contributed, as Pierre Bourdieu would put it, to increasing their symbolic capitals. They only became artists by first pleasing their customers, by providing them with the best hairstyles, dresses, and photographs. Seydou Keita’s photography was both enhanced and limited by the economic, social, and cultural conditions prevailing in Bamako between 1945 and 1964, when he had to close his studio and become a civil servant for the socialist government in Mali. The people he photographed in his studio were from the middle class. They were from traditional Bamako families—businessmen and their wives, landlords, and civil servants (schoolteachers, soldiers, and clerks for the colonial administration). As a photographer, Seydou Keita’s role was to make his subjects look like they belonged to the bourgeoisie and middle class of Bamako, to make them feel modern and Bamakois. The women were very beautiful, with their hair braided and decorated with gold rings, and their long dresses with embroidery at the neck. The men wore European suits or traditional boubous, and they exhibited their watches, radios, or cars. Seydou Keita produced artifice through studio mise-en-scène and makeup to ensure that every one of his subjects looked like an ideal Bamakois, a bourgeois nobleman or woman, or a civil servant invested with the authority of the colonial administration. When independence arrived in 1960 and the colonial administration had to cede its place to the new government of Mali, people’s relation to photography, as to many other things in Bamako, began to change. Civil servants were no longer content with their intermediary roles between whites and Africans; they were now competing with the traditional leaders for control of the country. They no longer wanted to mimic the colonial administrator in Seydou Keita’s studio; they wanted to be seen occupying the colonial master’s chair at the office, his house, and his places of leisure. As these patterns of life changed in Bamako, new structures of feeling emerged and studio photography became devalorized as something conservative and artificial. Soon the studio’s customers would be largely composed of people who needed passport and identification photos and visitors from rural areas. Seydou Keita’s reaction to the changes was also conservative: not only did he have problems with the new socialist government, but he also found women in pants, mini-skirts, and Afro hairdos to be neither beautiful nor religiously acceptable in a predominantly Muslim country.

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Thus, the change in power from a colonial system to an independent state brought about a profound transformation in people’s sense of aesthetics in photography. Young people especially began to look upon studio photography as old-fashioned or as something reserved for people who were pretending to be Bamakois. To be photographed in the studio was associated with being a fake and a powerless pretender. In other words, studio photography was seen as unreal, whereas realism had become the criterion for defining the new aesthetics of Bamakois photography. By insisting on realism, people were demanding a new photography that portrayed them as actors in situations, a photography that was neither a studio re-enactment nor an imitation of something previously done. The new Bamakois wanted to be filmed while he or she took the center of the action that was unfolding. Photographers therefore had to come out of the studio and follow the action wherever it was taking place. It was these limitations of studio photography—a genre fostered by colonialism— that led to Malick Sidibé’s emergence as the photographer of the young generation. While maintaining his studio—largely for passport photos and camera repair— Sidibé took his camera to where the youth were and photographed them there. I will therefore define the youth’s sense of a new realism in photography less as an absence of artifice, mise-en-scène, and mimicry, but as something tied to the location and historical action of the subjects in the photos. In other words, each photo tells a story located in space and time that serves to empower the subject. The emphasis on action was meant to bring photography as close to live action as possible. There is, however, another problem related to a change in power relations in Bamako that needs to be addressed when discussing Sidibé’s photography. It would seem that his photos of young Bamakois are in contradiction not only with colonial-era studio photography, but also with the patterns of life that one would expect in a decolonized state. According to the famous theses on culture developed by Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, it is not only impossible to create a national culture under colonialism, but it is also equally evident that artifacts like these photos are signs of neo-colonialism and Western imperialism. Writing about African independence in the 1960s, Césaire stated that whereas the colonial era was characterized by the “reification” of the African, the transition to independence would give rise to a revival of his creative energies, and a recovery of his authentic ways of being that had been forbidden by the colonizer. Independence would awaken in the individual the African personality that had for so long been suppressed. For Césaire, “after the ‘moment’ of pre-colonial Africa, a moment of ‘immediate truth,’ and the colonial ‘moment,’ a moment of the shattered African consciousness, independence inaugurates a third dialectical

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‘moment,’ which must correspond with a reconciliation of the mind with its own consciousness and the reconquest of a plenitude.”3 For theoretical purposes, it is important to retain Césaire’s use of the terms “moment,” “immediate truth,” “own consciousness,” and “plenitude.” All of them refer to independence as an authentic state of being, a state of genuine creative and natural harmony between the pre-colonial past and the present. In contrast, the colonial and neocolonial state was characterized by assimilation, alienation, and depersonalization of the African. Authors like Césaire expected the continent to create a new man with an African style in politics and culture. Lumumba, Sékou Touré, and Kwame Nkrumah were the prototypes of the ideal postindependence image, and they were all fiercely nationalist, authentic, and antiimperialist. That the images of the youth in Sidibé’s photographs did not seem to reflect the Africa these leaders were attempting to shape has been interpreted as an indication of how alienated the youth were, as a sign that the youth were not in continuity with the political history of the nation. The photos could be said therefore to reveal the presence of neo-colonialism among the youth. Indeed, in Mali, the socialist government created a militia in the mid-1960s to monitor the behavior of the people in conformity with the teachings of socialism. This militia was aimed not only at abolishing traditional chiefs and other tribal customs, but also at correcting the youth’s habitus. In Bamako, curfews were set and youth caught wearing mini-skirts, tight skirts, bell-bottom pants, and Afro hairdos were sent to reeducation camps. Their heads were shaved and they were forced to wear traditional clothes. The situation did not get any better for the youth after the military takeover in 1968. Even though the former regime was castigated for taking people’s freedom away, for being worse than the colonizer in its destruction of African traditions, and for being against free enterprise, the soldiers who replaced the militia continued to patrol the streets of Bamako in search of rebellious and alienated youth. It was clear, therefore, that to both the independence leaders and the military regime in Bamako, the youth in Sidibé’s photographs were not obeying the teachings of independence, nationalism, and tradition. They were mimicking the culture of the colonizer, which shut the door to authentic self-actualization. Looking at Sidibé’s photographs today, it is possible to see what was not visible then on account of the rhetorical teachings of revolution. It is indeed clear to me that the youth’s refiguration of the independence movement, their appropriation of the political history of decolonization, and their representation of their freedom were all misrecognized by their elders. According to Bourdieu, one can obey the past without representing it.4 In assessing the youth’s continuity with and transformation of the political history of independence in Bamako, it is therefore

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critical to look at the degree to which the youth had internalized and incarnated the lessons of the revolution. The youth had quickly internalized African culture, collapsed the walls of binary opposition between colonizer and colonized, and made connections beyond national frontiers with the diaspora and international youth movements. That the theory of decolonization could not recognize this at the time as anything but mimicry and assimilation is an indication of its failure to grasp the full complexity of the energies unleashed by independence. First of all, the youth saw in the departure of the colonizer from Bamako an opportunity to seize the city for themselves to become the modernizing agents of their home town, and to occupy its leisure spaces. Independence also enabled them to exhibit African cultures that until then had been forbidden by the colonizer. Thus, they could go back and forth in history without interruption, and without the permission of the new government or the traditional religious and tribal leaders. The youth in Bamako felt free to pick and choose as a prerogative of their new freedom. Their dress style, their point of view, and their corporal hexus constituted a new habitus in Bamako that was misrecognized by their parents. What I call here “change of habitus,” following Pierre Bourdieu, can also be understood through Raymond Williams’s notion of change in patterns of life. For Williams as well, the training of youth in social character and cultural patterns may result in youth’s developing its own structures of feeling, which will appear to come out of nowhere: “The new generation responds in its own ways to the unique world it is inheriting, taking up many continuities that can be traced, and reproducing many aspects of the organization, which can be separately described, yet feeling its whole life in certain ways differently, and its shaping its creative response into a new structure of feeling.”5 Clearly, what Bourdieu and Williams are saying is that one cannot predict the outcome of a revolution, nor the new habitus that will develop out of power relations, nor from where the youth will draw the resources for their creative and epistemological ideas. As the civil rights leaders in America have learned from the generation that succeeded them, it is much easier to liberate people than to tell them how to live their freedom. Unlike revolution, freedom cannot be taught—otherwise, it is a freedom that is no longer free, a freedom under siege. The youth in Bamako did not want to be restricted in their freedom, and therefore used it to express the themes and aesthetics of Pan-Africanism, the black diaspora, and rock and roll—some of which were in continuity with the independence movement, and some in contradiction with it. If one follows Bourdieu’s statement that habitus + capital = action, the challenge in Sidibé’s photographs becomes how to describe the components of

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the youth’s actions, the extent to which they represent an accumulation of social and cultural capitals in relation with diaspora aesthetics and bodily dispositions that Bourdieu terms, appropriately, habitus.6 The youth in Bamako, as in most modern African capitals in the 1960s, began building their social networks in high schools and soccer clubs. High schools were important centers of intellectual and cultural life in Bamako because, in the absence of a university at that time, they constituted the sites where the future elite of the nation gathered. Most young people in those days met at high school or at soccer games organized between schools, before forming their own clubs or Grins, to use the common Bamako term of reference. By the time high school youth had formed their own Grins, they had already self-selected among the masses of students, cemented their friendships, and developed attitudes and styles specific to them. They would have already chosen a name—the Rockers, the Temptations, the Rolling Stones, the Soul Brothers, the Beatles—by which they were known, and they spread their reputation throughout Bamako. The name was not the only important thing about a club; it was also crucial to have a permanent location associated with it—e.g., the Beatles of MedinaCoura—a sort of meeting place or headquarters for the group, with a turntable and a good collection of records, magazines, and detective novels that club members exchanged among themselves. Most Grins also had a shortwave radio which received BBC Radio, the Voice of America, and Radio France International. The Beatles of Medina-Coura regularly had the local newspaper L’Essor, and occasionally one could find French papers like Le Monde and magazines like Paris-Match and Salut les copains, from which they removed the posters of the Beatles of Liverpool, Jimi Hendrix, and James Brown to put on the wall. Finally, every Grin had green tea, which the members drank while listening to music and debating several topics of the world at the same time. Every club built its reputation and symbolic capital by accumulating these important resources at the headquarters, and by organizing parties and picnics to which rival members of other groups were invited. It has been estimated that by the time Malick Sidibé was at the height of his career, there were more than 250 clubs in Bamako.7 Besides debating over favorite rock stars, political discussions constituted an important characteristic of Grins in 1960s Bamako. Indeed, the way the youth talked about the music, movies, or detective stories was always related to their own condition in Mali. They always made a comparison between themselves and the people they saw on album covers, magazines, movie posters, as well as fictional characters in movies and novels. They debated the rock stars’ stances against the war in Vietnam, racial discrimination in America, the peace

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movement associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, and Muhammad Ali as the world’s heavyweight boxing champion. Discussion of African politics was generally concerned with the heroes of independence— Sékou Touré, Lumumba, and Nkrumah—who defied France, Belgium, and England respectively. The youth elevated these freedom fighters to the rank of icons like Mao Zedong, John F. Kennedy, André Malraux, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro. The Grins were important centers of social criticism about what was lacking and what was needed in Bamako. People talked heatedly about the government, the restriction of people’s freedom, and the incapacity of African nations to unite. Some argued that neo-colonialism was the reason that the leaders could not get together, and that France and the CIA still had their hands in our affairs. People at the Grin also saw themselves as rebels in Bamako against traditional societies, which wanted to interject more religion into their lives and control the way they dressed and behaved. The youth thought of themselves as open-minded and tolerant toward each other, regardless of ethnic and caste origins. They therefore did not want to go back to the separation of people by tribe that was encouraged during the colonial era. They defined themselves first of all as Bamakois, Malian, and Pan-African, as opposed to Bambara or Fulani. Not only did the youth in Bamako organize their own Woodstock to listen to music in a public sphere and protest against apartheid in South Africa, Ian Smith’s regime in Rhodesia, and the imprisonment of George Jackson and Hurricane Carter in the USA, but they also continued to resist the military dictatorship in Mali until its overthrow by a mass movement in 1992. When I look at Sidibé’s photographs today, I see this political action of the youth of Bamako: the way in which they transformed the themes of independence and adapted them for themselves, to the point of not being recognized by their elders. Because Bamako’s youth could not content themselves with the mechanistic application of the political theory of independence, nor return to certain African traditions which would have imposed limits on their freedom, they turned to Pan-Africanism and the African diaspora as powerful sources for the expression of their freedom.

The Impact of James Brown Looking back at the period between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s in Bamako, it is clear that the single most important factor, after independence, that introduced change into youth’s habitus was their exposure to diaspora aesthetics

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through rock and roll and the Black Power movement. And in this respect, it is also clear from the visual evidence in Sidibé’s photographs that James Brown was one of the most important reference that combined the ethos of black pride with the energy of rock and roll. As independence changed power relations in Bamako, the reception of diaspora aesthetics through popular culture opened the floodgate of youth’s energy and creativity. The youth could see themselves more easily in James Brown or in a glossy photograph of a defiant Muhammad Ali, than in any other motif of independence at that time. This enthusiastic embrace of popular culture from the United States may seem odd in a newly-independent socialist country like Mali. In Mali, as in other African countries, the US had at that time been identified as the symbol of imperialism and capitalist exploitation. It is therefore crucial to explain what James Brown and other diaspora aestheticians from North America were able to provide to Bamako’s youth that could escape the critical eye of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, but that was lacking in the other independence-era social and political formations. The identification with James Brown was total and uninterrupted; from the way he appeared in album cover photographs—as if caught in the middle of a trance—to the way his music and dance provoked the youth to action, James Brown was captivating. The dress styles that James Brown’s influence popularized among Bamakois included tight turtleneck shirts with buttons or a zipper, which the local tailors made from looking at the pictures on the album covers. The same tailors in Bamako also made the “James Brown” style of shorter, above-theankle bell-bottom pants; which were thought to enhance one’s ability to dance the Jerk or the Mashed Potato. In 1967, Malick Sidibé photographed two young women holding between them a James Brown album, Live at the Apollo, released that same year (figure 2.2). I remember that white suits similar to the one James Brown is wearing on that album cover were all the rage at dance parties in Bamako. It is also a measure of the popularity of the Live at the Apollo album that it appears more often than any music album in Malick Sidibé’s photography. There were also some songs on it, such as “Cold Sweat,” “There Was a Time,” “I Feel Good,” and “It’s a Man’s World,” without which no dance party in Bamako could rise to greatness. These James Brown hits, along with “Papa’s Got a Brand-New Bag” and “I’ve Got a Feeling,” remained at the top of the charts in Bamako for more than a decade. One of the girls in the photo is wearing a sleeveless blouse and skin-tight pants, while the other has on a checkered mini-dress reminiscent of the Supremes. They are both laughing and looking into the camera, each with one

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Figure 2.2 Malick Sidibé, Fans de James Brown, 1965/2008. © Estate of Malick Sidibé. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

knee bent forward and the other leg spread back as if to mark a dance step. The girl on the left, wearing the mini-dress, is holding the record album in the center, between herself and her friend. The other girl is pressing her body against the album as if she were dancing with it. The Live at the Apollo album thus becomes an important part of the composition of this photo. Inasmuch as James Brown is clearly identifiable here by his picture and by his name written in big letters on the album, one can say that he has become the third person in the photograph. By putting him in the center against their hearts, the two young girls transform him from a lifeless photo on an album cover to an omnipresence in front of Malick Sidibé’s camera. It is as if, in the photo, they were dancing with the “real” James Brown.

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It is also important to understand that the presence of the album in the photo helps redefine the young women. By seeing themselves in James Brown, identifying with the Live at the Apollo album, and becoming one with their idol through dance, they change themselves. The person looking at the picture also begins to see the two girls differently. For him, they assume a new identity that is secular and cosmopolitan. They are no longer stuck in the Malian identities defined by the tribe or by Islam. For example, in Mali, young women were not allowed to be seen by their parents dressed the way they were in this photo. Such conduct would have been deemed indecent by Islam. When young women went to the Grin or to a dance party, they smuggled their pants and mini-skirts out the window beforehand, and then walked out the door dressed in traditional clothes. They only changed into their modern outfits once they were far from home and unrecognizable. Clearly, therefore, diaspora aesthetics were opposed to the habitus imposed by tradition, home, and Islam, and which sought to control the young girls’ bodies. In this sense, identification with James Brown was an indication of where the youth in Bamako wanted to be at the time of independence, and of nationalist leaders’ blindness to these desires. In fact, the origin of this photo becomes indeterminate, as the two young women take on this new identity influenced by James Brown and diaspora aesthetics, one that had begun to emerge at the same time in Zambia, Liberia, Harlem, Senegal, Ghana, etc. The presence of James Brown in this photo helps therefore to explain the new habitus of postindependence, why young people dressed the way they did, and freed their bodies from the limitations imposed by older power relations. I call this a diaspora aesthetic, as opposed to a Malian or even an African aesthetic, because it is defined beyond the national boundary and united black youth through a common habitus of black pride, civil rights, and selfdetermination. The civil rights movement in America and the worldwide movement of decolonization were resources for this new aesthetic, and James Brown was the dominant symbol for the youth. James Brown, as a figure mediated through civil rights and worldwide decolonization, had become for the youth the link between the new freedom and an African identity that had been repressed by slavery, Islam, and colonialism. By that, I mean that there is a storehouse of African cultural and spiritual practices that had been forced into silence and rendered invisible by colonialism and Islam and that emerge to the surface when the youth enter into contact with James Brown’s music. It is no secret that both colonialism and Islam fought hard to rid Africans of their gods, rituals, and cultures. Colonialism imposed itself in a binary manner,

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collecting African statues and masks in order to burn them or send them to museums in Europe, and replacing them with the Bible. For both Islam and Christianity, polytheism was the root of evil, and they therefore sought to fill the African’s need for several gods with one God. In the process, they banned the priests who represented different gods, and left the rituals and dances unattended by an intermediary between the people and their creator. This destruction of the spiritual and technical base of African cultures is eloquently described in masterpiece after masterpiece of the creative writing of Africa and the African diaspora. In Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God, the African priest loses his place in the harvest ritual to the Christian missionary. In Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence, the anthropologist assists in the destruction of an African kingdom by collecting the masks and the oral traditions. In Maryse Condé’s Segu, Elhadji Oumar’s army of Jihad destroys the Bambara Empire, burns the fetishes, baptizes the king, and puts a Muslim priest in charge of Segu. By the time of independence in the 1960s, therefore, what we call “African” had been changed through and through by Islam and Christianity. Most importantly, the connections with the pre-Atlantic-slavery African had been destroyed or forgotten. The rituals seen today, performed for tourists or at the celebrations of the anniversary of independence, are fixed in time and devoid of any spiritual and technical meaning. They can no longer cure an epidemic, nor teach people the meaning of a puzzle. The presence of Islam and Christianity also means that people adopted a different way of praying that excludes dance, as well as a different disposition of the body which involves submission to God rather than an imitation of God through dance. It is therefore safe to say that Africans, who were famous in the literature of primitivism for their sense of rhythm, were without rhythm at the time of independence. James Brown’s music reconnected Bamako’s youth to a pre-Atlantic-slavery energy that enabled them to master the language of independence and modernity and to express the return of Africanism to Africa through Black aesthetics. The term “Africanism” has been used in a varied manner by diaspora authors and theorists, including Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) in Blues People, Robert Farris Thompson in Flash of the Spirit, V. Y. Mudimbe in The Invention of Africa, and Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark. My use of “Africanism” here is closer to the way Baraka and Thompson have adopted the term, and to Houston Baker’s8 concept of the “vernacular” in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature—all of which indicate the survival, transformation, and influence of pre-Atlanticslavery African cultures on modernist cultures. By subverting Christianity and Islam as the spiritual guardians of modernity, Africanism endows itself with

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distinctive resources that my friend and colleague Clyde Taylor calls “pagan modernism.”9 To understand the impact of James Brown’s music on the youth in Bamako, and what is here called pagan modernism, it is important, first, to make a detour to one of the pre-Atlantic-slavery cultures, which seems to have survived in James Brown’s own performance. I refer here to the Dogon of Mali. According to Marcel Griaule, in his classic book Dieu d’eau, Dogon cosmology revolved around men and women’s desire to be perfect like the Nommo.10 The Nommo were twin offspring of Amma, the Almighty God. Unlike their older brother, the incestuous jackal, who was ill-conceived through a union between Amma and the Earth, the Nommo were perfect in everything they did. They each had male and female organs, and would therefore reproduce without the other’s help. That is why the Dogon refer to the Nommo both as singular and plural; every Nommo is identical to the other, but also depends on the other like the left hand depends on the right. It is through their function in identity and binarism that the Dogon believe the Nommo to be part god and part human, part fluid and part solid, part water and part snake. The symbol of Nommo—variable and unlimited in Dogon cosmology and iconography—is also the vehicle for language. For the Dogon, the Nommo revealed the secret of language to men in three stages, each corresponding to a specific work and form of prayer. The first language, which is also the most abstract, came with the transformation of baobab barks into fibers with which to clothe the nakedness of the earth. Even today, the Dogon dress their masks and statues with these multicolored fibers that contain the most ancient language of Nommo, which is understood by very few people. The second language was revealed through the technique of weaving, and it was clearer, less sacred, and available to more people. Finally, the third language came with the invention of drums. It was a modern and democratic language understood by all. For the Dogon, mastery of these languages brought men closer to the purity and perfection of Nommo and placed them in control of their environment. Through imitation of the Nommo’s language, men could therefore partake of a divine essence and, like the eight ancestors of the Dogon, become Nommo themselves. If Nommo were in the drums that they had made to teach men language, then men, by beating drums, were speaking the language of Nommo, and they themselves were Nommo at that moment. As Ogotemmeli, Griaule’s interlocutor in the book, puts it, men were “learning the new speech, complete and clear, of modern times.”11 When we return to James Brown in the 1960s and consider his impact on the youth of post-independence Africa, we realize his Nommo-like quality: the desire to elevate men and women to perfection. James Brown is a Nommo—known as

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“shaman” elsewhere in the world—part god and part human, who teaches the world, through his music and dance, the complete and clear language of modern times, and who makes Bamako’s youth coincide with the Dogon desire for perfection. Just like the Nommo was one with the drum—the beating of which taught men the language of modernity—James Brown was one with his band, though his was never complete without his red cape and his invitation to the masses to become part of his groove. People often say that James Brown, the hardestworking man in show business, does not say much in his songs, that he is notorious for limiting himself to a few words like, “I feel all right,”“You’ve got it, let’s go,”“Baby, baby, baby.” In fact, James Brown, like the Nommo, uses his voice and vital power to imitate the language of his instruments—the trumpet and drums—to make his audiences understand better the appropriate discourse of our modern condition. James Brown’s mimicry of the sound of his instruments—letting them speak through him as if he were one with them—communicated more clearly with his audiences the meaning of 1960s social movements than any other language at the time. By subordinating human language to the language of the drums, or the language of Nommo, James Brown was partaking in the universalization of diaspora aesthetics, the freedom movements, and the discourse of black pride. The reception of the Live at the Apollo album in Bamako was due in part to the fact that it contained a complete and clear language of modernity with which the youth could identify. James Brown’s didactic concern with history and the names of dance steps and American cities was an important factor of identification with the album for the youth who knew that their independence was tied to the civil-rights gains of people in the diaspora. If we take, for example, a James Brown song, “I Feel All Right,” it is easy to account for its popularity in Bamako. James Brown begins the tune in a ritualistic manner by addressing everybody in the building. Like the high priest in a ritual about to begin, James Brown, calling himself the “groove maker”—as in rainmaker, the priest of a harvest ritual or funeral—makes sure everyone is ready for the amount of soul, or vital energy, that he is about to unleash. He even summons the spirit of the Apollo Theater in these terms: “Building, are you ready? ’Cause we’re gonna tear you down. I hope that the building can stand all the soul. You’ve got a lot of it coming.” Then James Brown, at once the son of Nommo and Nommo himself, proceeds to explain the dance steps he is about to teach the world. He performs the dance a few times, asking the audience to repeat after him. Repetition is the key word here for diaspora aesthetics: it marks the rhythm and accent of this new language. By imitating James Brown, one becomes James Brown, just as the imitation of Nommo’s acts brings men closer to him.

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Interestingly, as in all rituals, there is the risk of impurity, of something not working properly, and therefore threatening the success of the performance. During the song, we hear James Brown struggling with a man who was not properly following the directions he was giving: “My man always got to get his own extra thing in there,” says an amused Brown. But, luckily for the people at the Apollo that evening, the groove prevailed and the ritual was a success, as James Brown screams: “You got it? Yeah, you got it! Now, let’s go!” It is at such moments that James Brown reminds us most of Nommo, who could empower men and women and put them in control of their environment. In Griaule’s book, Ogotemmeli states that the first dance ever was a divination dance: “The son of God spoke through dance. His footsteps left marks on the dusty dance floor, which contained the meaning of his words.”12 Ogotemmeli goes on to say that the masked society that performs the dance rituals symbolizes the whole system of the world. When the dancers break onto the scene, they signify the direction in which the world is marching, and predict the future of the world. Similarly, one can say that, in Live at the Apollo, James Brown—son of Nommo and Nommo himself—was speaking with his feet and tracing, on the floor of the auditorium, the divination language which contained the future directions of the world. The youth in Bamako as well were interpellated by this movement, the language of which was absent from the other political movements of the time in Mali. They found the political and spiritual articulation of independence through James Brown’s music, and thereby could become Nommo themselves; that is to say, connect with the African culture of pre-Atlantic slavery. Ogotemmeli, the Dogon philosopher, likes to state that, for human beings, articulation is the most important thing. That is why the Nommo provided men and women with joints, so that they can bend down and fold their arms and legs in order to work. According to Dogon cosmology, the Nommo had placed one pebble at every joint—at the waist, the knee, the ankle, the wrist, the elbow, the neck joint, etc.—to symbolize a Dogon ancestor that facilitated the articulation of the joint. The movement of every joint is therefore tied to the presence of Nommo, who blesses and instructs it. The concept of articulation is also important for the system of language that permeates all Dogon activities. Language, for the Dogon, is opposed to silence and nakedness, while being at the same time the essence of action, prayer, and emancipation. Language prolongs action through prayer, and articulation provides every language system with its accent, rhythm, semantic content, and form. Ogotemmeli states that for each one of the eight Dogon ancestors, there is a language which is different from the others, and which is spoken by people in his village. The way a specific language is articulated by a

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people can also be read through the way they dance and communicate with God. In a word, articulation determines for the Dogon the rhythm of the world by relating, through a system of alliance, left and right, up and down, odd and even, male and female. It is thus easy to see how important the system of articulation was for both communication and aesthetics among the Dogon people. It was that which united opposites and created meaning out of seeming disorder, enabling men and women to enlist the help of their God and prolong their action on earth. For me, the two components of diaspora aesthetics—repetition and articulation, in other words, the incessant presence of Nommo and the joining of opposites in time and space—were missing in Bamako before the time of independence. It obviously had been suppressed by colonialism and Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions, which understood modernism as teleological, lacking in repetition and contradiction. To state this differently, before independence the youth in Bamako were mostly Muslim boys and girls without rhythm, because they were detached from Nommo and other pre-Atlantic slavery cultures. So imagine James Brown in Live at the Apollo when, in a song called “There Was a Time,” he invokes Nommo in these words: “But you can bet / you haven’t seen nothing yet / until you see me do the James Brown!” To “do the James Brown” in this instance is to speak a different language with one’s body, to improvise a new dance different from the ones mentioned before, like the Jerk, the Mashed Potato, the Camel Walk, and the Boogaloo. It is to dance with Nommo’s feet, and to leave on the dance floor the verb of Nommo, i.e., the complete and clear new speech of modern times. Finally, it is to perform one’s own dance of Nommo, without an intermediary, and to become one with Nommo and James Brown. In Bamako, in those days, James Brown’s music had an intoxicating power to make you stand up, forget your religion and your education, and perform a dance move beyond your ordinary capacities. As you move your legs and arms up and down in a scissors-step, or slide from one end of the dance floor to another, or imitate the blacksmith’s dance with an ax, your steps are being visited by the original dancers of pre-Atlantic-slavery African peoples. The Nommo have given you back all your articulations so that you can predict the future through the divination dance of the ancestors. For Ogotemmeli, to dance is to pay homage to the ancestors and to use the dance floor as a divination table that contains the secret of the new world system. Clearly, therefore, what James Brown was preparing the world for at the Apollo was the brand new body language of the Sixties: a new habitus that would take its resources from the civil rights movement, black pride, and independence. The catalogue of dances that James Brown cites, from the Camel Walk to the Mashed

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Potato, is composed of dances that the Nommo taught men and women so they could clearly understand the language of civil rights, independence, and freedom. In Bamako too, young men and women, upon hearing James Brown, performed dances that were imitations of the way Nommo swam in the river, the way the chameleon crawled and changed colors. The sun-dance of the Great Dogon mask, the thunder dance of the Kanaga mask, and the undulating movement of the snake were included too. In this way, the Bamakois took charge of their new situation, showed how the system worked, and predicted the future. Just as the Mashed Potato or the Camel Walk were coded dances that told different stories of emancipation, the dances the youth performed in Bamako were also expressions of independence and connection with the diaspora. James Brown’s music and other rock and roll sounds of the Sixties were therefore prefiguring the secular language that the youth of Bamako was adapting as their new habitus and as expression of their independence. The sweat on the dance floor, reminiscent of James Brown’s sweat at the Apollo—itself reminiscent of the sweat that runs down the body of Dogon dancers possessed by Nommo, is the symbol of the new and clear language pouring out of the body of the dancers. James Brown, with his red cape, heavy breathing, and sweat, is none other than Nommo. Looking at the Malick Sidibé photograph of the two young girls with the Live at the Apollo album, one revisits this new language and habitus of the Sixties. Curiously enough, at the same time that Malick Sidibé was taking photographs of the youth in Bamako, Ali Farka Touré, a blues guitarist from the North of Mali, was also imitating the songs from the diaspora. First, people would gather at night in schoolyards and cultural centers to dance to his modernized music. Then, Radio Mali in Bamako began to play his music on the air. There is one particular song by Ali Farka Touré from those days, “Agoka,” which takes several riffs from James Brown’s “There Was a Time.” It is therefore obvious that the youth used independence as an opportunity to latch onto diaspora aesthetics, i.e., a pagan modernist style opposed to religious modernism and the “nationalist” and conversionist modernism of Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Jean-Paul Sartre—thinkers who could think of post-independence Africans only as part of the proletariat.13

Copying the Copiers In Malick Sidibé’s photography, we see an encounter between pre-Atlanticslavery Africa, the post-civil-rights American culture, and the post-independence youth in Bamako that produces a diaspora aesthetic. Thus, to say that Sidibé’s

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photographs are “Black photographs”—as a photographer friend, Charles Martin, has stated to me—is to affirm his participation in the 1960s in shaping the new and universal look of the youth of African descent. Because Sidibé’s photographs made Bamako youth so stylish, au courant, and universal, it was easy to identify with them. The youth in Bamako saw themselves in them, and they wanted to be in them, because the photographs made them look like the rock and roll idols and movie stars they wanted to be. To say that the youth in Bamako saw themselves in Sidibé’s photographs is to state that his style was modern, and that his photographs presented a Bamakois that was beyond tradition. By leaving the studio to follow young people outside, Sidibé was also discovering his style. At the conscious and unconscious levels, Sidibé’s eye was being trained to recognize the youth’s favorite movements and postures during dancing, their hairdos, and their dress styles. By following the youth, he began to acquire their aesthetic taste, instead of imposing old-fashioned photographic models on them. This is why the youth in Bamako considered Sidibé’s photography to be realistic: he recognized their style and used his camera to immortalize it. Sidibé saw the emergence of a rebellious youth in Bamako who wanted to demarcate themselves from the rest through their love of rock music, dancing, and dress style. By photographing them in the manner in which they wanted to be seen, Sidibé too was able to distinguish himself from other photographers in the city. Sidibé, then, copied the youth who themselves were copying rock stars and movie stars. And if we consider that the youth in Bamako acquired their habitus by carefully watching images of James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, James Dean, Angela Davis, Aretha Franklin, and Mick Jagger in glossy magazines and movies and on album covers, it becomes possible to see these media outlets as important sources of Sidibé’s style. It is therefore no exaggeration to state that Sidibé, who never attended a photography school, had learned from the best in the field. By following the youth of Bamako, who were wearing flowered shirts made by famous designers—because they saw their idols wearing them in magazine photos—Sidibé was getting his eye trained by great photographers. And by following the copy of the copy, he was internalizing the history of photography without knowing it. It is possible to see the influence on Sidibé’s photography of great contemporary photographers from Richard Avedon to Andy Warhol, as well as that of blackand-white movie images. But what is important about Sidibé’s art is its ability to transform the copy into an original and to turn the images of the youth of Bamako into masterpieces of the Sixties’ look. Looking at Sidibé’s photographs

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today, it becomes easier to see how productive they were in the Sixties in shaping the youth’s worldview and in uniting them into a social movement. In this sense, Sidibé is the James Brown of photography, because he was not only the number one photographer in Bamako, but his photographs also helped universalize the language of the Sixties. Consider his single portraits of young men and women wearing bell-bottom pants, flowered shirts, and tops revealing the navels of the girls. It seems as if the individuals in the portraits define their identities through the outfits they are wearing. The bell-bottoms, in these pictures, become as much a feature of the portrait in claiming its position as a signifier of the Sixties and Seventies, as the person wearing them. In a way, the person wearing the bellbottoms is, like a model, celebrating the greatness of the pants to the onlooker. There is one particular portrait of five friends (figure 2.3), all of them wearing the same color of shirt and bell-bottom pants. They are standing facing the wall, with their backs to the camera. What dominates the visual field in this portrait are the bright black-and-white colored pants, which come all the way down to the floor and cover the young models’ feet. The rhetoric of the image implies that the five friends are identical and equal in their bell-bottom pants. In fact, this Sidibé masterpiece of the representation of the Sixties conveys a sense of redundancy, a mirror-like excess that keeps multiplying the image until it produces a dizzying, psychedelic effect on the viewer. This photograph is still remarkable for the youths’ daring and eccentricity in wearing the same outfit to a party. The expressionist patterns of their shirts and the black-and-white designs of the pants work together to produce a kitsch presentation, which erases individual identities and replaces them with a group identity. In other words, the portrait creates the illusion that we are looking at a photograph of a painting of five young men in the same outfit, instead of a live photograph. By wearing bell-bottom pants and sacrificing their individual identities for that of the Grin, or the new social movement, were indicating a break with tradition and their commitment to the new ideas symbolized by their eccentric outfits. Sidibé’s photograph captures this moment of the Sixties as parodied by itself—a moment of humor and kitsch, but also a moment marked by the universalism of its language. In this photograph, we not only see the location of the Sixties dress style in kitsch—the artifice associated with bellbottoms, tight shirts, Afro-hair, and high heels—but also the labor that went into getting it right. Sidibé’s photography defined bell-bottoms for Bamako’s youth and told them that they had to wear them in order to be modern. I have argued that Sidibé attained mastery of his craft by copying copies; that is, by following Bamako’s youth, who were themselves following the black

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Figure 2.3 Malick Sidibé, Les Amis dans la Même Tenue, 1972. © Estate of Malick Sidibé. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

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diaspora and the rock-and-roll social movement. It is now important to point out the significance of movement in Sidibé’s art. We have seen that the youth’s desire to have Sidibé follow them at dances and beach parties was based on their belief that studio photos were not real enough. For them, the way they dressed and comported themselves at the Grin and the parties was more original in terms of reproducing the energy and savoir-faire of the 1960s worldwide, than the mise-en-scène of the studio, which was stuck in the past. Sidibé had therefore to capture them in the details of their newly-acquired habitus. They wanted to be photographed looking like Jimi Hendrix, dancing like James Brown, and posing like someone in the middle of an action. The subjects of Sidibé’s portraits look like they are posing in the middle of a ritual. Their action can sometimes even reveal the content of the ritual they are performing. It is easy enough to imagine who was photographed in the middle of dancing the Twist, the Jerk, or the Boogaloo. It is even possible to hear certain songs while looking at Sidibé’s photographs. In a way, one can say that the postures and the forms of the body’s disposition in Sidibé’s portraits contain signifiers specific to youth habitus in the Sixties. Space is most significant in Sidibé’s shots, because the subjects are moving in different directions and the camera needs to account for the narrative of their movement in the shot. A depth of field is always required in order to reveal where the dancers are going and where they are coming from. It is therefore through the configurations of space that Sidibé captures rhythm in his photographs. We see the characters leaning backward and forward, pushing each other around, or moving in the same direction to mark the groove, as in a James Brown song. Sidibé’s portraits are possessed by the space, which they fill not only with the traces of the great music of the Sixties and the symbolic gestures of rock stars, but also with the spirit of great dancers, from Nommo to James Brown. There is always a narrative going on in Sidibé’s group portraits. Instead of the subjects revealing themselves for the camera to photograph, they engage in different activities, as if some of them were unaware of the camera’s presence. We see this already in shots with three or four people: they treat the camera more as a spectator to an unfolding story than as the reason they are posing. Looking at the images taken on the beach, for example, we can see the complexity of narrative in Sidibé’s photography and how the subjects seem to invite the camera to participate in its unfolding. Sometimes, each subject in a Sidibé portrait acts as if he were the main character in the shot. He attempts to achieve this level of characterization by manipulating the narrative time in the shot through a behavior that differs from the others. In one of the photos at the beach, there are

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six persons who all seem to be engaged in different activities. First, each individual is defined in space as if he were the focus of the shot and the others were there to enhance the mise-en-scène. Second, the facial expression of each one of the six people invokes a different emotion in the photo-contemplative, self- absorbed, playful, fatigued, or reacting to something off-field. At any rate, each of the characters in this shot seems to occupy a field of his own that is totally independent from the others. I believe that this predilection for narrative indicates two things in Sidibé’s art. First, the characters in Sidibé’s photography pretend to ignore the camera, or not to act for it, or simply to be caught in medias res, because they are posing like their idols on record albums, movie posters, and magazines. They are waiting for the moment of the photo to be like James Brown and Nommo, and to become like gods of entertainment themselves. It is their belief that Sidibé’s photos can transform them into stars, make them bigger than life, and that is why they act so dramatically in the photos. Each of Sidibé’s portraits looks like an actor in a black-and- white movie who has been asked to carry the action to the next level. By capturing movement—an action caught in time and space, which here I call narrative—in his portraits, Sidibé also enables each character to tell his own story. This act is political, insofar as it allows the youth in Bamako to seize upon their own individuality, away from tradition and the high modernism of the independence leaders. By looking like the modern black image, deracinated from nation and tribe, the youth in Bamako were also showing their belonging to Pan-Africanism and the African diaspora. Therefore, to say that Sidibé’s photographs reveal Bamako’s youth as alienated is to address their politics, which were more aligned with the diaspora and the universal youth movement. Finally, as I look at Sidibé’s album with my friend Diafode, I think of the pervasive influence of Hip Hop in Africa and the rest of the world. The young people participating in the movement today in Bamako are the ages of Diafode’s and my children. What Sidibé’s photographs achieve is to teach us to be more tolerant of today’s youth, to understand that their action is not devoid of politics, and to see in them the triumph of the diaspora.

Notes 1 This essay was first published by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, New York, in Paper Series on the Arts, Culture and Society, no. 11 in 2001. Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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2 André Magnin, Malick Sidibé (Zurich: Scalo Press, 1998). 3 Aimé Césaire, “La Pensée politique de Sékou Touré,” Présence Afticaine, 29 (December 1959–January 1960): 67. 4 Pierre Bourdieu, Seminar at College de France: Edouard Manet (Paris: 2000). 5 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 49. 6 Bourdieu, Lecture on Manet. 7 Magnin, Malick Sidibé. 8 Houston Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984). See also Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Blues People (New York: William Morrow, 1963) and Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Random House, 1983). 9 Clyde Taylor, The Mask of Art (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998). 10 Marcel Griaule, Dieu d’eau (Paris: Fayard, 1966). 11 Ibid., 74. 12 Ibid., 198. 13 Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre (Paris: Maspero, 1961); Jean-Paul Sartre, “La Pensée politique de Patrice Lumumba,” in Présence Africaine, 47 (1963): 18–58.

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Yugoslav Pop, Female Artists, and the Emergence of Feminist Agency Lina Džuverović

On 29 September 1964, arts journalists at Belgrade’s newspapers received an unusual telegram. It read, in Serbo-Croat: “I plan to arrive POP please meet me at the Graphic Collective Gallery POP On 1 October 1964, at 7pm STOP Olja Ivanjicki—flowers are not compulsory.”1 The enigmatic telegram turned out to be an invitation to the opening of an exhibition by Olja Ivanjicki—the first Yugoslav artist to claim to be making Pop Art. It was sent by the artist herself as a playful gesture, taking Pop’s entanglement with media beyond the gallery. Olja Ivanjicki’s keen desire to declare herself a Pop artist came after her exposure to Pop during the time she spent in the USA in 1962, supported by a Ford Foundation grant. Among the first of Yugoslav artists to benefit from such an opportunity, Ivanjicki found herself experiencing various aspects of American life, visiting New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.2 Travel and study grants became available to Yugoslav cultural workers from the 1950s onwards as a result of the political shift that followed the country’s split with the Soviet Union in 1948. While other Soviet “satellite states” continued along Stalin’s course, having scarce, if any, cultural links with the West, Yugoslavia rapidly shifted its political direction, embracing internationalism, introducing “self-management”—its own form of socialism, while also becoming a founding member of the Non-Aligned movement. The new political course led to the strengthening of links with Western, as well as African and Asian, countries creating a vibrant climate of internationalism, characterized by artists’ opportunities such as Ivanjicki’s grant, while also populating the country’s major cities with international students. The country also rapidly became the only regular “node” in Eastern Europe to host major international touring exhibitions, including Pop Art in 1966, sponsored by the cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris International and featuring screenprints and lithographs by major American and British Pop artists.3 73

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Olja Ivanjicki may have been the first self-proclaimed Pop artist in the country, enthused by her firsthand exposure to American industrial, fast-paced culture, consumerism, and artists’ playful engagement with everyday life, but her interest in Pop was by no means unique amongst her contemporaries. Young Yugoslav artists found themselves in a “hybrid” situation in a single party state, yet one with an open flow of cultural information, visa-free travel to most countries, and a modest level of consumerist pleasures—a form of “utopian consumerism.”4 For many of them, Pop became a critical site of articulation of the role of the artist in such a rapidly changing sociopolitical climate. But did Pop offer new freedoms to female artists who were negotiating a deeply unequal, patriarchal art system? This essay examines several female artists’ experimentation with Pop Art, in the context of women’s shifting position in Yugoslav society and the contradictions that underpinned its “hybrid” cultural situation. It covers a period of over ten years, from Ivanjicki’s 1964 Pop announcement to the countercultural, as I argue, post-1968 conceptualist Pop of Sanja Iveković and the early work of Katalin Ladik. I question Pop’s potential to not only liberate artists from established structures through cheap, accessible, often domestic materials, but also its capacity to give agency to the previously excluded female artists, enabling them to “act otherwise”5 within the complexities of Yugoslav patriarchy.

Yugoslav Approaches to Pop Art: Pop Reactions and Countercultural Pop Yugoslav artists’ engagement with Pop can be viewed as two temporally overlapping, but not entirely concurrent, distinct approaches which I have named “Pop Reactions” and “Countercultural Pop.”6 The two differed from one another not in terms of an affirmation or critique of consumerism and pop culture, but more profoundly, in the way the plurality of Pop idioms were used to articulate artists’ positions vis-à-vis the Yugoslav art system, and the very role of art in Yugoslav society.7 In the case of artists whose work I have characterized as belonging to “Yugoslav Pop Reactions”—the most prominent being Dušan Otašević, Dragoš Kalajić, Lojze Logar, Boris Jesih and Boris Bućan—the Pop idiom was used to contest the conventions taught in art schools in the 1950s and early 1960s. Artists challenged the focus on lyrical abstraction and the rigid rules imposed by the academies (for instance, the rule against the use of pure colors side by side, as

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this was reminiscent of painting the flag and was associated with craft, not art) in painting and sculpture by introducing figuration, flat surfaces, glossy paint, and non-art materials. The art system itself was not being put into question by these artists, only the way things were being done within it. Conversely, work made in the “Countercultural Pop” sensibility focused more on the political foundations of Yugoslav socialism, and its meaning for artists—in many cases, fueled by the 1968 spirit of disrupting the status quo, and putting existing structures under scrutiny. Many of these artists gathered around the newly opened Student Cultural Centers in Yugoslavia’s major cities of Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana, and were heavily influenced by conceptualism.8 Known as the “New Art Practice” generation, their conceptual art in many cases also embraced Pop strategies and materials. This was the case with early photomontages of Sanja Iveković and Katalin Ladik’s performance scores and collages, to name only two bodies of such work central to this essay. Pop sensibilities and materials were also at the core of the work of artists as diverse as the filmmaker and artist Tomislav Gotovac, the conceptual ecologically-aware work of the OHO group, the Zagreb-based Mladen Stilinović, the Subotica-based Slavko Matković and the group Bosch + Bosch, to name but a few. Artists belonging to this category combined the idioms of Pop and conceptualism to interrogate the role of art in Yugoslav socialism and to take art beyond the gallery. This work was much more politicized, with student magazines becoming a popular site for critical reflection. The difference between the Pop Reactions and Countercultural Pop approaches, in summary, lay in the raison d’être of the artwork, not necessarily in the work’s aesthetic and formal qualities.

From Partisan to Pin-up: The Shifting Image of the Yugoslav Woman The position of women, and certainly women artists who came of age in the 1960s and early 1970s, in Yugoslavia was colored by a conflicting value system. They found themselves uncomfortably negotiating the postwar legacy of the Antifascist Women’s Front (Antifašistički front žena [AF Ž ]) and the female emancipation that it had stirred on the one hand, and the gradual return of the prewar bourgeois patriarchal traditions placing women in charge of the domestic sphere (whilst still retaining the outward image of social equality) on the other.9 The gulf between the rhetoric of socialist emancipation and the reality of women’s lives was rapidly widening. The situation was further complicated by the

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proliferation of the schematic portrayal of women in magazines, Yugoslav film and advertising from the mid-1960s onwards. The public realm of media and advertising filled with women as sex symbols; temptresses; women as out of control (a particularly familiar trope in film in this period) or, indeed, women as consumers and housewives embracing the rapidly permeating consumer bliss of the new, Western-facing, liberalized Yugoslavia.10 Unsurprisingly, the female body became a dominant trope in Yugoslav Pop work of the period, with a slew of paintings and screenprints by male artists featuring fetishistic depictions of pin-ups and isolated parts of women’s bodies. Using Pop approaches of stripping away and paring down to the simplest elements of images, flat monochrome surfaces were dominant, reducing the image to schematic representations of their subject. The notion of women as a “virus” through which consumerism spread across the country seemed to underpin female representation across all spheres of public life in patriarchal Yugoslavia of the 1950s and 1960s. Not unlike their Western counterparts women became the prime target group (and protagonists) for advertisers, in particular for products related to fashion, make up, the domestic realm, food or family, leading to their association with spending and indulgence, and perception of them as a self-indulgent and greedy virus of consumerism. The public image of women rapidly shifted from the “petrified femininity”11 of monuments commemorating anti-fascist heroines of AF Ž , to the sexualized femininity of pin-ups, models and filmic temptresses who are eventually punished for their behavior and the freedom they have acquired.12 If anything, in socialist Yugoslavia, women’s roles became more complex, in a negotiation of what has since been theorized by feminist scholars as the division between “public patriarchy” (the state) and “private patriarchy” (the family).13 Socialist regimes, more broadly, were often characterized by contradictory goals in their policies toward women: “They wanted workers as well as mothers, token leaders as well as quiescent typists.”14 Despite the public declaration of her equality with male counterparts, the Yugoslav drugarica (comradess) lived with the expectation of always being well dressed and groomed as well as being a fast and efficient homemaker. This was summed up in the speech by the Slovenian socialist leader Vida Tomšič in 1948 in which she explained how the “comradess” would ideally aspire to fulfilling all of these roles: “all that we want—beauty, joy and diversity. We should teach our women how to dress well and how to clean their homes so they can do it quickly.”15 Within the rhetoric of equality and “brotherhood and unity,” which brought together people of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds across Yugoslavia’s six republics and two provinces, lay the sweeping generalization that “the

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women’s question” had simply been “resolved.”16 Feminism was broadly deemed unnecessary in such a climate, seen as a superfluous Western influence, with the general rhetoric that the legislated Yugoslav equality in the workplace placed the country “ahead” of other parts of Europe. The status of Yugoslav women was invaluable to the image of Yugoslavia, and their contribution genuinely central to postwar recovery in terms of necessary labor. Their contributions were, however, limited to “support roles” and instrumentalized for other purposes, and women lacked possibilities to define their own course of action.

The Gendered Disease of Consumerism and Pop The very notion of pleasures derived from the consumption of material goods or entertainment for its own sake was complicated in Yugoslavia by, as the historian Branislav Dimitrijević has argued, “two parallel but conflicting forms of cultural logics”17—the logic of Partisan asceticism and, on the other hand, “utopian consumerism.” While Yugoslav citizens by no means lived a life of scarcity, their leisure time was frequently linked to their working lives and organized (and thus also monitored) by their employers. A key element of Yugoslav everyday life incorporated enterprise-sponsored annual leave, rehabilitation on the coast from any injuries, and day trips—state sponsored, and controlled, forms of wellness, leisure and celebration.18 With so much government-organized, and generously subsidized activity, the Yugoslav government could argue that any other forms of leisure and entertainment were superfluous, as self-indulgent and unproductive. While the state-orchestrated forms of popular culture and leisure provided many benefits, they did not offer what could increasingly be seen in advertising, TV and film—a different vision of life fueled by insatiable consumerism. The notion of lifestyle choices was beginning to emerge. Although the consumption of both fashion and domestic products were aspects of consumer behavior that were broadly tolerated and could “pass” as fulfilling relatively practical needs, the unresolved tensions between socialist asceticism and the newly developing consumer culture meant that in Yugoslav patriarchy, women now appeared as “spoiled” for having developed desires that reached beyond a basic, practical existence. It is significant, then, in such a climate that the first Yugoslav practitioner to actively declare herself a Pop Artist was female, perhaps seeing Pop as a language in which she could articulate a response to the conflicting expectations placed upon her. Ivanjicki’s exhibition, held at the “Small Gallery” of Belgrade’s “Graphic

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Collective” art space, did not at first glance seem to share much with the cool, brash, bold distancing associated with Pop (figure 3.1). The exhibition consisted of a series of customized and hand-painted drawers and suitcases filled with found objects assembled by the artist. The exhibits, entitled Twin Drawers, Drawer Packed before the War, Taxi Suitcase (all 1964), etc., included a used tube of toothpaste, dry bread, war medals and old water pipes, packed into drawers and suitcases belonging to the artist. These pieces were more in line with Robert Rauschenberg’s assemblages—an artist well known to Yugoslav audiences after being awarded the first prize at the influential Ljubljana Graphics Biennial

Figure 3.1 Olja Ivanjicki, image of the artist next to her work at the Graphic Collective Gallery, during her solo exhibition “Pop Art,” Belgrade, October 1964. Courtesy of Olga Olja Ivanjicki Foundation, Belgrade.

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in 1963—than Pop’s preoccupation with mass production and consumerism. Ivanjicki’s was a local variant of Pop, seeking to bring the everyday into the gallery through ordinary and personal objects, but the artist was not yet ready to shed the emotional, memory-driven references to the war and the narrative of heroism prevalent in Yugoslav socialist modernism, the country’s official artistic expression. Above all, this exhibition served as a catalyst for Ivanjicki to publicly proclaim, with great enthusiasm, that she was now a Pop Artist— a phrase that she would go on to frequently repeat in newspaper and TV interviews. Despite its innovative spirit, Ivanjicki’s big Pop Art announcement did not leave lasting effects on the local art scene, nor did it enthuse Yugoslav audiences about Pop Art. Her exhibition was ridiculed, with newspaper articles proclaiming her work vulgar and aligning her ideas with Western decadence.19 In 1964, unlike the young generation of artists who were enthusiastic about new influences from abroad, the Yugoslav arts establishment still regarded Pop Art as a conformist artistic expression of American “bourgeois boys,” complicit and passive in their world made of “neon, colorful industrial goods, Coca Cola, adverts and chemically stimulated underage sex.”20 Ivanjicki was now seen as the voice of such decadence—a female agent of consumerism.

From Women’s Pop Reactions to Feminist Pop Conceptualism It is difficult to tell whether the reception of Ivanjicki’s early Pop enthusiasm would have been more favorable had it been directed towards a male artist. Perhaps the work was simply not developed enough, and Ivanjicki’s announcement simply an ill-timed publicity-seeking gesture. But the trouble Ivanjicki faced in finding a gallery to show her Pop project in the first place, coupled with the subsequent mocking and dismissive publicity and Ivanjicki’s eventual development into an archetype of a flamboyant and eccentric artiste persona, with frequent media appearances, but limited critical acclaim within the art world, points to a limited range of positions available to women artists at the time. Despite structural inequalities and conflicting demands of domesticity and work, a small number of female artists managed to successfully devote themselves to artistic practice, negotiating the heavily male-dominated networks governing academies, the state commissioning system, studio allocation as well as exhibition opportunities.21 Several experimented with Pop techniques, which in some cases

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continued to inform their practice, while for others it remained just a phase. Slovenian Metka Krašovec (1941–2018), for instance, produced a series of Popinspired paintings, becoming best known for Kokošja Juha–Sporočilo (Chicken Soup – The Message), 1968 (plate 1), which was a response to Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup series, with a domestic reference. Like Warhol, she turned to repetition, depicting a popular local brand of soup called Podravka. Unlike Warhol’s screenprints, though, in which repetition was suggestive of seriality and automation in line with the artist’s well-known statement, “Everyone should be a machine,” Krašovec’s soup logos were reproduced ten times, but painted manually, with the image varying substantially in size and level of detail— echoing a more modest and less mechanized form of consumerism. With tabloids and magazines now a feature of daily life, print media became both a material to physically cut up and deploy in artworks bringing forth new meanings, and a source of content, be it political events, pop culture and celebrity stories, or advertising. For the Zagreb-based sculptor Vera Fischer (1925–2009) the turn to Pop marked a departure from her eclectic sculptural and installation works. It was precisely the appeal of tabloid imagery that drew Fischer to collage in the late 1960s. Works such as Pasji život (A Dog’s Life), 1968–72 (plate 2), illustrated the liberal spirit in Yugoslavia, creating overwhelming scenes by collaging fashion adverts featuring domestic appliances, food and animals. Fischer’s collages humorously embraced and reimagined the promise of consumer bliss, lightheartedly mocking its seduction. Unlike, for instance, the political magazine and newspaper collages of Martha Rosler, who in the same period in the United States produced sharply critical works, such as House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, 1967–72, juxtaposing consumer-driven culture and its deliberate blindness to violence and war, Fischer’s collages were neutral in tone, offering no such juxtapositions. Instead, Fischer’s denselypopulated collages gave a sense of saturation, a humorous play with scale and motif, inciting a sense of being overwhelmed by consumer offerings. In the diverse modes and styles of their Pop Reactions Ivanjicki’s, Krašovec’s and Fischer’s works spoke of life in Yugoslav society to a certain extent, but none of the artists directly tackled gender inequalities. A head-on engagement with the realities of being a female artist, and citizen, in the contradictory Yugoslav system was first introduced in the photomontage work of the pioneering conceptualist and feminist artist Sanja Iveković (b. 1949), an artist of a younger generation. Iveković’s first forays into popular culture marking her engagement with Pop Art began while she was still a student at the Department of Graphics

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at Zagreb’s Academy of Applied Arts. Between 1967 and 1968, the artist made a number of works directly responding to Warhol’s 1964 work Jackie, a series of screenprints of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that Iveković encountered at the aforementioned exhibition Pop Art at Zagreb’s Gallery of Contemporary Art in March 1966. Her day job in a local newspaper during her studies gave Iveković the tools to incorporate current events into her art (plate 3). The artist used one of the printing plates found in its office as a basis for a series of screen-printing experiments. For Iveković, the traditional disciplines taught at the academy were of little interest and she found “the notion of autonomous art and the modernist paradigm rather alien.”22 Pop Art and minimalism, conversely, as she explains in an interview, were deemed subversive in an environment whose idea of art was lyrical expressionism, abstract expressionism and academic figuration: “Pop Art or minimal art was something seen as simply non-artistic.”23 Moreover “being of a politicized generation,” she sought to address issues that she deemed important at the time, which explains the focus of her screenprints on news items and current political issues. While only one sheet of prints survives from Iveković’s experimentation with the found printing plate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s image, this student work’s focus on a female Pop icon is also an early indication of Iveković’s desire to explore the relationship between women and media. Iveković followed this project with one that references the events of the “Croatian Spring,”24 a political movement demanding more autonomy for Croatia, which would be suppressed by force in 1972. Here she underscores female agency by shifting from a politician’s wife to the figure of a female politician—Savka Dabčević-Kučar— one of the first female politicians in the country whose image accompanied a magazine article. Iveković used the printing plate to create a number of screenprints in different colors and textures (none of the prints survive, only the printing plate). Iveković’s early Pop experiments are a potent prelude to the artist’s 1970s photomontages—the signature modus operandi of her feminist conceptual multimedia work for which she is now celebrated. They foreshadow her turn to media-found imagery—including filmed TV footage—for her considered investigation of female subjectivity in Yugoslav society, media culture and consumerism. Whilst Iveković never considered herself a Pop artist per se, her use of materials and her direct engagement with current events and media meant that an underlying Pop element remains central to her practice to this day,

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resulting in her becoming the only Yugoslav female artist to be included in the Tate’s The World Goes Pop, 2015, exhibition, which sought to revisit not only Pop’s geographies, but also its gender bias.25 From the outset Iveković focused on destabilizing the notion of gender as fixed, pointing to its socially constructed nature by exposing the artifice of image-making and the politics of the gaze. Developing her student “pop experiments” further in her subsequent work, in the photomontage series for instance Tragedy of a Venus, Double Life, Sweet Life, and Bitter Life, all produced between 1975 and 1976, she used images of women culled from newspapers and magazines, juxtaposing anonymous models and international celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe, with photographs from her own family albums. These works, initially produced and exhibited as books, embraced Pop’s possibility of distribution and multiplication, mimicking the format they were critiquing. Repetition and seriality were central tropes in these series, used by Iveković to problematize and destablize the associations with femininity, in each instance reaffirming the construction of a gendered body through repeated gestures, movements, and situations. Iveković’s use of her own family photographs in the photomontages showed just how much such representation is already embedded in women’s visions of themselves.26 Iveković’s own personal photographs used in her photomontages often predated the magazine imagery by several years, or in some cases over a decade. For instance, in Double Life (plate 4) Iveković’s own portrait on the left was taken in 1962 while the magazine image on the right dates from 1975. Iveković’s photomontages were not only critical of the mediated female body, they complicated the sociocultural construction of that body as Iveković positioned herself as the subject at the receiving end, immersed in the succession of acts that produce the performance of femininity. For Iveković, advertising images are always already present, involuntarily embedded in her own private negotiation of gender. Feminist Pop can be seen also in Katalin Ladik’s collages (plate 5). The Yugoslav artist of Hungarian origin began her career in the early 1960s by taking part in a children’s radio program involving experimental sounds and voices. It was not long before Ladik applied her interest in experimental sound and acting by taking part in numerous avant-garde theater productions, later joining the conceptual art group Bosch + Bosch. Comprising a body of work created between 1971 and 1979, inseparable from her pioneering work in performance, sound poetry, film, and theater, her collages served primarily as visual scores for her performances. Ladik’s approach was that of a bricoleur, collating and

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repurposing material from the domestic sphere—dressmaking patterns, magazine adverts, Letraset, her child’s school materials—both in her collages and performances.27 The material in Ladik’s collages was of genuine, practical use to her—be it dressmaking patterns from magazines that the artist used to make clothes for her young son, or the collage paper he used for his school assignments.28 For instance, the work Laž Papir, 1973, that featured the Yugoslav flag with an overlay of the word laž meaning “a lie” was cut out from a fragment of the cover of Ladik’s son’s collage paper book for school. The word kolaž (collage) was found on its cover, but Ladik split it in two to spell out the word laž. Although elements of humor and cynicism were present in the work, Ladik’s was not a detached position, instead she created work from the debris of life itself as a bricoleur. Ladik spoke of her deliberate decision to bring everyday life into her work: By then I was already a rebellious woman, and I had been humiliated precisely on the grounds of being a woman, so I thought . . . I deliberately started to make work from my own world. I started sewing . . . all of these things I used, I had all these things—the shears, I’d completed a pattern-cutting course, so that I could sew for myself, because it was necessary [to make clothes], both for myself and for my child.29

In another collage, Eil-Nitt, 1976, for instance, a section of a dressmaking pattern from a magazine is placed on music paper and combined with cut out letters. The collage serves as a visual score for performance, doubling up as an object in a gallery and a score for performance at events. By juxtaposing the “tools” of her domestic life with the realm of her public self as a performance artist, Ladik not only points to the tension in the experience of Yugoslav women, but also highlights the question of class and social standing by collapsing the distinction between high art and vernacular traditions. This tension created through the juxtaposition of dressmaking patterns—suggesting the need to make one’s own clothes—with the association of trained musicianship reads as a clash of two worlds. Social class was not to be spoken of in Yugoslavia’s supposedly classless society (according to its political rhetoric, if not reality) but, as Ladik’s work reminds us, women’s roles still continued to be shaped by much of the previous regime’s traditions, even if this was not to be publicly articulated. Ladik’s visual scores, in their activation through performance, question those paradoxes, articulating the artist’s own will to subvert the assumed female roles, while problematizing class

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and gender difference. Despite Yugoslavia’s egalitarian rhetoric, the space of public performance remained highly gendered, populated by male authors and female entertainers. While women could frequently be seen performing (pop culture brought about a host of female pop singers, dancers and entertainers), the best way a “good comradess” could be respected for being in the public eye was through her participation in group public ceremonies such as Tito’s birthday, The Day of Youth, performing traditional folk songs that celebrated the Yugoslav state and the beauty of the country, celebrating the leader or remembering the anti-fascist battle. Female performative roles were associated with the realm of folk culture, with the performer embodying the collective voice by carrying forward traditional folk material. Even by the 1970s, by which point numerous female pop singers could be seen in the media, performance and authorship remained separate. Ladik’s collages and visual scores, by contrast, actively incorporated the incongruities and difficulties of her own daily life in the work itself, collapsing the distance between the private life of a woman, wife, mother, homemaker (fille honnête) and the public life of the (often nude) performer (fille publique). Ladik’s work embodied the dual burden of being active in the workforce in an allegedly equal society, and the weight of responsibility for domestic and family life. The agency in Ladik’s work is thus located in the act of repurposing and activating the very elements that constrained her (domestic work, sewing) into active, outspoken, performative acts, using all the means at hand to articulate her experience. The use of disposable everyday objects (in her later performances of 1980s Ladik often used household objects, underwear or food as props— emulating shaving, cooking, dressing and undressing, wearing underwear over street clothes, etc), the voice, and the often naked or semi-naked body, were all means of speaking back, subversive acts of empowerment. Ladik effects a strategy of “détournement,” the repurposing of the visual language and tools aimed at reinforcing women’s traditional roles (sewing patterns, food, sewing machines, undergarments, make-up) with the aim of reconfiguring them to formulate her own critique of the constraints of patriarchy. Ladik was also particularly interested in incorporating folk traditions into her work, having previously studied oral folk song traditions (research she undertook in the 1960s with her first husband who was an ethnomusicologist). She has explained her interest in folk as a search of authenticity but, with an openness to consumerism:

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The reason I used folk elements . . . was that I wanted to become authentic. I did not want to imitate the Beatniks or to fight against consumerism, when in fact we couldn’t wait to have the opportunity to consume. Aluminium, plastic foil, cling film, we would wash the cling film three or five times to be able to reuse it [in performance]. I was certainly not going to fight against it [consumer culture].30

Even though her approach was close to experimental practices that were emerging across Europe and the US, Ladik was decidedly interested in the local: I decided to work from the world that I lived in, from my world. What did I need the Beatniks for? What did I need rock for? This was pop for me—this was my world. And I added some cynicism and perhaps some humor. This was my New York. By then I understood, that they [American artists] had their problems, I had mine. But if I were to do it with the same temperament, if I rebel just like they [Americans] rebelled against their circumstances, I rebelled against mine. I was not going to rebel against consumer society when I was poor.31

To conclude, we can view both artists’ work as feminist yet underpinned with different agendas, Ladik’s collage works dealt implicitly with her own position and experiences, while Iveković’s focused on structural inequality, reaching beyond her personal experience. The first artist in Yugoslavia to explore the gendered nature of her social context, Iveković’s early work pointed to the media’s assault on women and the absence of women’s voices in the public sphere. The explicitness of the manifestations of Iveković’s feminist agency could be attributed to the fact that she came of age in a moment when questions around gender difference begun to rise, even if they were not yet articulated as feminist. Immersed in the critical environment of the “New Art Practice” networks around the Student Cultural Centers, she was also closely connected with the members of the emerging feminist movement, including participants of the first feminist conference held in the country in 1978 at Belgrade’s SKC and the lectures series “Woman and Society” in Zagreb from 1986.32 From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, artists as diverse as Olja Ivanjicki, Metka Krašovec, Sanja Iveković and Katalin Ladik turned to Pop precisely for its enabling and liberating possibilities, as it catalyzed new ways of working and engaging with the present moment, freeing them from existing conventions and structures. Pop’s accessibility was indeed, as I have tried to show, a catalyst for new, previously unavailable modi operandi, breaking down the exclusivity of a professionalized studio practice and associated networks, often previously inaccessible to female

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artists. But without structural change, choices were limited. Every aspect of these young women’s lives was colored by the deep sexism underpinning the Yugoslav system. Pop’s liberating potential was severely hindered by gender stereotyping and the lack of engagement with structural inequality along gender lines. If social reproduction was still seen as the women’s domain, as was indeed the case in socialist Yugoslavia, then any departure from the responsibilities of reproducing life was likely to be seen as damaging to the socialist project.33 The simultaneous encouragement and vilification of women, bodies that stood as both, a virus of consumerism and a harbinger of a more prosperous Westernized lifestyle, while still carrying the load of social reproduction, created a near impossible predicament. Overall, Pop in its various guises stood at the intersection of new and often conflicting logics in the country, reflecting, and sometimes making visible the contradictions in this young country’s system. Even though, as in the West, Pop also brought about multiple setbacks, namely the objectification of the female body in the public realm, it did act as an enabler on the path of new, often feministoriented, articulations of the multitude of complex experiences of being female in Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s.

Notes 1 The telegram sent by Olja Ivanjicki was quoted in an interview of the artist published by D. Krajčinović in Večernje Novosti (Evening News) on September 29, 1964, with the title, “Sudbina izložbe—rešena u autobusu” (The Destiny of the Exhibition— Solved on the Bus). 2 Grants were centrally administered by the government and cultural workers had many opportunities to apply. Notable examples include the painter Mića Popović (1950, three months in Paris); Zoran Musić’s study in Paris, curator Želimir Koščević’s four months at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet with Director Pontus Hultén, and artist and museum Director Miodrag B. Protić’s research visit to New York’s MoMA in 1963, prior to opening the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade. 3 Pop Art took place at Zagreb’s Gallery of Contemporary Art in association with Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art. It included works by Allan D’Arcangelo, Jim Dine, Allen Jones, Gerald Laing, Roy Lichtenstein, Peter Phillips, Mel Ramos, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, John Wesley, and Tom Wesselmann; the catalogue is available at: http://www.msu.hr/#/hr/14965/. 4 The term “utopian consumerism” was coined by art historian and curator Branislav Dimitrijević, in “Utopijski Konzumerizam: Nastanak I Protivrečnosti Potrošačke Kulture U Socijalističkoj Jugoslaviji (1950–1970)” (Utopian Consumerism: The

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Emergence and the Contradictions of the Consumer Culture in Socialist Yugoslavia [1950–1970])” (PhD diss., University of Arts in Belgrade, 2011). Raymond Caldwell, writing about Foucault’s conceptions of agency, claims that agency breaks the link between voluntary choice or a desire to “act otherwise,” and the “moral, political and practical possibilities of making a difference.” Raymond Caldwell, “Agency and Change: Re-evaluating Foucault’s Legacy,” Organization, 14, no. 6 (2007): 769–91. Lina Džuverović, “Pop Art Tendencies in Self-Managed Socialism: Pop Reactions and Counter-Cultural Pop in Yugoslavia in 1960s and 1970s” (PhD diss., Royal College of Art, London, 2017). Exhibitions such as The World Goes Pop, Tate Modern, London, 2015, International Pop, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 2015, Ludwig Goes Pop + East Side Story, Museum Ludwig, Budapest, 2015–16, to name but a few, have been instrumental in bringing work from Central-Eastern Europe into the Pop context, as does the recent anthology, Annika Öhrner (ed.), Art in Transfer in the Era of Pop (Huddinge: Södertörn University, 2017). Intersecting with these curatorial initiatives are a number of feminist re-evaluations of women associated with Pop, from the pioneering Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968 (Philadelphia, PA : University of the Arts, and New York: Abbeville Press, 2010), to comparative explorations such as, Disobedient: Eulàlia Grau, Katalin Ladik and Women in Black, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana Slovenia, curated by Bojana Piškur. Yugoslav Pop has been theorized from diverse perspectives, by Branislav Dimitrijević, sociologist Radina Vučetić, Petja Grafenauer as well as Tanja Mastnak. But amongst these wide-ranging viewpoints, the work of female artists in the context of Pop has remained sorely overlooked. My research seeks to reposition and reinsert the multiplicity of female Pop expressions in the country from a decidedly feminist perspective. Student Cultural Centers were multidisciplinary cultural organizations, created by the Yugoslav state in the larger cities (Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana), following the student protests of 1968. They came with secure infrastructural funding and were administered under the auspices of the cities’ respective universities. The AF Ž was a women’s social and political organization founded on December 6, 1942, in Bosanski Petrovac in Bosnia, as part of the National Liberation Struggle (Narodno-oslobodilacka Borba, NOB) during the Second World War. AF Ž ’s goal was to unite all women in the struggle against the fascist enemy, through women’s participation in armed operations and diversionary activities, organization of child care, and women’s cultural and educational development. Examples of films portraying women as passionate, out-of-control temptresses include Lisice (Handcuffs, Dir. Krsto Papić, 1969) and Rani Radovi (Early Works, Dir. Želimir Žilnik, 1968). Term used by Bojana Pejić in Bojana Pejić (ed.), Gender Check: A Reader, Art and Theory in Eastern Europe (Vienna: ERSTE Foundation and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig; Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2010).

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12 Such examples have been elaborated in the work of art historians Ivana Bago and Antonia Majaca. The question of female guilt, in particular with reference to female roles in Yugoslav films, is discussed at length by Ivana Bago, “The Question of Female Guilt in Sanja Iveković’s Art: From Yugoslav Beauty Pageants to Wartime WitchHunts,” in Helena Reckitt (ed.), Sanja Iveković: Unknown Heroine—A Reader (London: Calvert 22 Foundation, 2013), 62–88. 13 For a detailed discussion of changing gender roles, see Pejić, “The Morning After,” in Pejić (ed.), Gender Check, 97–110. 14 Susan Gal and Gail Kligman (eds.), “Introduction,” Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life After Socialism (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2000), 6. 15 Vida Tomšič, “Speech to the Anti-Fascist Women’s Front Plenum,” October 10, 1948, as quoted by Pejić, “The Morning After,” 97. 16 In a speech entitled, “From Amazon to Partisan” (January 1944), the well-known Croatian poet, Vladimir Nazor, proclaimed: “women’s question is resolved” as part of the new Yugoslavia’s political position regarding gender difference. Quoted by Pejić, “The Morning After,” 99. 17 Dimitrijević, Utopijski Konzumerizam, 132, author’s translation. 18 Leisure time, public holidays, and entertainment in Yugoslavia are discussed in Breda Luthar and Maruša Pušnik (eds.), Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia (Washington, DC : New Academia Publishing, 2010). 19 For instance, Borba (The Struggle)—the official newspaper of the League of Communists—reported on Ivanjicki’s exhibition with a text entitled, “Pop Art or the Vulgarization of Art,” alluding to the gradual Americanization of Yugoslav cultural life, subsequently following with a mocking review titled, “U Kratko: Hm!” (In Short: Hmm!), sampling the mostly sarcastic and condescending responses to Ivanjicki’s exhibition from the gallery’s comments book. 20 Article published in the newspaper Borba, Belgrade, October 18, 1964. 21 Women were heavily underrepresented in most collectives across the history of Yugoslav avant-garde (a dominant modus operandi for artists in Yugoslavia across the twentieth century). They were also, frequently, not fully credited. The group Bosch & Bosch did include Ladik but she is rarely mentioned in the historical accounts of the collective, and, by her own account, she was frequently asked to work specifically on the sound elements of their projects, which she viewed as an input of lesser importance. 22 Sanja Iveković, interview with the author, April 2013. 23 Ibid. 24 The Croatian Spring (Hrvatsko proljeće) also called masovni pokret or MASPOK , for “mass movement,” was a political movement from the early 1970s that called for

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democratic and economic reforms in SFR Yugoslavia and therefore more rights for Croatia within Yugoslavia. In 1971, the Yugoslav authorities suppressed the movement by force. Sanja Iveković’s video Sweet Violence (1974) was included in the exhibition The World Goes Pop in 2015. In the interviews section of the exhibition catalogue, in response to the question, “Did you ever consider yourself (now or in the past) to be a Pop artist?,” Iveković asserted she did not consider herself a Pop artist, but a conceptualist, wishing to break away from the modernist tradition, seeing Pop as just another product of a capitalist mainstream culture. Jessica Morgan and Flavia Frigeri (eds.), The World Goes Pop (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), 123. For further analysis of Iveković’s early photomontages, see Ivana Bago, “Sanja Iveković: Becoming-Woman-Artist,” in Lina Džuverović and Lily Hall (eds.), Sanja Iveković: Unknown Heroine (London: Calvert 22, 2012). Iveković’s Pop strategies are also discussed in Zora Rusinova’s text, “Discourse of the Self: Self-Portrait in the Milieu of Gender Visuals,” in Bojana Pejić (ed.), Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (Vienna: Mumok, 2009), 125–31. Ladik’s feminist practices have belatedly begun to be acknowledged, and included in feminist revisiting of art from the region. Her work was included in exhibitions such as Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, Mumok Museum, Vienna, 2009–10; Re.Act.Feminism: A Performing Archive, various venues 2011–14; WOMAN: Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s, Photographers’ Gallery, London, 2016, and Mumok, Vienna, 2017. In an interview conducted by the author in November 2013, Ladik explained how, at the time, children’s clothes were not available at affordable prices in Yugoslavia and that most people made clothes for their children. Katalin Ladik, interview with the author, November 30, 2013, Budapest, Hungary. Ibid. Ibid. Held in Belgrade’s Student Cultural Center in October 1978, Drug-ca žena (Comrade Woman) was a constitutive event for the entire feminist movement in the country. For further information, see Chiara Bonfiglioli, “Comrade Woman. The Women’s Question: A New Approach Thirty Years After” (MA thesis, Utrecht University, 2008). Social reproduction theory (SRT) posits that human labor is at the heart of creating and reproducing society as a whole, and within this, reproducing different forms of inequality in society. Social reproduction theory, originating in historical materialism, continues to be an important concept, central to both feminist theory and activism. For a range of contemporary perspectives on SRT, see Tithi Bhattacharya (ed.), Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London: Pluto Press, 2017).

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“Everything for Money” Warhol, Kant, and Class Anthony E. Grudin

During its emergence in the early 1960s, Andy Warhol’s Pop work posed an unusual challenge to the predispositions of American art criticism. Two major critical paradigms, both broadly Marxian, had come to dominate the American art scene during the 1940s and 1950s: Clement Greenberg’s formalism and Harold Rosenberg’s existentialism. Where Greenberg emphasized the art object and its potential to acknowledge and criticize the constraints of its own medium, Rosenberg focused on artists as subjects, and their ability to approach a freedom of being through artistic production. Both approaches utilized elements of Kantian aesthetics to pursue a common project: protecting art from the encroaching world of profit and exchange. In doing so, however, they inherited from Kant a fundamental tension between egalitarianism and hierarchy with regard to artists and audiences: who, precisely, could afford to produce or enjoy art in the Kantian manner? A closer examination of the ambitions and paradoxes of these critical projects will thus help to illuminate the assumptions that Warhol’s work, with its unprecedentedly vulgar approach to needs and appetites, confronted and disputed during this period (plate 6). Kant’s Critique of Judgment famously argued that an artwork’s beauty depended on its “purposiveness without an end,” its seeming to conform to a purpose without specifically being governed by one.1 The result would be a “freedom in the play of our cognitive powers,” which produces “that pleasure which is alone universally communicable though without being grounded on concepts.”2 For Kant, the only way that art can provide the possibility of free, non-cognitive understanding between individuals is if it seems “free from all constraint of arbitrary rules,”3 while yet retaining a sense of finality. In this respect, the artwork resembles Nature just as the artist, as a Genius, resembles 91

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Nature’s creator, God: “Nature was beautiful, if at the same time it looked like art; and art can only be called beautiful if we are aware that it is art and yet it looks to us like nature.”4 Clement Greenberg’s description of the rationale behind avant-garde artistic practice in his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” remained strikingly loyal to Kant, both in logic and terminology, teasing out concrete readings of some of its more difficult passages.5 Like Kant’s artist, Greenberg’s avant-gardist resembled God by producing works that could not be justified by any outside standard: “imitate[ing] God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid . . . something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals.”6 Greenberg made Kant’s theory of God-given imitative genius historical, and proposed that this imitating of imitation takes its ultimate form in abstraction, where all reference to the outside world is abandoned, and artists take their cues only from the tradition of the medium as it has been handed down to them.7 Abstraction, he argued, “must stem from obedience to some worthy constraint or original . . . [which] can only be found in the very processes or disciplines by which art and literature have already imitated the former.”8 The logic is straightforward: if every equivalence to the outside world has been renounced, the avant-garde can only turn inward for its constraint. It is as though Greenberg has literalized Kant’s paradoxical proscription: the somewhat vague injunction to “purposiveness without purpose” becomes “purposeless [free from outside influence] purposiveness [governed only by its own rules].” What’s more, by proving itself unique and non-replaceable—a human creation that was “given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals” and could not “be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself ”9— Greenberg’s avant-garde artwork offered a refuge from the incessant leveling power of exchange, capitalism’s “endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier.”10 Both Kant and Greenberg occasionally worried that their versions of art would be more accessible to some audiences than to others. In a remarkably candid aside, Kant admitted that: “Only when the need is satisfied can one distinguish who among the many has taste or does not.”11 This remark significantly undermines the universalist ambitions of the Kantian critical project. Greenberg would make this problem much more explicit in his early criticism when he conceded that the avant-garde had always been financially dependent on society’s very wealthiest: “in the case of the avant-garde, [financial support] is provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached

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by an umbilical cord of gold.”12 The critical abstraction that he advocated, built upon the foundation of Kantian aesthetics, might only appeal to the most privileged subjects—wealthy, educated, independent. This was, for Greenberg, an unfortunate but unavoidable element of its development. Where the Greenbergian paradigm focused on the formal qualities of artworks, Kant’s thoughts on art addressed creative production as well. There, too, he installed strict requirements regarding motivating forces, distinguishing “art” from “handicraft,” and arguing that, “We look on the former as something which could only prove final (be a success) as play, i.e. an occupation which is agreeable on its own account; but on the second as labour, i.e. a business, which on its own account is disagreeable (drudgery), and is only attractive by means of what it results in (e.g. the pay), and which is consequently capable of being a compulsory imposition.”13 According to this prescription, in order for her activities to qualify as art-making, the maker must be motivated solely by her own inherent interest in these activities; any ulterior motives, most notably pecuniary ones, are understood to corrupt the process, detracting from the purity of creative generosity.14 Kant’s emphasis on the necessity of freedom for art-making played a central role in the thought of Greenberg’s most important contemporary critical rival, Harold Rosenberg. Where Greenberg had emphasized the art object and its potential to acknowledge and criticize the constraints of its own medium, Rosenberg focused on the artist as a subject, and her ability to approach a freedom of being through artistic production.15 In this way, he reversed the priorities of Kant’s theory of art-making while retaining its basic logic: instead of concentrating on the ways in which creative freedom defined art-making, Rosenberg emphasized the ways in which art-making defined and engendered creative freedom. Thus, where Greenberg had accentuated the aspects of the art object that guaranteed its autonomy (although his method implicitly presupposed an artist who must have created the autonomous artwork), Rosenberg located this autonomy first and foremost in the actions of the artist (which must necessarily reach their audience through some sort of art form, be it painting, sculpture, performance, or event): “With traditional esthetic references discarded as irrelevant, what gives the canvas its meaning is not psychological data but rôle, the way the artist organizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a living situation.”16 Rosenberg’s unfettered artist was the logical counterpart to Greenberg’s selfcritical art object; just as Greenberg’s artwork had to forfeit politics and representation to be political, the freedom of Rosenberg’s artist was guaranteed

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by her circumscription to the fine art sphere. For both of these theories, it was art’s independence, its autonomy, which paradoxically guaranteed it a critical purchase. Any attempt actually to affect social or historical change through art would only compromise art’s autonomy, and thus its political potential as well. But just as Greenberg’s paradigm relied on a satiated and sophisticated viewer, Rosenberg’s assumed a producer who transcended needs and appetites like hunger and rent. As Rosenberg argued, “The big moment came when it was decided to paint . . . Just TO PAINT. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value—political, aesthetic, moral . . . Art as action rests on the enormous assumption that the artist accepts as real only that which he is in the process of creating.”17 In order to attain creativity in Rosenberg’s terms, the artist must achieve a moment in which all physical needs and values are transcended. For both Greenberg and Rosenberg, relying on the framework of Kantian aesthetics meant building arguments with secretly theological and conservative roots. Critical investigations of this framework have unearthed the hidden economic principles that underwrote Kant’s vision of art. In “Economimesis,” Jacques Derrida linked Kant’s definitions of artistic form and art making—so vital to Greenberg and Rosenberg, respectively—along the axis of profit. In each case, art is a realm in which one is expected to forego compensation: the viewer through her recognition of an object that is purposeful without ultimately resulting in a purpose, and the artist through the purity of her pursuit of play. It is the notion of “salary,” and its supposed absence in art, that links the two spheres; as Kant put it: beautiful art must be free art in a double sense: it must not be a matter of remuneration, a labor whose magnitude can be judged, enforced, or paid for in accordance with a determinate standard; but also, while the mind is certainly occupied, it must feel itself to be satisfied and stimulated (independently of remuneration) without looking beyond to another end.18

Just as the mind enjoys art without seeking purpose, the artistic genius makes art without anticipating profit; in each case, the ideology of art requires an impossible subject free of needs, one who can work and play purely, without thought of payment; as Derrida points out, “The free man, the artist in this sense, is not homo oeconomicus.”19 If the Kantian artist is untouched by greed and the Kantian audience is uncorrupted by desire, then artworks can legitimately be expected to transcend the narrow boundaries of self-interest, and to enable free and true communication between otherwise constrained individuals and communities. Aesthetic judgment is meant to be potentially universal, and yet it

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rests on a hidden assumption of wealth and satiety. “The aesthetic,” as Michael Wayne has argued, “opens up a space for reflecting on interests (compulsions) precisely because it is not a direct reflection of interests (compulsions).”20 This Kantian fantasy of a world beyond appetite and remuneration underwrote the Greenbergian and Rosenbergian theories of art’s revolutionary potential. Both writers considered themselves Marxists during the period of their greatest innovation, and in both cases, Kantian assumptions allowed them to presuppose artistic freedom as a critical component in the pursuit of social justice.21 But this dream of artistic freedom was also a dream of class: Rosenberg posited a class of artists who were somehow free of all constraints of salary, while Greenberg posited an audience who could appreciate objects entirely on their own terms, and despite these objects’ complete refusal to appeal to their viewers in any paraartistic way. Needless to say, these artists and objects and viewers were ultimately as fantastical and unsustainable in a capitalist art market and economy as their Kantian models. No surprise, then, that both critics ended up deeply disappointed by what they saw as the commercialization of abstract expressionism in the 1950s—what Greenberg called “the turgid stalenesses of the de Kooning-Klineand-Guston school of Abstract Expressionism that had held the foreground of United States painting during most of the 1950s.”22 As Rosenberg disparagingly put it, “Here the common phrase, ‘I have bought an O—” (rather than a painting by O—) becomes literally true. The man who started to remake himself has made himself into a commodity with a trademark.”23 A fundamental tension characterized Kantian aesthetics as it was adopted by Rosenberg and Greenberg: on the one hand, as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière have separately remarked, Kantian creative production and aesthetic experience seem in principle to be available to everyone.24 This aesthetic egalitarianism might open onto the “communism of the senses” described by David Graeber and Alberto Toscano, the “social mobility of aesthetic judgment” proposed by Christopher Janaway, or the “ ‘empowered’ imagination” advanced by Jane Kneller.25 The stakes could not be higher since, as Wayne has argued, the Critique of Judgment investigates “a species-being capacity we have to remake the world, a remaking in which the imagination plays a crucial role.”26 But, on the other hand, as philosophers like Derrida and Kim Hall have noted, there’s a rarely mentioned hierarchism—structured around species, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, and class—built into both ends of the Kantian system.27 In order to survive, the artist must have the security to give without recompense. And in order to make proper aesthetic judgments, the viewer must be safe and comfortable enough to gauge the object without thought of appetite. The

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purposelessly purposive artwork forms the bridge between these fortunate groups. Subaltern populations, disparaged for their supposedly uncontrollable needs and appetites, were implicitly excluded from this system. Warhol’s entire career could be said to have been predicated on a rejection of Kantian disinterest, a turn toward appetite, which he and his audience frequently associated with subaltern or subhuman voices: animal, female, queer, “immature,” and/or working-class subjects, as well as people of color, all of whom were stigmatized for their alleged propensity to succumb to their appetites.

Warhol’s Anti-Kantianism In a variety of ways, the artistic production that coalesced around the name “Andy Warhol” in the early 1960s temporarily disabused itself of both imaginary solutions to this Kantian problem by insisting upon the irreducible roles of class, desire, appetite, and aspiration in artistic production and reception.28 Where Greenbergian formalism had premised the value of the avant-garde on an artwork’s ability to escape the equivalences of capitalist exchange by dissolving content “so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself,” Warhol’s work famously abandoned the injunction to abstraction, rendering itself nearly indistinguishable from everyday images and thus minimizing its distance from the world of exchange and profit.29 This minimization was accompanied by a corresponding embrace of the art market, the place of art in an inescapable economy of investment and exchange.30 Here Warhol’s critique of Greenbergian formalism bled over into its critique of Rosenbergian existentialism: the embrace of the market was paired with a new emphasis on mechanization and insincerity that seemed to abandon all pretense to artistic autonomy. As Rosenberg put it, in a scathing overview of Warhol’s career, “For de Kooning, art has been a ‘way of living’; for Warhol, it is part of one’s self-projection or something to do for gain.”31 Although Pop’s thematic transgression had a distinguished tradition in avantgarde practice, its financial transgression was relatively unprecedented. Artists affiliated with Dada had rejected the inviolability and autonomy of art, but had never reduced it to a purely monetary endeavor.32 Countless art- or craftmakers—designers, potters, advertising illustrators (like Warhol)—would have freely admitted to the financial impetus behind their work, but they would not have qualified as artists under Kant’s definition (nor were they granted attention by Greenberg or Rosenberg). Warhol’s move was, in this respect, groundbreaking.

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By 1963, he would tell an interviewer “I am going to stop painting. I want my paintings to sell for $25,000.”33 In 1964, he directly rejected the Kantian ideal of art-making for its own sake; the interviewer’s final follow-up question hinted at the anthropocentric stakes of the Kantian ideal: Q. If you are happy doing what you do, should you be paid for it? A. Yes. Q. If so, why? A. Because it will make me more happy. Q. And how much? A. As much as I want. Q. Are you human? A. No.34

This final question, and Warhol’s answer to it, anticipated Derrida’s critique of the Kantian aesthetic paradigm. The pure generosity that Kant sought to establish in artistic production was fundamentally a defensive maneuver, an attempt to install a firewall between the para-divine altruism of the human genius and all other lesser lifeforms.35 Warhol’s espousal of profit put his works’ thematic transgression in a new light. Where all previous efforts to reduce the artwork to an object of merely personal interest—Duchamp’s above all—had been quickly rehabilitated as profound, innovative, or beautiful, Warhol’s espousal of a purely financial imperative for artmaking raised the possibility that his art was in fact only interested, that it existed purely to stimulate interest in order to produce sales and therefore profit. By transgressing not just one but both of these Kantian proscriptions,Warhol effectively raised the possibility of a fine-art project that was openly and explicitly marketdriven at both its productive and receptive poles. As Thierry de Duve has argued, “It is only with late modernism, that of Warhol for instance, that the economic conditions of art practice, understood until then to be contingent and external to art properly speaking, became its subject, its substance, and its form.”36 Warhol’s contemporaries recognized this feature right away, bemoaning his “working class” or “peasant mentality,” his alleged propensity to “[do] everything for money.”37 Kant’s dual proscription did not just attempt to rescue the artwork from the trials and tribulations of market life; it also protected both the artist and the viewer from the difficulties of cross-class communication. Knowing that the Kantian artist created without thought of recompense, the Kantian viewer could imagine her as a creator beyond desire or resentment. Likewise, believing that the

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Kantian viewer had purged herself of individual interest, the Kantian artist could imagine her as approaching the artwork with a pure and uncorrupted receptivity. This fantasy of aesthetic equality and classlessness was still vital for some of Pop’s key collectors, who were not always so comfortable relinquishing the Kantian privileges of taste and disinterest. In his 1966 profile in the New Yorker, Robert Scull, “the pop of Pop [Art],”38 described a driver for his taxi company, with whom he “fight[s] all the time. We have these tremendous fights about how Callas handles the second act of ‘Tosca.’ He says that she should never go and open the door when she does—that she should take the paper from the dead guy’s hand first, not afterward. His cab’s waiting, meanwhile, all ready to go out, and he’s in here screaming about what a jerk I am about Callas. It’s beautiful!”39 The owner’s and the worker’s shared interest in art is imagined here to override the otherwise mercenary and exploitative dimensions of their relationship—Scull can even forgo a few minutes of his employee’s surplus value for the sake of the “beautiful.” Of course, for many established artworld voices, Scull’s claims to these Kantian privileges were offensively false and overstated. These voices insisted that someone from Scull’s class background—first-generation Jewish immigrant working-class, raised in New York’s Lower East Side tenements—could never attain the Kantian heights to which he aspired. After all, as Barbara Rose argued, the Sculls “learned everything they know from Andy Warhol,” who taught them not to be “afraid to own up to being all that was considered lowbrow, déclassé, grasping, and publicity seeking . . . vulgar, loud and over dressed.” Ultimately, Rose argued, the Sculls would be unable to transcend their class background, which Rose chose to racialize: their foray into Pop could only win them “that instant of recognition” gained by “the humblest Puerto Rican graffiti artist whose scrawl proclaims in the anonymous void: I am I.”40 *

*

*

In his 1958 poem,“Ode to Joy,” Frank O’Hara had imagined a vulgar, drive-oriented relationship to mass culture as being central to an emergent queer ethos: We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying on the pretty plains or in the supper clubs for our symbol we’ll acknowledge vulgar materialistic laughter over an insatiable sexual appetite and the streets will be filled with racing forms and the photographs of murderers and narcissists and movie stars will swell from the walls and books alive in steaming rooms to press against our burning flesh not once but interminably . . .41

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Warhol’s early work intermittently attempted to pursue this explicitly queer vulgarity, as in his remarkable drawings of feet and branded goods from the 1950s and early 1960s (figure 4.1), where queer attraction is twinned with the powerful appeal of the national brand, and in his early Pop paintings of Troy Donahue and Elvis Presley. But it quickly became apparent that these attempts would not be welcomed by contemporary critical gatekeepers: his homoerotic drawings were disparaged in the New York Times as “coy,” “sly,” and “provincial”;42 Michael Fried dismissed the Troy paintings for being overly influenced by a “personal predilection” that “mars the effect”;43 and, as Jennifer Sichel has shown, the editors at ARTnews chose to eradicate every mention of homosexuality from Warhol’s famous 1963 interview with Gene Swenson.44

Figure 4.1 Andy Warhol, Feet with Campbell’s Soup Can, c. 1960. Black ballpoint on white paper, 17 x 13.85 in (43.2 x 35.2 cm). © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Faced with this repressive atmosphere, Warhol seems to have responded by finding ways to balance or even disguise the queer vulgarity described by O’Hara with a vulgarity that could—and would—be accepted as universally “American”— “more concretely American than the American flag itself.”45 He did so by proposing an outside to abstract expressionism’s petty bourgeois vulgarity: the aesthetic world of the working-class American.46 In this way, he both literalized and challenged the Kantian framework that governed contemporary art criticism, cashing in on its universalism and egalitarianism while also highlighting and dramatizing the potential threats faced by its less privileged participants. Betty Asche Douglas, one of Warhol’s only Black classmates at Carnegie Tech, noticed Warhol’s class stylistics right away: “Like Courbet, who came from peasant stock and was on the upwardly mobile road via art, Andy wore his peasant heritage like a badge of honour. His use of the working-class vernacular was part of it.”47 Warhol’s work of the early and mid-1960s ventriloquized working-class Americans in a variety of ways. Iconographically, it took up a world of images that was directly associated with working-class “consumers”: brand-name groceries, comic-book characters, movie stars, and gruesome death scenes.48 And stylistically, Warhol’s Pop work flaunted a childish, anxious, impetuous affect that contemporary critical voices ascribed to the “impulse-following,”49 “inarticulate,”50 and “non-rational”51 working class, who were “profoundly different from the middle class individual in [their] mode of thinking and [their] way of handling the world.”52 Warhol’s jittery, restless, quasi-mechanical style drew heavily upon these stereotypes. In Warhol’s work, this anxious impulsiveness coalesced around his own ability to reproduce the imagery he took as his subjects—the cans and bottles and celebrities and headlines he seemed to find so appealing—and thereby to achieve a truly “participatory culture.”53 “Amateur cultural participation” is an apt way of describing Warhol’s style during the 1960s and after; this style incessantly tested the possibility of consumer-grade reproductive technologies—silkscreens, Polaroids, tape recorders, video cameras—actually contributing to the common culture, despite the fact that “no one thinks they’re professional.”54 Like women, homosexuals, and people of color, working-class Americans were widely disparaged by experts as childish or bestial in their impetuousness, and particularly susceptible to these promises of cultural participation.55 They were encouraged, not just to consume these mythic products passively, but actively to reproduce them—to participate in their cultural production. With the proper

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guidance, the working class and other subalterns could join in a neoliberal “utopia” defined by “the liberty of consumer choice, not only with respect to particular products but also with respect to lifestyles, modes of expression, and a wide range of cultural practices.”56 These cultural practices would be duly monetized through the novel and accessible technologies that Warhol embraced—silkscreens, tape recorders, 35mm cameras—all promising amateur cultural participation to even the least moneyed Americans.57 For the most part, neither Rosenberg nor Greenberg were able to acknowledge these working-class voices in Warhol’s work directly, let alone the queer voices that they partially disguised. Instead, they tended to group his work with that of other Pop artists, and to describe Pop as a middle-class style—“middlebrow” rather than “lowbrow,”58 as Greenberg would put it. Perhaps they had a point about Pop Art generally, and particularly its other most prominent practitioners: Roy Lichtenstein claimed to be averse to his déclassé source images, describing them ungenerously as “things we hate,” while Claes Oldenburg seems to have enjoyed dabbling in these sources without having to accept them as his own “native” culture.59 Warhol’s divergence in this regard—his hard-won “workingclass vernacular”—seems to have been registered only occasionally and negatively by the Kantian critics: in Rosenberg’s description of the Soup Can paintings as arranged “in narcotic reiteration, like a joke told over and over again until it carried a hint of menace,”60 for instance, or in Greenberg’s throwaway comment in a late interview, after years of professing at least a modicum of admiration for Warhol, that, “I find his art sappy. The big screen portraits and all these things. Who cares about them?”61 Schmaltzy, cloying, stoned, unthinkably unimportant, vaguely dangerous: this was how America’s most esteemed critics evaluated Warhol’s working-class voices when they deigned to remark them at all.

Notes 1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment [1790], trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 111. 2 Ibid., 185. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 For an early analysis of Kant’s influence on Greenberg, see Donald B. Kuspit, who argued that Kant “supplies the operational principle of Greenberg’s criticism” (Clement Greenberg: Art Critic, Madison, WI : University of Wisconsin Press, 1979,

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9). For an overview of the differences between Kant’s “subject-centered” and Greenberg’s “object-centered” approaches, see Paul Crowther, “Kant and Greenberg’s Varieties of Aesthetic Formalism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 42, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 445. Greenberg was cagey about Kant’s influence on his early work, telling Caroline A. Jones that he did not read the Critique of Judgment until after he was discharged from the Army in 1943. The claim is dubious, particularly since, as Jones points out in her comprehensive investigation of his intellectual development, Greenberg was already citing Kant in 1931 (Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 2008, 449 n. 72, 77). Greenberg would later proclaim that, “there has been no greater thinker on art [than Kant,] whose revolutionary insights into its nature go unappreciated or misunderstood even today” (“ ‘Americanism’ Misplaced: Review of Preface to an American Philosophy of Art by A. Philip McMahon,” [1946], reprinted in John O’Brian, ed., The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1986, 66); cited in Jones, p. 78. See also Mark A. Cheetham, who argues that: “Greenberg was in tacit agreement with the ultimately humanist purpose of Kant’s interest in the purity of disinterestedness and aesthetic autonomy” (Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 88). For an opposing view, see David Craven, who argues that many of Greenberg’s premises “are pre-Kantian in a primitive empiricist way” (“Clement Greenberg and the ‘Triumph’ of Western Art,” in Brian Winkenweder, ed., Art History as Social Practice: The Collected Writings of David Craven, Boston, MA : Brill, 2017, 222). Clement Greenberg, “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” (1939), reprinted in, John O’Brian (ed.), The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1 (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1986), 8. See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 47, and Paul Guyer, “Introduction,” and Brigitte Sassen, “Artistic Genius and the Question of Creativity,” in Paul Guyer (ed.), Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays (Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Guyer points out that: “the centrality of the concept [of genius] to Kant’s entire theory of fine art was unprecedented” (xvii–xviii). Greenberg, “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” 9. Ibid., 8. Karl Marx, “Notebook III ,” [1857], in Grundrisse (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 334. The result of this flattening in the cultural sphere is, of course, kitsch. It is capitalism’s threat to culture that is bemoaned in the essay’s closing line: “Today we look to socialism simply for the preservation of whatever living culture we have right now” (Greenberg, “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” 22). Greenberg would retain the basic outline of this argument well into the 1950s, when his main adversary had shifted from kitsch to middlebrow culture; as he put it in 1953: “The highbrow has, as it

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were, to price his product out of the market in order to protect it from the market’s demands,” in “Work and Leisure under Industrialism. The Plight of Our Culture: Part II ,” Commentary, 16, no.1 (July 1953): 54; cited in Sara Doris, Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 38. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 96. Gilles Deleuze points out a similar stipulation with regard to the sublime: “in the trials of the forces of nature, in its devastation . . . the vulgar man sees only pain, danger, and misery” (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 29; cited in Deleuze, “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Esthetics,” trans. Michael Taormina, in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, Los Angeles, CA : Semiotext(e), 2004, 63). Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 10–11. Rosenberg directly disputed this claim: “Unlike the art of nineteenth-century America, advanced paintings today are not bought by the middle class. Nor are they by the populace. Considering the degree to which it is publicized and feted, vanguard painting is hardly bought at all . . . the vanguard artist has an audience of nobody” (Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in The Tradition of the New, New York: Horizon Press, 1959, 50). Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 43. This argument for unfettered production is in keeping with the general project of the Critique of Judgment, which, as Deleuze has argued, needs to prove the possibility of “a free spontaneous agreement, without legislation, without purpose, without predominance” between the faculties of reason, the imagination, and the understanding (“The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Esthetics,” 58). For thorough and thoughtful readings of Rosenberg’s development and political commitments, see Fred Orton, “Action, Revolution and Painting,” Oxford Art Journal, 14, no. 2 (1991): 3–17; Debra Bricker Balken, “Rosenberg and the American Action Painter,” in Action/Abstraction (Jewish Museum: New York, 2008); and Robert Slifkin, “The Tragic Image: Action Painting Refigured,” Oxford Art Journal, 34, no. 2 (2011): 227–46. Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” 28–9. The sentence that follows this passage establishes Rosenberg’s emphasis on action as an important target for the anti-theatricality of Greenberg’s most prominent student, Michael Fried: “The interest lies in the kind of act taking place in the four-sided arena, a dramatic interest.” See also Rosenberg’s formulation of the same idea six years later: Art as craft and, to a lesser degree, art as experiment, can function under any social system. Art as action, however, is the offspring of this revolutionary epoch and can flourish only so long as individuals are determined to be responsible for their own development and to interpret the past in relation to this aim. The ideal vista for the future is clear: it is that self-development shall be the motive of all work. If that ideal prevails, the distinction between the arts and

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17 Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” 23, 48. 18 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 198–9, cited in Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” trans. R. Klein, Diacritics, 11, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 11. 19 Derrida, “Economimesis,” 6. 20 Michael Wayne, Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism, and the Third Critique (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 95. 21 The revolutionary commitments of Greenberg’s early criticism are decisively established in T. J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” Critical Inquiry, 9, no. 1 (September 1982): 139–56. For Rosenberg’s revolutionary ambitions, see Slifkin, who argues that the critic hoped that his “performative model of selfhood, in which a person’s actions operate within an unfolding temporal narrative, could provide a means for individuals in modern society to break free of alienation and the sense of historical determinism and develop a truly revolutionary consciousness” (“The Tragic Image,” 240). 22 Clement Greenberg, “Pop Art,” unknown date and venue, c. early 1960s, printed in Artforum, October 2004, 52, 55. The passage continues: There is no question, for me, but that Pop art was, is, and always will be better than degenerated Abstract Expressionism. But Pop art has not yet produced anything that has given me, for one, pause; moved me deeply; that has challenged my taste or capacities and forced me to expand them. I have come across nothing in Pop art yet that transcends the plane of the agreeable or titillating or breaks with any of the canons of accepted taste as these stood in 1955. In sum: Pop art, in my experience, falls far short of being major art or anything like it—by which I mean that Pop art has not proved to be an art of searching originality, not even quite in the case of Jasper Johns. 23 Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” 35. The transformation described from artist into trademark foreshadows a key pop art strategy of the coming years. 24 For an illuminating discussion of the links between the aesthetic theories of these three thinkers, see Katherine Wolfe, “From Aesthetics to Politics: Rancière, Kant and Deleuze,” Contemporary Aesthetics, 4 (2006), available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ spo.7523862.0004.012. 25 Christopher Janaway, “Kant’s Aesthetics and the ‘Empty Cognitive Stock,’ ” in Paul Guyer (ed.), Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays (Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 69; Jane Kneller, “The Aesthetic Dimension of Kantian Autonomy,” in Robin May Schott (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant (University Park, PA : Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 186–7. 26 Wayne, Red Kant, 16.

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27 Kim Hall, “Sensus communis and Violence: A Feminist Reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment,” in Schott (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, 257–72. 28 I use this awkward phrase (“coalesced around the name”) to mark the importance of collaboration in Warhol’s practice during this period and in the years to come. For the sake of economy, I will refer in the pages that follow to “Warhol” and “Warhol’s work,” but the collaborative nature of his production should be understood as implied throughout. 29 Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 8. 30 This embrace was performed with varying degrees of poetic and ironic distance. C.f. Oldenburg’s Store vs. Warhol’s Factory. For a fascinating discussion of Oldenburg’s early work and its relation to changes in the urban landscape of New York City, see Joshua Shannon, “Claes Oldenburg’s The Street and Urban Renewal in Greenwich Village, 1960,” Art Bulletin, 86, no. 1 (March 2004): 136–61. 31 Harold Rosenberg, “Warhol: Art’s Other Self,” in Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1975), 106. 32 On the contrary, in his “Dada Fragments,” Hugo Ball deplored the “accentuated I” and its “constant appetites, whether they be greedy, dictatorial, vain or lazy . . . Whoever renounces his interests, renounces his ‘I’ ” (Hugo Ball, “Dada Fragments,” [1927], reprinted in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory: 1900–1990, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995, 247). Where Ball and Tristan Tzara defended the Kantian ideal of absolute aesthetic generosity without compensation, Marcel Duchamp, lecturing at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961, expressly defended the necessity of limiting artistic production in order to protect the aesthetic exclusivity of his works: “I REALIZED VERY SOON THE DANGER OF REPEATING INDISCRIMINANTLY THIS FORM OF EXPRESSION [the Readymade] AND DECIDED TO LIMIT THE PRODUCTION OF ‘READYMADES’ TO A SMALL NUMBER YEARLY” (Marcel Duchamp, “Apropos of ‘Readymades,’ ” [1961], reprinted in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, 1996, 820). It was only by strictly delineating his work from everyday commodity production that Duchamp could maintain the aesthetic status of his Readymades. 33 John Giorno, “Andy Warhol Interviewed by a Poet” (unpublished manuscript, 1963), reprinted in Kenneth Goldsmith, Reva Wolf, and Wayne Koestenbaum (eds.), I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004), 25. The interviewer replies, “What a good idea. What are you working on now?” Warhol: “Death.” 34 Gerald Malanga, “Andy Warhol: Interviewed by Gerald Malanga” (1963), reprinted in I’ll Be Your Mirror, 49.

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35 See Anthony E. Grudin, “Warhol’s Animal Life,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 56, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 593–622. 36 Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 350. I’m grateful to Johanna Gosse and Hannah Bruckmueller for having pointed out this connection. For de Duve’s thoughts on Rancière, see his, “Aesthetics as the Transcendental Ground of Democracy,” Critical Inquiry, 42, no. 1 (Autumn 2015): 149–65. For my purposes, Rancière’s emphasis on creativity and sensation rather than art as a category makes him a more useful guide to Warhol’s work than de Duve. 37 Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (New York: Da Capo, 2003), 95; see Anthony E. Grudin, Warhol’s Working Class: Pop Art and Egalitarianism (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 2017). 38 Jane Kramer, “Profiles: Man Who is Happening Now,” New Yorker, November 26, 1966, 64. 39 Ibid., 98, emphasis in original. 40 Barbara Rose, “Profit without Honor,” New York, November 15, 1973, 80. 41 Frank O’Hara, “Ode to Joy,” in Donald Allen (ed.), The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 281. 42 See S. P., “About Art and Artists,” New York Times, May 22, 1954, 13, and S. P., “About Art and Artists,” New York Times, March 3, 1956, 37. 43 Michael Fried, “New York Letter,” Art International, 6, no. 10 (December 1962): 57, reprinted in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 287–8. For more on the role of homophobia in Fried’s early criticism, and his militant rejection of what he called “faggot sensibility” (429), see Christa Noel Robbins’s crucial essay, “The Sensibility of Michael Fried,” Criticism, 60, no. 4 (2018): 429–54. 44 Jennifer Sichel, “ ‘Do you think Pop Art’s queer?’ Gene Swenson and Andy Warhol,” Oxford Art Journal, 41, no. 1 (March 2018): 59–83. 45 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956–1966,” in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2000), 499. 46 T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 401. 47 Bockris, Warhol, 64–5. 48 See Grudin, Warhol’s Working Class, 77–9, 101. 49 Wilbur Schramm, Jack Lyle, and Edwin B. Parker, Television in the Lives of Our Children (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 1961), 112. 50 Aaron A. Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2004), 250. 51 Pierre D. Martineau, “The Pattern of Social Classes,” in Robert L. Clewett (ed.), Marketing’s Role in Scientific Management (Chicago, IL : American Marketing Association, 1957), 246.

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52 Martineau, “The Pattern of Social Classes,” 235. 53 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 23. 54 Warhol, quoted in, “Andy Warhol interviews Henry Santoro,” in Raphaela Platow, Synne Genzmer, and Joseph Ketner (eds.), Image Machine: Andy Warhol and Photography (Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2012), 194. 55 See, for example, Harold H. Kassarjian, “The Negro and American Advertising, 1946– 1965,” Journal of Marketing Research, 6, no. 1 (February 1969): 36, 39; Marcus Alexis, “Pathways to the Negro Market,” Journal of Negro Education, 28, no. 2 (Spring 1959): 115, 121; and Raymond A. Bauer, Scott M. Cunningham, and Lawrence H. Wortzel, “The Marketing Dilemma of Negroes,” Journal of Marketing, 29, no. 3 (July 1965): 2. 56 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 42. 57 For the longstanding associations between gadgetry and the working class, see Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 132; and Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide through the American Status System (New York: Touchstone, 1983), 72. 58 Clement Greenberg, “Where is the Avant-Garde?” John O’Brian (ed.), The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4 (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1993), 264. 59 G. R. Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Part I,” ARTnews, 62, no. 7 (November 1963): 25. 60 Harold Rosenberg, “The Game of Illusion: Pop and Gag,” in The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1983), 74–5. 61 Clement Greenberg, “Modernism or Barbarism: An Interview with Karlheinz Lüdeking,” in Late Writings (Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 222, cited in Jeanette Bicknell, “To See a Picture ‘as a Picture’ First: Clement Greenberg and the Ambiguities of Modernism,” Æ: Canadian Aesthetics Journal/ Revue canadienne d’esthétique, 14 (Fall/Automne 2008): 4.

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Pop Art’s Comic Turn and the Stand-up Revolution Mona Hadler

The late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed a revolution in comedy and humor that presaged the politics and counterculture of the generation of revolt. At this very moment stand-up comics in the United States, from Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Elaine May & Mike Nichols, to Mort Sahl, Jackie “Moms” Mabley and Richard Pryor (who hit his stride in the seventies), as well as the comedians of the British stage revue Beyond the Fringe, changed the face of comedy. They accomplished this shift with biting political satire and ironic social critique in tandem chronologically with the rise of Pop Art and with an entanglement of gender, race, and class that this volume proposes is a key to an expanded understanding of Pop’s criticality.1 Subversive riffs on racial and ethnic identity, particularly from Jewish and Black comedians, and on gender, sexual politics, drugs, religions, and class conflict weaponized their irreverent and often ribald routines. While much has been written about Pop Art and its roots in popular, vernacular, or mass culture, or the role of campy humor and the postmodernism of parody in it, this unexplored context needs to be addressed as it casts a new light on Pop’s comic turn. And, as a groundbreaking performative practice in its own right, stand-up deserves a larger place in the revisionist art historical discourse of the 1960s that this essay begins to redress.2 “The old comics made jokes about real life,” as Richard Zoglin concluded, “The new comics turned real life into the joke.”3 They veered away from the classic repertoire of tired gags (mother-in-law jokes, etc.) and instead transformed lived reality into a challenging new art form in a way comparable to Pop’s appropriation of the world around as it ranged the divide of high and low. Humor was a shared force. Yvonne Rainer remembers doubling up with laughter at Rauschenberg’s Bed as it parried the “high-flown claims of Abstract Expressionism.”4 It is well known that humor played widely divergent but 109

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important roles for artists from Claes Oldenburg,5 to Roy Lichtenstein and in Pop practices that wedge between the high seriousness of Abstract Expressionism and the wry appropriations of postmodernism. But I will zero in on a different narrative here, one whose range includes R. Crumb, Rosalyn Drexler, Deborah Kass in her decades-later Warhol Project, Mad magazine, Gladys Nilsson, Martha Rosler, Anita Steckel, Hervé Télémaque, Bruce, Gregory, Mabley, and Pryor. The artists are among those who took sharp political stances through humor—at times transgressive and idiosyncratic in nature—that echo the comedians, and they often expressed an affinity with the comedic or this particular rising group of comedians. As Pryor put it, he could “stir up more shit on stage than in a revolution.”6 Indeed, looking at Pop in relation to the new comedy allows one to foreground Pop practices often with quite explicit, activist politics which sometimes existed dangerously in relation to laws on obscenity and censorship. And while much of stand-up comedy is perhaps more or just as relevant to art of the 1960s that relates to performativity and sexuality—Hannah Wilke lauded Bruce, for example7—I will begin the conversation here with Pop because there are key ways in which some Pop triangulates with comics and comedy, in a shared alternative humor and cross-border accessibility, and with the discourses of race, gender, and class central to this book. And there is, as we shall see, a performative element in Pop. Overall, my essay aligns with recent scholarship that forefronts humor, comedy, and the comical as a driving if complex force for the avant-garde throughout the twentieth century internationally.8 My project is not one of tracing influences (although some exist), but above all argues for a new understanding of the 1960s through comedy for, as I have argued elsewhere, humor in its many guises is a fitting corollary to the complex subjectivity and fraught ideologies of the Cold War era.9 One cannot forget Major Kong mounting the phallic bomb cowboy style and riding into the “wargasm” of nuclear annihilation in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.10 Indeed, the “sick humor” of bomb culture in Jeff Nuttall’s words, marked the improvisatory genius of Bruce’s cabaret acts.11 Yet, I contend in this essay, that the particular criticality of this parallel form of humor, that of the stand-up comics and their brethren in Pop Art, centers on the outsider, on those marginalized by gender, race, and class who speak back. For this project I heed those writers who posit the revolutionary potential of the people’s humor such as Kobena Mercer, who in his groundbreaking study Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, drawing upon Bakhtin, argues for the importance of dialogic strategies of destabilization in African American art.12 Turning to the

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writings of Henry Louis Gates, Mercer contends that Black artists in “call and response” patterns “talk back” to cultural representations of Blackness.13 Mercer joins others, such as Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha in interrogating stereotypes (ubiquitous in comic routines) which, according to Bhabha, reveals the power structures that created them.14 Many Black artists from the 1960s to today, including Hervé Télémaque and famously Betye Saar in her 1972 The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, have used negative images subversively to counter the racism they exhibit. And some, like Glenn Ligon, found inspiration in the new comedy itself, drawing directly on racial epithets from Pryor’s routines.15 Mel Watkins in his important book on African American comedy has linked the material of both Black and Jewish comedians to W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of “twoness.” Both, he argues, are shaped by the minority status of its creators: “The outsider or ‘shadow’ position of Jews and blacks in mainstream American society has given them a unique perspective on themselves as well as on the dominant or majority culture.”16 Although the humor of Black and Jewish comedians diverges in significant ways, stemming from different religious, historical, and social conditions, the vast majority of practitioners in these years in the United States were either Black or Jewish. A 1978 article, lamenting the relative lack of women comedians in this decidedly male profession, estimated that 85 percent of the“great” male comedians were Jewish—although Jews made up approximately 3 percent of the US population.17 As feminist artist Martha Rosler later put it, “I keep returning to the basic realization that I am a New York Jew, and a vaudevillian ‘shtick’ comes naturally to us as raconteurs.”18 Nichols, May, and Bruce were all Jewish comedians who referenced stereotypical aspects of Jewish culture in their acts. And even Lichtenstein singled out his Jewish father’s sense of humor as formative for his own.19 Beyond illuminating the material of Black and Jewish comedians, however, the same theories of humor that I draw upon here, from Bakhtin via Mercer, to Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha, are just as relevant to understanding the Pop Art and comedy made by other men and women across class and race lines.

Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor These Black and Jewish comedians fed off each other intersectionally with deeply personal and equally subversive humor. When Gregory saw Bruce for the first time in 1962, he called him the “eighth wonder of the world.”20 “Coleman Hawkins is Jewish,” Bruce famously quipped.21 They were cultural harbingers,

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each in their own way: “Sahl, of a new political cynicism; Bruce, of the sexual, pharmaceutical, and linguistic revolution . . .; Dick Gregory of racial unrest; . . .”22 One critic who attended Bruce’s catalytic 1962 performances in London later concluded: “He was the comedic counterpart of Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso, and Southern,” and his progeny were the “new black comics who, irreverently mixing race, sex, and politics, seemed to continue where Lenny left off.”23 Bruce took cues from Black hipsters and musicians giving them the credit they deserved.24 He was, in Pryor’s words, “the brightest and bravest of all.”25 Pryor began performing in the early 1960s with less controversial material and found his voice in the 1970s with his use of the vulgar and profane to target racism (figure 5.1). Historian Amy Abugo Ongiri connects him to the effective propaganda strategies of the Panthers, arguing that he “embodied the ways in which the cultural politics of groups like the Black Panther Party were influencing a developing African American popular culture.”26 In Pryor’s performances and

Figure 5.1 Richard Pryor performing at San Jose State University on April 3, 1974. Photo: Barbara Harrison. Wikimedia Commons.

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record album covers he, like the Panthers and some Pop artists, engaged the media in an effective way that drew power from visual representation.27 The Panthers, of course, went further, calling for revolutionary action, but the driving political protest in Pryor’s work was nonetheless unequivocal. Pryor along with Bruce were arguably fellow travelers in 1960s’ revolutionary street theater.28 It was, in fact, about an incident with Huey Newton in 1969 that Pryor made his quip about the potential of stage acts to stir up revolution.29 The new comedians went mainstream on television and in widely circulated records, at times with pop inspired memorable or controversial covers that complexify simplified notions of pop consumption and or mass media visuality as complicit with corporate culture. Gregory’s radical act of sitting on the couch next to Jack Paar in their 1962 televised interview, shocked the public. As one media theorist contended, in a defense of television: “The same forces that relegate ethnic, linguistic, and subcultural minorities to the margins of contemporary culture, also transmit the oppositional sensibilities of marginal groups to a mass audience.”30 Gregory appeared with Paar at the moment when old style servile postures of Black stage comedians were about to be overturned on television by a vision of Black Americans willing to face racist police armed with dogs and hoses.31 Gregory, who like other performers had earlier worked in exclusively Black clubs, broke barriers and played to White audiences, stating that he refused to be a “negro comedian” in a timeworn manner but, “I’ve got to go up there as an individual first, a Negro second.”32 He was to become known for his racially biting jokes with unforgettable punch lines, such as his retort to a southern waitress who refused to serve “colored people”, that he didn’t eat them.33 Drawn first to satire, as Civil Rights protests grew and exposed further police violence in the US (the march at Birmingham, Alabama, happened the year after his Jack Paar interview) Gregory was to spend increasingly more time with political activism. Indeed, AFRICOBRA artist Barbara Jones-Hogu went to the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968 because she knew Gregory would be there. She didn’t draw him literally but, when asked, she replied that the men in her work could represent him as she used some figures symbolically.34 No doubt a result of his activism, Gregory was included in the 1967 Chicago Wall of Respect, a mural painted by the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC).35 Moms Mabley too responded to the urgency of the Civil Rights struggle and veered from comedy with a poignant top 40 hit song “Abraham, Martin and John.” A raw politically charged element of humor fueled much Black American comedy and its counterpart can be found in Pop paintings by Black artists such as Télémaque or Robert Colescott. Gregory and Pryor’s racialized satire is deeply

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affined with these works. Even beyond Pop, into the twenty-first century, Pryor’s impact continues. Ligon found his work from the 1970s scatological, racially charged, and both frightening to him and compelling.36 Art historian Jody Cutler has been most articulate in connecting Colescott’s humor to Pryor. She links Pryor’s narrative subject matter and concerns for Black male subjectivity to Colescott’s project as well.37 But the connection she stresses above all is to Bruce. Colescott, in fact, told her that he was aware of Bruce from the 1950s. Cutler singles out Bruce’s attacks on hypocrisy and racial stereotypes along with his subversive use of racial slurs as “shock” tactics as salient points of intersection between the comedian and the painter. “Like Lenny Bruce” was a constant refrain from the 1960s (figure 5.2). Bruce, found dead in his home in 1966 from a drug overdose, was the lightning rod for first amendment rights and sexual freedom. He was jailed numerous times for obscenity—with the likes of Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, Woody Allen, and James Baldwin testifying on his behalf. Pop artists rallied to Bruce’s cause with Rosalyn Drexler (herself a noted playwright and novelist as well as painter), Lichtenstein, Oldenburg,38 Faith Ringgold, and Larry Rivers, joining 123 others in signing a 1974 paid political advertisement, spearheaded by Tom Wesselmann, in the New York Times to protest the election of Richard H. Kuh as attorney general given his role in Bruce’s convictions ten years earlier.39 Under Kuh’s aegis, the ad proposes, works by artists such as Rivers,Wesselmann, Dine, Rauschenberg, and Kienholz might come under judicial scrutiny. Bruce was often lionized by artists who suffered at the hands of censors from Allen Ginsberg to Jonas Mekas, Drexler, Anita Steckel, and Wesselmann.40 Bruce’s name was ubiquitous in the 1960s, and even more so after his death and the release of a spate of movies that commemorated his life and chronicled his demise. Tellingly he stands fourth from the left on the top row of the Beatles 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album designed by Pop artists Jann Haworth and Peter Blake. Haworth herself spoke of the significance of the new comedy in London: “Another aspect of this time that is seldom mentioned is I think the impact and irreverence of the theatre at that time . . . Beyond the Fringe, Wesker, Pinter, Osborne, Beckett, and the political satire TV, That Was the Week That Was with David Frost . . . Oz Magazine and Private Eye.”41 Pauline Boty, too, considered Beyond the Fringe important enough to merit a possible feature article in ARK even before they reached fame on the London stage.42 Bob Dylan and Warhol both named works after Bruce (a 1981 song and a 1976 animal portrait respectively) while Warhol described Paul America’s “superfunky” hotel as one that Bruce would have frequented.43 Warhol’s films and

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Figure 5.2 Lenny Bruce being arrested, 1961. Newspaper press photo. Wikimedia Commons.

photos are often populated by his famous coterie staged for the camera. And in a broader way, Warhol’s public persona was performative and peppered with comedic on-camera interviews such as one with Edie Sedgwick on the Merv Griffin show in October of 1965 where he played the “dummy” to her ventriloquism.44 Bruce’s comedy routines ranged from attacks on organized religion to ones on sexuality and bodily abjection. Indeed, one historian claims: “the deepest desire of stand-ups is to be, with respect to their lives, unencumbered. All a stand-up’s life feels abject to him or her, and stand-ups try to escape it by living it as an act.”45 This statement is revelatory for Bruce, but as Anthony Grudin has suggested, for Warhol, too, and maybe for “an entire strand in pop art

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that’s always trying to shed mass culture as an abject object by living it as an act?”46 The content of the “speaking back” done by the new comedians and Pop artists alike could therefore be both politically overt, as well as complex performances that confused the boundaries between reality and art.

Women Artists and Comedians Although Bruce opened the door to a sexual revolution and challenged censorship laws, his depictions of women were at times problematic to some feminists in the 1970s, as was the comic art of Robert Crumb who has famously credited Bruce for inspiring his own breakthrough style: “I didn’t want to turn into a greeting card artist for the counter-culture! I didn’t want to do ‘shtick’— the thing Lenny Bruce warned against. That’s when I started to let out all my perverse sex fantasies.”47 Both Bruce and Crumb were controversial. It was at this moment, 1970, countering such machismo, that Trina Robbins helped usher in a new era of satiric feminist comics collaborating on the comix It Ain’t Me Babe. Martha Rosler is an example of a feminist who found fault with Bruce’s attitudes towards women. While she appreciated his mordant cultural critique she was annoyed by his stories of his wife.48 Nonetheless the sharp antiwar satire of her well-known photomontage series, House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, 1967–72, where the domestic or ordinary clash with the horrific, inadvertently finds common ground with the wry political humor of the era.49 Her strategy in House Beautiful, whose images jolt people into understanding, also recalls to a degree the shock tactics of Bruce’s language. Elsewhere, Rosler has repeatedly stressed the importance of humor in her art as well.50 Other women artists working in the 1960s applauded Bruce’s courage and humor. Anita Steckel for example, who was a founder in 1973 of the “Fight Censorship Group,” along with Louise Bourgeois, Hannah Wilke and others, admired Bruce. She included his image in her collaged work, which she had irreverently called “Mom Art” in a 1963 one person show, to distinguish it from a perceived paternalism of Pop Art. In Steckel’s practice, like others in this book from Télémaque to Yêdamaria or Katalin Ladik, collage offered a way to interrogate difference. Bruce’s head appears in the bottom center of Collage, New York Landscape Series, 1970–80 superimposed over the face of Jesus in Leonardo’s The Last Supper. As Rachel Middleman writes, Steckel would incisively transform Catholic imagery into allegories of modern persecution though her subversive collage practice.51 Bruce, who himself frequently used religious tropes to expose

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hypocrisy, was indeed a martyr to free speech. Both Bruce and Steckel shared a commitment to radical transgressive sexuality and an equal commitment to fighting censorship in its name.52 Drexler, whose play The Investigation was charged with obscenity in Boston, was also a great supporter of Bruce and was in the audience at the Vanguard when Bruce was arrested. She considered him to be “wonderful at the time” and has described how “really awful” and “serious” the situation was.53 (She was less sanguine about Mort Sahl, however.54) She, in turn, found Bruce’s brand of comedy liberating and wildly funny, in league with Crumb and later Pryor. Crumb, Drexler maintains, “was reviled for his sado-masochistic stuff but he made it so rich and so funny.”55 Drexler’s paintings such as The Dream, 1963 (plate 7), as a parody of beastly love, traffic in the complexity of the human condition where love, violence, and politics coexist. The ambiguous entanglement of couples, as in Kiss Me Stupid, 1964, play a complex dance of power and submission, of love and abuse, approaching and avoiding, embracing and hurting.56 Such imagery echoes the humor and veracity of Bruce’s and Pryor’s exposures, albeit in a visual form that is more abstract and open to interpretation. Yet, in a broader way, as Kalliopi Minioudaki argues, Drexler and other women Pop artists of the 1960s used humor oppositionally as a proto/feminist form of empowerment to counter belittling and sexualizing stereotypes (such as the pinup) by repeating them and/or enacting them.57 They accord with Jo Anna Isaak’s theorizing of a feminist tradition drawn upon the “revolutionary power of women’s laugher,”58 in light of Freud, Bakhtin, and feminist notions of jouissance. Looking at humor in relation to Pop intersectionally aligns these women, including Steckel, with the subversive comedy of the Jewish and Black comedians (both men and women) of the day, as well as to those whose art challenged class divides. Drexler in fact worked with Pryor as she was one of the co-writers for the 1973 award-winning CBS comedy special Lily starring Tomlin and Pryor. He was, according to Drexler, a great comic genius. Nonetheless, she hastened to add that she loved women comedians, too, such as Moms Mabley, (figure 5.3), whom she saw on TV and found nasty in the best sense of the word.59 Mabley, born in 1894 and on the stage from the 1920s, was considerably older than Bruce or Gregory and unlike them she spoke “through” a fictional grandma character. But she did address racism and turned the gender tables with oneliners such as: “All I want from an older man is to introduce me to a younger one.” As a Civil Rights activist she reminded her audience she was “moms not mammy.”60

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Figure 5.3 Jackie Moms Mabley, 1968. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, CBS Television. Wikimedia Commons.

Bruce himself was inspirational to women comedians. When Joan Rivers bombed in Greenwich Village he sent her a note, “You’re right and they are wrong,” which she cherished.61 Rivers joined a tradition of earlier Jewish women comedians such as Belle Barth and Totie Fields. While these women’s acts were different from Bruce and Gregory, singing with powerful voices in the tradition of the Jewish Borscht Belt and cabaret performance, they foreshadow feminist issues. Mabley, too, took the stage to support women’s sexuality, poking jokes at men rather than women or at herself. Barth was lionized for her bawdy humor and like Bruce was arrested and subsequently sued for moral corruption. Fields,

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overweight for much of her career, engaged issues that today fall under the rubric of body positivity. Healing from a leg amputation and breast cancer surgery, she incorporated these health issues into her act, thereby anticipating disability rights advocates of today. Mabley, Barth, and Fields’s activist stances on disability rights, feminist body politics, and sex positivity presage contemporary feminist concerns. In the 1990s, it is not surprising that contemporary feminist painter Deborah Kass gravitated to these women, as her own appropriationist strategies—riffing on Barbra Streisand and inflected by Warholian practices—are deeply performative and comedic at their core. In her practice, Pop, performance, and stand-up comedy link hands. “Presenting herself—a woman and a lesbian—as a gay man vamping as a woman vamping as a man, Kass thoroughly muddles distinctions of gender and sexuality, and promulgates a fresh persona, flagrant and droll,” writes one critic.62 In her 1993 series, Double Yentl (My Elvis), Jewish Kass plays Jewish Streisand as a male Yeshiva student in the guise of a queer Catholic man in a comedic dance of compulsive performativity, to use the language of Judith Butler. And so, too, with Moms Mabley, called by her friends Mr. Moms, who enacted in dizzying syncopation the toothless raunchy yet straight grandma character who lusted in drag for young men. Not surprisingly, Kass now admires the powerful performances of Hannah Gadsby, who, in her 2017 Nanette, refused to let humor belittle her, diffuse the anxiety or sweeten the pain.63

Class, Comics, and Mad That most of these comedians came from challenging economic circumstances is well known and chronicled in their own biographies. Pryor most notably spoke of growing up in his grandmother’s brothel. But the issues of class and comedy run deeper than these personal stories suggest. Historians have unpacked how, for example, in London—home to much trenchant comedy such as the cutting-edge satirical revue Beyond the Fringe, which debuted at the 1960 Edinburgh festival and was followed in 1962 by the BBC’s That Was the Week That Was—changes in class eroded engrained mores and formed fodder for humor.64 Peter Cook riffed on the new fluidity of class and paired it with issues of ethnicity pointing out that while he and Jonathan Miller (both writers and performers of the Fringe’s satirical sketches) came from a public-school education, Miller was Jewish (or Jew-ish in Miller’s words). To this, comedian

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John Fortune responded, that he thought Jews were only in the Bible.65 But it is the sociologist Luc Boltanski, writing in France in 1975 in the circle of Pierre Bourdieu, who is most astute about class issues, subjectivity, and humor. In regard to humor, and specifically that circulated in comic strips, Boltanski concludes that the uncertain position of the illustrators themselves—those of low social origin whose production was brought into the university environment as the subject of classes and academic writings66—encourages a form of selfmockery, lack of pretentiousness, and use of humor to contend with societal issues. Boltanski writes: The uneasy relationship with the social definition of the “artist” (a concern not to “look ridiculous,” not to “take yourself seriously” but also not to “underestimate your work,” not to “be deferential”) returns as a leitmotif in the gags essentially intended as in-jokes by which the cartoonists send up the affectations of members of the field and, above all, parody themselves.67

These words are provocative for stand-up comics as well. In 1978 one study of comedians in the US revealed that 80 percent of their participants were from the working class.68 There was, indeed, as one historian said of the underground comics, an “odd meeting of lowbrow form and highbrow attitude”69—and the same can hold true for comedy, where comedians from working-class homes like Bruce or Gregory played to mixed audiences in every sense. Pop, too, existed in such liminal territory. Adding the popular adds to such entanglement and double consciousness. It brought together the self-taught British critic Lawrence Alloway, with the gallerist Leo Castelli70 (the elegant Italian Jewish émigré from a wealthy banking family), and upwardly mobile industrial patrons such as Robert Scull. Warhol, as Grudin argues, was a prime example of someone from the working class who understood both its preferences and alternatively the cultural appeal of downward mobility or slumming.71 Comics and comedy cross-dressed often in the name of racial, political and sexual satire. American comic icons, from Superman to Mickey Mouse, as eminently labile symbols, were ripe for the picking.72 Comics could be the language of subterfuge. They were ideologically loaded vehicles of approbation (i.e., romance and war comics), disguised dissent, or transgressive sexuality. Warhol featured a blatantly campy Batman in his 1964 film Batman Dracula, followed by Mad’s summer “camp” issue in September 1966, featuring Batman and Robin. Superman—the brainchild of the Jewish artists Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster—as the arch White heterosexual male was perfect fodder for the intersectionality of iterations that crossed from the comics to comedy, and

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boundaries of race, gender, and ethnicity.73 Pryor did a skit on Superman in his first album (Richard Pryor, 1969) from a Black perspective of a hero disguised as “Clark Washington,” a mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet, “with his X-ray vision that enables him to see through everything except whitey . . .”74 Black artist, Barkley L. Hendricks riffed on the theme in Icon for My Man Superman (Superman never saved any black people—Bobby Seale) in 1969. And Bruce of course weighed in as “Superjew.” These in turn conjure the earlier themes of Mad whose now canonical April–May 1953 issue included a parody by Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood, “Super-Duperman,” that helped catapult the magazine to success and included the infamous panel where Lois Lane rebuffs “Clark Bent” with the feminist retort, “So you’re Superduperman instead of Clark Bent! Big Deal! . . . Yer still a creep!”

Comic Entanglements of Gender, Race, and Class in the Art of Gladys Nilsson and Hervé Télémaque The career of the Chicago artist, Gladys Nilsson forms another site for the intersection of class, comedy, comics and gender. Heralded as the birthplace of Chicago jazz, the city was just as much a mecca for comedians such as Gregory, the May and Nichols team and Joan Rivers in their wake. The pioneering improvisational comedy theater, Second City, after all debuted there in 1959. Nilsson, a prominent member of the Hairy Who, fits Cécile Whiting’s characterization of the men and women in the group as artists who “relied on the subcultural language of the comics [and] often recalling the hilarities and grotesqueries of Mad magazine, to parody gender stereotypes in a manner meant to prompt a visceral reaction.”75 Nilsson, who hailed from the working class, was decidedly unpretentious and enjoyed the raucous humor of comics and the new comedy. “I like comedies. I think it takes a lot more structure and ambition to make a good comedy than to make a drama—probably unfairly said for all the drama people. But I think that comedy is a very high art. I think it has been given, you know, a bad trait or something. I don’t know. I just have a sense of humor. I like to laugh.”76 A graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, she, too, was aware of changing class, of her difference from her parents—a father who worked in a factory and mother who waited tables. While her father admired Milton Berle, Nilsson was drawn to the new comedy of Bob Newhart and Second City (which she reiterates her father would not have liked), kept a copy of Mad in her high school locker, admired Crumb and was in turn admired by him.77 At

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this moment Mad topped the sales charts due to its satiric wit that dovetailed with the spirit of the underground commix of the late 1960s in the US so associated with R. Crumb and Zap.78 The imagery of her paintings witness this class crossover. Swedish women, drawn with an animated line inspired in part by the cartoons of Olive Oil, and shifts in scale found in Sears Roebuck’s bathrobe ads or Northern Renaissance paintings with “small donors,” cling to an oversized, empowered and humorously carnivalesque Wonder Woman in Mt. Vonder Voman During Turetrush of 1967 (plate 8). The title playfully reads “Mount Wonder Woman During Tourist Rush,” Nilsson explains.79 The diminutive figures, tourists or working-class women wearing anklets and heels or housedresses (which she remembers from her childhood and often include aprons), “mount” the voluminous figure. The comics, new comedy, Mad, The Art Institute of Chicago, mix with experiences of a working-class heritage to create a comic idiom that in Boltanski’s words arose in part from shifting social class at the service of unpretentious but wry selfawareness. She no doubt relished her shape shifting freedom just as dancer Yvonne Rainer found the carnivalesque in Bakhtin liberating, “Reading Bakhtin has eased whatever snobbish ambivalence I may still be laboring under with regard to my father’s ‘peasant’ sense of humor.”80 For Hervé Télémaque, the Haitian diaspora artist who became a major figure in the Narrative Figuration group in Paris, the ironies of his shifting class and changing economic circumstances fed his trenchant sense of humor and his outrage. Well-born in Haiti, experiencing the racism of New York City in the late fifties, only to arrive in a 1961 Paris reeling from the end of the Algerian War, he cast his irreverent eye on problematics of race, gender, and class. Tired of the abstract expressionist abstraction prevalent in New York, Pop Art’s modernist style and narrative content beckoned to him. As we have seen, Pop Art offered a way for many artists to assert identity in a new cutting-edge idiom. In Télémaque’s case, Pop Art facilitated a fierce critique of racism through humor. Historian Richard J. Powell, in fact, credits Télémaque with raising the subject of racial Blackness well before the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s.81 As Marine Schütz writes in this volume, Télémaque employed his keen sense of humor to engage pop culture in a critique of racial stereotypes. One thinks of Bhabha on the structure of power or Bakhtin on laughter as a stimulus for a people’s revolution with its “indissoluable and essential relation to freedom.”82 Claiming that, “humor is the best weapon to make people rethink,” Télémaque likewise aimed “to fight for a better image of the African.”83 Even in Paris he drew upon his Haitian roots, relating his comic sensibility and bold competing color

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palette to the inversions of the “terribly and wonderfully popular” carnival itself, which he witnessed as a youth.84 He marshals comic abstraction, at times in a carnivalesque manner, to a visual dialogue on race. And like Pryor after him, he not only tackled forbidden subjects such as sex, and White stereotypes of Black people but also Black people’s comic views of themselves. In his 1965 Petit célibataire un peu nègre et assez joyeux (Little Bachelor Slightly Negro, and Quite Happy) a preposterous grinning black face with bulging eyes and extended tongue summons racist stereotypes in the work of famed French poster illustrator Paul Colin. He quotes directly from Colin in the figure on the left-hand side of Notes Pour La Piste, 1964 (figure 5.4).85 Mercer’s thesis comes to mind here on the grotesque “as one of the primary visual languages of modern racism.”86 Petit célibataire alludes to the sexuality of Duchamp’s bachelors, to Lichtenstein in its comic book layout and use of dots,87 and to the bold colors of the Haitian carnival, all the while parrying with subversive humor. Petit célibataire, Télémaque explains, counters prevalent tropes of the “negro” being happy and sexual.88 Mel Watkins’s words ring true here when he underscores the way “Black Americans” joke about the hypocrisy of racism and the “outrageous stereotypes that racists have concocted.”89 Endless

Figure 5.4 Hervé Télémaque, Notes Pour La Piste, 1964. Oil on canvas, 51.18 × 77.55 in (130 × 197 cm). © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Société des Auteurs Dans les Arts Graphiques et Plastiques (ADAGP), Paris. Collection Jean, F & J Lavantes. Photo: Francoise Fernandez.

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jokes by Gregory and Pryor come to mind, although Télémaque was unaware of their comic performances.90 Télémaque, like the new Black comedians, “talks back.” My Darling Clementine, 1963 (plate 9), a combine with two canvasses and a small box containing a racist Black figure holding a banana that he purchased in France, is marked by vivid “carnival” colors (orange shirt, green tie, red vest) and an animated surface characteristic of early hand-painted Pop. Overall Télémaque, an avid film buff, spoofs John Ford’s canonical Western by that name. A goofy peg-legged Black cowboy stands front and center amidst the mass cultural debris of racism. In a 1977 essay on the painting, Télémaque contrasted the beautiful heroes of John Ford, to a Black cowboy with straightened hair (“les cheveux décrépées comme il faut”), missing a limb, on crutches. He self-identified with this scruffy figure, writing, “Ce cow-boy abimé, c’est moi.”91 Such associations are not surprising for an artist schooled in surrealism and deeply involved with psychoanalysis. The wacky one-legged figure, half cowboy, half self-portrait, Télémaque relates, owes much to the “baka” of the Haitian Carnival, the tradition of Caribbean buccaneers and somewhat to Mad magazine.92 Like the artist himself, whose life experiences at this point were multinational, the cowboy breaks racial, national and religious borders, from White Protestant America to the Haitian Carnival to Black Harlem metonymically through product advertisements. Télémaque’s offbeat cowboy offers a humorous look at both Black consumerism and tropes of Black masculinity in advance of the machismo of both Black Power and Blaxploitation movies of the 1970s. On the left side of the central panel, Télémaque collages an advertisement for Johnson’s hair straightener with the slogan, “Sa.a.y this is Terrific!”93 The droll ambivalence towards products that often marks Pop production is furthered here in its focus on Black consumerism with its own attendant absurdities and commercial exploitations. He laughs amicably at himself with the straightened hair, but with an insider humanism. In so doing he unwittingly aligns with much of the new comedy that interrogated stereotypes by veering from gags to real life. In the humorous look at his own foibles, and those of his community, one hears the routines of Pryor as he creates the figure of Mudbone (a wino alter ego), riffs on Black masculinity, or mimics Black people laughing at themselves.94 One hears also Bruce turning his fantasies into ribald humor or other Jewish comedians who cut their teeth in this era, from Woody Allen to Joan Rivers and Mel Brooks. In My Darling Clementine Télémaque also taps into the iconography of the Black cowboy.95 Later cinematic portrayals of Black cowboys range from Brook’s

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Blazing Saddles, created in 1974 to Quentin Tarantino’s sensational 2012 film Django Unchained. Significantly, Blazing Saddles, which troubles the racist clichés of the Hollywood Western, was indebted to Pryor, Brooks’ friend who was a co-screen writer for this movie.96 Télémaque’s self-deprecating inversions— contrasting the handsome John Ford hero to the one-legged Black cowboy and spoofing both himself and the stereotypes in a double or triple entendre—mark the humor of these filmic parodies as well as Gregory’s and Pryor’s comedic performances. As Brooks remembered in a 2014 interview about Pryor’s role in Blazing Saddles, Pryor avoided heroizing the Black sheriff in a satiric manner, and instead focused on the eminently Bakhtinian, oversized hulking, inarticulate man of the people, Mongo (“Mongo no go. Mongo stay with Sheriff Bart.”) Brooks had expected the former: “But no, he loved Mongo. He wrote, ‘Mongo only pawn in game of life.’ Brilliant . . . a lot of Mongo was Richard Pryor.”97 Mongo was Pryor’s cowboy “abimé.” Brooks recalls that he and Pryor met as stand-up comics in the 1960s and that they in turn rubbed elbows with the Pop artists of the day. When asked how he came to hire Pryor as his cowriter he answered: He worked at the Village Vanguard in New York City. I worked at the Bitter End. We were both stand-ups, killing ourselves trying to get some laughs. We’d meet and have sandwiches and drinks later at Max’s Kansas City. What a great place that was. Sitting to the right of us, Roy Lichtenstein. Willem de Kooning sitting behind us. Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, [Robert] Rauschenberg was there, all these great artists. We were all struggling.98

Pop Art and the new comedy were multivalent entities that overlapped in many ways. I am not arguing for direct influence, although that might be the case as in Crumb and Bruce, but for a richer understanding of cultural shifts. Thomas Crow in The Long March of Pop, problematizes the 1960s production of Indiana, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist and Warhol and grounds it in “larger historical changes, tectonic shifts . . .”99 The seismic effects of just such a shift have been felt in recent years as comedy has moved from the clubs to the gallery space and has inspired new artistic practices.100 While I posit a link between the humor of the new comedy with Pop’s comic turn in paintings and graphic work in the 1960s, the performing comic as artist often takes center stage today. But the rumblings of this quake began earlier. Crow surmises that: “The best Pop regularly finds its themes and subjects in minority enclaves of everyday cultural expression . . .”101 These words resonate with the new comedy that came to fruition alongside Pop Art but, like Pop, germinated before, in the earlier postwar

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era with its fraught and ambivalent ideologies. Such humor feeds above all the alternative, censored, satiric, components of Pop often in a form of double consciousness—the liberated and oppositional language of the marginalized. It helps give voice to the issues of gender, race, and class that comprise this anthology and points the way to a more intersectional understanding of Pop and the 1960s.

Notes 1 See the Introduction to this book and Jessica Morgan in Morgan and Flavia Frigeri (ed.), The World Goes Pop (London: Tate Publishing, 2015). 2 For more on Black performance in the 1960s, see Malik Gaines, Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible (New York: New York University Press, 2017). 3 Richard Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 4. 4 Yvonne Rainer, “What’s so Funny? Laughter and Anger in the Time of the Assassins,” October, 160 (Spring 2017): 86. 5 The diversity of Pop humor has been addressed in many venues. In 1966, Oldenburg, for example, framed his work more in terms of parody than satire. See, Bruce Glaser, “Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, Warhol: A Discussion,” Artforum, 4, no. 6 (February 1966): 23. The slippery ambiguity of Oldenburg’s and Lichtenstein’s humor parted ways with the satiric; see Kevin Hatch, “Roy Lichtenstein: Wit, Invention, and the Afterlife of Pop,” in John Wilmerding and Hal Foster (eds.), Pop Art: Contemporary Perspectives (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Art Museum, 2007), 55–73. Kobena Mercer in his edited volume, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2007), argues for the importance of the carnivalesque. I am in the process of writing a book on comedy and postwar art which will highlight the differences in types of humor between the comedians and the artists and will relate stand-up comedy to other performative practices of the era. No doubt many more artists will emerge as relevant to this study. 6 Richard Pryor, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences: The Official Autobiography (Los Angeles, CA: A Branacle Book, 2018), 122; cited in Amy Abugo Ongiri, Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 34. 7 Quoted in Margo Hobbs Thompson, “Agreeable Objects and Angry Paintings: ‘Female Imagery’ in Art by Hannah Wilke and Louise Fishman, 1970–73,” Genders, no. 43 (2006): 4. 8 See, for example, the Spring 2017 special issue of October, “Comedy and the AvantGarde.” See also, David Robbins, Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-

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Century Comedy (Copenhagen: Port Salad Press, 2011), and Livia Páldi and Olav Westphalen (eds.), Dysfunctional Comedy: A Reader (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016). Mona Hadler, Destruction Rites: Ephemerality and Demolition in Postwar Visual Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017). At this moment, critics used the terms “new” or “pop” satire to link Dr. Strangelove with Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (published in 1961), the writings of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and Mad. Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (New York: Delacorte Press, 1968), 119. Mercer, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, 17–18. Henry Louis Gates, in fact, uses Pryor’s parody of Stevie Wonder’s music and the Black sermon as one of his examples of signifying in, “The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique on the Sign and the Signifying Monkey,” reprinted in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (eds.), Literary Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 909–10. Mercer, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, 144. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 95. See also the writings of Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’ ” in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage Publications, Inc. 1997), 225–79. See Tanya Barson, “Introduction: Modernism and the Black Atlantic,” in Tanya Barson and Peter Gorshlüter (eds.), Afro-Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic (Liverpool: Tate Gallery, 2010). She quotes Ligon, p. 15, in his interview with Malik Gaines, from Glenn Ligon: Text Paintings 1990–2004 (Los Angeles, CA : Regen Projects, 2004), 2. Cherise Smith, in Michael Ray Charles: A Retrospective (Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 2019) follows the discourse surrounding Black artists and the stereotype to the current day. Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy from Slavery to Chris Rock (Chicago, IL : Lawrence Hill Book, 1994), 27–8. Samuel S. Janus, Barbara E. Bess, and Beth R. Janus, “The Great Comediennes: Personality and Other Factors,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 38 (1978): 369. “In Conversation: Martha Rosler with Sabine Breitweiser, Part 2: Stepping out from Behind the Proscenium Arch,” in Garage Sale Standard, 2 (November 2012): 13. Drexler, who was also Jewish and was related to Chico Marx, admired the writings of S. J. Perelman. Richard Brown Baker, Oral History Interview with Roy Lichtenstein, November 15, 1963, Archives of American Art, available at: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/ interviews/oral-history-interview-roy-lichtenstein-11994#transcript. Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, 10. Lenny Bruce, AZQuotes.com, Wind and Fly LTD, 2021, available at: https://www. azquotes.com/quote/1378941. Today a comment like this raises the issue of cultural erasure.

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22 Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 5. Watkins chronicles the history of Black comedians who played earlier to exclusively Black audiences. 23 Charles Marowitz, “Remembering Lenny Bruce,” Swans Commentary, December 24, 2012, 217. 24 Watkins, On the Real Side, 485. Jack Hamilton in Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2016) contends that rock music in the 1960s was purged of its Black roots. With the rise of Pryor, however, Black comedy held the limelight. 25 Pryor, Convictions, 78. 26 Ongiri, Spectacular Blackness, 34. 27 Similar, too, was a dance with commodity culture—engaging and problematizing at the same time, Ongiri, 52. The artists of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), too, with their own activist agenda, combined coolade neighborhood colors, media images and Pop-inflected strategies. See, for example, Colette Gaiter’s comparison to Lichtenstein in, “Visualizing a Black Future: Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party,” Journal of Visual Culture, 17, no. 3 (2018): 305. 28 Pryor’s photo appears in Jerry Rubin’s book, Do it!: Scenarios of a Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 187, while he includes Bruce in his Academy Award of Protest Acceptance Speech, p. 191. 29 Pryor, Convictions, 122, cited in Ongiri, 34. 30 George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 249. There is a robust literature on race and the televisual. See, for example, Christine Acham, Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power (Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, 2004) with a chapter on Pryor. 31 Watkins, On the Real Side, 500. 32 Dick Gregory with Robert Lipsyte, Nigger: An Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), 132. Gregory has discussed and defended his controversial title on many occasions. 33 Ibid., 144. 34 Rebecca Zorach and Skyla Hearn, Interview with Barbara Jones-Hogu, Never the Same: Conversations about Art Transforming Politics & Community in Chicago & Beyond, online archival project, 2012, available at: https://never-the-same.org/ interviews/barbara-jones-hogu/. 35 Abdul Alkalimat, Romi Crawford, and Rebecca Zorach (eds.), The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Evanston, IL : Northwestern University Press, 2017), 24, 49, 59, 168, 279. 36 Stephen Andrews, “Glenn Ligon: In Conversation,” in Glenn Ligon: Some Changes (Toronto: Power Plant, 2005), 176.

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37 See Jody B. Cutler, “The Paintings of Robert Colescott: Race Matters, Art and Audience” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Sony Brook, 2001), 17–20; and “Art Revolution: Politics and Pop in the Robert Colescott Painting George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware,” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, 1900 to Present, 8, no. 2 (Fall 2009). I thank Lowery Stokes Sims for leading me to these sources. 38 Oldenburg contends that stand-up comedy did not impact his performative practice. Nadja Rottner, email message to the author (May 2, 2018). 39 Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon (Naperville, IL : Sourcebooks, 2002), 379–80. The ad appeared in The New York Times, April 3, 1974, 41. 40 Tom Wesselmann, in, “Editor’s Letter,” Art News, 62, no. 4 (Summer 1963), contested the censorship of one of his collages. Longtime friend and cartoonist Eli Stein (in an email message to the author, March 24, 2018) remembers Wesselmann’s cartoons. See also, Michael Lobel, “Another Wesselmann,” Tom Wesselmann (New York: Mitchell Innes & Nash Gallery, 2016). I thank Michael Lobel for generously sharing his thoughts with me. 41 Jann Haworth, email message to Kalliopi Minioudaki, October 25, 2005, published in Minioudaki, “Women in Pop: Difference and Marginality” (PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2009), 335. 42 Sue Tate, “A Transgression too Far: Women Artists and the British Pop Movement,” in Sid Sachs and Kalliopi Minioudaki (eds.), Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968 (Philadelphia, PA : University of the Arts, and New York: Abbeville Press, 2010), 215. ARK was the Royal College of Art student magazine that ran from 1950 to 1978. 43 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s (Orlando, FL : Harcourt, 1980), 157. 44 Merv Griffin Show, “Andy Warhol & Edie Sedgwick Interview (Merv Griffin Show 1965),” video clip, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8sptsjCk18. 45 John Limon, Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2000), 6. 46 Anthony Grudin, email message to author, March 1, 2018. 47 R. Crumb and Peter Poplaski, The R. Crumb Handbook (London: MQ Publications, 2005), 164. 48 Martha Rosler, email message to author, September 24, 2018. 49 See, for example, Mort Sahl’s 1967 televised segment on Vietnam, available at: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=73ZsgQexpzg. One thinks as well of Tom Lehrer’s famous antiwar songs of the 1960s. 50 See Martha Rosler, “Exit through the Thrift Shop,” in Darsie Alexander (ed.), Martha Rosler: Irrespective (New York: Jewish Museum, 2018), 16.

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51 Rachel Middleman, “Collage as a Feminist Strategy in the Work of Anita Steckel,” in Legal Gender: The Irreverent Art of Anita Steckel (Chico, CA : Jacki Headley University Art Gallery, California State University, 2018), 21. 52 Richard Meyer, “The Return of Anita Steckel,” in ibid., 10–16. 53 Rosalyn Drexler, Oral history interview with Rosalyn Drexler by Christopher Lyon May 17 to June 2, 2017, Archives of American Art. 54 Rosalyn Drexler, telephone interview with the author, November 2, 2018. She shared the stage with Mort Sahl in a Dick Cavett episode (8/4/1970) and considered his attitude towards women abhorrent. 55 Drexler, telephone interview with the author, November 2, 2018. Artist Lee Bontecou, a member of the Castelli Gallery in the 1960s, also found Crumb subversively funny. She and I viewed his work together in 2004 at the Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, see Mona Hadler, “Lee Bontecou and Drawing: From the Real to the Strange,” Woman’s Art Journal, 35, no. 1 (Spring/Summer, 2014): 80. 56 See Kalliopi Minioudaki, “Pop’s Ladies and Bad Girls: Axell, Pauline Boty and Rosalyn Drexler,” Oxford Art Journal, 30, no. 3 (2007): 412, and for more on Drexler’s feminism, see, Minioudaki, “Rosalyn Drexler: Madly and Transgressively Embracing the Vulgarity of Life,” in Katy Siegel (ed.), Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She is? (Waltham, MA : The Rose Art Museum, 2016). 57 Minioudaki, “Pop’s Ladies and Bad Girls.” 58 Jo Anna Isaak, Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter (London: Routledge, 1996). See also Kalliopi Minioudaki, “Not Just Funny: May Wilson’s Avant-Gardes,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 83, no. 2 (2014): 183–205. 59 Drexler, telephone interview with the author, November 2, 2018. 60 For Moms Mabley quotes, see the 2013 documentary, Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley. 61 Emily Nussbaum, “Last Girl in Larchmont,” New Yorker, February 23, 2015, available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/last-girl-larchmont. 62 Faye Hirsch, “A Woman Under the Influence,” Art in America, 100, no. 11 (December 2012): 126. 63 Deborah Kass, email, September 24, 2018, and interview with the author, November 18, 2019. Kass had been interested in the comedy of Joan Rivers but increasingly found her material obsessed with men and too self-deprecatory. She circled back to Barth and Fields because of their sense of empowerment and similarities to her own Jewish grandmother. This material was included in the College Art Association (CAA) session chaired by Hadler, with Katherine Guinness as discussant, on February 14, 2020, titled, “Women and Stand-up Comedy: Rosalyn Drexler Meets Mrs. Maisel,” and in Hadler’s paper on Kass. Other panelists included, Paula Burleigh, Mette Gieskes, and Robert R. Shane.

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64 Humphrey Carpenter, A Great Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom of the 1960s (London: Da Capo Press, 2003), 7. 65 Carpenter, A Great Silly Grin, 112. 66 In the 1960s, Sarah Wilson contends, in a discussion of Luc Boltanski’s comic-strip “field,” a new appreciation of the comics correlates with the explosion in student population (often of different classes) in the French literature faculties, and the emergence of comics as an academic subject, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 75–6. 67 Luc Boltanski, “The Constitution of the Comics Field,” trans. and republished in Ann Miller and Bart Beaty (eds.), The French Comics Theory Reader (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014), 296. Originally published, “La Constitution du champ de la bande dessinée,” Actes de la recherche en science sociales, vol. 1 (1975). 68 Janus, Bess, and Janus, “The Great Comediennes,” 368. 69 Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson, MI : University Press of Mississippi, 2005), xxii. 70 See Annie Cohen-Solal, Leo & His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). 71 Anthony E. Grudin, Warhol’s Working Class: Pop Art and Egalitarianism (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 2017), 10. 72 See Miriam Hansen’s subtle discussion of Benjamin and Adorno in, “Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 92, no.1 (Winter 1993): 27–61. See also Mona Hadler, “David Hare, Surrealism, and the Comics,” The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914–1945, VII : 1 (December 2011): 93–108. 73 See Marc Singer, “ ‘Black Skins’ and White Masks, Comic Books and the Secret of Race,” African American Review, 36, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 107–19, for the contested literature on racial stereotypes, ideology, and power in comic book representations. 74 Quoted in Watkins, On the Real Side, 535. 75 Cécile Whiting, “Second Sex in the Second City, Women of Chicago Imagism,” in Chicago Imagists (Madison, WI : Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011), 126. See also, Isaak, The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter. 76 Kathy Goncharov, interview with Gladys Nilsson, August 9, 2008, Archives of American Art, available at: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oralhistory-interview-gladys-nilsson-13708. I thank Robert R. Shane for leading me to this quote. 77 Gladys Nilsson, interview with the author. New York, September 6, 2017. When she and her husband Jim Nutt went to San Francisco in the 1960s, Crumb invited them to his studio. 78 See Hatfield, Alternative Comics. In Europe, too, a comparable humor to Mad surfaced in the 1960s with the success of Astérix drawn by René Goscinny, or

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the satirical Hara-Kiri, dating from 1960 with profane humor that evoked the ire of the censors and caused it to be banned in 1961 and 1966. See Thierry Groensteen, “The Dawn of a Revolution: Comic Strip and Newspaper Cartoons,” in David Alan Mellor and Laurent Gervereau (eds.), The Sixties: Britain and France, 1962–73. The Utopian Years (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 1997), 132–50. Gladys Nilsson, interview with the author. New York City, September 6, 2017. Rainer, “What’s so Funny?,” 89. Rainer (ibid. 88) refers to Bakhtin’s use of “folk culture” which “celebrated the ‘lower’ bodily states of birth, digestion, defecation and death” and avoided moralism and judgementalism. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press, 1984). Originally written during the former Soviet Union in the 1940s. Richard J. Powell, “The Brown Paper Bag Test: Hervé Télémaque’s Exploded Discourse,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, 42–3 (November 2018): 242. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 95 and Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 89. Brazilian artist, Teresinha Soares, turns to Bakhtin because she claims that humor awakens people from passivity to face, “the barbarity that exists. The work, War is War; Let’s Samba [Vietnam Series 1968] recalls Bakhtin’s concept of carnivalesque. We dance, thanks to indifference in front of the horrors perpetuated by war and of human suffering,” in Sofia Gotti, “Eroticism, Humour and Graves, Conversation with Teresinha Soares,” n. paradoxa, international feminist art journal, 36 (2015 [Humour]): 68. Hervé Télémaque, telephone conversation with the author, June 2, 2018. Hervé Télémaque, interview with Mona Hadler and Marine Schütz. Villejuif France, May 29, 2018. According to Jean Lavantes, owner of the painting and friend of Télémaque, the figure on the left with a bowler hat was drawn from a work by Paul Colin in, “La Revue Nègre—Music Hall—Champs-Élysées—1925,” email to the author, May 16, 2019. For more on alternative humor, see Robert Storr’s foundational writing in Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque (Santa Fe, NM: Site Santa Fe, 2004). Mercer, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, 144. Télémaque, interview with Hadler and Schütz. Villejuif, France, May 29, 2018. Ibid. Watkins, On the Real Side, 26. Télémaque, interview with Hadler and Schütz, Villejuif, France, May 29, 2018. Hérve Télémaque, “À propos My Darling Clementine” (January 21, 1977), in Hérve Télémaque: Écrits, entretiens (Paris: École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 2015), 67. Mad parodied the western on its cover, March 1954.

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92 Jean-Paul Ameline and Bénédicte Ajac, “Entretien avec Hervé Télémaque 10 and 14 September 2007,” Figuration Narrative: Paris 1960–1972 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux and Centre Pompidou, 2008), 330–1. 93 While this illustration is directed at men, he tops it in the painting with a wry before-and-after riff for women. He targets Black commerce here as Johnson Products Company was successful in selling such products, becoming in 1973 the first African American owned business to be listed on a major US stock exchange, Robert E. Weems Jr., Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 94. African Americans spent a large portion of their disposable income on such products but much of the advertising was aimed at women—after all, Essence, a magazine for Black women, began in 1970, Weems, 93. 94 Watkins, On the Real Side, 552. 95 For a “serious” comic book image of a Black cowboy see the cover of Lobo, #1, 1965, in William Villalongo and Mark Thomas Gibson, Black Pulp (New Haven, CT: Yale School of Art, 2016), 48. The Black Cowboy was a familiar figure in the American West during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, documented in a rich array of photographs. The lore of this figure has continued in recent years in exhibitions of current art such as The Black Cowboy, curated by Amanda Hunt in 2016 for the Studio Museum in Harlem. The Scalphunters, a 1968 comedy western with Ossie Davis in a lead role, is relevant to this discussion as well. 96 Pryor believed Brooks caved into pressure by not choosing him to play the Black sheriff, Convictions, 132. 97 Brooks continued: “And I wrote a lot of the black stuff, always checking with Richard: ‘Can I say this? Can I say that?’ ” Will Harris, Interview with Mel Brooks, September 9, 2011, AV Film, available at: https://film.avclub.com/melbrooks-1798227333. 98 Gary Susman, “Mel Brooks on ‘Blazing Saddles’ at 40, Richard Pryor’s Genius, and Keeping His Edge at 87,” Moviefone, published online, May 20, 2014, at: https:// www.imdb.com/news/ni57205033. 99 Thomas Crow, The Long March of Pop: Art, Music and Design, 1930–1995 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), vii. 100 See, e.g., Páldi and Westphalen (eds.), Dysfunctional Comedy. 101 Crow, The Long March of Pop, ix. He mentions Bruce and comedy in passing on p. 272.

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Tom Max’s “Okinawan Inferno” Reversion and After Hiroko Ikegami

In considering Pop Art of the global sixties in terms of race, gender, and class, US-occupied Okinawa emerges as one of its most explosive contexts. Even the briefest overview shows Okinawa’s history to be ridden with one domination after another. A semi-tropical island lying about 930 miles southwest of Tokyo, Okinawa once encompassed the capital of the Ryūkyū Kingdom that flourished with East Asian trade in the sixteenth century. Since the 1609 invasion of the Satsuma Domain, however, the kingdom, which maintained its nominal independence sanctioned by Ming and then Qing China, came under the rule of Satsuma and by extension Tokugawa Japan, until it was forcibly annexed by the modern Empire of Japan and transformed into one of its prefectures through the so-called “Ryūkyū Disposition” in 1872–79. The island was then used as a sacrificial pawn by the government toward the end of the Pacific War, suffering the loss of about 150,000 lives—approximately a quarter of its population at the time—during the fierce Battle of Okinawa in 1945. Remaining under US occupation after the defeated Japan regained sovereignty in 1952, Okinawa was forced to rent out a good part of its land to the US military to serve as its Asian front base, especially during the Vietnam War. Even after reverting to Japan in 1972, Okinawa has lived with military bases to this day. An Okinawan artist Makishi Tsutomu, aka Tom Max (1941–2015), understood the complexity of the island’s history and critically thematized its political conditions through the use of Pop strategies.1 Although Makishi, like artists based in Tokyo, drew his inspiration largely from American Pop, he put it to a much more politically charged use than his mainland or American colleagues by capitalizing on the ambiguity of Pop appropriationism and portraiture as well as that of his own imagery.2 For instance, in his 1972 installation work, 135

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Commemorating the Reversion to the Great Empire of Japan, he used numerous silkscreens of two photographs to cover the walls of the entire gallery like wallpaper in a manner reminiscent of Andy Warhol (figure 6.1, plate 10). The images Makishi showed were certainly iconic, but not unequivocal. One of them portrayed Tōjō Hideki, the Prime Minister of wartime Japan, responsible for ordering the attack on Pearl Harbor among other warmongering acts. The other was Joe Rosenthal’s famous 1945 photograph of the raising of the US flag during the battle of Iwo Jima, with one critical detail changed by the artist: the American flag was transformed into a Japanese flag. With this gesture, Makishi commented on the grave price of Okinawa’s reversion to Japan: not only did the US Army continue to stay in Okinawa but the Japanese Army also re-entered the island, under the postwar rubric of “Japan Self-Defense Forces”—named as such because Japan’s postwar constitution, enacted in 1947, renounced war and prohibited the maintenance of official armed forces. This article examines Makishi’s Pop work mainly from the viewpoint of class in three distinct moments of Okinawa’s history: before, around, and after its reversion to Japan in 1972. This period coincided with the American military intervention in

Figure 6.1 Makishi Tsutomu, installation view of Commemorating the Reversion to the Great Empire of Japan. Okinawa Arts and Crafts Center Gallery, June 1972. Courtesy of Makishi Tamiko.

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Vietnam, which deeply affected Okinawan society by complicating its already convoluted class issues.3 First, while Okinawa had its own class distinction between the upper-class warriors and the lower-class farmers during the period of the Ryūkyū Kingdom, Okinawan people have been unfairly treated by the Tokyo authorities as “second-class” citizens since the 1872 annexation.4 Second, during the US-occupation period, a huge economic disparity existed between “poor Okinawans” and “rich Americans.” And finally, the prolonged presence of the US military has led to a new divide within post-reversion Okinawa, between the antibase middle-class people who tend to have secure jobs and the pro-base workingclass people who rely on base-related jobs to make their living. Such distinct class issues in Okinawa informed Makishi’s use of Pop—specifically silkscreen and portraiture strategy as represented by Warhol—which he regarded as a “useful tool” for his art, and, as I argue, its politics.5 It should be noted that in US-occupied Okinawa, class was more a political category than an economic one in the strict Marxist sense, as the divide existed between the de facto colonizer and the colonized while necessarily involving the issue of race and gender. Nonetheless, political protest movements in Okinawa, such as the “all-island struggle” (shimagurumi tōsō) in the 1950s against the US military’s forcible acquisition of land for the construction of new bases and the subsequent “reversion movement” (fukki undō) during the 1960s, were fought as a “class struggle,” as Okinawan activists often borrowed their theory and strategies from mainland leftist intellectuals, especially those related to the Japanese Communist Party. Indeed, some student activists in mainland Japan even called the reversion of Okinawa a “revolution.”6 That those mainland students’ vision was rather naïve soon became clear, as evoked by Makishi’s 1972 installation. Miyume Tanji, a scholar of Okinawan social movements, argues that the seemingly unified protest movement in the 1950s and 1960s, in fact, masked the internal diversity of Okinawan people and their at times conflicting interests.7 Makishi understood this complexity as well as the duality of Okinawa’s position and its people in the context of the Vietnam War. Since US troops were dispatched and bombing raids were flown from Okinawa, bringing both violence and economic benefits to the island, Okinawans were at once a victim of US military force and also its co-conspirator. The end of the war in 1975 did not bring an end to their struggles, either, as post-reversion Okinawa shifted from military-dependent economy to subsidy-dependent one, creating a greater fissure between those who benefited from the continued presence of the US military and those who did not. By using Pop Art strategies in a satiric manner, Makishi sharply pointed to this conflict in his work from the

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late 1960s up to the 1972 reversion, while his subsequent production attested to the fragmented unity of the Okinawan people as a melancholic commentary on the “Okinawan Inferno,” in which American soldiers were also entrapped.

Before the Reversion: The World According to John Lewis, 1967 How did Makishi develop into a Pop artist in Okinawa, practically the only one in his generation? Born in 1941, he grew up in US-occupied Okinawa and embraced American culture such as jazz and fashion as his own. His father had a successful tailor store named AJ Tailor Shop for American officers and their wives in the military base Camp Kuwae (also known as Camp Lester) in Koza City.8 Makishi would visit his father in the camp during Christmas, enjoying his encounter with the American way of life.9 In other words, he belonged somewhere between “rich Americans” and “poor Okinawans.” Outside the camp, though, he also experienced the economic disparity between Okinawans and Americans firsthand. Indeed, Okinawans’ ambivalence toward the material wealth of their occupiers was a decisive factor in shaping his personality, as he recollected an incident during his childhood: There was a big hole by a naval gun below a cliff at the ruins of Iha Gusuku (Iha Castle), which the US forces used as a dumpsite. They would bring truckloads of garbage there. It was exactly like today’s smoky mountain in the Philippines, and we the kids would go there to pick through garbage to find bloomed chocolates and dented food cans, things like that. It was like a treasure mountain for us. I was so excited that I took my little brother with me to scavenge food. You know, we were hungry. (Laughs.) Then, this young guy, very manly, perhaps an ex-army officer, scolded us, “Shame on you, kids, to eat the garbage of yesterday’s enemy!” But we saw a packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes in his pocket. So, we thought, what the hell. Since then, I became a contrarian.10

Although this episode indicates the impoverished state of the Okinawan people in the immediate postwar years, Makishi’s father, who moved his AJ Tailor Shop in 1953 from Camp Kuwae to near USCAR (US Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands) on Kokusai dōri, the main promenade in Naha City, was well-off enough to send his son to Tama Art University in Tokyo from 1960 to 1964. (Technically, Makishi “went abroad” to study art in Tokyo, as Okinawan residents under American control needed to use a US-issued passport to travel

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to mainland Japan despite their Japanese nationality.) There, his art shifted from gestural abstraction in the Informel style to junk- and readymade-based work in the Anti-Art vein by summer 1963, as he responded to the currents of vanguard art in Japan’s capital city. His first encounter with American Neo-Dada and Pop Art must have happened during his student days in Tokyo, too, where the critic Tōno Yoshiaki championed post-Abstract Expressionist American art through a series of articles since the early 1960s.11 Among avant-garde artists, Shinohara Ushio exemplified the early Japanese interest in American Neo-Dada and Pop. In fall 1963, he created Drink More based on black-and-white reproductions of works by American artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and George Segal. For the first show of his “Imitation Art” series at the Naiqua Gallery, he proclaimed “This is Pop!” on the exhibition’s invitation card.12 The year 1964 then saw a momentum in the “Tokyo Pop” movement, as artists in the city such as Kojima Nobuaki and Tateishi Kōichi created Pop-inspired works one after another—a development that Makishi must have followed as an art student who was frequenting galleries in the city. Upon his return to Okinawa in spring 1964, however, he was obliged to help in his father’s tailor store for a few years. During this time, he could only devote his artistic energy on the store’s interior and window display, for which he often used his favorite materials and motifs such as pages of American comics, insignia of the Ivy Leagues, and sports cars. This period of apparent hiatus in fact turned out to be critically important for his subsequent artistic career. Working on a window display (the idea of which was virtually nonexistent in Okinawa at the time and thus amazed many customers) was a good practice for his exploration of Pop installations. In addition, Makishi learned the silkscreen technique at AD PRO, a design company where he worked while helping in AJ Tailor Shop,13 which completely changed the appearance of his work. Manifesting his decisive turn to Pop, Makishi’s first solo exhibition since his return home took place in the lobby of the building of Ryūkū Shinpō, one of the two major newspapers in Okinawa, in May 1967. In the form of an installation titled The World According to John Lewis, it consisted of repeated portraits of his favorite jazz musician that were silkscreened on numerous sheets of old gunnysacks and covered the gallery walls like wallpaper (figure 6.2). While this wallpaper treatment is clearly reminiscent of Warhol’s Cow series from the previous year,14 the Okinawan artist’s formal treatment of his silkscreened subject differed from that of his American counterpart: his source image, a photograph of Lewis’s portrait on the record jacket of an LP by his

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Figure 6.2 Makishi Tsutomu, installation view of The World According to John Lewis, held at the lobby of the building of Ryūkyū Shinpō, May 1967. Courtesy of Makishi Tamiko.

band,15 deployed what graphic designers called a “line drop-out” technique that emphasized a sharp contrast of an emblematic black figure against the white background. This is of seminal importance, as the “line drop-out” was the favored style of protest art in the global sixties because of its populist appeal. The style gained worldwide recognition and circulation with the 1968 celebrated poster Viva Che, which the Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick designed based on a photograph by Alberto Korda in 1960. As discussed by Thomas Crow, Cuban and European designers had already used the style from as early as fall 1967.16 Although Makishi could not have known Cuban or European examples—for the Okinawan artist’s exhibition was held in May 1967—his choice of the “line drop-out” style resonated with the politically engaged art of the era in regions outside Okinawa and beyond. Notably, the choice of John Lewis, a Black American musician, had a subtle political implication when seen against the background of Okinawans’ “reversion movement,” which was gaining impetus at the time as the American military intervention in Vietnam intensified, bringing more and more soldiers to Okinawa and increasing tensions with the local residents. Although those involved with the reversion movement found all American military personnel unwelcome in

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Okinawa, many Okinawans were sympathetic to Black American soldiers, correctly observing their segregation and discrimination by White soldiers. From this perspective, Black Americans’ long battle for civil rights in the United States echoed Okinawans’ own fight for equal citizenship as Japanese nationals in the postwar years. The sympathy was mutual, indeed. When the legendary Koza riot broke out December 20, 1970, with Okinawan bar-town workers protesting against US soldiers’ violence, they had an unwritten rule not to attack women and children as well as Black servicemen. The very next day, Black American soldiers associated with the Black Panther movement issued a statement, “We support the riot.”17 A clearer reference to the Southeast Asian situation can be found in a surviving photograph documenting the inclusion of the stenciled word “VIETNAM” and a portrait of Ho Chi Minh in Makishi’s installation.18 In addition, among the walls papered with images of John Lewis, he inserted a few panels depicting Hoshi Yuriko, a popular Japanese actress in the 1960s, also silkscreened on gunnysacks. The face of Hoshi was taken from a poster for Chikumagawa Zesshō (A Song for Chikuma River), a 1967 film about a truck driver diagnosed with leukemia, to whom the actress, in the role of a nurse, dedicated selfless love and support until his death. However, Hoshi is not necessarily portrayed as a “celebrity” in Makishi’s work: With her eyes cast down, the actress is not easily identifiable. Plus, taken out of its original, melodramatic context, Hoshi is treated as a generic Asian woman, with her tragic expression hinting at the victims of war in Vietnam as well as Okinawan women under US military occupation. The same holds true of the portrait of Lewis. While the jazz musician may have been a hero for Makishi, he was not necessarily a Pop icon in the United States, let alone in Okinawa. For Okinawan audiences unable to identify Lewis’s face, the image of an African American would have figured as a generic Black man, reminding them of the presence of Black soldiers on their island. As a whole, therefore, these motifs conveyed Makishi’s critical commentary on the Vietnam War and the ambivalent role Okinawa played in it. With Kadena Air Base supporting the US Air Force’s combat missions, the war brought many more soldiers to the island, including their crime and violence against Okinawans. However, their presence also boosted an economy in base station areas such as Koza City, which flourished more than ever from the entertainment-cum-sex industry for US servicemen. Pop’s visual language, itself one of ambiguity, was suitable to make an implicit reference to such a convoluted situation in which Okinawans found themselves.

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Makishi’s reference to Americans in general is equally subtle, as exemplified by the origins of the gunny bags he used. Below his silkscreening and the white background, the words, “Donated by the People of the United States of America,” are visible, along with labels in Asian languages such as Chinese and Korean (plate 11). This strongly suggests that these bags were used by Licensed Agencies for Relief in Asia, which sent relief aid to Asian countries including Japan and Okinawa from 1946 to 1952. In addition, Nagayama Nobuharu, an artist who reviewed the show for Ryūkyū Shinpō, noted that Makishi had also used militarysupplied flour bags that had an image of the Stars and Stripes printed on them.19 In other words, these two kinds of bags referred to Americans’ dual role as both aggressor and savior in Okinawa, attesting to Makishi’s nuanced representation of the occupiers.

On the Reversion: Commemorating the Reversion to the Great Empire of Japan, 1972 In May 1972, Okinawa reverted to Japanese sovereignty, but the result fell short of the hope of Okinawans. The fundamental problem before the reversion was that the Japanese laws did not protect Okinawan people under the US occupation: those working at American bases had to tolerate unfairly low wages and the local residents suffered American soldiers’ frequent violence against them—including rapes and murders. Worse, Okinawa was, in effect, placed outside of Japan’s socalled Peace Constitution that renounced war,20 and remained in the state of war as their island served as a main front for the Vietnam War that dragged on for years. They thus ardently hoped that Okinawa’s reversion to Japan would lead to the removal of US military bases and the danger of war from their island and that they would align with mainland Japan as a safe “home.” However, neither the Japanese nor the American authorities shared this view. When President Nixon agreed in 1969 to return the administration of Okinawa to the Japanese government, it gave consent to the US military to remain on Okinawa after the reversion. This naturally infuriated most Okinawans, and their frustration led to the aforementioned Koza riot in 1970 and to two major general strikes in 1971.21 Makishi’s engagement with Pop thus intensified in the form of political satire with his next exhibition of another installation work, Commemorating the Reversion to the Great Empire of Japan, held at the Okinawa Arts and Crafts Center Gallery in June 1972, exactly a month after Okinawa reverted to Japan.

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Near the entrance, for instance, there was a crumpled sheet of blank paper, as if casting doubt on this “memorable” event. For the invitation card, Makishi used a Xerox of a draft notice, commonly known as akagami (red paper) because of its color, which was used by the Japanese government during the war years. He even wrote on the card, “Each person shall pay their travel expenses as this mission is for the sake of our nation state.” Clearly Makishi’s critique went beyond American imperialism in this work. Rather, his real target was Japanese imperialism. As many survivors attested, the Japanese Army had abused and even driven Okinawan people to their death during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa; and now it was re-entering the post-reversion Okinawa under the new guise of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. In other words, with this exhibition, Makishi exposed Okinawa’s reality for his people: from now on, Okinawa would offer land not only to American forces but also to Japanese ones, as part of a combined antiCommunist front in Asia. If this “double military occupation” was the price of returning to Japanese sovereignty, the Okinawan people were then still treated as the “second-class” citizens. For the installation, the artist repeated his 1967 strategy of using silkscreens as wallpaper, but in a much more dramatic manner. As mentioned before, one of the two images in the exhibition was Iwo Jima. The other was Tōjō Hideki, who was hanged for Japanese war crimes in 1948. These images, printed on graph paper of A4 size, filled the walls of the entire gallery. Importantly, in this exhibition Makishi deployed the “line drop-out” style more emphatically than in the previous exhibition. For instance, the original plate for the Iwo Jima photograph shows how the artist manipulated the photograph by inserting hinomaru (the red circle of the sun) into the flag, while dropping its contour lines. The portrait of Tōjō, of which the original image remains unknown, is also subjected to the same stylization. As a result, these silkscreens utilize pop/ graphic design strategies to demonstrate a stronger contrast and flatter rendering compared to the 1967 portraits of John Lewis. If the artist discovered the style in 1967 as a readymade image from an LP jacket of Lewis’s band, his return to the same technique in 1972 was perhaps more consciously informed by political concerns. By 1972, the iconic image of Viva Che must have been circulating in Okinawa, as it was in mainland Japan and elsewhere. Makishi likely was inspired by the revolutionary icon, thereby knowingly aligning his work with international protest art of the day. As mentioned before, however, the images that Makishi chose—the photograph of Iwo Jima and the portrait of Tōjō—carried a profoundly negative ideological charge in Japan, including Okinawa. Granted, six soldiers who raised

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the flag on Mount Suribachi of Iwo Jima were national heroes for the United States,22 but that was obviously not the case in Okinawa. Equally, Tōjō may have been a national hero when the tide of the Pacific War went, albeit briefly, in favor of Japan in its early stage, but he was exposed as a quintessential war criminal after the country’s defeat. Therefore, his treatment could not be more different from Fitzpatrick’s positive interpretation of Guevara as a hero and falls closer to Warhol’s ironical treatment of death and criminals in his earlier works. Although Makishi adopted the line-dropping style probably because of its populist appeal, he deliberately chose problematic images for the Okinawan people, thereby eliciting their own politics and private concerns about the subject of reversion to Japan. Okinawan audiences were not excluded from Makishi’s critique, either. During the exhibition, the artist gave a rare explanation about the installation to a newspaper reporter: Take, for instance, the stationing of the Self-Defense Forces. We all feel so numb about it that the issue no longer surprises us. Visitors [to my exhibition] with war experiences may make a series of associations with the familiar face of Tōjō, while visitors who know nothing about the war may respond in their own ways. In any case, I want them to leave the tired everyday behind and be surprised again.23

How, then, did his own people receive Makishi’s provocation? Certainly, most reviews noted Makishi’s sharp satire,24 but one newspaper article quoted the diverse responses found in the guestbook. For instance, one visitor, oblivious to the satire, left the enraged comment, “You have no right whatsoever to live as a human being. I don’t give a damn about the Great Empire of Japan. Hundreds of thousands of people who died in the war must be hoping that we will never make the same mistake again.” In contrast, another visitor, seemingly sympathetic to Japan’s wartime nationalism, wrote, “I firmly believe that the spirits of those who died for the nation do symbolize the people of Japan.” Yet another one simply wrote, “Nonsense!”25 These conflicting responses once again proved Pop to be the language of ambivalence, which could suspend the meaning of an iconic image between celebration and critique. More importantly for the discussion here, they also point to the fact that Okinawans’ political consciousness was not necessarily monolithic. As discussed by the social historian Tanji, the “all-island struggle” and the “reversion movement” during the 1950s and 60s were more or less unified movements but did not cover all the strata of Okinawan society,

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with their organizers practically ignoring bar-town workers or women in the sex industry in base town districts.26 For instance, the Koza riot was impacted by the presence of the Kadena Air Base and Camp Kuwae (where Makishi’s father once ran AJ Tailor Shop). The main protagonists of the riot were bartown workers, who did not take an active part in the reversion movement because they heavily relied on base-related incomes to make living. The same holds true of women who supported the riot, as they worked in the same area and were thus most vulnerable to American soldiers’ violence and sex crimes. In brief, the Koza riot was undertaken by those who suffered most from the presence of US military bases and yet were excluded from the organized reversion movement. Political activism during the 1950s and 60s nonetheless helped to form the myth of unified Okinawans, as they were categorically placed outside the protection of the Japanese constitution, let alone the American one. However, with the reversion realized, albeit in a severely compromised manner, Okinawan protestors lost the common cause. Worse, Okinawan class consciousness was irrevocably changed as the post-reversion Okinawa started receiving sizable public funding from the Japanese government in compensation for the continued presence of US military, turning the Okinawan economy from base-dependent to subsidy-dependent one. The increasing affluence eventually reversed the class relationship between Okinawans and the US servicemen. Yet, it also created a disparity within Okinawa, making it difficult to hold the identity of “we Okinawans” vis-à-vis “American occupiers.” In other words, Okinawa changed from “a poor yet equal society” to “an affluent yet unequal society,” just like other parts of Japan.27

After the Reversion: Tom Max Visualizing the “Okinawan Inferno” Makishi’s work after 1972 can be seen in this light, too. Shortly after the Commemorating exhibition, Makishi left for New York with a new Japanese passport. This year-long trip involved a temporary class shift for Makishi, as he worked at the jazz bar Village Gate and as a truck driver to support himself. To help with pronunciation, he anglicized his name, changing it from Tsutomu Makishi to Tom Max, which he used as his artist name for the rest of his career. In New York Makishi saw numerous exhibitions. By 1972, Pop Art was no longer the cutting edge of contemporary art, although artists such as Roy Lichtenstein,

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James Rosenquist, and Jim Dine continued working and exhibiting and Warhol produced his famous Mao portraits. Nonetheless, New York had ample options to offer such as Video Art or Land Art, if Makishi wanted to adopt the latest style or medium for his subsequent artistic career. However, Makishi neither turned to breaking trends nor did he continue creating silkscreen-based Pop installations when he returned to Okinawa in fall 1973. In fact, what most inspired him in New York was the work by Rauschenberg, especially his transfer drawings from the late 1950s to early 1960s. In 1975, Makishi made as study of oil paintings a number of drawings (figure 6.3) that are very much reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s series of thirty-four drawings for Dante’s Inferno (hereafter the Dante Drawings). Makishi may have known of the work from the critic Tōno’s 1962 long article on Rauschenberg,28 but it is highly likely that he saw a few works from the series in 1973 as part of the exhibition Works on Paper: A Selection from the Collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.29 Although hand-drawn and not involving transfer technique per se, Makishi’s drawings include typical Rauschenbergian motifs such as a flying bird, a half-naked man, a parachute, and a clock without hands. Their dark, disquieting atmosphere, combined with indexical striations of crosshatching, also show that Makishi was emulating the technique and iconography of Rauschenberg’s Dante Drawings. At first glance, this “Neo-Dada turn” might seem anachronistic, but it makes sense in retrospect that Makishi chose to respond to the Dante Drawings among other works by the American artist. It was in this series that Rauschenberg questioned the mythic image of America’s “Golden Fifties” by putting twentiethcentury ordinary people, taken from popular magazines such as Life and Sports Illustrated, into the hell of contemporary New York.30 In 1975, Okinawa also saw the bright and dark side of being part of Japan as a site of the Expo ’75. For the first large-scale international event in Okinawa, the government spent sizable funds to build the infrastructure and develop the island as a resort destination. Although this project certainly contributed to creating a tourism industry in Okinawa, the rapid development came with its own price: the destruction of Okinawa’s natural environment and the solidarity of its people. The image of a “peaceful tropical island” masked their traumatic wartime past and militarydominated present, and the severe post-Expo depression darkened their economic prospects.31 The following year, Makishi created Countdown (plate 12), one of his most commanding works, in which he duplicated the effect of transfer drawing again by painting diverse photo-based images. To create this large oil painting

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Figure 6.3 Makishi Tsutomu, Untitled, c. 1975. Pencil on paper, 10.03 × 14.05 in (25.5 ×. 35.7 cm). Courtesy of Makishi Tamiko.

(162 × 130 cm), the artist most likely used a projector to enlarge his photographic sources and then hand-painted the projected images while coloring the background with light gray. Ominous images such as the murdered Vietcong, hanged victims, and the wartime Japanese soldiers are juxtaposed with American images of pornography, a footballer, and a US serviceman giving a take-off sign to a pilot, who is probably departing Okinawa to bomb Vietnam. According to the curator and art historian Onaga Naoki, this work was produced as Makishi’s answer to the end of Vietnam War.32 But Makishi told Onaga in a 2012 interview that “Some fool said Japan’s ‘postwar era’ would never be over without Okinawa’s reversion to mainland Japan, but [even after the reversion] the postwar is not over yet in Okinawa.”33 The end of the war did not mean the end of Okinawans’ struggles: they were now not only torn between two nations, but also torn inside, as the economic disparity in post-reversion Okinawa, due to government subsidies, was poised to increase. Together with the drawings from the previous year, these works can be seen as Makishi’s own version of the “Okinawan Inferno,” his melancholic commentary on the convoluted reality of Okinawa and the fragmented solidarity of his people.

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However, Makishi did not include any specific Okinawan motifs in his work. This is a critical difference between Makishi and the Pop artists in Tokyo, who often capitalized on Japanese premodern visual culture as part of their strategy to resist the overwhelming influence of American popular culture and Pop Art.34 After “Imitation Art,” for instance, Shinohara devised a kind of Pop ukiyo-e in 1965–6 in his Oiran (high courtesan) series, by combining a motif from late-Edo woodblock prints with the mechanical production methods. The series led him to receive a grant from the JDR 3rd Fund, which enabled him to move to New York in 1969.35 In contrast, Makishi never used motifs from a premodern tradition of Japanese visual culture. Unlike Shinohara, he remained virtually anonymous outside Okinawa during his lifetime, as he chose to show his work almost exclusively on his island.36 Indeed, given the history of the Ryūkyū Kingdom as outlined in the beginning of this article, it is questionable to what extent Okinawan artists regarded the Japanese tradition of visual culture as their own. Makishi’s exclusive use of American Pop and Neo-Dada, combined with his own innovative use of the “line drop-out” style and hand-painted transfer technique, was therefore meaningful in more than one way. The artist not only appropriated the artistic language of the occupier to describe the situation of the occupied, but he also implicitly questioned what Japanese “national tradition” is and for whom it exists. When seen in the context of postwar Japanese art, Makishi’s work had a destabilizing, or even denationalizing effect on works by mainland Pop artists. Makishi’s broad critical stance even included what mainland Japanese considered the aggressor: American soldiers. While Countdown depicts the US serviceman in a rather cool manner, his 1979 painting Left Alone (figure 6.4), also rendered in the style of transfer painting, depicts the back of an American soldier filled with sorrow, showing him as an alienated figure subject to a large power and order in a foreign land, himself entrapped in the same Okinawan Inferno as the local residents. Yet, the absence of direct visual references to Okinawa makes his work not just about Okinawa but also about the violence of recent past on the whole, inflicted upon victimized people of the world by those who exploited their predicament. Makishi thus achieved a wider communicability to speak for those whose voices are suppressed in one way or another despite their difference in social status, race, or nationality. As the title Countdown and the image of the clock in the painting imply, the work offers an apocalyptic image of not just Okinawans,’ but our own doomsday.

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Figure 6.4 Makishi Tsutomu, Left Alone, 1979. Mixed media, canvas, 29.25 × 24.4 in (74.3 × 62 cm). Courtesy of Makishi Tamiko.

Notes 1 I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to following individuals who helped my research on Makishi Tsutomu: Machida Megumi, Kuniyoshi Atena, Onaga Naoki, Makishi Tamiko, and Makishi Nami. In this article, Japanese names are given in the traditional order: surname first, followed by first name, except for individuals who have voluntarily adopted the Western order. 2 There have been many articles since the 1970s on the political potential and ambiguity in Pop Art, in particular Warhol’s work. See, for instance, Andreas Huyssen, “The Cultural Politics of Pop: Reception and Critique of US Pop Art in the Federal Republic of Germany,” New German Critique, no. 4 (Winter 1975): 77–97, Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” in Serge Guilbaut (ed.), Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1990), 311–26, and Hal Foster, “Death in America,” October, 75 (Winter 1996): 36–59. 3 For a longer article on Makishi and postwar Okinawan art scene, see Hiroko Ikegami, “Pop as Translation Strategy: Makishi Tsutomu’s Political Pop in Okinawa,” ARTMargins, 7, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 42–71. While the present article focuses on class issues in Makishi’s work, the essay in ARTMargins incorporates comparison of his work with Okinawan literature in terms of the concept of “untranslatability,” the theme of the special issue.

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4 It is to be noted that a disparity existed within Okinawa, too, between the central authorities in Naha and remote islands such as Miyako and Yaeyama, which were oppressed with a poll tax by the Ryūkyū authorities. 5 Makishi Tsutomu, interview by Onaga Naoki and Machida Megumi (March 9, 2012), Ātisuto no kotoba: Intabyū shū [Artists’ Words: Interviews] (Naha: Okinawa Artist Interview Project, 2014), 71. 6 Miyume Tanji, Myth, Protest, and Struggle in Okinawa (London: Routledge, 2006), 82. 7 Ibid., 5. 8 Although Makishi would later joke that “AJ” of AJ Tailor Shop represented America and Japan, it is likely that the two initials came from Atkinson Jones Construction Company, which undertook the construction of US military bases in the USoccupied Okinawa. 9 Makishi, Ātisuto no kotoba, 51. 10 Ibid., 50–1. 11 For the introduction of American Neo-Dada and Pop in Japan, see chapter 4 in Hiroko Ikegami, The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2010). 12 For this show and the movement of “Tokyo Pop,” see Hiroko Ikegami, “ ‘Drink More?’ ‘No, Thanks!’: The Spirit of Tokyo Pop,” in Darsie Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan (eds.), International Pop (Minneapolis, MN : Walker Art Center, 2015), 165–80. 13 Makishi Tamiko, interview by the author, Naha, Okinawa, May 31, 2017. 14 As the library at the Ryukyuan-American Cultural Center in Naha carried a good collection of American art magazines, we may surmise that Makishi knew the latest examples of American Pop Art. 15 The two-volume record was released in 1962 on the Atlantic label as European Concert by The Modern Jazz Quartet, for which John Lewis acted as a leader. 16 For Guevara’s poster by Jim Fitzpatrick, see Thomas Crow, The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design, 1930–1995 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 329–40. 17 Quoted in Masamichi S. Inoue, Okinawa and the U.S. Military: Identity Making in the Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 55. 18 Makishi Tamiko, interview by the author, Naha, Okinawa, May 31, 2017. 19 Nagayama Nobuharu, “Makishi Tsutomu ni yoru ‘Jon Ruisu no sekai’ o mite” (A Review of Makishi Tsutomu’s The World According to John Lewis), Ryūkyū Shinpō, May 29, 1967. 20 Tanji, Myth, Protest, and Struggle in Okinawa, 62. 21 Inoue, Okinawa and the U.S. Military, 52–3. 22 For the full story of the six soldiers, see James Bradley with Ron Powers, Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima (New York: Bantam Books, 2000). 23 “Maibotsu shita nichijō-sei o utsu” (Shooting the Tired Everyday), unidentified newspaper, undated, clipped and pasted in Makishi’s photo album along with other reviews on the exhibition.

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24 See, for instance, a review by Ōmine Shin’ichi, “Makishi no surudoi fūshi: Fukki no genjitsu ni keikoku hassu” (Makishi’s Sharp Satire: Warning against the Reality of the Reversion), Ryūkyū Shinpō, July 7, 1972. 25 “Tsūrestu na fūshi to gyakusetu: Koten, Makishi Tsutomu” (Sharp Satire and Paradox: An exhibition by Makishi Tsutomu), unidentified newspaper, June 18, 1972. 26 Tanji, Myth, Protest, and Struggle in Okinawa, 103. 27 Quoted in Inoue, Okinawa and the U.S. Military, 68. 28 Tōno Yoshiaki, “Robāto Raushenbāgu arui wa Nyūyōku no ‘Jigoku hen’ ” (Robert Rauschenberg, or the New York ‘Inferno’), Mizue, no. 683 (February 1962): 42–56. 29 The exhibition was held from March 7 to May 28, 1973. The exhibition’s checklist includes Canto III, Canto XXXI , and Canto XXXIV from the Dante Drawings. 30 For discussion on Dante Drawings, see chapter 2 in Ikegami’s The Great Migrator and also Ed Krčma, Rauschenberg/Dante: Drawing a Modern Inferno (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 31 For this event, see Tada Osamu, Okinawa Imēji no tanjō: Aoi umi no Karuchuraru sutadīzu [The Birth of Okinawan Image: Cultural Studies on the Blue Sea] (Tokyo: Tōyō Keizai Shimbun-sha, 2004). 32 Onaga Naoki, “Poppu kara, Rikyūnezu, kuro, hakuboku e” (From Pop to Rikyū Gray, Black, and Chalk) Tomu Makkusu: Sakuhin shū/Tom Max: Works (Naha: Executive Committee for the Makishi Tsutomu Exhibition, 2016), 55. 33 Makishi, Ātisuto no kotoba, 71. The “fool” mentioned here is Satō Eisaku, who served as Japan’s prime minister from 1964 to 1972 and worked toward Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese sovereignty. 34 On this topic, see Ikegami, “‘Drink More?’ ‘No, Thanks,’” 165–80, and Reiko Tomii, “Oiran Goes Pop: Contemporary Japanese Artists Reinventing Icons,” in Jessica Morgan and Flavia Frigeri (eds.), The World Goes Pop (London: Tate Modern, 2015), 103–11. 35 For Shinohara’s career before and after his move to New York, see Hiroko Ikegami and Reiko Tomii, Shinohara Pops! The Avant-Garde Road: Tokyo/New York (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012). 36 Makishi is gradually gaining posthumous fame; the Okinawa Museum Prefectural Museum & Art Museum and Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts held exhibitions of the artist in 2016–17, respectively titled Makishi Tsutomu: “Ambivalent” and Makishi Tsutomu: “Out to Lunch.” For two publications related to these exhibitions, see Tomu Makkusu: Sakuhin shū/Tom Max: Works and Tom Max 1941–2015 (Naha: Makishi Nami, 2016). In 2020, Tama Art University Museum held Tom Max: Turbulence 1941–2015, the first museum exhibition of the artist held in mainland Japan, publishing an exhibition catalogue of the same title.

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Following the Traces of Yemanjá Pop Art, Cultura Popular, and Printmaking in Brazil Giulia Lamoni

In 1975, Brazilian artist Yêdamaria (1932–2016) created a black-and-white metal engraving depicting two mirroring figures of the Orisha Yemanjá, an AfroBrazilian deity much celebrated in the city of Salvador (figure 7.1).1 The print, titled Yemanjás, challengingly combined the artist’s engagement with AfroBrazilian spirituality with figurative strategies that resonate, to some extent, with a “Pop” imagery. A Black woman from Salvador, and a teacher at the School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Bahia, Yêdamaria had already mobilized a figurative repertoire critically akin to “Pop” in mixed-media works created in the early 1970s. These colorful pieces materialized a set of representations of Yemanjá in her mermaid form by combining painting with collage techniques. Here, as in the later engraving Yemanjás, the deity, sovereign of the sea, was portrayed as a simple white silhouette, accompanied by stars and sometimes by a globe or a rounded shape, a possible reference to her abebê, the circular fan associated with Yemanjá.2 Most importantly,Yêdamaria envisioned the Orisha’s female body, traditionally related to the maternal,3 as a space of creativity and freedom in which gender and racial relations could be explored and critically reimagined. In the mixedmedia piece Proteção de Yemanjá (Protection of Yemanjá), 1972 (plate 13), for instance, a montage of female faces, probably cut out from women’s magazines or advertisements, constituted the deity’s mermaid tail. Belonging to Black and White women, the faces signified spiritual unity as well as the longing for an equality of rights, as suggested by the title of another work from this cycle, Yemanjá todos iguais (Yemanjá all equals) also from 1972. Similarly, in the 1975 engraving Yemanjás, the Orisha’s long hair was composed of a set of black and white faces, close to each other and often indistinguishable. 153

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Figure 7.1 Yêdamaria, Yemanjás, 1975. Metal engraving, 21.25 x 27.87 in (54 × 70.8 cm). Acervo Associação Museu Afro Brasil, SP. Photo: Guilherme Lopes Vieira.

Only a few years after creating these works, Yêdamaria left Salvador to pursue a Master’s degree in painting and printmaking at Illinois State University. In the United States, where she lived between 1977 and 1979, she was advised to abandon what was considered “primitive” in her imagery by her professors and reorient her practice.4 While partly resisting such bias, she also became attracted to “the plastic possibilities of the common culinary, in North-American local color: hamburgers, milkshakes, ice cream with fruits, Campbell’s soup etc.”5 The metal engraving Lunch, 1979, depicting food on a table, including a conspicuous hamburger, is symptomatic of this phase. Not surprisingly, when Yêdamaria exhibited her work in Salvador in 1980, artist Mário Cravo Jr discerned “pop references” in its themes.6 Yêdamaria’s stay in Illinois in the late 1970s cemented her already heightened awareness of race relations. “In the United States black people have united, [. . .] but in Brazil it is very difficult for blacks to have a good position,”7 she said in the mid-1980s. Earlier, in 1972, in her painting Yemanjá com luz (Yemanjá with light) (plate 14), she had inserted a round cut out photograph of Martin Luther

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King in a star placed on the Orisha’s chest. According to the artist and curator Emanoel Araújo: Yêdamaria was moved by the magical-religious touch of the African gods of Bahia, but with a certain tone of redress characteristic of women, of black people, of the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King. One perceives in her work of the 1970s, constructed with collage and emblematic elements of a rigid symmetry—frankly figurative and with a strong pop influence—her diverse travels and residence in the United States.8

The reception of Yêdamaria’s mixed-media works and engravings from the 1970s, in Brazil, as somehow relating to “Pop” is particularly interesting as it calls into question an expanded understanding of “Pop” as a transnational and heterogeneous phenomenon—one that, in the Brazilian context, extended beyond the centrality of the urban triangle of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte, while engaging a variety of artistic mediums such as painting and printmaking. Critically eccentric—because of its distance from hegemonic narratives of Pop that credit Britain and the United States, with inscribing its “influence” on the rest of the world,9 and because of its exclusion from most histories of Brazilian critical realism and new figuration—Yedâmaria’s practice offers a challenging perspective from which to explore how Brazilian artists committed, in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond, to art forms engaging with the political and cultural reality of their country as well as with different international events, while strategically drawing from the languages of the media, from everyday materials and vernacular sources. In addition, Yêdamaria’s practice stimulates a possible reconfiguration of the “several lives”10 of Pop in Brazil—emerging in the mid-1960s and extending in diverse forms into the 1970s and early 1980s—and of the space they opened for artists to explore political issues at large, including the oppressive rule of the military government, the cultural and economic hegemony of the United States and the part it played in Latin American affairs, but also the transformation of gender relations and the role of representation in perpetuating patriarchal norms and racial biases in Brazilian society.11 Drawing on a set of questions inspired by Yêdamaria’s work, and on an expanded idea of Pop as “amazingly hospitable category,”12 this text explores, in a situated, feminist and nonexhaustive perspective, the multifaceted relations between Pop Art, cultura popular (popular culture), printmaking, and the inscription of political positionings in Brazilian art, with a specific preoccupation with feministoriented discourses and, at times, with their intersections with racial issues.13

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POP as in “Cultura POPular”? Since the late 1950s, in the context of the country’s process of modernization, emerging discussions of the role of cultura popular in Brazil lead to different, and sometimes conflicting, understandings of this category. Northeastern Brazil in particular, because of its cultural richness and heterogeneity, played the role of a “precursor in ‘discovering’ and ‘accepting’ the importance of the popular”14 in the early 1960s, as observed by Aracy Amaral. For the architect Lina Bo Bardi, whose explorations of popular culture were strongly, although not exclusively,15 connected to her relation to the northern city of Salvador, where she first traveled in 1958, and with its artists and intellectuals, the notion of cultura popular was critically distinct from that of folklore. In 1963, in the catalogue of the exhibition “Nordeste,” inaugurating the Museu de Arte Popular do Unhão in Salvador, that she created, Bo Bardi asserted: “folklore is a static and regressive inheritance, whose character is paternalistically sheltered by those responsible for culture, whereas popular art (with art being used here not only in its artistic sense, but also in that of technically making) defines the progressive attitude of popular culture linked to real problems.”16 Aware of its liveliness and its fundamental connection with the country’s reality, Bo Bardi was convinced that the popular could play a key role in the process of the Brazilian culture’s development and in the articulation of what she called a “new humanism.”17 As early as 1958, she affirmed, in her weekly page of the Sunday issue of the Diário de notícias in Salvador that: “Safeguarding the genuine forces of the country to the maximum, while at the same time seeking to be aware of international development, will be the basis of the new cultural action.”18 In its disentanglement from the folkloric, this validation of the popular related to an interest in Gramsci’s thought19 and implied a reconfiguration of the distinction between high and low arts, evident in her involvement with the exhibition of craft and popular productions from Northeastern Brazil, an area characterized by particularly poor socioeconomic conditions but also by burgeoning vanguard movements in the cultural field. In 1959, Bo Bardi collaborated with Martim Gonçalves, director of the Theatre School at Bahia University, in the organization of the exhibition “Bahia” in the Ipirapuera park in São Paulo during the 5th Art Biennial. Presenting a variety of cultural productions from the region—including handicraft, ceramics, everyday tools and Afro-Brazilian religious objects20—the exhibition strongly contrasted with “the cosmopolitan currents” on display at the Biennial.21 This opposition resonated with the architect’s depiction of the Brazilian cultural panorama of the early 1960s as a disputed field. In 1961, she wrote:

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Today, Brazil is divided in two: the one of those who want to keep abreast, who look constantly abroad, trying to capture the latest news in order to drop them— hurriedly covered in a national coating—in the culture market; and the one of those who look inside themselves and around them, tiredly searching—in the sparse heritance of a new and passionately loved land—for the roots of a culture still unformed, to construct it with a seriousness where no smiles are admitted. A tiresome search in the tangle of heritage contemptuously snubbed by an improvised critique drastically defining it as regionalism and folklore.22

While Bo Bardi’s work in the early 1960s as the director of the newly founded Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (MAMB) and later also of the Museu de Arte Popular do Unhão—including her effort to connect industrial design with local handicraft23—was directed toward an “acknowledgement of the agency” of the popular,24 she participated in a political and cultural geometry that significantly included other actors.25 One of them was the Movimento de Cultura Popular (MCP) in Recife, created in 1960 by a group of artists and intellectuals with the support of the city’s mayor. Aiming to encourage a process of democratization of culture, in contexts of strong economic indigence and social marginalization, the organization realized cultural activities while furthering popular education and literacy training. It is in this context that Paulo Freire developed his method where teacher and student underwent a non-hierarchical process of dialogue and exchange whose goal was the transformation of reality.26 In addition, the popular came to be associated by the early decade’s left-wing activism with revolutionary aspirations, with the struggle for the participation of “the people”27 in the cultural field and with the need for intellectuals and artists to engage in a collective process of social transformation in Brazil. In this sense, the Centros Populares de Cultura (CPC) (Popular Centers of Culture) linked to the National Student Union (UNE), created in 1961 in Rio de Janeiro,28 aspired to “contribute to the struggle by raising consciousness among the people, and among workers in particular.”29 From a nationalist perspective, and in line with experiences such as those of the MPC in Recife,30 the CPC came to envision “cultura popular” as a political project.31 As put by Marilena Chaui, “In reality, the phenomenon that one observes is not so much a searching for the popular but rather its construction by the self-named ‘combative vanguard of the people.’ ”32 In this sense, in his 1963 book Cultura posta em questão, poet Ferreira Gullar defined cultura popular as a “new phenomenon” in Brazil, “a denunciation of fashionable cultural concepts seeking to hide their class-based character,”33 a form of conceiving and practicing culture, by the CPC, as an instrument of

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social transformation. “If, from an artistic and literary standpoint,” explained Gullar, “popular culture manifests itself as a ‘new tendency’ characterized by a national theme, directly or indirectly didactic, one should not lose sight of its deep social roots that distinguish it from merely aesthetic movements.”34 At the same time, a critique of imperialism, especially by the US, lay at the heart of this new politically engaged cultural production. Gullar, like Bo Bardi a few years before him, condemned those Brazilian elites who, affected by an “a-critical provincialism,” exclusively looked at the outside, towards Paris or other central metropolises. For Gullar, cultural development in Brazil “requires both the exchange of experiences with those abroad, as well as the criticism of what arrives here from there.”35 This question remained urgent for him even after the 1964 military coup that dramatically marked the end of these cultural and political experiences. “Will a concept of aesthetic ‘vanguard,’ valid in Europe or in the United States, be equally valid in an underdeveloped country like Brazil?”36 Gullar asked in 1969.

A Popular Imagination What was the popular in Brazilian “Pop” art? Emerging from the mid-1960s, this current developed as a local vanguard, weaving a dialogue, at times conflicted, with international artistic tendencies. I contend that Pop in Brazil mobilized multiple layers of the construction of the popular in different political and artistic discourses since the early years of the decade,37 while intertwining them with questions related to “mass society,” and to the oppressive political situation after the 1964 coup, and with the need to emancipate Brazilian art from a paradigm of “derivativeness.” These connections are particularly interesting in the case of printmaking. As highlighted by art critic Frederico Morais in 1974, during the 1960s, printmaking “remained one of the last shelters of the ‘specific’ in the plastic arts. It undoubtedly renewed itself under the influence of pop/new figuration imagery, optical and permutation art and, more recently, conceptual art without, nevertheless, disconnecting itself from its own tradition [. . .] that its followers energetically support.”38 Associated with the mastery of specific techniques, printmaking also maintained historical ties to notions of democratization and the expression of social and political concerns. The Clubes de Gravura (Engraving Clubs) that developed in Porto Alegre and other Brazilian cities in the early 1950s, for example, expanded access to printed artworks while producing socially engaged

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imagery.39 The pioneering work of Lívio Abramo in the 1930s, whose practice was impacted by German expressionism, is relevant here in its exploration of the conditions of the working class in São Paulo, as is that of Renina Katz, among others, active in the field of social realism in the early 1950s. Anna Maria Maiolino studied woodcut engraving with artist Adir Botelho in the early 1960s at the Ateliê Livre of Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. Her classmates included Rubens Gerchman, Roberto Magalhães and António Dias, who would soon become celebrated exponents of Brazilian new realist or Pop tendencies—or as preferred by Gerchman, of “critical realism.”40 The history of the atelier as a “privileged place for the unfolding of figurative expressionism,”41 was marked, since the mid-1950s, by the teaching of Oswaldo Goeldi—one of the most influential woodcut engravers in twentieth-century Brazilian art, who worked in an expressionist vein—and later by his assistant and successor Adir Botelho. If Goeldi created, directly and indirectly, a school of printmakers, as theorized by Roberto Teixeira Leite in 1965,42 Maiolino’s woodcut practice arose from this context. Subsequent to her studies, in 1966, Maiolino realized a set of woodcuts depicting scenes of everyday street or domestic life—such as O Açougue (The Butcher) and O Cabeleireiro (The Hairdresser), both of 1966. In O Bebê (The Baby), 1967 (plate 15), three vignettes, oriented vertically, narrated a mother and child interaction and articulation of the word “mãe” (mother). If the internal structure of the work reveals an interest in the narrative possibilities of figuration—drawing probably on comic strips and cinema—the simplicity of the representation and the austerity of the incision suggests, as critics have argued, the use of woodcut in the context of cordel43 literature in the Northeast. An artistic form that could be defined as popular—in Bo Bardi’s understanding of the term—cordel literature is printed in small booklets, often illustrated by woodcuts with a simple and direct design. Maiolino’s woodcut practice of this period “suggests a melding of cordel and Pop, evoking comic books,”44 according to Paulo Herkenhoff. Nevertheless, “while cordel woodcuts provided the anthropological prototype and the graphic style [. . .] they did not yet furnish the imaginary content for her articulation of political utopia.”45 Maiolino herself agreed, and stressed the importance of the popular in those years. “For us, approaching the popular meant looking for our roots,” she said, “Unlike American Pop art, in Brazil the incorporation of the popular was due to an interest in everything political and social.”46 Yet, her work O Bebê is not clearly identified as a humorous critique of the military rule after the coup—as in another woodcut of this period, O Héroi (The Hero), 1967.

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Rather, it is part of an ensemble of works, also including objects like A Espera (The Waiting), 1967, that explore gendered roles and everyday life from a woman’s perspective, while, as a consequence, indirectly affirming the legitimacy of addressing these questions in light of both art and politics. “It was a socially excluded theme . . .,” commented Maiolino, “it still is.”47 If woodcut, historically associated to figurative tendencies in Brazil48 and to the popular cordel tradition, best adapted itself to a pop imagery, as Morais claimed,49 the contemporaneous work by Wilma Martins in Rio de Janeiro also mobilized the popular in a singular way. Although Martins’s dialogue with Pop was “involuntary,”50 and her woodcuts did not directly engage the media, urban and suburban life, or straightforward political imagery, her production of this period resonates with Maiolino’s woodcuts featuring domestic life and maternity. Martins’s prints of mid-1960s, indeed aligned the popular with the fantastic in that she “recovers the old engraving tradition with its romantic, fantastic and popular character, full of symbolic meanings.”51 Increasingly interested in reality,52 in 1966 and 1967 Martins created a set of woodcuts evoking the female body, sexuality and maternity in an explicit form. This new focus corresponded, chronologically, to Martins’s move together with her husband, the art critic Morais, from Belo Horizonte to Rio de Janeiro. “My engraving has two phases now: before and after Rio,”53 affirmed the artist in 1967. In A mãe (The mother), 1967, for instance, women and men, Black and White, arranged in three neat rows, wait under what looks like a representation of female fertility—a breast or a uterus exuding large drops of red blood as the mother provides blood instead of nourishment. Likewise, in Retorno (Return, plate 16), a woodcut print of the same year, Black and White women and men retreat into the maternal body, in a reverse action to birth. If both works explore the pain of being born and living, they also reveal the craving for the maternal body as a corporeal shelter.54 At the same time, from the mother’s perspective, they signal the pain of giving birth, physically as well as symbolically. The focus on female viscerality55 and reproductive organs resonates, in terms of gender difference, with some remarks made by Martins in a 1967 interview: In my engravings, the man is always battling the forces of nature. The woman, on the other hand, is presented more intimately. I think that man is only concerned about what is outside him. Man only creates with the body and outwards. With the body, with the arms, externally. Woman, in contrast, creates from the inside, she is essentially interior. She has her little demons there to root out, constantly.56

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When associated with Retorno, the idea of “creating from the inside” seems to refer both to a visceral act of creation and to a symbolic one, and, most importantly, to the relation between the two. These works also point to Martins’s preoccupation, largely shared with her peer artists in Rio de Janeiro and across Brazil, with the country’s social and political reality—the new military rule and its violence—and that of the world in general. In the aforementioned interview the artist acknowledged: “Yes, the major world issues today are in my engraving: social problems, war, fear of the bomb, threats to integrity. Only I show them together with man’s most intimate tensions. I think that the individual is the only thing that really matters, [. . .] more important than anything: homeland, family, God.”57 This quite open criticism of the ideological stance of the military regime in power—homeland, family, God—combines with a subtle attempt to problematize racial relations in the artist’s work, through the materialization of White and Black bodies, probably related, among others, to an awareness of Black liberation movements in the United States.58 Indeed, the individual, and more particularly the female body, becomes, in the artist’s engraving of this period, a prism through which the collective dimension of reality can be approached and critically addressed. According to Morais, the intertwinement of different themes—associated to the “female condition” and beyond—are articulated by Martins through a formal vocabulary rooted in an interest in religious psalters.59 At the same time, she enlarged the prints’ format, in dialogue with current vanguard strategies developed in the fields of painting and sculpture. “Making vanguard engraving is more problematic,”60 considered Martins in 1967, while referring to her intention to let engraving “grow” in size.61 The renewal of the languages of printmaking under the spell of Pop tendencies in Brazil included other techniques such as lithography and metal engraving. Lotus Lobo, who studied engraving at the Guignard School in Belo Horizonte, like Martins,62 and became a teacher there in the late 1960s, developed a strategy of appropriation of lithographic trademarks used by small rural industries in the region of Minas Gerais between the 1920s and the 1950s to promote local products like butter and sweets.63 In these works, from the late 1960s and early 1970s, lithographic labels were altered through a series of playful interventions: their images were multiplied, differently colored, juxtaposed to one another and displayed between transparent acrylic sheets, printed on tin plate or other materials. In an untitled piece of 1969, for instance, the trademark of a butter called “Rosa de Ouro” (Golden Rose), represented by the image of a rose,

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appeared in different variations, printed on polyester and framed between acrylic sheets hanging from the ceiling. Lithographic printing thus began to engage with space and play with transparency, inviting the public to walk around the piece to fully apprehend it.64 Drawing on the permeable boundaries between the popular and the rural, on regional identity and vernacular practices—proposing a “rural aesthetic nationalism,” and a “research similar to pop-art,”65—Lobo was motivated, in her own words, by “the preservation of an era, of a design, of a style—of a vocabulary, of a culture, of motivation to consume awakened by the association of ideas.”66 On the one hand, industrial production evoked through the lithographic trademarks referred to an archaeology of visual communication in Minas Gerais that was associated to a small local economy and thus countered the mass production generally connected to US Pop Art. Conceiving the appropriation of these labels as “readymades,”67 the artist explored the constant reproducibility of hand-drawn images realized in rural contexts and local workshops. On the other hand, the use of acrylic sheets and the focus on transparency was meant to turn lithographic prints into an object—a turn often characterizing Pop painting at that time in Brazil—thus allowing a more comprehensive relation to real space and the possibility of a three-dimensional physical encounter with the audience. The possibility for lithography to align with vanguard strategies developed by Brazilian artists at that time such as the interactive engagement of the public, particularly evident in the 1967 Biennial,68 was further investigated by Lobo in those years. On the occasion of the 1969 Biennial, she created “three objectsengravings using the trademarks Rosa de Ouro, Pião and 3A. By manipulating the objects, the printed images could be seen in their totality, [or] undergoing fragmentation and superimposition, thus producing different visual effects, according to the spectator’s involvement.”69 This possibility—materialized here through the use of shifting acrylic panels (plate 17)—had already been conceived in 1967, when Lobo herself spoke of her interest in the direct manipulation of the “object-engraving” by the public.70 Like Martins, Lobo envisioned prints penetrating public space, comparable to other vanguard art forms, at that time, leaving behind the institutionalized space of the museum. In the late 1960s, she considered: “The idea of an engraving being hung among propaganda posters, in the middle of the street, to be seen quickly, from inside or outside a bus, no longer an engraving specifically, but an image to be consumed in everyday life [. . .] very important.”71 Among propaganda posters, printed images could thus assume the role of a critical counter-voice in the cityscape. Similarly, in 1967, Martins envisioned her woodcuts reaching an

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“outdoor” size, eventually being displayed in the street.72 Did the artists ever materialize these options? What is certain is that Maiolino took part, in February 1968, in the event known as Domingo das bandeiras (Sunday of flags) in Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro, with a silkscreen flag titled Alta Tensão (High Tension) in which a white skull at the center of a shooting target referenced the violence of the military regime.73 In a pre-carnival celebration, the Mangueira samba school danced, and the printed flags were sold to passers-by, in a collective attempt to turn vanguard art into a popular art form to be purchased at the local market, at least for one Sunday.

“Contemporaneity of the Non-contemporary” “In the 1960s,” print historian Maria Luísa Luz Tavora argues, while discussing the work of Isa Aderne, “the recognition of popular culture transformed it into one of the symbols of national culture, a shield of resistance against the invasion of foreign culture, especially American.”74 Aderne like Maiolino, studied with Adir Botelho at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes and later taught engraving at the Escolinha da Arte do Brasil, both in Rio de Janeiro. Her production of the 1960s was strongly linked to the cordel tradition. If, for Aderne, the relation to cordel was core to her practice, other artists turned to it, at times, as a strategic way to connect with popular culture. In December 1967, for instance, artists Nelson Leirner and Flávio Motta attempted to sell flags with silkscreen prints of cordel and city themes in the street in São Paulo, thus summoning both popular art from the Northeast and urban aesthetics.75 Also in São Paulo, artist Judith Lauand, who, in the 1950s, had experimented with the possibilities of using woodcut to produce concrete art—like Lygia Pape in Rio de Janeiro—turned to figurative strategies akin to Pop in the early 1970s. In this period, her figurative woodcuts, simple and direct in style, depicting various themes such as young women, scenes of domestic life and tropicalist musicians Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil (figure 7.2), clearly resonated with a popular imagination. But what made printmaking such an effective and challenging tool to connect with the popular for artists working in a Pop vein in Brazil? Besides the reference to the traditional use of woodcut in cultura popular, printmaking made possible the multiple reproduction of the artwork while, at the same time, keeping an essential relation to craft. “Today, in general,” said Goeldi in the late 1950s, “craft is being abandoned in the other arts, whereas in engraving it continues to be important.”76 Printmaking, in this sense, allowed for a utopic vision of a work of

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Figure 7.2 Judith Lauand, Sem título (Untitled), 1970s. © Judith Lauand/AUTVIS 2021.

art that was popular, meaning accessible to the people—the flag events in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were examples of this. At the same time, its craft backbone stimulated a problematization of the very idea of mass production and mass society in Brazil, signaling differences from the specific developments of capitalism in the United States and in Europe. In the 1950s and 1960s, as Marilena Chaui claims, expressions such as “mass culture” and “mass society,” originating in the social sciences in the US, became very successful, and “mass culture” tended, in Western contexts, to become synonymous with “popular culture.” In Brazil though, this was not the case for several reasons, including the fact that “the notion of the mass [. . .] tends to conceal social differences, conflicts and contradictions.”77 It was precisely these social and political conflicts and contradictions that artists in Brazil attempted to explore and question through their practice and mobilization of cultura popular.

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Perhaps, the heterogeneity of this complex society and culture at a particularly troubled political time better translated into what Morais called, in 1967, “the contemporaneity of the non-contemporary.”78 Discussing the first Bahia Biennial in GAM magazine, Morais explicitly appropriated this concept from sociology, referring to “the existence of different socio-economic layers in the same historical or geographical context,”79 to apply it to Brazilian culture. In this sense, the critic considered that in Brazil “different modes of artistic expression” coexisted: indigenous art, art forms grouped under the expression “archaic Brazilian behaviour”—I would call it arte popular in Bo Bardi’s sense—and “an art that directly reflects urban life, technified and industrial.”80 Only rarely, according to Morais, a real synthesis happened, as in the works of artists like Volpi and Rubem Valentim. “Coexistence occurs,” he wrote, “but not always synthesis. And should we look for it? I think so, even if it is utopian.”81 I conclude by arguing that, while mobilizing different ways in which the popular as an idea had been constructed since the early 1960s in Brazil, the artworks discussed in this text also attempted, in a variety of ways, to create a synthesis between vanguard art and other cultural forms—often used as strategic signs of local identity and specificity. This synthetic impulse was not a-critical and did not hide differences and incongruences, it tended, on the contrary, to unearth them. This is perhaps one of the most compelling characteristics of Brazilian Pop tendencies as evident in the woodcuts of Maiolino and Martins, or in Lobo’s lithographic objects—combining references to the popular with vanguard strategies, and intertwining, at times, a social and political critique with an affirmation of the legitimacy of gender-specific struggles and the problematizing of women’s position in a patriarchal society and in an art world that was inclined to marginalize them. In conclusion, I circle back to Yêdamaria’s work and more specifically to her 1975 engraving titled Yemanjás. Here, the synthetic impulse was deployed in challenging ways, combining an Afro-Brazilian religious imagery with the urban languages of pop, and with the affirmation of the need to approach gender and racial relations in Brazil critically. Like in Martins’s woodcuts, the female body of Yemanjá becomes the fertile space of visceral and symbolic creation in which these relations can be explored and utopically reimagined. The effectiveness of this synthesis brought fishermen in Bahia to invite the artist, in 1976, to create a work as a present for Yemanjá to be offered during the celebrations of the deity on February 2. Yêdamaria created a plaster sculpture of a mermaid. “It was emotional,” she recounted, “when the fishermen came to fetch

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the sculpture at dawn. I heard the fireworks announcing 2nd February very early. I became even more involved, even more strongly linked to Yemanjá.”82 Considering her capacity to compellingly bridge the vanguard and the popular, it comes as no surprise that Lina Bo Bardi spoke in these terms of the artist with writer Jorge Amado, in the early 1960s: “Keep an eye on this young woman, she has talent and a future.”83

Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6 7

8

All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Orishas are spiritual entities in Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion of West African origin. “The orixás are nature gods. They are associated with distinct provinces of the natural world—water, air, forest, and earth—and it is from these primary sources that they gather and impart their axé, or vital energy. Each physical domain, in turn, corresponds to an array of perceived personality traits.” Robert A. Voeks, Sacred Leaves of Candomblé: African Magic, Medicine, and Religion in Brazil (Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 1997), 1136. Kindle. See Raul Lody, Dicionário de arte sacra & técnicas afro-brasileiras (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas, 2003), 145–7. Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara, Manipulating the Sacred: Yorùbá Art, Ritual, and Resistance in Brazilian Candomblé (Detroit, MI : Wayne State University, 2005), 77–8. Yemanjá is “the archetypal symbol of fertility and motherhood,” according to Voeks, Sacred Leaves of Candomblé, 1145. Yêdamaria, interviewed by Angélica Basthi, CULTNE—Acervo da Cultura Negra, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufBGKtyxKJc. See also Alexandre Araújo Bispo, “Yêdamaria: A Cor sem Rancor,” in O Menelick 2° Acto, (2010), available at: http://www.omenelick2ato.com/artes-plasticas/1195 (last accessed 16 January 2019). Vânia Bezerra de Carvalho, “Yêdamaria: A Path of Light and Color,” in Yêdamaria (São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial do Estado de São Paulo, Museu Afro Brasil, 2006), 213. “Yedamaria, entre a Bahia e os Estados Unidos,” Diario de Pernambuco: B Section, Recife, September 16, 1980, 6. Yêdamaria quoted in Betty LaDuke, Compañeras: Women, Art, and Social Change in Latin America (San Francisco, CA : City Lights Books, 1985), 117. LaDuke also observed: “She does not know of any other black woman in Brazil who is a professional artist. There are not many black professionals in the university system, and no black students in her classes.” Emanoel Araújo, “Yêdamaria, the Painter and the Silence,” in Yêdamaria, 207.

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9 On the question of “influence” and “derivativeness,” see Partha Mitter, “Modern Global Art and Its Discontents,” in Per Bäckström and Benedikt Hjartarson (eds.), Decentering the Avant-Garde (Amsterdam: Rodopi, Avant-Garde Critical Studies 30, 2014), 35–54. 10 Kobena Mercer, “Introduction,” in Kobena Mercer (ed.), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2007), 7. 11 For a general view on Brazilian Pop and the role played by women, see Giulia Lamoni, “Unfolding the ‘Present’: Some Notes on Brazilian ‘Pop,’ ” in Jessica Morgan and Flavia Frigeri (eds.), The World Goes Pop (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), 59–71. For a transnational approach on Pop and feminism, see Kalliopi Minioudaki, “Feminist Eruptions in Pop, Beyond Borders,” ibid., 73–93. 12 In the words of Geeta Kapur, “The Uncommon Universe of Bhupen Khakhar,” in Mercer (ed.), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, 111. 13 For a general survey on the relationship between art and feminism in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s, see Talita Trizoli, “Atravessamentos Feministas: um panorama de mulheres artistas no Brasil dos anos 60/70” (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 2018), available at: https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/48/48134/tde03122018-121223/publico/TALITA_TRIZOLI_rev.pdf. 14 “precursor no ‘descobrir’ e ‘assumir’ a importância do popular.” Aracy A. Amaral, Arte para quê? A preocupação social na arte brasileira 1930–1970 (São Paulo: Studio Nobel, 2003), 317. The role of the new capital, Brasilia, should also be mentioned. 15 As indicated by Juliano Pereira, in Lina Bo Bardi, Bahia 1958–1964 (Uberlândia: EDUFU, 2008), 41–54. Bo Bardi’s interest in popular cultural productions in Brazil was already manifest in her work in the frame of Habitat magazine in São Paulo in the early 1950s and could be related to her time as an architect in Italy in the immediate postwar period. 16 “por ser o folklore uma herança estática e regressiva, cujo aspecto é amparado paternalisticamente pelos responsáveis da cultura, ao passo que arte popular (usamos a palavra arte não somente no sentido artístico, mas também no de fazer tecnicamente) define a attitude progressiva da cultura popular ligada a problemas reais.” Lina Bo Bardi, “Nordeste,” 1963, in Silvana Rubino, Marina Grinover (org.), Lina por escrito: Textos escolhidos de Lina Bo Bardi (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2009), 118. 17 “novo humanismo.” Lina Bo Bardi, “Cinco anos entre os ‘brancos,’ ” 1967, in ibid., 131. 18 “Salvaguardar ao máximo as forças genuínas do país, procurando ao mesmo tempo estar ao corrente do desenvolvimento internacional, será a base da nova ação cultural.” Lina Bo Bardi, “Cultura e não cultura,” 1958, ibid., 89. 19 As highlighted by Rubino, Bo Bardi’s opposition to folklore was not directly related to the folkloric movement in Brazil. Silvana Rubino, “Lina, leitora de Gramsci,” in A Mão do Povo Brasileiro 1969/2016 (São Paulo: MASP, 2016), 70.

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20 See Jorge Amado, “Exposição Bahia” (1959) in Lina Bo Bardi, Tempos de grossura: o design no impasse (São Paulo: Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi, 1994), 43. 21 In Bo Bardi’s words, the objective of the exhibition was, for Gonçalves, to “reveal, through a theatrical presentation, the popular roots of the culture of Bahia, in contrast with the cosmopolitan currents that characterize the great São Paulo enterprise.” Quoted in Zeuler R. M. de A. Lima, Lina Bo Bardi (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 92. 22 To quote: O Brasil, hoje, está dividido em dois: o dos que querem estar a par, dos que olham constantemente para fora, procurando captar as ultimas novidades para jogá-las, revestidas de uma apressada camada nacional, no mercado da cultura, e o dos que olham dentro de si e à volta procurando fadigadamente, nas poucas heranças de uma terra nova e apaixonadamente amada, as raízes duma cultura ainda informe para construí-la com uma seriedade que não admite sorrisos. Procura fadigada no emaranhado de heranças esnobemente desprezadas por uma crítica improvisada que as define drasticamente como regionalismo e folclore. (Lina Bo Bardi, “Brennand cerâmica,” 1961, in Rubino and Grinover, Lina por escrito, 113–14.) 23 At the Solar do Unhão Museum, Bo Bardi intended to develop a school of industrial design, in which a strong connection with local handicraft was to be implemented through the interaction between university students in the field of engineering and architecture and local craftsmen. See Juliano Aparecido Pereira and Renato Luiz Sobral Anelli, “Uma Escola de Design Industrial referenciada no lastro do préartesanato: Lina Bo Bardi e o Museu do Solar do Unhão na Bahia,” Revista Design em Foco, 2, no. 2 (July–December 2005), 17–27, available at: . 24 “reconocer su agencia.” Maria Iñigo Clavo, “1969–2016: Lo Popular en disputa para el relato de la Guerra Fría en Brasil,” in Paula Barreiro-López (ed.), Atlántico Frío: Historias transnacionales del arte y la política en los tiempos del telón de acero (Madrid: Brumaria, 2019), 330. 25 Others include film director Glauber Rocha, economist Celso Furtado and his activities at SUDENE (Superintendency for the Development of the Northeast), and Edgar Santos, director of Universidade Federal da Bahia. See Renato Anelli, “Lina Bo Bardi and Her Relationship to Brazil’s Economic and Social Development Policy,” in Andres Lepik and Vera Simone Bader (eds.), Lina Bo Bardi 100, Brazil’s Alternative Path to Modernism (Munich and Berlin: Architekturmuseum der TU München and Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2014), 169–82. See also André Augusto de Almeida Alves, “Um projeto para o Brasil: arquitetura e política na trajetória de Lina Bo Bardi no Brasil, 1946–1977,” in Risco: Revista de Pesquisa em Arquitetura e Urbanismo, IAU-USP, 20 (2014): 35–48.

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26 See Roberto Schwarz, “Cultura e política no Brasil: 1964–1969,” 1970, in Carlos Basualdo (org.), Tropicália: Uma revolução na cultura brasileira [1967–1972] (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2007), 285. See also Sérgio da Costa Borba, A problemática do analfabetismo no Brasil (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1984), 49–50. Apparently, these experiences in Recife became the main reference for Bo Bardi in the early1960s, according to Lima, Lina Bo Bardi, 101. 27 For a critique of how “the people” was monolithically envisioned and represented in this context, see Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda, Impressões de viagem: CPC, vanguarda e desbunde: 1960/70 (Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano Editora, 2004). 28 See Miliandre Garcia, “A questão da cultura popular: as políticas culturais do Centro Popular de Cultura (CPC) da União Nacional dos Estudantes (UNE),” in Revista Brasileira de História, São Paulo, 24, no. 47 (2004): 12–2, available at: http://www. scielo.br/pdf/rbh/v24n47/a06v2447.pdf. 29 Ferreira Gullar, in Ferreira Gullar in Conversation with Ariel Jiménez (New York: Fundación Cisneros, 2012), 88. 30 Ferreira Gullar, “Cultura posta em questão,” 1963 (selected passages), in Arte em Revista, 2, no. 3 (March 1980): 85. 31 Renato Ortiz, Cultura brasileira e identidade nacional (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1986), 72. See also Carlos Estevam Martins, “Anteprojeto do Manifesto do Centro Popular de Cultura (CPC),” 1962, in Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda, Impressões de viagem, 135–68. 32 “Na verdade, o fenômeno que se observa não é tanto o de uma procura do popular, mas o de sua construção pela autodenominada ‘vanguarda aguerrida do povo.’ ” Marilena Chaui, Conformismo e resistência, aspectos da cultura popular no Brasil (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1986), 108. 33 “fenômeno novo,” “uma denúncia dos conceitos culturais em voga que buscam esconder o seu caráter de classe.” Gullar, “Cultura posta em questão,” 83. 34 “Se, no plano literário e artístico, a cultura popular se manifesta como uma ‘nova tendência’, que se caracteriza por uma temática nacional e, direta ou indiretamente, didática, cumpre não perder de vista suas profundas raízes sociais, que a distinguem dos movimentos apenas estéticos,” ibid., 84. 35 “provincianismo acrítico,” ibid., 86; “tanto exige a troca de experiências com o exterior, como a crítica do que de lá nos chega,” ibid., 87. 36 “Um conceito de ‘vanguarda’ estética, válido na Europa ou nos Estados Unidos, terá igual validez num país subdesenvolvido como o Brasil?” Ferreira Gullar, Vanguarda e Subdesenvolvimento: Ensaios sobre arte (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1978), 19 (1st edn 1969). 37 In this sense, I agree here with Maria Iñigo Clavo’s contention: “CPC closed after the military coup but in spite of it and as a consequence, the popular stays during the whole decade in the artists’ imaginary.” “Los CPC se cerraron tras el golpe militar

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pero, a pesar de ello y como consecuencia, lo popular permanece durante toda la década en el imaginario de los artistas.” Clavo, “Lo Popular en disputa,” 327. “permaneceu como um dos últimos refúgios do ‘específico’ nas artes plásticas. Sem dúvida renovou-se sob a influência da imagetica pop/nova figuração, da arte ótica e das permutações e, mais recentemente, da arte conceitual, sem contudo, desligar-se de sua própria tradição [. . .], que é defendida energicamente por seus cultores.” Frederico Morais, “A Gravura Brasileira: Os Anos 60/70,” in Mostra de Gravura Brasileira (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1974), 39–40. Aracy Amaral, “A experiência dos Clubes de Gravura,” in Arte para quê? A preocupação social na arte brasileira 1930–1970, 175–90. See also Roberto Teixeira Leite, A Gravura Brasileira Contemporânea (Rio de Janeiro: Artes Gráficas Gomes de Souza S.A., 1965), 41–2. Rubens Gerchman quoted in Marisa Alves de Lima, “Artes Plásticas,” A Cigarra, no. 5 (May 1966): 77. See also, “A Conversation between Anna Maria Maiolino and Helena Tatay,” in Helena Tatay, Anna Maria Maiolino (Barcelona and London: Fundació Tapiés, Koenig Books, 2010), 39. “lugar privilegiado dos desdobramentos do expressionismo figurativo.” Maria Luísa Luz Tavora, “Artistas do Ateliê de Gravura da Escola de Belas Artes e a Tradição Popular: Anos 50 e 60,” XXII Colóquio Brasileiro de História da Arte, CBHA, 2002, n.p. Teixeira Leite, A Gravura Brasileira Contemporânea, 18. Cordel is a popular literary genre in Brazil particularly present in the Northeast and often illustrated with woodcut engravings. Cordel poems are written in verses. Paulo Herkenhoff, “Maiolino’s Trajectory: A Negotiation of Differences,” in Catherine de Zegher (ed.), Anna Maria Maiolino: Vida Afora/A Life Line (New York: The Drawing Center, 2002), 328. Gullar highlighted the same double relation to both popular printmaking and comic strip in António Henrique Amaral’s woodcuts of the mid-1960s. Gullar, “O meu e o seu de A.H. Amaral,” in Mirante das Artes, São Paulo, no. 5 (September/October 1967): 32. Herkenhoff, “Maiolino’s Trajectory: A negotiation of Differences,” 328. Maiolino, “Maiolino and Tatay,” 39. Ibid., 41. The case of Lygia Pape and her concrete woodcuts clearly stands out. See the debate on engraving in the newspaper, Jornal do Brasil, in 1957–8, especially Pape’s testimony, published on December 15, 1957. See also Maria Luísa Luz Tavora, “A gravura artística no Rio de Janeiro como objeto de pesquisa: anos 1950/ 60,” Locus Revista de História, 19, no. 2 (2013): 125–40, available at: http://ojs2.ufjf.emnuvens. com.br/locus/article/view/20730/11110. Morais, “A Gravura Brasileira,” 41. “involuntariamente.” Tania Rivera, “A janela e o mundo,” in Frederico Morais (coord.), Wilma Martins (Rio de Janeiro: Tamanduá Arte, 2015), 13.

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51 “retoma a velha tradição da gravura de cunho romântico, fantástico e popular, prenhe de significações simbólicas.” Art critic Jacques do Prado Brandão quoted in, “Salão Mineiro Concede Prêmios Nova Revelação em Gravura,” Diário de Notícias: 2nd Section, Rio de Janeiro, December 4, 1966, 3. 52 See “Wilma Martins faz gravura para dizer,” Correio Braziliense: Caderno 2, Brasilia, September 29, 1967, 1. 53 “Minha gravura tem agora dois tempos: antes e depois do Rio,” Martins, quoted in ibid. 54 In ibid., Martins clearly expresses this idea of suffering and of the maternal body as a shelter. 55 In the scope of this text, I will not discuss the question of viscerality in the artistic production of those years, particularly in Anna Bella Geiger’s practice in engraving. 56 Martins quoted in, “Wilma Martins faz gravura para dizer”: O homem em minha gravura sempre entra em luta com as forças da natureza. Já a mulher é apresentada de modo mais intimista. Acho que o homem só se preocupa com o que está fora dêle. O homem só cria com o corpo e para fora. Com o corpo, com os braços, externamente. A mulher, pelo contrário, cria a partir de dentro, ela é essencialmente interior. Tem lá seus demoniozinhos para extirpar, constantemente. 57 “Sim, os grandes assuntos do mundo de hoje estão em minha gravura. Os problemas sociais, a guerra, o mêdo da bomba, às ameaças à sua integridade. Só que o mostro juntamente com as tensões mais intimas do homem. Acho que indivíduo é a única coisa que importa e vale, [. . .] mais importante do que tudo: pátria, família, Deus,” ibid. 58 In Martins’s words, “I could be wrong [. . .] but the photograph of a black child killed in the racial conflicts in the United States, at the feet of a white soldier, moves me much more than the news of 800 dead in an earthquake in Venezuela. I know that one thing leads to the other, but individual pain comes first.” “Posso estar errada [. . .] mas a fotografia de uma criança preta morta nos conflitos raciais dos Estados Unidos, sob os pés de um soldado branco, me comove muito mais que a notícia de 800 mortos num terremoto da Venezuela. Sei que uma coisa leva à outra, mas primeiro a dor individual,” ibid. 59 Morais, “Retrato-Autorretrato da artista,” Wilma Martins, 142–3. 60 “Fazer gravura de vanguarda é mais problemático.” Martins, in “Wilma Martins faz gravura para dizer.” 61 Ibid. 62 Martins studied engraving with Misabel Pedrosa and Lotus Lobo with Yara Tupynambá.

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63 According to artist and friend, Luciano Gusmão, “Marca Litográfica,” exposição Lotus Lobo (Belo Horizonte: Galeria Guignard, 1970). Reprinted in Lotus Lobo, Marca Registada (Belo Horizonte: Palácio das Artes, 2007), n.p. 64 Not surprisingly, Jayme Maurício evoked Mira Schendel’s use of acrylic sheets around the same period. Jayme Maurício, “Lotus: lito-objeto do ready-made mineiro,” Correio da manhã, Segundo Caderno, Rio de Janeiro, June 20, 1969, online archive ICAA-MFAH. 65 “nacionalismo estético caipira,” “pesquisa próxima da pop-art.” Luciano Gusmão, “A Gravura de Lotus Lobo,” 1960s, typewritten text, online archive ICAA-MFAH. 66 “a preservação de uma época, de um desenho, de um estilo—de um vocabulário, de uma cultura, das motivações de consumo despertadas por associações de ideias.” Lobo quoted in Maurício, “Lotus: lito-objeto do ready-made mineiro.” 67 Ibid. 68 See Lamoni, “Unfolding the ‘Present.’ ” 69 “três objetos-gravuras usando as marcas Rosa de Ouro, Pião e 3A, manipulando os objetos as imagens impressas podiam ser vistas na sua totalidade, sofrer fragmentações e superposições, construindo visualidades diferentes, de acordo com a intervenção do espectador.” Lobo, in Marilia Andrés Ribeiro and Fernando Pedro da Silva (eds.), Lotus Lobo: depoimento (Belo Horizonte: C/Arte, 2001), 23. 70 The artist referred to the multiple Moonstripes Empire News (1967) by British Pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi. Paolozzi’s work was mentioned under the name Moonstripes News in Maurício, “Lotus: lito-objeto do ready-made mineiro.” 71 “A ideia de uma gravura a ser colocada em meio aos cartazes de propaganda, no meio da rua, para ser vista em velocidade, dentro ou fora do ônibus, não mais gravura específicamente mas imagem a ser consumida no quotidiano, [. . .] muito importante.” Lobo quoted in Gusmão, “A Gravura de Lotus Lobo.” 72 “Wilma Martins faz gravura para dizer.” 73 See, for instance, “Domingo de bandinha e bandeiras,” Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, February 20, 1968, São Paulo Biennial Archive. 74 “Nos anos 60, o reconhecimento da cultura popular passava pela sua transformação em um dos símbolos da cultura nacional, escudo da resistência à invasão da cultura estrangeira, em especial a americana.” Maria Luísa Luz Tavora, “Isa Aderne: fazendo política com a xilogravura—anos 60,” Revista Poiésis, no. 11 (November 2008): 96, available at: http://www.poiesis.uff.br/PDF/poiesis11/Poiesis_11_ isaaderne.pdf. 75 “As bandeiras apreendidas,” Folha de São Paulo, São Paulo, December 26, 1967, 10, São Paulo Biennial Archive. 76 “Em geral, hoje, nas outras artes, o artesanato está sendo abandonado, enquanto na gravura ele continua a ser importante,” Jornal do Brasil: Suplemento Dominical, Rio de Janeiro, December 1, 1957, 3.

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77 “A noção de Massa [. . .] tende a ocultar diferenças sociais, conflitos e contradições,” Chaui, Conformismo e resistência, 28. 78 “Contemporaneidade do não-coetâneo,” Frederico Morais, “A dupla significação da Bienal da Bahia,” GAM , 2 (January 1967): 4. 79 “coexistência de diferentes camadas sócio-econômicas no mesmo contexto histórico ou geográfico,” ibid. 80 “diversos modos de expressão artística,” “comportamento arcáico brasileiro,” “uma arte que reflete diretamente a vida urbana, tecnificada e industrial,” ibid. 81 “A coexistência ocorre, mas nem sempre a síntese. E deve-se buscá-la? Creio que sim, mesmo utopicamente,” ibid. 82 “Foi uma emoção, quando os pescadores foram buscar a escultura de madrugada. Bem cedo eu ouvi os fogos, anunciando o 2 de fevereiro. Fiquei ainda mais envolvida, com uma ligação ainda mais forte com iemanjá.” Yêdamaria quoted by Claudia Alexandre, “Morre em Salvador, aos 84 anos, a artista plástica Yêdamaria,” Centro de Estudos das Relações de Trabalho e Desigualdades (CEERT), March 30, 2016, available at: https://ceert.org.br/noticias/historia-cultura-arte/11016/morreem-salvador-aos-84-anos-a-artista-plastica-yedamaria. 83 “Preste atenção a essa jovem, tem talento e futuro.” Lina Bo Bardi quoted by Jorge Amado. In Newton Sobral, “Os sete anos de arte plástica de Yêdamaria,” Jornal da Bahia, August 1972, reprinted in Yêdamaria, 51.

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Facing the Maid Gendered Shades of Labor in American Pop Kalliopi Minioudaki

History in capitalism is always, to some extent, the history of work. Jasper Bernes, 20171 Today . . . in order to grasp new forms of waged work we need to draw on the older feminist analyses of waged and unwaged “women’s work.” Kathi Weeks, 20172 It’s so awkward when you come face to face with a maid. Andy Warhol, 19753 “It’s bad. You don’t know what to do when you’ve got five children standing around crying for something to eat and you don’t know where to get it and you don’t know which way to start to get it. . . . Kentucky miner’s wife.” This desperate confession appears handwritten inside two red circles in Corita Kent’s serigraph that they may have life, 1964 (plate 18), along with Mahatma Gandhi’s answer: “there are so many hungry people that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” As a variation of wonderbread, 1962, an abstract evocation of the Eucharist through colorful dots referencing the wrapper of Wonder Bread, made soon after the first exhibit of Warhol’s soup cans at Los Angeles in the vicinities of the Immaculate Heart College where the celebrated “sister” of postwar art taught, that they may have life marks the Pop inflection of her printmaking along with the social turn of its politics. In the 1964 print, however, the circles evoking communion wafers appear only in red and white. Their reference to the balloons of the popular brand’s logo is instead reinforced by the product’s signature marketing attribute—ENRICHED BREAD—itself a supermarket-found 175

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signifier of God’s immanence, telling of the fitness of Pop’s appropriationism for Kent’s artistic propagation of the modernization of the Catholic church and her own theological convictions.4 Vaguely evoking the American flag, the print deftly intertwines the industrial and spiritual miracles available to the American people—supermarket abundance and transubstantiation—while protesting hunger in America.5 Responding to the Watts Rebellion with a more starkly Pop appropriation of a Los Angeles Times front page in my people a year later, Kent’s concern with those not belonging to the “middle class part of Christ’s body”6 included the plight of the Black poor. But the misery of Kentucky’s miners had also become national news by 1964, due to a Life photo-essay on the Appalachian poor published in the context of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty.”7 The persistence of poverty despite America’s postwar economic boom had become evident by 1964, yet not so in Pop.8 Its thematizing in the “wonderbread” series is commensurate with the radical nun’s artistic activism, influenced in part by the Second Vatican Council and 1960s protest culture, and her instrumentalizing of Pop’s accessibility through cheap prints and posters.9 Dispossessed workers became Pop’s subjects in different sociopolitical circumstances and embraces of Pop that served regimes of revolutionary or seemingly revolutionary inclusiveness, as in Fidel Castro’s Cuba or Juan Velasco Alvarado’s Peru.10 Solidarity with workers’ struggle underpins Pop practices in milieus with reconfigured Marxist legacies, like Paris in the era of decolonization, as discussed elsewhere in this volume, or the later 1960s’ protest art of various social movements.11 Yet, that they may have life stands out not only as a stark reminder of American Pop’s limited interest in the “other America.”12 Making palpable the inextricability of the waged and unwaged labor serving capital’s production and social reproduction, it foregrounds labor, in its intertwinement with class, as a potent topic in Pop through the oblique evocation of two dispossessed workers—one of the mines, the other of the home.13 That today their suffering looms larger than the promise of mass (produced) bread is reflective of our moment. Revisiting Pop from a contemporary perspective, when the mid-twentieth century social mobility promised by the “American way” has been stalled by massive global proletarianization, an indisputable crisis of labor and their extra toll on women, it compels switching focus from the market to the “hidden abode” of production, where waged work looms as the mechanism and lifeblood of capitalism and its morphing discontents.14 Turning thus from Pop’s commodities to capitalism’s UR commodity—labor—from a feminist perspective that includes home as an enduring stage of gendered labor and social reproduction, rather than

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consumption, this essay surveys (re)presentations of working men and “women’s work” by Rosalyn Drexler, Jann Haworth, Martha Rosler, Betye Saar, George Segal and Idelle Weber in quest of the complementary stories they tell about Pop, its intersection with gender, race, and class, and the (un)changing face of work in capitalist patriarchy shaping the nascent neoliberal fallacies of equality and classlessness underpinning the American Dream in the 1960s and beyond. Neither a “revolutionary” nor a “reactionary” realism,15 I argue, Pop in America— although its social purchase is sometimes fueled by working-class experience, ethos, tastes and desires—breached social realism’s representation of labor. But whether a residue of its ties to realism,16 or not, the liminal concern with work surfacing in the iconography of the aforementioned artists bridges the importance of labor in American art before and after Pop, underscoring the continual centrality of work in contemporary art’s critique of capitalism and globalization.17 It also opens a space for an intersectional feminist contemplation on the labor that capitalism always relied on but undermined by deeming unproductive or making invisible: unpaid and paid domestic labor. Its exploitation and expropriation, central to the contemporary “crisis of social reproduction,”18 continues to sustain the gendered, classed, and largely racialized divide of labor in the “social factory” of global capital, amplifying the weight of racism, heteropatriarchy, and White supremacy on women and particularly immigrant women of color, both in the US and beyond. It also makes imperative not to overlook Kent’s “miner’s wife” and, above all, Haworth’s and Saar’s “maids” of color which have sparked this essay and its feminist look at work in Pop, within and beyond artistic intentionality. This essay is structured in two parts along the gendered division of the public and domestic spheres of waged labor and women’s (non)work, studying them as complementary sides of patriarchal capitalism critically exposed in Pop. While its first part reflects the White and masculine makeup of the changing class contours of the postwar urban workforce in light of the working men of Segal, Drexler, and Weber, the second revisits Pop domesticity as a site neither of postwar technological and consumer renewal nor femininity, but unpaid and paid homekeepers. It is by revealing the intersection of gender with race and class in their exploitation (including by women) that this essay intimates the ongoing undermined centrality of women’s both free and paid labor at home for capital’s (re)production that the gendered divide of labor has sought to naturalize, and wishes to shatter the universality of the loving naturalness or the common drudgery of “women’s work,” along with that of the unifying category “woma/en,” from the margins of Pop.

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Workers, Businessmen, and “Little Men” Work is not a new topic in Pop’s discourse. Andy Warhol’s Factory and his “oscillation” between assembly-line and corporate practices capturing his ambivalent solidarity with workers and managers, have been central to influential understandings of Pop’s industrial aesthetics.19 Conversely Rosalyn Drexler, George Segal, and Idelle Weber stand out from New York Pop for their iconographic thematizing of work across old and new understandings of class beyond the industrial settings both of modernity and Pop. Although an important figure in its early discourse and international transfer, Segal’s relation to Pop was always questioned due to the humanism of his figurative tableaux.20 “Making no bones” about his interest in “the human situation,” the artist has hardly resisted the Pop label, valuing instead its embrace of reality in refute of the solipsism of formalism and abstract expressionism.21 Hybridizing sculpture—a medium that remains hard to bend to an inclusive theory of Pop—Segal turned to the world around him through an innovative combination of directly cast figures with found, constructed or fabricated objects and urban settings. The latter’s objectivity and Americanness—diners, cinema marquees, advertising signs, including film projections of highway trips— secured Segal’s marginal place in Pop, along with the very duplicity of his replication of the real by casting friends, colleagues, and neighbors into abstracted ciphers of everyday people that function as three-dimensional silhouettes inasmuch they carry the imprint of real bodies. Segal’s broad thematography included biblical subjects and traditional genres, like the nude—from professional models whose paid employment complexifies the intersection of gender and class in his ruminations on work.22 It is, however, the cast of “blue-collar universality”23 that further distinguished his embrace of everyday life from the implicit prosperity of many Pop interiors or consumer cornucopia. With a significant number of his scenes animated by the poses of inexpressive working men and women, as in The Bus Driver, 1962 or The Farm Worker, 1963, his work lent early—and rather exceptional—credence to Pop’s social consciousness. John Russell, for instance, distinguished Segal as chief example of the “responsibility” he thought several Pop artists shared with William Hogarth.24 Labor is indeed the theme of several works that the artist discerned as “work pieces”—such as The Tar Roofer 1964 (figure 8.1), Man on a Ladder, 1970, and Man on Scaffold, 1970, or variations such as Man installing Pepsi Sign, 1973. Working people inhabit most of his scenes of quotidian urban life, capturing a short spectrum of employment and small businesses that are

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Figure 8.1 George Segal, The Tar Roofer, 1964. Plaster, wood, tar, enamel, rope, mop, buckets, 87 × 84 × 96 in (34.25 × 33.07 × 37.79 cm) overall installed. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Gift of Donna and Carroll Janis, 2009. © 2021 The George and Helen Segal Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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distinctly low class, whether urban or suburban, and American, such as The Diner, 1964–6 and The Gas Station, 1963–4. Hailed as a “proletarian mythmaker,”25 Segal was rather an existentialist of proletarian origins—a fact he highlights in interviews and statements on his work.26 His sympathy for the low-class protagonists of urban modernity and its fringes, is informed by his background and his experience of New York through the Bronx, where he was raised during the Depression in a family of Jewish immigrant origins, and of New Jersey, where he lived till his death, upon his family’s move to open a chicken farm during the war. The Butcher Shop, 1965, a replica of the kosher business of his father in Bronx, with its vendor cast from his mother, provides an autobiographic anchor of such thematic predilections and a moment of loving respect for women’s labor as mother and worker. The socialist Zionism which motivated his parents’ farm business, along with his own experience of farm work, have marked his profound respect for physical labor manifested in his solemn celebration of unskilled workers mounted on ladders and scaffolds.27 “Commute” and “transit,” between New Jersey and New York, underpin the often nocturnal highway settings of working-class occupations, as in The Truck, The Diner, The Garage, and The Cinema.28 Yet, Segal’s working people are neither heroicized nor lamented as victims of capitalist exploitation. Beat from fatigue, bored, or caught in routine action, they are figured in rituals of everyday survival and its material trappings, carrying the timeless burden of the work of life along with that of modern life’s alienation. Their loneliness, whether alone or not, resounds Segal’s disbelief in collective emancipation, countering the revolutionary promise bestowed on abstraction by individualizing the “pathos of the proletariat”29 in America through dignified ciphers of a universal existential plight without end.30 Not surprisingly the model for the employee in The Dry Cleaning Store, 1964 was the artist’s friend Rosalyn Drexler, a co-participant in the intersecting old and new vanguard circles of downtown New York City. A same-age New Yorker, Drexler also originated in part from an immigrant Jewish background from the city’s fringes.31 Rather than real people in plastered medical bandages, Drexler embalmed in paint figures cut out from various print media—such as tabloids, photo books and film posters—developing a highly idiosyncratic combination of painting and collage, as well as abstraction and figuration, thoroughly Pop in its contamination of painting by reproductive technologies/effects and the noir tabloid resonance of the mediascape fueling her imagery. Unlike Segal’s affectionate look at estranged bearers of working-class life, Drexler’s focus on the underside of the American Dream came through her cool look at the most

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affective encounters—love and violence—transpiring through mediated, often distinctly cinematic, transactions that speak of the absurdity—the vulgarity—of life, differently channeling working-class tastes and afflictions—death, above all—rather than staging its everyday banality.32 Work also enters Drexler’s thematography both directly and obliquely, summoning differently the malaises of working America. It is explicitly tackled in a series of paintings exhibited in 1966 with the title Men and Machines. Comprising colorful re-editions of black-and-white clippings— photomechanically enlarged, pasted on canvas, and copied in paint—they feature men overviewing the operation of various machines or interacting with them. Drexler has obscured their individual characteristics with paint, reducing both to contemporary archetypes of men at work with technologically up-to-date equipment in professions quite endemic to the media transformation of the postwar world that underpins her work. The unidentified commercial source of Fresh News, 1965, for instance, confirms the featured “machine” being the latest model of Heidelberg’s offset printer launched for its US demand.33 Drexler has variously claimed her fascination with men’s concentration at work as the series’ inspiration.34 Concentration is, indeed, highlighted in several of these works. But whether portable, as in Hold Your Fire, 1966 or towering over the men, as in the movie lab of The Lesson, 1962, it is the machines that take center stage in their intimate dance with men, subtly rendering them into McLuhian machine “extensions.” A gendered reflection on technocratic labor in advanced capitalism, ambiguously nodding to men’s will to power and “control,”35 Drexler’s timely encounters gain further significance in the context of her work’s masculine public arena. Collage explorations of men at work, sans machines, predate the series. It is in The Syndicate, 1964 (plate 19), a diptych whose parts comprise a mirror image of black-suited men assembled around a table, that the subtext of corporate America is revealed as never too far from the violent affairs of the rest of Drexler’s work.36 With its title evoking both corporate and crime organizing, The Syndicate cements the interchangeability of the suited (business)man with the ubiquitous gangster in her work—ambiguously morphing throughout the decontextualized cliches of its noir transactions from thug and mobster to private eye and G-man or violent lover—as signifier of the dark side of maledominated business in America.37 Amplifying such critique, in Is It True What They Say About Dixie, 1966, Drexler indicts racism in America by embodying its violence through two groups of men in suits presided over by the specter of Alabama police chief “Bull” Connor, implicating the “organization” men of the

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nation’s police and corporate business in systemic brutality and White supremacy through the white (collar) menace of their march.38 A more city-specific and less sinister view of men at work in the 1960s marks the work of Idelle Weber. Weber first began as an abstractionist, but in the early 1960s embarked on an amalgamation of abstraction and figuration distinct for its design stylization and stark black silhouettes. Private and, above all, public rituals of modern life comprise much of her 1960s’ iconography, distilled into handmade but recognizable signs of graphic simplification. Large-scale canvases and works on paper that focus on New York’s office culture stand out, featuring sharply outlined men in suits. In what Sid Sachs deems a Pop masterpiece, the three-canvas Munchkins I, II & III, 1964, Weber captures six men in profile moving up and down hard-edged stylized escalators against the nearly Op “dazzle” of a black-and-yellow checkerboard.39 In smaller polymaterial collage renditions, she follows them in their offices, during business and professional meetings, setting their silhouettes against abstract backgrounds or window views of the city. Occasionally she catches them on the street, or portrays them in deliberate poses of success or repose. In works like Lever Building 2, 1970 (plate 20), vertical bands separate repeated identical pairs of a sitting and a standing figure, emulating the transparency of the new glass building and accentuating the imprisonment and uniformity of office workers, resonating C. Wright Mills’s critique of the conformity of white-collar workers and the new middle class.40 A sort of fashionable flâneuse of mid-town Manhattan, Weber indexed and mediated gestures of the public performance of all-rank office workers, with an infatuation and stylization that pertains to fashion advertising. But whatever criticality lurks in the homogeneity of her working men is tempered by the mixture of fascinations that meet in these works, including her admiration of New York’s latest architecture—Pan Am, Seagram, Lever are equal protagonists in her work—and New York fashion, distinct from the West coast lifestyle she was familiar with. As Sachs suggestively observes: “[Weber’s] subtle commentaries on the Grey Flannel and Organization Businessmen never reach the level of political satire per se but are closer to an encoded document of her own life with a corporate lawyer.”41 Calling the everyday office force munchkins gives, however, an unmistaken pop twist to Mills’s critical appellation “little men.” Veering from the monopoly of consumer culture in Pop’s discourse, and of the factory as the only arena of labor struggle, such works by Drexler, Segal and Weber, captured modern work worlds from different and differently classed critical perspectives, cutting across the enduring burdens of low-class

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occupations of the city’s immigrant and working-class neighborhoods42 to the increasing professionalization that masked the class problematic of the postwar urban, white-collar workforce. No matter how the anxieties encrypted in their visions of modern alienation and loss of individuality differ, they intimate challenges to old and new productive pillars of capitalism, including the early “deindustrialization” of postwar urban labor, while reflecting its sexist and racist make up.43 While women comprised one third of the American workforce in the early 1960s, their appearance in the public realm of work in representations by all three artists is limited and restricted to typical occupations telling of the era’s gendered division of labor: waitresses, for instance, in Segal and secretaries in Weber, or movie stars in Drexler.44 The racialized divide of women’s participation in America’s postwar workforce is best evoked by those working at home, not necessarily their own, as the next section argues.

Home Work and House Servants “Women’s work” whether in the public domain or at home, became a multifaceted topic of art under the effect of women’s movements, marked by the critical exposure and reclamation of domestic labor—encompassing the household’s “dirty” chores and the crafts of domestic art, economy and leisure—contesting home as epicenter of patriarchal myths, while also unleashing “feminist domesticities.”45 Precedents exploring “women’s work” from the realm of Pop partake in the diversity of feminist positions articulated in the long 1960s about domestic labor, further evincing the various ways in which Pop’s opening of the hierarchies of “high” and “low,” and its mining of the babel of commercial representations of women paved the way for feminist subversion, while fostering its “deconstructive impulse.”46 With regard to the latter, the special place that Martha Rosler’s photomontage Woman with Vacuum (or Vacuuming Pop Art), 1966–72 (plate 21), and Betye Saar’s assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972 (plate 22), have in feminist art history is commensurate with their status as critiques of Pop, while dovetailing with it and its mis-representation of women’s labor. With images culled from mainstream magazines, Rosler scorned mass culture’s typecasting of the female consumer as a happy housewife, featuring her impeccably dressed and smiling at work in an absurdly sweat-less pas de deux with her “snaky appliance,”47 in a confining corridor embellished with pop icons of femininity and Pop Art posters. Doubling the irony, Rosler has set as background to the housekeeping bliss of

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such a “retrograde image”48 Robert Indiana’s 1967 poster for the opera The Mother of Us All. Against it, the warrior of Cold War domesticity appears as an unlikely descendant of such radical foremothers as Gertrude Stein or Susan B. Anthony, the social reformist, abolitionist and women’s rights’ activist who inspired Stein’s libretto. In contrast, Saar turned a commodified derogatory pop icon of subservience that “classified all black women,”49 the mammy, into an empowering revolutionary “black heroine” by arming her with guns and a Black Power fist. Saar also attacked the joint conspiracy of art and mass culture in reiterating racist stereotypes of Black womanhood under the combined effect of the militant Black movement and feminism, sandwiching together both nineteenth- and twentieth-century commercial apparitions of the “Mother of all Mammys”50— Aunt Jemima—in the form of found images and objects: a 1880s stock trade card of a mammy with a White or biracial baby on her hip;51 a notepad holder in the form of a broom-holding Aunt Jemima, and a Warholian grid repetition of an early Quaker Oats logo for the popular Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix. While, as Kobena Mercer argues, Saar “buries”52 the mammy as a historical artifact, she also exposes its relentless lastingness as a stereotype that, “huckstering”53 the first fruits of mass production since the advent of American print advertising, under the postbellum reconstruction mythologies of the South and Black womanhood, continued to feed American racism from breakfast to dinner, “controlling”54 the intersecting oppression of race, class, gender and sexuality that underpinned the experience of Black women, as put by Patricia Hill Collins. But she also transvaluated it. For Saar arguably redeemed the work that supported Black women’s survival—from cleaning to childrearing and cooking—by honoring the mammy as an “extreme heroine” of labor that enabled Black people’s revolution. While the artist has vehemently returned to the topic of Black women’s domestic labor since the 1990s, already in 1975 she disentangled the racism underlying the subservience of such stereotypes, reclaiming the role labor played in Black Americans’ survival and protection of the youth “so that they could grow up and get an education.”55 It is the early work of Jann Haworth that foreshadowed feminist art’s reclamation of “women’s work” as well as its problematizing of paid and unpaid domestic labor, via its mode of production, materiality and themes. A transnational episode of British Pop, Haworth’s groundbreaking early cloth sculpture merits consideration in the context of American Pop too not only because of her origins but also its multifaceted encryption of her identity as an American woman. Haworth turned a short stop to London at the end of 1961 on

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her way back to Los Angeles, where she was born and raised, into a multidecade stay. Before the end of her studies at the Slade—“‘only a minute’ as far as [her] psyche was concerned,”56 in the UK—she switched from painting to sculpture, fabricating three-dimensional objects and figures pieced together primarily from flat—sewn and stuffed—fabrics, variously staged in cinematic sets and domestic mises-en-scène. Movie stars, funnies, donuts—staples of American pop culture—solidify the thematic popness of her early 1960s work. But the distinctive Pop character of Haworth’s celebration of the ordinary resides in her pseudo-realist production mode’s combination of the inventiveness of the makebelieve artistry of Hollywood filmmaking and various domestic crafts—versed in both since childhood.57 Marrying the iconography of the everyday with fabric’s “soft, warm, changeable”58 materiality Haworth twisted Pop’s reconciliation of “high” and “low” to include women’s vernacular culture in the form of devalued handicrafts that range from doll-making and home dressmaking to quilting. Waging a “gender war”59 to amplify her undermined voice as a female artist in the arrogant male-dominated realm of the British art world and her school, Haworth turned to all varieties of home sewing (including mechanical), neither in search of an essentially feminine aesthetic, nor to raise “fiber crafts”60 to the level of art, but as a radical, and a radically assertive means of sculptural experimentation. She, in turn, sabotaged the hierarchies of arts through everyday languages of form-giving and image-making, denigrated due to their historic association with women’s lives in the twentieth century but valued, understood and mastered due to her distinct experience of them: I like to think of it as “anti-art.” Part of my pleasure in it is that it’s the antithesis of all I learned at art school. I am not a pop artist . . . I’d rather be rated— denigrated if you like—as a glorified doll-maker. . . . I liked the idea of a ladies’ art . . . so I wouldn’t have to compete with men. Perhaps it’s an art-process . . . or a way of cocking a snook at art . . .61

Independent from Patty Mucha and Claes Oldenburg, and other artists who turned to sewing and soft materials or crafts in the context of Pop or not in the 1960s, Haworth’s democratizing Pop revolt was energized by the atmosphere of rebellion and artistic experimentation in London’s intersecting art circles,62 the satire boom and working-class theater she saw preceding “the carnival of Swinging London,” as well as the “cold confrontation” of her emancipated Californian self with the gender, race, and class bias of postwar London that, for her, the sexual revolution there only masked.63 The “quiet revolution”64 of her practice also honors a lineage of anonymous and family foremothers,65 including those

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who taught her sewing for doll- and dress-making as a child. For them, sewing was neither a domesticating pastime nor waged labor, or occupation as for Saar’s mother, but a cross-class amateur skill of domestic economy and care that was nonetheless mobilized, for instance, by her maternal grandmother for her family’s survival during the Depression, and an important aspect of the anticonsumerist ethos of self-reliance passed down to her by her mother. Given this rich background, in the 1960s she went along with the misrecognition of the multifaceted nonhierarchical sourcing of her “textile politics,”66 acknowledging as much: “I am not particularly concerned with the art level of it all. I don’t really mind if it’s put down to the lowest level of loving hands at home.”67 It is in this light that the “loving hands at home” of one of her several variations of “grannies” Old Lady II , 1965–7 (plate 23), sitting on a rocking chair sewing a bedcover, render her not only a celebration of domestic art but also labor, yet more affective (re)productive labor than housework per se.38 Haworth, who had already explored various patchwork and quilting techniques and needlework in crafting her stuffed “doubles” and “cut-outs,”69 and had raised quasi-applique figurative quilts into art objects, chiseled the wrinkled face and hands of Old Lady II from symmetrical scraps of fabric foregrounding the ingenuity with which quilt makers turned fabric color and precious—in memories—waste into visual marvels.70 The dazzling cover she makes conflates the formalist splendor of “optical illusion”71 quilts and geometric abstraction pointing to the still then neglected dialogue of abstraction and quiltmaking, as an artform that combines artistic creativity with what patriarchal culture holds apart from it: skill, decorativeness, usability and care. It is by presenting her Old Lady II sewn like, and with, the quilt that she is sewing, conflating her body and the product of her work, with her “loving hands” as their juncture, that Haworth fashioned a potent, in its very material expendability, monument to the affective labor of social (re) production intimating the coextensiveness of women’s lives, bodies, art and uncompensated work “of love.” Twice a representation of a working woman in light of the history of its changing conception, it is Maid, 1966 (figure 8.2), that ushers in paid domestic labor to Haworth’s work, inviting a contemplation on the entanglement of race and class in “women’s work,” as well as the divide of privilege that it masks. “I couldn’t afford a parlor maid, and even if I could, I would not be able to manage her,” Haworth is cited musing in the catalogue of Maid’s first Museum exhibition in the US together with Old Lady I and Old Man, eschewing the privilege of her emancipated position, while pointing to the employer–employee relation that structures the asymmetrical exploitation of both in capitalist patriarchy.72

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Figure 8.2 Jann Haworth, Maid, 1966. Nylon, cotton, satin, kapok, human hair, 66 × 20 in (167.6 × 50.8 cm). Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. As installed during Jann Haworth’s second solo exhibition at the Robert Fraser Gallery in 1969. Photo: Iain MacMillan. Courtesy of Jann Haworth.

Part of an ambiguous pantheon of ordinary American idols underpinned by a subtle critique of American culture, along with the artist’s experience of growing up in Hollywood and her disregard for celebrity, such as Pom Pom Girl, Cowboy or Surfer, Maid is another emulation of the real that distinguishes Haworth’s Pop in the form of an “enchanted simulacrum”73 whose lost original is evoked through a rich layering of mediated and lived referents.74 Made as a lifesize doll “carved”75 in stuffed pink satin and covered with several layers of light brown panty-hose epidermis, Maid is dressed in a black-and-white uniform whose broderie Anglaise nods wittingly at the afternoon best of Victorian maids, and their specter amid the postwar British middle class’s (mal)adjustment to “servantless”76 domesticity and part-time “girls,” but is measured to the length of Swinging London mini-skirts and the sexual fetishism of transatlantic pop culture. While reminiscent of a fond childhood memory of a time Haworth had served breakfast to her father and stepmother playfully dressed as French maid

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and speaking in children’s-song French, Maid, indeed, conflates a wide array of clichés that range from American print pin-ups to real and cinematic servants.77 Originally commissioned as a surprise birthday gift for Hugh Hefner, Maid however was meant to be a Playboy Club waitress, a “Bunny.” Despite an appalling encounter with her clients at the newly opened London Playboy Club, where they demonstrated its sexist beauty standards by mocking rejected Bunny candidates, Haworth proceeded, drawn to the prospective Pop spectacle of her sculpture’s promised transatlantic flight and reception at the Chicago Playboy Club. In critical reaction, she envisioned “an ideal woman—an Eve or Venus”78 of mixed heritage, arguably a counter-Bunny challenging the hegemonic racial coding of beauty at a time when Playboy “playmates” and Bunnies were still largely White. Haworth does not seem to have known about Gloria Steinem’s 1963 invasion of the Playboy Club that fueled Steinem’s feminist ire against the working conditions, objectification and harassment of America’s “luckiest” female employees.79 Upon an experience of awakening to the Club’s sexist culture, however, akin to Steinem’s and spurred by the “groping” of her sculpture while she was waiting at the London Club foyer to have it fitted by the Club’s seamstress with a real Bunny outfit, Haworth dropped the commission. Instead, she dressed her “doll” as a parlor maid, subverting its objectification by repurposing it through its transformation into a domestic worker, yet at rest.80 In recent years the artist has highlighted the sexual politics of her revision81 of the Bunny trope, linking Maid’s autobiographic and iconographic references to Frenchness (albeit, as she described it, “Hollywood French”82) to her perception of French women then as more “independent, self-assured [and] sexy” and France as “racially mixed.”83 But whether a “French Maid” or a maid of “Hollywood French,” the skin tone of her figure was always programmatically conceived as a positive attribute of difference. Haworth ruminates: “I saw her as a woman of ‘crossed ethnicity’: Asian, African, Caucasian, and Mexican. I had in mind phrases I’d heard—that mixed blood was genetically superior.”84At the time, this fantasy—of a single figure that could transcend ethnic difference embodying many different people through skin tone—did not strike her as unacceptable, as Haworth concedes today.85 Nor did she question the racist paradigm of genetic inferiority and superiority (of all kinds) lurking within even radical discourses on ethnoracial mixture in postwar US, invoked by her justification. Obfuscating the different lived experiences of (multiracial) women across the stages of both Hollywood and domesticity, such framing undercuts the potential of Maid’s political intervention.86 As an affirmative visualization of racial hybridity made during the heyday of Civil Rights struggles in the US and rising anti-immigrant racism in the UK,

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Maid indeed articulates a naïve celebration of otherness and defiance of lasting miscegenation taboo. It asserts the multicultural Californian egalitarianism of Haworth’s progressive liberal upbringing against the more stifling biases of her British milieu, acknowledging domestic service as a waged means of independence through a gender perspective of alliance across race and class.87 Seen today, that limits the work from unveiling the racialization of domestic service that it effects,88 ironically more or differently resonant in the US than in the UK at the time, in all her multipurpose reconfiguration of clichés ensuing from the maid’s centrality in Western mythologies of domesticity and desire and its ambiguous embrace/displacement in Victorian settings as a figure of labor.89 Domestic work was the predominant occupation for Mexican or Mexican American women in California when Haworth was growing up, before they were outnumbered by Latin American migrants or the contemporary Latinization of the domestic service worker in American (pop) culture.90 The systemic racist biases that limited work opportunities for Black women rendering them America’s “preferred” domestic workers in the postwar twentieth century,91 had also amply shaped the maid into a signifier of servitude and race, if not successor of the “mammy.”92 As Audre Lorde has powerfully reminisced, while wheeling her daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, a year after Haworth’s work was finished, “a white girl in her mother’s cart called out excitedly: “Oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!,” only to be shushed but not corrected by her mother.93 And while domestic workers’ activism, emboldened by civil rights activism, struggled in the 1960s to shake off the legacy of such stereotypes and secure respect and basic labor rights, racial politics continued to be played out on the contested terrain of Black women’s domestic labor.94 American Whiteness, meanwhile, continued to be in part defined by contrast with all kinds of racialized domestic workers, as network television took over its fictions, updating and giving center stage on the stereotypical but marginal Hollywood character of the “domestic.”95 Replete with racist projections and sexualizing stereotypes, it is the Maid’s transatlantic reception, rather than the artist’s ambiguous anti-racist “sisterly” gesture, that bespeaks the racialized gendered contours of paid household labor and the service sector in its deep-seated biases, turning Maid’s failure to generate critical thinking in the late 1960s into the feminist effect of the intersecting oppressions it can unveil today. In a special report from London the Los Angeles Times critic, for instance, saw her as a “smart Negro waitress.”96 The British art critic Robert Melville, a supporter of Haworth’s work, deemed her also a waitress

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who “skipped out” from the trendy London coffee shop Kardomah, at the height of immigrant labor in London.97 All those who recognized her as an everyday idol of a working woman in the form of a domestic maid, found her in stereotypical manner “sexy”98 or “slatternly,”99 in ironic contrast to the sympathy elicited by Duane Hanson’s pensive Bunny as a profound emblem of the toughness, alienation and boredom of life in Pop civilization, when exhibited together with Maid in the US.100 John Canaday, for instance, conflated his aesthetic repulsion with his own fetishistic gaze, describing her as “a stuffed effigy of an appalling little slut all tricked out in a black satin uniform and starched lace apron, lolling in a chair.”101 For Grace Glueck too it depicted “a sluttish, saucy parlor maid” lolling on a settee.102 Slut, “initially a shorthand for ‘slattern’ or kitchen maid,” as we are reminded by Phyllis Palmer, captures all “suspect qualities,” such as sexuality, immorality, laziness, ignorance and above all dirtiness, resonating the ideologies and realities that fed the staples of Maid’s cursory critical reception in the turn of the 1970s by men and women—qualities that are not only unimaginable in a male persona, as Palmer further explains, but “justify social rankings of race, class and gender”103 among women. Such “qualities” are interwoven with the degrading of paid household work, in its entanglement with the history of slavery and race in America.104 The ensuing ideological opposition of “soil and purification,” as observed by Arlene Raven, becomes indeed a central parable for the unhealing wound of racism in the US in Saar’s later exploration of domestic workers, exposing the failure of the integration of the American nation that the mammy stereotype was designed to propagate.105 It is captured too in her Cornellian reliquary of Aunt Jemima. The drying spotless white laundry hung on a fence, in front of the babyholding nursemaid, contrasts with the color of her skin and the black fist, standing for the labor through which she ensured the purity of the White household and femininity by doing its dirty work in the nation’s broken home before and after liberation. This is why next to both Rosler’s and Haworth’s domestic workers, Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (holding a White or multiracial baby) could be seen as doubly feminist, empowering Black women but also targeting the fallacies of White second wave feminism’s understanding of “common oppression”106 from a Black woman’s perspective.107 Framing the racial and class division of domestic labor that sustains women’s own exploitation of women across colonialism and capitalist democracy, Saar subtly upended the color, if not class, myopia of the mainstream feminist movement’s vision of sisterhood and reformation through gender and pay equality in work, showing

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that such emancipation was predicated on the labor of the nation’s ex- and current female “slaves” of color, even as Black women exited domestic service en masse and the first domestic workers’ minimum wage campaigns succeeded.108 In response to Civil Rights, War on Poverty, Anti-War Protest, Decolonization Movements, Black Power, Chicana/o Movement, and (Art) Labor struggles, second wave feminism in the fraught but important alliance of its liberal, Black, and radical manifestations and the plurality of its multiracial articulations, did mature an intersectional contemplation on women’s work that has yielded a long and continuing genealogy of maids that critique both patriarchy and capitalism, as well as the intersection of race and class in their exploitation.109 All the more reason why Haworth’s dignifying attention to working women, despite the contradictions that underpinned her early iconographic choices towards combatting the dismissal of women’s (art) work, deserves to be included in the prehistory of feminist and contemporary art’s contemplation on women’s work, even if it displaces Pop’s celebrities with anonymous working heroines only through ambiguous clichés.110 Granted, Haworth’s “granny” helped her inscribe female subjectivity and experience in a male dominated White (art) world without questioning the naturalizing of women’s work as love’s labor, and the pink nails and short skirt of her maid compromised her rescue from the (sexual) labor of a Bunny through its subjugation to an equally exploitive—in capitalism— workplace for women. But Haworth’s iconography and “textile politics,” inflected by an alliance with the invisible labor of Hollywood studios’ production shops as much with that of women,111 effectively reclaimed both the paid and unpaid work that is hidden in patriarchal capitalism’s most undermined (re)productive “abode”—the home—by making visible the bodies that continue to carry it, foregrounding the intersection of race, class as well as age in their predicament.112 That the latter has changed only for a limited number of women in the ruling classes is a failure that contemporary feminism seeks to act upon, yet what is here reclaimed is the artist’s sociohistorically determined but important effort to make us positively face them.113

Coda When I go to a hotel, I find myself trying to stay there all day so the maid can’t come in. . . . I just don’t know where to put my eyes . . . while they’re cleaning. It’s actually a lot of work, avoiding the maid, when I think about it. Andy Warhol114

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Alienation, a signifier of the pathology of modern life with a long history in religion, philosophy and Marxism, “came into its own as a talismanic term in the 1950s and ’60s,” as put by Martin Jay in an insightful contemplation on alienation’s diminished place in critical thought alongside its new importance for right-wing xenophobia and nationalism, and the fear of alien labor.115 Inextricable from Marx’s understanding of the estrangement of labor in industrial society, and its winding course in existentialism, Humanist Marxism and the Frankfurt School, it infiltrated popular psychology, sociology, and literature in the US in the 1950s and 1960s as a fear of loss of individuality,116 straddling both the blue- and whitecollar discontent with work and the iron grip over life held by work routinization, corporatism and the culture industry in that era. It is under such rich layering that alienation underpins the different predicaments of Segal’s, Drexler’s and Weber’s urban working men, whether on scaffolds, conference rooms or highrise “office factories,” with a criticality that in all its differences perhaps more unmistakably questions the inescapable grip of capitalism on modern life and/as work than Warhol’s queer mining of “sameness.” Alienation also presupposed the estrangement of waged labor and the fall from an ideal self and community that to a large degree was masculine and White. Under the originally Marxist expulsion from the factory arena of labor’s classed struggle, women’s work remained a matter that liberal, Black and radical feminists would begin to take on through various and non-identical struggles and debates with limited success in truly changing the valorization of women’s labor in capitalism’s social factory that includes the home.117 Today, the feminization of postindustrial affective labor and poverty, as well as the commodification of the reracialized and largely immigrant domestic service of social reproduction seem inextricable symptoms of neoliberalism’s global labor exploitation and crisis. As these realities trounce the capitulation to consumerism and media colonization—prophesied by Warhol—as defining concerns about both capitalism and Pop, we can turn to what is prophesied instead by the (home) work of Kent’s miner’s wife, Haworth’s quilt-maker, and Saar’s and Haworth’s maids. From the margins of Pop, these works highlight the largely unchanged subjugation of the work of social (re)production not only to heteropatriarchy but also the White privilege inherent in the capitalism that it serves, as well as its importance in feminism(s)’s “unfinished” struggles for all women’s equality and work. Moving past Warhol’s own difficulty with the “corporeal realities of work and class,”118 we must face Pop’s domestic workers of all ethnicities for the alienation of their work and the imbrication of race and class in its exploitation, as well as the threat of their refusal to work lurking in Haworth’s maid’s humorous

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break as she indeed “lolled” in her changing but White domestic (Victorian or American) and institutional settings of Pop.119

Notes 1 Jasper Bernes, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 2017), 2. 2 Kathi Weeks, “Feminism and the Refusal of Work,” interview by George Souvlis, Verso, September 19, 2017, available at: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3400feminism-and-the-refusal-of-work-an-interview-with-kathi-weeks, reprinted in Souvlis, Voices on the Left: Challenging Capitalist Hegemony (Athens: Red Marks, 2019). 3 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 102. 4 See Thomas Crow, No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art (Sydney : Power Publications, 2017) and Kristen Gaylord, “Catholic Art and Activism in Postwar Los Angeles,” in Miguel de Baca and Makeda Best (eds.), Conflict, Identity and Protest in American Art (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 91–120. 5 Wonder Bread’s “enrichment,” ensuing from a wartime governmental program fighting malnutrition and various diseases marked the industry’s “quiet miracle,” doubling the novelty of the bakery good’s mass production and sliced form. 6 Maurice Ouellet, Catholic priest known for his support of the Civil Rights movement, from a speech quoted in this print, limiting the effectiveness of its critique of racism; see Gaylord. 7 John Dominis, Life, 56, no. 5, January 31, 1964. Kent’s quote came from a 1963 issue of the liberal church paper Jubilee; see Crow, No Idols. 8 The same can be said for British Pop, see Oliver Peterson Gilbert, “Pop Art Redefined. British Pop Arts of the 1960s: Towards a Social and Institutional History” (PhD diss., University of Southampton, 2015). 9 For a detailed account of the series and new perspectives on Kent’s “supermarket poetics” (as argued by Richard Meyer), see also Susan Dackerman (ed.), Corita Kent and the Language of Pop (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and Harvard Art Museums, 2015). 10 See Sofia Gotti, “Expanded Pop: Politics, Popular Culture and Art in Argentina, Brazil and Peru, 1960s” (PhD diss., University of the Arts London, 2016). Esther Gabara (ed.), Pop América, 1965–1975 (Durham, NC: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2018), 11, discusses also how Pop’s engagement with consumer culture in Latin America reflects contradictory experiences of wealth and scarcity.

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11 See also Marie-Louise Ekman’s critical insinuation of class in the “Gunnel” print series, in Kalliopi Minioudaki, “Marie-Louise Ekman: Feminist ‘Bad Girl’ or Sweden’s Bad Feminist?,” Tone Hansen and Maria Lind (eds.), No is Not an Answer: On the Work of Marie-Louise Ekman (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013). 12 See Michael Harrington’s 1962, The Other America: Poverty in the United States and its mythic role in spearheading the “War on Poverty.” 13 Dispossession is the fundamental trait of class formation and the precarity of proletarianization in Karl Marx, according to Bryan D. Palmer, “Reconsiderations of Class: Precariousness as Proletarianization,” Socialist Register (2014): 40–62. 14 Per Marx on waged labor, and its critique by Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2011). 15 Unlike what is argued by Donald Kuspit, “Pop Art: A Reactionary Realism,” Art Journal, 36 (Fall 1976): 31–8. 16 As argued by Lawrence Alloway (in Kuspit, ibid.), and variously surfacing in Pop’s understanding as art of “modern life.” For Pop’s realist mode, see also Michael Lobel, Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 17 With the exception of Warhol, Pop is missing from explorations of the politics and representations of labor prior to and after the 1960s, see, for instance, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, 2009); Helen Molesworth (ed.), Work Ethic (Baltimore, MD, and University Park, PA : Baltimore Museum of Art and Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), the two volumes of Work and The Image edited by Griselda Pollock and Valérie Mainz (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), and the exhibition, The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers (Washington, DC: National Portrait Gallery, 2017). Of great importance for this essay is the foregrounding of the intertwined “labor crisis” and “labor turn” in art and society and their role in contemporary materialist feminism by Angela Dimitrakaki, see indicatively, Gender, artWork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), and her introduction (with Kirsten Lloyd) to the special Third Text issue (January 2017) on social reproduction, as well as Tithi Bhattacharya (ed.), Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London: Pluto Press, 2017). 18 See Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (London and New York: Verso, 2019). 19 See Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1996), and the writings on Warhol by Benjamin Buchloh, Isabelle Graw, Anthony Grudin, Blake Stimson, and others.

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20 See Lucy Lippard (ed.), Pop Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966), 101–2; Marco Livingstone, George Segal Retrospective: Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1997). 21 “Of course if Pop has to mean witty ironic detachment, count me out. I make no bones about the fact that I am involved in the whole human situation. But Pop is not as narrow as all that,” George Segal, in Carl R. Baldwin, “On the Nature of Pop,” Artforum, 12, no. 10 (June 1974): 37. 22 Along with the role of Jewish identity that nuances Segal’s take on work in light of the working mother in The Butcher Shop, its intersection with gender and class merits further investigation that is beyond the limited cross-class focus of this section on arguably and differently alienated working men. 23 John Perreault, “George Segal: Plaster Caste,” Art News (November 1968): 54–5. 24 John Russell, “Introduction,” in Russell and Suzi Gablik (eds.), Pop Art Redefined (London: Hayward Gallery, 1969), 21–2. 25 Martin Friedman, “George Segal: Proletarian Mythmaker,” George Segal: Sculptures (Minneapolis, MN : Walker Art Center, 1978). 26 See Jan Van der Marck, George Segal (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1975). 27 Donald Kuspit links Segal’s Jewish origins to his revolutionary modernism in, George Segal: Modernist Humanist (Montclair, NJ : Montclair State University, 2008). 28 Kelly Baum, “On the Road,” New Jersey as Non-Site (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), 40. 29 Harold Rosenberg, “The Pathos of the Proletariat,” The Kenyon Review (Autumn 1949): 595–629. 30 George Segal, in an interview by Paul Cummings (Archives of American Art, November 26, 1973) reminisces on the change from the prewar atmosphere that made him reject reading Marx, while crediting the impact of the New Masses and its artists. 31 For the role of her Jewish origins, see Michael Lobel, “Gangster’s Paradise: Rosalyn Drexler and Immigrant Culture,” in Katy Siegel (ed.), Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She Is? (New York: Gregory R. Miller and the Rose Art Museum, 2016), 47–73. 32 See also Minioudaki, “Rosalyn Drexler: Madly and Transgressively Embracing the Vulgarity of Life,” in ibid., and in “Women in Pop: Difference and Marginality” (PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2009). 33 The series’ unidentified sources—possibly sales catalogues as recalled by the artist in a 2004 interview by the author—are archived at Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. 34 Rosalyn Drexler, interview with the author, June 19, 2005 and Oral History Interview conducted by Christopher Lyon, Archives of American Art, May 17 to June 2, 2017. While in the former she stressed the admirable aspects of such concentration, in the latter she sexualizes the relation of men with their machines and stresses its controlling aspect.

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35 Drexler, interview by Lyon, 2017. 36 Perhaps not coincidentally, The Syndicate was used as an illustration for a review of John Kenneth Galbraith’s, The New Industrial State, 1967 (Raymond J. Saulnier, “The Shape of Things,” New York Times, June 25, 1967). 37 Minioudaki, “Women in Pop.” 38 Doubling the irony of her critique by tuning their march to the 1936 song that titles the work, itself an artifact of White mythologies about the South and cultural appropriation first made popular by no other than Al Jolson (in blackface on the record cover). 39 Sid Sachs, “Idelle Weber: New Realist,” in Idelle Weber: The Pop Years (New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 2013). 40 C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press), 1951. 41 Sachs, Idelle Weber, 12. 42 Nadja Rottner perceptively discussed class, labor, and ethnicity in Claes Oldenburg’s, Store, 1962 at the panel “Pop and Class” that Mona Hadler and I cochaired for the College Art Association conference in 2018. 43 As Bernes observes, while postwar America witnessed better conditions for blue-collar workers, already in the mid-1950s white-collar jobs outnumbered blue-collar ones, a rapid transformation that caused the former’s split into a privileged class of managerial, professional, and technical positions, as well as low-paying Taylorized positions occupied primarily by White women. The increasing proletarianization, as he argues, of the lower ranks of the white-collar middle class, had by the mid-1960s brewed, in the US too, the discontent against the routinized industrial model of work beyond the factory, and its “qualitative” critique. Bernes, “Introduction.” Work of Art in Age of Deindustrialization. 44 Segal’s mother in The Butcher Shop, nuances this reading as does Drexler’s counterheroes—anonymous lady wrestlers, immigrant boxers, like Kid Paret, or Black stars, like Chubby Checker. Her attention to the intersection of gender and race in the limited opportunities and public visibility of America’s “other” working class is exceptional. 45 See the special issue on Feminist Domesticities of Oxford Art Journal (March 2017) edited by Jo Applin and Francesca Berry for an excellent addition to the lengthy literature on the domestic, which substantially marks Pop’s imagery (as first noted by Lucy Lippard in “Household Images in Art,” originally published in Ms., 1, no. 9, in March 1973), in spite of the absence of women’s Pop in the important literature on postwar (feminist) art on work (with the exception of Rosler), including Helen Molesworth, “House Work and Artwork,” October, 92 (2000): 71–97; Siona Wilson, Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance (Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, 2015) and Hilary Robinson, in

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Helena Reckitt (ed.), The Art of Feminism: Images that Shaped the Fight for Equality, 1857–2017 (San Francisco, CA : Chronicle Books, 2018). The feminist revision of Pop, however, variously expands on the issues of the domestic in Pop as in the writings of Agata Jakubowska, Giulia Lamoni, Katarina Wadstein MacLeod, Ana María Reyes, and others. For the feminist “deconstructive impulse” (in light of Griselda Pollock’s theorization) that I argue underpins also the critical “thinking with and about” images of women and Pop’s “bad girl” appropriative and performative tactics, see Minioudaki, “Feminist Eruptions in Pop, Beyond Borders,” in Jessica Morgan and Flavia Frigeri (eds.), The World Goes Pop (London: Tate Publishing, 2015). For the intersection of the politics of feminism and Pop, as well as its feminist critique, see also Martha Rosler, “The Figure of the Artist, The Figure of the Woman,” in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001 (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2004). Martha Rosler, Artist’s Interview, September 2015, conducted in relation to the exhibition The World Goes Pop and posted at Tate Modern’s website at: https://www. tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/ey-exhibition-world-goes-pop/ artist-interview/martha-rosler. Ibid. Betye Saar, in Cindy Nemser (ed.), Art Talk: Conversations with 15 Women Artists, rev. and enl. edn (New York: Icon Editions, 1995), originally published in Feminist Art Journal (Winter 1975/6). Arlene Raven, “Mostly ’bout Survival,” Betye Saar: Workers + Warriors: The Return of Aunt Jemima (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 1998). For a poignant reading of the child as mixed-race signifier of the woman’s servile status “as breeder and chattel,” see Lisa E. Farrington, Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 165. See also Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, 18 (2016): 166–73. Kobena Mercer, “Tropes of the Grotesque in the Black Avant-Garde,” in Kobena Mercer (ed.), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 143. While Mercer is the first to consider Saar’s bricolage practice in the context of Pop, Raven had mapped this work’s dialogue with both Warhol and supermarket aesthetics. Jo-Ann Morgan, “Mammy the Huckster: Selling the Old South for the New Century,” American Art, 9, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 86–109, identifies the card used by Saar as a “stock card” offered by printers to advertisers to “huckster” (to sell) and “messenger” (to keep the racial and class lines of American womanhood in place). Patricia Hill Collins, “Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images,” in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 69–96. While the origins of this fictional version of the

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Southern “mammy” in minstrel, its commodification, and mobilization against White domination by Black artists in the 1960s such as Murry DePillars, Joe Overstreet, and Jeff Donaldson are well studied and tapped in this volume, Cheryl Thompson, in, “Contesting the Aunt Jemima Trademark through Feminist Art: Why is She Still Smiling?,” n.paradoxa, 31 (2013): 65–72, excellently sums up how the commodified icon of Aunt Jemima encodes racism in America, while illuminating how Saar’s and other Black women artists’ resort to it as a derogatory stereotype of Black womanhood and labor not only attacked racism, but intervened in the Black nationalist (art) discourse around the role of Black women, challenging the masculinist and sexist bias of its weaponizing by male artists. Saar, in Nemser, Art Talk, 322. See also Saar, “Women, Work, Washboards,” and Steven Nelson, “Betye Saar: Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroines,” in Betye Saar: Keepin’ it Clean (Los Angeles, CA : Craft and Folk Art Museum, and New York: Historical Society, 2017). Jann Haworth, in Marco Livingstone, British Pop (Bilbao: Museum of Fine Arts, 2005), 419–21, eloquently contemplates her “American attitudes.” Haworth is daughter of awarded Hollywood production designer Ted Haworth and ceramicist, printmaker, and painter Miriam Severy Haworth. For the impact of Haworth’s contradictory upbringing and intertwined childhood experience of Hollywood filmmaking and arts through home, widely addressed by the artist in recent interviews, see also Minioudaki, “Women in Pop.” Haworth, in Livingstone, British Pop, 422. Haworth, in Angela Stief (ed.), Power Up: Female Pop Art (Vienna: Kunsthalle and DuMont, 2010), 213. For the rivalry of arts and fiber arts in this era, see also Elissa Auther, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Haworth, quoted in Irene Dancyger, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Woman: Jann Haworth,” The Times, February 9, 1967, 13. Haworth has repeatedly credited the formative openness of Slade and St Martin’s tutors Harold Cohen and Tony Caro. See Haworth, “Everything is the Stuff of Art,” in Nadine Käthe Monem (ed.), Contemporary Textiles: The Fabric of Fine Art (London: Black Dog, 2008), 5. Adding ethnicity (and religion) to gender and class as markers of difference and discrimination, in one of her accounts of her early experience of the “stratified” British society, Haworth (email to the author, July 19, 2006) highlights that she was “shocked by the use of the word ‘blacks’ for anyone who was not white anglo saxon . . . so Mexicans were blacks . . . along with Indians[India] . . .,” noting that in 1962 the English “were still in Empire mode.” Her experience as an artist’s wife, married to Peter Blake in 1963 (until 1979), only amplified this perspective.

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64 As Miriam Schapiro wrote in, “Geometry and Flowers,” Charlotte Robinson (ed.), The Artist and The Quilt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 29. 65 Making visible their tireless labors, as put, in light of the inventive practices of several postwar female sculptors by Anna C. Chave, “Sculpture, Gender and the Value of Labor,” American Art, 24, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 30. 66 See Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art + Textile Politics (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 2017). Haworth’s soft sculpture is unduly missing from the growing (since Rozsika Parker’s pioneering writings) feminist literature on 1960s rise of “fiber arts.” I am using Wilson’s term here to acknowledge the non-hierarchical combination of the “marginally handmade” in Haworth’s multifaceted craft-loving practice, especially due to the inherent tension of textiles’ public and domestic history revealed by Bryan-Wilson that resonates particularly with the mixed origins and evolving associations of Haworth’s politics of sewing, and the dissonant intersection of gender, race, and class in its different meaning for women of different backgrounds at the time in both London and the US. Denise Noble nuances the racial politics of women’s work as well as meaning of home in light of Caribbean immigrant women’s home dressmaking and crafted doilies in postcolonial London, in, “Material Objects as Sites of Critical Re-Memorying and Imaginative ‘Knowing,’ ” in Cloth and Culture, 16, no. 2 (2018): 214–33. See also Kirsty Robertson, “Rebellious Doilies and Subversive Stitches: Writing a Craftivist History,” in Maria Elena Buszek (ed.), Extra/Ordinary, Craft and Contemporary Art (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2011). 67 Haworth cited in Elizabeth Glazebrook, “Juliet, Betjeman, and Sonny Liston,” The Times, February 3, 1969, 6. See also Tessa Traeger, “Fashions in Living: Loving Hands at Home,” Vogue, January 1970, clipping from Jann Haworth’s collection. 68 This is where sartorial aspects of Haworth’s sculpture differ from the wearable assemblages of Mimi Smith, another artist who dovetails with Pop and explores domestic labor. 69 The double, the cutout, the prop, and the set are among several cinematic terms that mark the experience and effect of Hollywood film production on Haworth’s practice. 70 Her dress, a patchwork of feminine outfits from different ages in a woman’s life (such as christening robe and undergarments) accent the metaphoric valence of (commemorative) quiltmaking in its triangulation in Old Lady II, both as a means of sculpting and gender critique of ageism following the groundbreaking portrayal of her grandmother in Old Lady I, 1962. 71 Laura Fisher, Quilts of Illusion: Tumbling Blocks, Delectable Mountains, Stairway to Heaven, Log Cabin, Windmill Blades, and Other Optical Designs (Pittstown, NJ : Main Street Press, 1988). 72 Jann Haworth, cited in, Figures/Environments (Minneapolis, MN : Walker Art Center 1970), 27. As put by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild (eds.), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Owl Books, 2004), 11:

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Pop Art and Beyond the globalization of child care and housework brings the ambitious and independent women of the world together . . . Only it does not bring them together in the way that second-wave feminists in affluent countries once liked to imagine—as sisters and allies struggling to achieve common goals. Instead, they come together as mistress and maid, employer and employee, across a great divide of privilege and opportunity.

73 For my understanding of Haworth’s realism in light of Jean Baudrillard and her ambiguous critique of American racism or teenage culture in Cowboy, 1964, Pom Pom Girl, c. 1964, and Surfer, 1965, see Minioudaki, “Women in Pop.” 74 A photo of a model looking like Barbra Streisand, who ironically debuted as a maid in The Boyfriend, 1960, is mentioned as an aid for her facial features, in Figures/ Environments, 24. 75 Haworth, “Working Girl: Jann Haworth on Maid (1966),” statement posted at Walker Art Center’s website on August 2015, at: https://walkerart.org/magazine/jannhaworths-playboy-maid. An earlier version of this statement was emailed to the author in 2006. 76 See Lucy Delap, “‘Doing for Oneself’: The Servantless Home,” Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), for a fascinating account of the postwar withering of servant-keeping and the new forms of “help” that contextualize the figure of the “maid” both as a contested term and a persistent specter of the classed British imaginary, and popular culture, straddling comedy and pornography. 77 Including the French maid styling of Hollywood stars such as Marilyn Monroe. 78 Haworth, email to the author, May 6, 2006. 79 Gloria Steinem’s undercover experience as a New York Playboy Bunny was published in Show magazine in May and June 1963. 80 Alternating assertively between Victorian-style couches, armchairs and settees since her second solo at the Robert Fraser Gallery, in 1969 as seen here. 81 Revision and critique of its Pop beginnings marks the development of Haworth’s feminist practice, both in terms of her studio and public art projects, especially her large-scale community murals inclusively celebrating women’s history. The 2004 mural, SLC Pepper, for instance, corrects the gender and racial imbalance of the famous Beatles cover that she co-designed with Peter Blake. 82 “My French maid is essentially ‘Hollywood French,’ really (you won’t find French toast in France.)” Haworth, “Working Girl.” 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid., where Haworth also adds “and crossing cultures produced new art.” In an email to the author, March 7, 2006, she also included Native American heritage among these examples. 85 Haworth, “Working Girl.”

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86 Ironically, Fredericka Washington’s short stardom relied on playing a Black woman “passing” as a White woman in Imitation of Life, but failing to fit the limited roles available for Black actresses, such as maids, she was recommended to try to be cast as French, at: https://www.history.com/news/fredi-washington-black-actresshollywood-jim-crow-era. See also the discussion of the mixed-race maid in Robert Colescott’s Café au Lait au Lit by Lowery Stokes Sims in this volume. 87 Although it is worth remembering the words of bell hook’s critique of Betty Friedan in this context: “She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute, than to be a leisure-class housewife,” in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984), 2. 88 In contrast to its exposure by the silver-faced servant in Marisol’s, The Party, 1965–6. 89 For the low-paid but public, rather than private, domestic, and care labor allotted to “Black” women in 1950s and 1960s London, see Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, ‘Race’ and National Identity, 1945–64 (London: Routledge, 1998). 90 Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A. (New York: Routledge, 1992). The cartoony Mexican maid, in Melesio Casas’s painting Humanscape 68 (Kitchen Spanish) from 1973, derived from an illustrated booklet instructing “housewives” how to boss their Spanish-speaking maids, provides a Pop-inflected critique of the racial dynamic of the American Dream from a Chicano perspective. For Northern California, see Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia, PA : Temple University Press, 1988). 91 Denied upward mobility, Black domestic workers began to outnumber White women domestic workers only in the twentieth century, rising to ten times more in number than White domestic workers in the 1950s, according to Enobong Hannah Branch, Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011). By 1960 at least “one-third of Black women workers remained chained to the same old household jobs and an additional one-fifth were non-domestic service workers,” according to Jacquelyne Johnson Jackson (1973), quoted by Angela Y. Davis in, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981). For detailed statistics and the substantial gains for Black women in the labor force in the 1960s, see Cecilia A. Conrad, “Changes in the Labor Market Status of Black Women 1960-2000,” in Conrad et al. (eds.), African Americans in the US Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005). 92 See Premilla Nadasen, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (Boston, MA : Beacon Press, 2015); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From servitude to service work: Historical continuities in the racial division of paid reproductive labor,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18 (1992): 1–43, and Collins, “Mammies, Matriarchs.” See also Kimberly WallaceSanders, Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (Anne Arbor, MI : University of Michigan Press, 2008).

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93 Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Keynote Speech at National Women’s Studies Association, 1981, published in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Crossing Press: 1984). 94 See Nadasen, Household Workers Unite. 95 Lahn Sung Kim, “Maid in Color: The Figure of the Racialized Domestic in American Television” (PhD diss., University of California, 1997). The repeated casting of Black women as maids and menials in the golden days of Hollywood, was contested already in the 1940s in the pages of Ebony. 96 G. S. Whittet, “The Doll’s house of Jann Haworth,” Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1967, italics are mine for emphasis, as in all quotes about Maid hereafter. 97 Robert Melville, “Magic Parlour,” New Statesman, February 14, 1969. 98 Guy Brett, “Jann Haworth,” The Times, February 17, 1969. 99 Figures/Environments, 24. 100 Ibid., 20. 101 John Canaday, “Odd Thing to Worry About, Ethics,” New York Times, June 7, 1970. 102 Grace Glueck, “New York: A ‘New Realism’ in Sculpture?,” Art in America, 59, (November–December 1971): 152. Such a stereotypical reaction by the New York Times’ art critic is remarkable as it took place during the heyday of the coalescence between liberal and radical (White and Black) women’s and domestic workers’ rights activism with regard to (house)work in New York, marked by the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality and the hearings organized by the New York Commission on Human Rights, all contributing to Glueck’s own feminist consciousnesses regarding the inequities faced by women in her own industry. See Carol Giardina, Freedom for Women: Forging the Women’s Liberation Movement, 1953–1970 (Gainsville, FL : Florida University Press, 2010). 103 In her explanation of middle-class women’s allocation of housework to “other” women, Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920–1945 (Philadelphia, PA : Temple University Press, 1991). 104 In Household Workers Unite, Nadasen further discusses liberal feminism’s denigration of domestic work as dirty and monotonous, in the context of its redemption by Black domestic worker activism and its strategic coalitions with the women’s liberation movement, as well as middle-class women’s needs for “help” as they entered the workforce in the 1960s. 105 Raven, “Mostly ’bout Survival.” 106 For Black critiques of mainstream feminism by the end of the 1960s in the US, see Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–1985, A Sourcebook (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2017). Saar included a work from the Aunt Jemima series in the show she curated for the feminist collective Womanspace (Black Mirror, 1973). 107 In its intersection with the feminist “deconstructive impulse” in Pop, Saar’s, among others, inclusion in this context reinforces the space this anthology opens for Pop’s

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oppositional tactic uses across intersecting lines of oppression in the 1960s, both feminist and beyond. For the mobility and deconstructive modality of the differential consciousness of radical women of color as theorized by Chela Sandoval, see “US Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” Genders, 10 (Spring 1991): 1–24, and Sandoval (ed.), Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Domestic household work, deemed largely unorganizable and not legitimate as work, was excluded both from the mainstream labor’s struggles and federal labor protection legislation until the turn of 1970s minimum wage protections and the amends to the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1974. See Nadasen, Household Workers Unite. See Martha Rosler’s Tijuana Maid (card novel), 1976, and the unfinished film on a Mexican maid discussed in Jane Weinstock, “Interview with Martha Rosler,” October (Summer 1981): 77–98, and Lorna Simpson’s Untitled (Maid), 1981, to mention a few of the earlier ones of American feminist art, or the maids of Chantal Akerman, Tracey Moffatt, and Wu Tsang. The important work on the topic by Yolanda M. López, who was also student and friend of Rosler, must be also acknowledged here. I regret the limitations of this chapter have not allowed for a much needed consideration of labor in Chicana art and feminism, or a more inclusive consideration of “US Third World” feminist perspectives. Although Haworth also intervened in British Pop’s fixation with Marilyn Monroe through her representations of Mae West, as Hollywood’s “brainier” working girl. One must acknowledge the other side of Hollywood that Haworth mined: production shops and the working-class labor, in its intersection with gender and race, that the film industry masks. Haworth has reminisced on the impact not only of the Hollywood sound- and backstage on her work but her leftist father’s support of Hollywood labor struggles, particularly the 1940s strikes of animators and set decorators. For the intersection of race, gender, and class in the film industry, see Jacqueline Bobo (ed.), Black Feminist Cultural Criticism (Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishers, 2001). Her artistic rehabilitation of women’s domestic (cultural) production is informed by her dismissal of feminine style (whether of Californian dressmaking or Mod styling) and speaks volumes of the difficulties she had as a female artist in London. Mignon Duffy, “Doing the Dirty Work: Gender, Race, and Reproductive Labor in Historical Perspective,” Gender and Society (June 2007): 313–23. For the complicity of White feminism in the subjugation of Black and immigrant domestic workers, see Terri Nilliasca, “Some Women’s Work: Domestic Work, Class, Race, Heteropatriarchy and the Limits of Legal Reform,” Michigan Journal of Race and Law, 16 (2011): 377–410.

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113 While Haworth’s home workers aid my critical exposure of the racial and class biases of second-wave feminist (art) discourse on domestic labor, they also complement its focus on housework’s “dirty chores,” allowing this essay’s reclamation of the importance of the labor of social reproduction in the second wave’s unfinished but important multiperpectival struggles for work. See Kirsten Swinth, Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2018). For the role of domestic workers activism in changing feminist understandings of work see Nadasen, Household Workers Unite. For the “dirty chores” of domestic labor (that could be exemplified by Marjorie Strider’s 1970s sculptures of brooms, to mention an artist with a Pop past), see Patricia Mainardi, “The Politics of Housework,” 1970, available at: https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/09/11/pat-mainardi-the-politics-ofhousework. 114 Warhol, The Philosophy, 102. 115 Martin Jay, “In the 1950s Everybody Cool was a Little Alienated. What Changed?,” Aeon, March 2018, available at: https://aeon.co/essays/in-the-1950s-everybodycool-was-a-little-alienated-what-changed. 116 Cutting across the writings of C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, David Riesman, W. H. Whyte, and others. 117 Prominent among them being Silvia Federici’s role in the Wages for Housework movement. See Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA, and New York: PM Press, 2012). 118 Anthony E. Grudin, Warhol’s Working Class: Pop Art and Egalitarianism (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 2017), 155. 119 For the centrality of waged and unwaged women’s strike in anti-capitalist feminist activism today, see Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, A Manifesto, and Angela Davis, Barbara Ransby, Cinzia Arruzza, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff, Nancy Fraser, Rasmea Yousef Odeh and Tithi Bhattacharya, “Beyond Lean-In: For a Feminism of the 99% and a Militant International Strike on March 8,” Viewpoint Magazine, February 3, 2017, available at: https://www.viewpointmag. com/2017/02/03/beyond-lean-in-for-a-feminism-of-the-99-and-a-militantinternational-strike-on-march-8/.

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The Commonwealth of British Pop Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Politics in Frank Bowling’s Mother’s House Series Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani

Before relocating to New York City from London in 1966, Frank Bowling began work on a series of paintings utilizing a screenprint of a photograph of his mother’s house and business taken on Coronation Day in 1953 (figure 9.1).1 Bowling’s Variety Store resided on Main Street, in New Amsterdam, British Guiana; formerly a Dutch colonial capital, later a British colonial port town, positioned near the estuary of the Berbice River. The screenprint was produced with assistance from Joe Dixon in 1964, a friend and colleague of Bowling at the Camberwell School of Art in London, where both were instructors.2 The conception of the paintings began, however, in 1962, during a summer retreat funded by a bursary to Barbados, Trinidad, and British Guiana, which Bowling embarked on after his graduation from the Royal College of Art (RCA). It was the artist’s first visit back home in almost a decade, fostering a transition in his practice towards themes of personal and collective memory. Paintings incorporating the screenprint of his mother’s house and store include Cover Girl, 1966, his most recognizable Pop canvas, produced while in London, Bowling’s Variety Store, 1966–7, Mother’s House with Beware of the Dog, 1966, Barticabather, 1966–7, and My Guyana, 1966–7. Bowling also began his Map series using the image of the house in paintings like Plus Mother’s House, 1968 or Middle Passage, 1970. The focus of a major recent retrospective, these panoramic, chromatically saturated paintings outlining the continental landmasses of Africa, South America and Guyana, were originally shown in his 1971 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.3 During this period, Bowling began writing for the New York-based Arts Magazine, encouraged by another British expatriate in New York, art critic Lawrence Alloway. Actively participating in the 205

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Figure 9.1 Photograph of Bowling’s Variety Store, 1953. © Frank Bowling. Courtesy of the artist and the Frank Bowling Archive.

Black Arts Movement, and deeply affected by the problematic Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Harlem on My Mind, 1969, he addressed critical problems faced by Black American abstract artists including William T. Williams, Al Loving, Mel Edwards, and Jack Whitten.4 Better known as an abstractionist, Bowling is often overlooked as a contributor to Pop in Britain and excluded from its canonical histories, which ostensibly begin with Alloway’s contribution to Lucy Lippard’s edited volume Pop Art, 1966, on British Pop’s development. More recently, art historians and critics including Okwui Enwezor, Eddie Chambers, Kobena Mercer, and Mel Gooding position Bowling’s early London practice and the period following his move to New York as a transitional shift in the artist’s œuvre moving from a Baconian, expressionist figuration in works like Mirror, 1966, towards abstraction that he is most celebrated for.5 While acknowledging his use of the aforementioned screenprint and stenciled texts as pop-oriented devices, this takes secondary significance to the characterization of works like Cover Girl as sites of contestation; “intermediary zone[s] between figuration and abstraction.”6 The artist’s involvement with the Black Arts Movement after his move to the United States in 1966 often marks the point of departure for investigating the

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artist’s political awareness, eliding, as Enwezor observes, “the significance of postcolonial British cultural life and diasporic politics, and their ultimate impact on his work.”7 My objective here takes up Enwezor’s reins, and recovers and resituates Bowling’s critical engagement with Pop within the larger social and cultural networks of the Commonwealth internationalism emerging in Britain during the rapid decolonization of its empire in the 1960s.8 The cultural Commonwealth, as in organizations like the Young Commonwealth Artists Group (YCA), of which Bowling and Barrie Bates were members, developed in tandem with a growing nationalist school of British Pop initiated in texts like the 1962 Young Contemporaries (YC) exhibition, and Pop Goes the Easel, 1962, the stylized documentary directed by Ken Russell featuring Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty, and Peter Phillips. The Map paintings are Bowling’s most recognized and studied works from this period, and as Chambers and Mercer assert, are not only biographical, but through the trope of the map, according to Chambers, present “signifiers of Pan-African, or African Diasporic, identity.”9 Bowling’s Mother’s House series are transnational objects, germinated in the Caribbean, in Barbados and Trinidad, and at home in British Guiana, begun in London, and completed in New York City. Overlooked in readings of his early practice incorporating the screenprint of his mother’s house, however, is that the colonial-style building was also a place of commerce, housing his mother’s variety store, millinery and dress shop, thereby illuminating issues of labor, postcoloniality and race explored by Bowling, which were also inextricably linked to postwar politics during this period in Britain. Drawing on primary and archival sources, this text considers Bowling’s early figurative works incorporating this image within the wider sociopolitical developments of Commonwealth labor and racialized politics occurring in Britain during the 1960s, while also challenging the centrality of consumer culture and its products in the canonical definitions of British Pop. Pop is characterized by Lippard as a transatlantic visual language created first in England and reborn in America, stimulated by an optimistic approach to the rise of a new world market: Pop was not a grass-roots movement in any country, nor was it an international fusion of styles . . . its standards were not determined by regionalism so much as by a widespread decision to approach the contemporary world with a positive rather than a negative attitude.10

Lippard’s narrative of Pop as an apolitical, ambiguous language was shared by Alloway in his contribution to her book.11 “The Development of British Pop,” as

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noted in Pop Art and Design, was written as a personal memoir and expressed Alloway’s own interests in American popular culture, more so than the manifold sources Pop artists were culling from the streets, mailboxes, record stores and cinemas of London.12 Having moved to New York by 1961, Alloway’s linear narrative of British Pop left out the significant impact of design history and British popular arts and culture, including the influence of Barbara Jones, on the sensibilities of the Independent Group and the next generation of Pop artists, such as Peter Blake.13 Pop artists, according to Alloway, were both producers and consumers of the new iconography, and swinging London was “a known place, defined by games, by crowds, by fashion.”14 While Alloway’s canonical definition of Pop in Britain was formulated during a period marked by nascent and burgeoning globalization, it was paradoxically predicated on rendering invisible the political and cultural reformation shaped by decolonization, the rise of the global market, and newly-independent nation states. In Britain, Pop emerged from a decade of austerity measures and rationing, rebuilding, and the recalibrating of a new nationalism in the wake of the Second World War. Retaining the empire was economically unfeasible and decolonization, inevitable.15 Rebuilding Britain required recuperating a decimated workforce, enforced, in part, by the British Nationality Act of 1948, which granted British citizenship to all within the Empire and Commonwealth and equal rights to migrate freely throughout.16 Between 1946 and 1962, roughly 1 million colonials and Commonwealth citizens settled in the United Kingdom to live or work. Various government agencies began recruiting laborers from its colonies and Commonwealth, particularly from Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica.17 The centrality of products in Pop in Alloway’s narrative thus elides the rising visibility of immigrant labor. The significatory power of the new consumer culture in Pop Art was based, not on the use-value or labor-value of a product—the Marxist determination of material culture—but instead on the consumption or desire for its final objects; in Alloway’s assertion via Reyner Banham, an “aesthetics of expendability.”18 Alongside Harold Macmillan’s declaration to the British people in 1957 that “you’ve never had it so good,” such sentiments were symptomatic of the fastpaced, all-consuming consumer culture engendered by economic recovery in the 1960s. Rationing was in the past, and a growing middle class could afford to go to the cinema or collect products, not for necessity, but for their leisure or aesthetic value. British Pop artists “accepted industrial culture and assimilated aspects of it into their art,” Alloway writes, yet the uncritical, as-is ambiguity with which quoted works like Richard Hamilton’s Hommage à Chrysler Corp,

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1957, or Peter Phillips’ For Men Only, MM and BB Starring, 1961, were produced or discussed, renders its producers and the effects of its productions, invisible.19 The demographic map of Britain, forever changed by the mass migration from its peripheries to metropoles like London, challenged the social and cultural milieu of a Britishness that evoked the Empire as something outside, othered, and distanced by geographical separation. The 1960s marks the largest contingency of former colonial states and protectorates to gain independence and join the Commonwealth, including Nigeria (1960), Sierra Leone (1961), Jamaica (1962), Trinidad and Tobago (1962), and Guyana (1966). Twice rejected from the European Economic Community by France in 1963 and again in 1968, Britain rigorously sought in the 1960s to identify and create a Commonwealth.20 Britain’s industrial relationship to the Commonwealth took precedence in the contemporary politics of the day. The emerging Commonwealth, for all its pretense as a fundamentally new economic and trade entity, was still rooted in a colonial system designed to provide Britain with surplus wealth and labor, sources of raw material, and markets for goods.21 Internationalism, a claim of cultural and political “unity and diversity,” invoked by Queen Elizabeth II during her Christmas Day speeches, became the cornerstone of the construction of a cultural Commonwealth during the 1960s. Bowling’s esteemed classmates at the Royal College of Art, including the New-Zealand born Barrie Bates (who would become Billy Apple in 1962), Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Peter Phillips, Norman Toynton, and Allen Jones, were described in Alloway’s narrative as British Pop’s third and final wave. “We were all painting from newspaper cuttings, photographs, films, etc.,” Bowling recalled of his colleagues at the RCA, “but I wasn’t allowed to be a Pop artist because of their preoccupation with what was Pop.”22 Bowling graduated in 1962, winning silver behind Hockney’s gold for their painting class yet was excluded from the seminal New Generation exhibition held at Whitechapel Gallery in 1964, which included many of his RCA cohort. When pressed by the artist as to why, Bryan Robertson, director of the Whitechapel Gallery, responded, “England is not yet ready for a gifted artist of colour.”23 Bowling’s exclusion, as he estimated, was because his subject matter “was to do with political things in the Third World . . . I did not paint Marilyn Monroe because she did not interest me.”24 In The Martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba, 1961, a student work, imagery is taken from the filmed beating and torture of the Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by Belgian and

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Katangan officers in the hours leading to his assassination. Clips were televised on British newscasts, and still frames widely reproduced in newspapers around the world. The painting was one of several canvases Bowling created in response to the assassination plot backed by the US and Belgian governments. Bowling substitutes Lumumba’s two comrades, who were also murdered, with whitemasked men, alluding to the Belgian officials present at the moment of their deaths. Although the painting is stylistically indebted to Francis Bacon, with Bowling’s violent sweeps of dense and dark color, the artist specifically characterized this series as Pop for its mass media references.25 All of those pictures that came out on the front pages of the newspaper, right?” Bowling recalls, “My work emerged round about the time of the turmoil in Africa. Patrice Lumumba and all that.”26 Contradicting Alloway and Lippard’s approach to Pop as an apolitical and optimistic visual language, mass media headlines and broadcasts of global politics became integral sources for visual quotations and symbols among Bowling and his RCA peers. Cold War politics and the infiltration of American consumer culture were important subjects as evidenced by R. B. Kitaj’s Murder of Rosa Luxemburg, 1961, with its implicit reference to Communism, and Derek Boshier’s Rethink, Re-entry, 1962, featuring a Union Jack disintegrating into puzzle pieces and figures sucked into, or out of, a Soviet Union-built intercontinental ballistic missile. While colonial violence is central in Bowling’s Martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba, it plays only a supporting role in Boty’s collage Picture Show, 1960–1, or Boshier’s Man Playing Snooker and Thinking of Other Things, 1961 (figure 9.2). Picture Show includes the front page of a Cypriot newspaper featuring a portrait of Georgios Grivas (better known as Digenis), guerilla leader during Cyprus’s war of independence from the British occupation. Among the “expendable” icons of high and mass culture of Marilyn Monroe and Madames de Pompadour and Recamier in Boty’s collage, the anticolonial politics of the Cypriot revolutionary takes secondary significance to the iconic potential of his portrait.27 Man Playing Snooker and Thinking of Other Things, a phrenological outline of a man’s head in profile, references the Sharpeville massacre by Boshier’s stenciled tag “ANGOLA SHARPSVILLE,” encapsulated in a sound bubble.28 Segmented by quadrant, the grey matter of Boshier’s man consists of images taken from newspaper and magazine fragments—of pinup girls, film stills, a game of cricket—tonally transformed into greyscale background noise, an internal buzzing of information overload. That Boshier’s colonial reference was misspelled only amplifies its sidelined significance; it is merely one concern among several for the snooker player. In

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Figure 9.2 Derek Boshier, Man Playing Snooker and Thinking of Other Things, 1961. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS), London. Courtesy Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, Portugal. Photo: David Rato.

sharp contrast, the patriotic colors of the Union Jack and Mad magazine’s satirical comic book hero, Superduperman, fight for primacy. The reference to the massacre is joined by other thought bubbles which carry cryptic messages, but in relationship to tenebrous inferences made elsewhere in the painting, one might imagine their meanings: “?”: anxiety of the unknown; “SPACEPROBE”: of exploration; “I HATE YOU! (YEA, YOU)”: resounding hostility. Snooker, made popular in the nineteenth century by British colonial forces stationed in India, conjures associations with the orthodox genteel of an Imperial past, a “make do” sort of British resilience in the face of uncertainty; a man thinking of “things,” yet powerless, apathetic, or unwilling to act. Political

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narratives thus reflect an ambiguous, but often anxious lexicon of cultural invasion. Pop artists were coming to terms with a kind of visual and sensory Babel—from American consumer culture to the increasing visibility of black and brown faces—which had not existed to such scale in Britain before the Second World War. Contrary to Alloway’s understanding that Pop artists were exploring consumer culture as “our only universal culture,” a national school of Pop was forming in Britain at the precise moment its borders were being renegotiated.29 Ken Russell’s documentary Pop Goes the Easel on RCA graduates Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips, and Pauline Boty aired on the BBC’s arts program Monitor in March 1962. It codified an emerging Pop vernacular through a visual network vacillating between signs and signifiers of Britishness, the anxiety of American conquest, and popular culture: repetitive frames of Hollywood gunslingers and blonde pinups, dutiful references to Second World War, the cacophonic arrangements of pinned-up images wallpapering the artists’ studios, and the carnivalesque, transient atmosphere of new city living. The pervading presence of the Union Jack and the signifiers to aristocracy and royalty, however, belied a Britishness restricted to its nostalgic boundaries, where the transitioning empire and Commonwealth resided outside of its insular definitions of Britishness. In Blake’s dream-in-bed scene, the camera slowly pans upward to the artist’s face, pausing on the quilt he lays beneath, stitched with transfer images of portraits of its royal families and national leaders, and the Royal Standards and national flags of the British Empire and its First World War allies, Japan, France, and the United States. The camera sweeps over Blake’s oil painting On the Balcony, 1957, the focal point a photographic image reproduced in grisaille of the Royal Family on a balcony, juxtaposed aurally with James Darren’s pop love song, Her Royal Majesty. In Boshier’s interview at the breakfast table, he described his work having to do with “the infiltration of the American way of life” in England by its commodities and advertisements. England’s Glory, 1961, which takes its subject matter and title from a British brand of matches with a reproduction on its packaging of the Victorian battleship HMS Destruction, Boshier states in a voiceover, “is specifically to do with England” and illustrates the anxiety of American influence by the stars and stripes overtaking the painted product. Boshier qualifies the inclusion of a map of the range of the megaton bomb, the Union Jack, and a famous quote by Nelson, “England expects every man to do his duty” as “very English images.”30 A traditional Britishness contrasts with fractured moments of Black presence throughout Pop Goes the Easel. Blake drinks a cup of tea in front of La Vern

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Baker, his homage to the African-American jazz and blues singer. In one scene, Phillips is chauffeured in a 1959 Ford Fairlane convertible by a Black man in sunglasses while This Here, by Cannonball Adderley, the African-American jazz saxophonist, plays in the background. In Boshier’s studio, we see a clipping of an image of a Benin Oba head pinned to the wall. Rifling through record albums at Boty’s studio, Blake asks her, “What Ray Charles have you got?” During the dance scene, Boty briefly does the twist with an unidentified Black male. “Bo Diddley” appears as text in Blake’s Drum Majorette, 1957, an outlined image of a female figure in sunglasses and bikini; like Boshier’s thinking man diagram, Diddley is an accessory alongside a plethora of other pop-induced images like Elvis and clippings of Victoriana. Evidence of a swinging London that was “cool, exotic, and sexy” are marked by two moments of Black presence in Pop Goes the Easel, the unnamed chauffeur and the twisting dancer, both wearing shades. Blackness was commodified in Britain by entering as US export products: the album cover for Bo Diddley’s: A Twister, for example, was the source of Blake’s 1963 painting. In Pop Art and Design, Anne Massey and Alex Seago note the influence of Black culture and music in the development of British culture and Pop Art, citing examples of jazz, blues, and Afro-Caribbean concerts and events, including a six-lecture series “Blues and Jazz,” chaired by Alloway, Eduardo Paolozzi and Alexis Korner held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1950s and 1960s. Although Massey and Seago note that “the ICA’s embrace of Black music testified to its culturally and politically progressive credentials,” within the larger context of the ICA’s program of events, including a spate of anthropological film screenings, lectures and symposiums the ICA’s events were beholden to primitivist and ethnographic narratives.31 Pop artists looking towards the US for Black culture instead of inwardly speaks to an ambivalence or invisibility. Pop was supported in Britain, Leon Wainwright argues, because it was a “celebration of Britishness which imagined pop as a crucial chapter in the national art story,” effectually estranging artists, like Bowling, whose work resided outside of its restrictive parameters.32 Whereas Alloway identifies the inclusion of Al Jolson in Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? 1956, as symbolic of “a technological innovation in movies (‘The Coming of Sound’),” Mercer astutely observes it as the presence of an othered Blackness.33 The “blacked-up minstrel figure” from the talkie The Jazz Singer, 1927 on the marquee of Hamilton’s late-night theatre resides in the multicultural city, outside of the domestic space populated by American trademarks and products like Ford and Tootsie Pop, a blonde in pasties, and the bodybuilder Mr. L.A., 1954.34

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The year 1962 was also a significant year for Commonwealth immigration politics. In July, only months after Pop Goes the Easel aired, an amendment to Britain’s open-door policy on Commonwealth immigration by the Conservative government went into effect. The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act introduced restrictions on immigration through a limited number of employment vouchers aimed at laborers migrating from South Asian and Caribbean countries, essentially retracting the egalitarian principle of jus soli (right of the soil), a cornerstone of the original 1948 act.35 In November, Image In Revolt, Bowling’s first solo exhibition with Derek Boshier at Grabowski Gallery closed, and Commonwealth Art Today, in which he represented the British Guiana section with fellow countryman abstract painter Aubrey Williams, opened at the Commonwealth Institute.36 Contemporary art by émigrés living and working in the UK exhibited at the Commonwealth Institute’s art gallery was inseparable from the narratives of resources, labor and products of the Institute’s educational permanent displays which featured dioramas, models and industrial and cultural objects in various stages from raw to finished product of each Commonwealth country. The material and visual culture from the Commonwealth was thus presented to audiences in terms of their industrial or economic value to Britain as products, like the colonial exhibitions earlier in the century including the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 and the 1951 Festival of Britain. The Commonwealth, as a shared cultural entity, one which enlisted Britain’s historical relationship to its colonies as evidence of a united cultural heritage, also allowed, by that very same imperial legacy, to paradoxically proclaim its cultural diversity, one held in abeyance to the ideological valences of racial, cultural, or industrial superiority. “The canonical divisions between [Pop] artists was a colonial relation writ large,” Wainwright writes, “a reassertion of imperial power in the cultural sphere of the metropole, as if to offset the loss of power in the imperial landscape of the wider globe from which many of these artists were drawn.”37 Bowling thus “encountered a canon for pop art that was structured through the lens of Britain’s imperial decline,” yet contradicted this affirmation by his very presence in the metropole—not as a colonial, with all its marginalizing baggage, but as a modern, transnational individual.”38 Identifications with Commonwealth were thus racially, culturally and ethnically fraught but were often necessary platforms for exposure at a time when young artists, especially South Asian and Afro-Caribbean artists, found few opportunities to exhibit without recourse to politicized subjectivity. While at the RCA, Bowling recalls spending time with artist-friends Jerry Pethick and

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William Culbert around Fulham and Kings Roads in Chelsea, a bohemian neighborhood where a sizable student community of Commonwealth students were living and working; drinking in Finch’s pub, doing “odd jobs like washing up and working in the garage” to pay the bills, and at night, “crashing on other people’s floors.”39 The international presence of Commonwealth students is made visible in an early photographic sequence by Bates, Drunk, 1960, where friends Peter Bell-Smith and Ahmad Jarr animatedly progress through several pints at a local pub in Earls Courts Road. The Young Commonwealth Artists (YCA) formed in 1959 partly in response to the RCA’s Young Contemporaries (YC) exhibitions, from which Alloway’s iconic Pop artists were being culled. Bowling, a founding member of the YCA, recalls that “it was felt that the people from the Commonwealth were being edged out by the English provincial lot: people from Yorkshire, and Manchester, really heavy duty guys from up North, and the Welsh.”40 Branded as “a sort of annual pendant to the ‘Young Contemporaries,’ ” the Young Commonwealth Artists annual shows were also held at the RBA Galleries, often following the more prestigious exhibition.41 Several YCA artists were included in the YC exhibitions including Bowling, Bates, Neil Stocker (Australia), and Jerry Pethick (Canada).42 YCA, according to Bowling “was made up of guys from places like Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, Jamaica, Canada, Singapore, India, South Africa, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and a couple of very good sculptors from the southern part of Rhodesia.”43 Exhibits ranged from the abstract, as in Ralph Hotere’s expressionist series Human Rights in 1962, to the figurative in Celebration, 1960, a Tangnyikan festival scene by Sam Ntiro.44 David Sylvester branded Bowling a new “Baconian” alongside Kitaj and Hockney, for his paintings at the 1962 YCA exhibition, which the critic found to “compress terror and violence” through the artist’s “forcefulness of expression.”45 Barrie Bates, who was pursuing a degree in design at the RCA, designed marketing materials for the 1962 YC and YCA exhibitions. Young Contemporaries 1962, his contribution to the YC exhibition, is a blow-up, offset lithograph of the information labels which were affixed to the back of the artwork entries. His posters for the YCA exhibition are decidedly more dogmatic, inferred by the use the Union Jack, outlined in black and turned on its side. Under the punchy byline “join our Union, Jack!,” the call for submissions encouraged artists from South Africa to submit artworks, although the country had withdrawn from the Commonwealth amidst the controversy surrounding apartheid a year prior, suggesting a solidarity for immigrant experience. In his advertisement poster, the accompanying text “a union, Jack!” also suggests a belongingness to this

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community. The sardonic phrases of the YCA posters also calls to mind the wartime colloquialism “I’m alright, Jack!,” a sarcastic rejoinder describing someone self-serving and able but unwilling to assist another. The Union Jacks are unfinished and almost entirely emptied of color; in between the lines, Bates scribbled in red crayon, only to abruptly abandon, in two separate stages, the task at hand. Associating this abandoned action as the phenomenological presence of omission, the Union Jacks are liminal signs, incomplete, lacking the variegation of color. By the time Bowling moved to New York, increasing restrictions regarding immigration from the new Commonwealth in 1965, and the hasty legislation banning of Asian-Kenyan and Ugandan refugees fleeing from increasing oppression in 1968 were accompanied by rising anti-immigration rhetoric initiated by hate groups such as the British National Party founded in 1960, and the National Front founded in 1967. Responding to the Kenyan situation, racist politics reached its pinnacle with the incendiary “Rivers of Blood” speech by Enoch Powell in 1968, in which the Conservative statesman, convinced of immigrant takeover, characterized Britain as “a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”46 Not only was Black labor highly visible in London and throughout the major cities in the UK, as many were jobs in the public service sector, but racialization and its resistance by growing Black communities were inextricable from issues of labor. Anti-Black riots throughout the UK were often initiated by labor disputes: In 1948, riots in Liverpool were fueled by a resolution of the National Union of Seaman to keep Black sailors from working on British ships; the 1955 Nottingham riots began as a union strike by the Transport and General Workers Union to keep out Black bus drivers. The 1958 Notting Hill riots were the result of racial violence, spreading to Kensel Green, North Paddington, Harlesdon, Southall, Hornsey, Islington, Hackney and Stepney. The image of Bowling’s mother’s house and business exposes the dichotomy between the ambivalent rendering of products for consumption in Alloway’s reading of Pop, and the visibility of labor, colonialism, and racial politics in Britain. It is thus a signifier of domesticity and home, but also of colonial labor, inextricable from diaspora. Bo Diddley and La Vern Baker albums circulated across the Atlantic as did people, whether of their own agency, forced by slavery, or out of economic necessity. The photograph was a personal relic of his young adulthood but also reminded the artist of his mother as an industrious businesswoman; “in that hot, hot country, she was always working.”47 In the photograph, Bowling’s mother stands in front of the three-story building, behind a palm tree, and on its exterior, the Union Jack. On the ground floor resided his mother’s variety store,

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and her millinery and dressmaking shop. Variety stores were a common sight throughout Guyana and the Caribbean, often selling products of a lower unit value. His mother, a cornerstone of the New Amsterdam community, was also a frequent employer of handymen, and as Bowling remembers, “Our household was always a place where people were coming to work.”48 Cover Girl (plate 24) and Mother’s House with Beware of the Dog both from 1966 (plate 25), are arguably Bowling’s most recognizable Pop canvasses through the formal devices of screen printing, stenciling, and brightly rendered colors, but also exhibits the artist’s undertaking of color field abstraction and op art geometry prominent in Mirror of the same period. The screenprint of his mother’s house first appears in Cover Girl, completed before the artist’s move to New York in 1966. The house is juxtaposed with a figure taken from a color image in a March 1966 Observer supplement of Pierre Cardin’s muse, Japanese model Hiroko Matsamoto, wearing the designer’s iconic target dress from the 1966 Spring/Summer collection.49 Behind the model, a stained color field striped in incandescent cadmium gold, green and red—pan-African colors also used within the new Guyanese flag—bleeds into a blueish sunset wash. Cover Girl opposes a luxury commodity made in Paris, the center of the fashion world, with his mother’s dress shop and millinery in New Amsterdam. The inclusion of Matsumoto, a Japanese model in the clothing of a Parisian designer, speaks to the burgeoning globalism afforded by the rapid developments of communication, but within the canvas, where space and time are collapsed by imagery and the formal segmenting of linear abstract blocks of color, it also speaks to the disjointedness of source material, a methodology conjured in Boshier’s snooker player or Blake’s majorette. The reference to Guyana’s recent independence from Britain, in May 1966, with Matsumoto in the high-end street fashion of Paris, echoing the swinging London of Mary Quant, the Beatles, Caribbean Calypso and American blues and jazz, were not only seemingly incongruous sources. It is the house that anchors them here: the causal effects of decolonization, industrialization and globalization were derived from the same historical processes. Other works from this series, however, directly make connections between colonialism and the historical significance of labor in Britain and its empire. Mother’s House (Untitled), 1966, like Cover Girl, emphasizes a foregrounded figure, yet here, a Black woman in historical clothing flees from the house, face contorted in horror, arms crossed in front as if deflecting an unseen violent force.50 In a publicity photograph from around 1966, showing Bowling in his studio with Vidal Sassoon receptionist Michele Delderfield (figure 9.3), propped

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Figure 9.3 Frank Bowling and Mishi Bellamy (née Delderfield) in Frank Bowling’s studio, 1966. Photo: Chris Morgan-Davies. Courtesy the Frank Bowling Archive.

against the wall next to Cover Girl, is another work depicting the same foregrounded figure in front of his mother’s house. The woman was repeated thematically in relationship to the screenprint. British ownership of commodities across the Empire once extended to people, as Bowling evokes here, where colonialism simultaneously produced products and producers. In Blazing Cane Field with Rum Shop, 1967, the house stands-in as a rum shop; the cane field alluding to the forced labor and the legacy of Guyana as a colony whose sole purpose was to produce sugar for export to Britain and the rest of the empire. Mercer, in his anthology on Pop, asked the question: was Pop in the West evidence of a “critique or compliance with the market economy in which images are exchanged as commodities?”51 There was no division between domicile, commerce and production in Bowling’s mother’s house. Labor is materially manifested in paintings Barticabather, 1966–7, and My Guyana, 1966–7, where cut fragments from earlier figurative work are stitched alongside the screenprint on a canvas ground, paying homage to the labor of dressmaking and millinery expended by his mother back home. With this series, Bowling essentially makes visible the invisibility of Black presence in British Pop and productions of Empire, as well as initiating a self-criticality of Pop with its

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preference for products and the apathetic disavowal of its labor and its processes. During his 1962 visit back home, Bowling produced a series of portraits of homeless individuals, who often begged outside his mother’s store. They became familiar faces to Bowling as his mother would invite them into the store to be fed. The Beggar series, in contrast to Alloway’s assertion of Pop artists as enthusiastic patrons of the new consumer culture, demonstrates that not all who are producers are consumers. Products retained their primacy in British Pop even as sociopolitical developments regarding labor, inextricable from Commonwealth immigration (particularly from Caribbean and South Asian countries), became prominent issues in contemporary British politics. Peter Blake’s diminutive shopfronts in his series of assemblages, including Toy Shop, 1962, for example, displayed Blake’s personal collection of novelty objects. “For me,” the artist explains, “pop art is often rooted in nostalgia: the nostalgia of old, popular things.”52 Toy Shop includes seven miniature plastic Union Jack flags: one hanging in patriotic display beside the door; the other six, displayed for sale along with little trinkets and other toys in the window case. The immediate gratification of comprehensible signifiers and its worldly, of-here products, as in Blake’s Toy Shop, is cut off by the blurred offset of the variety store’s exterior of the screenprint, especially in Mother’s House with Beware of the Dog where the porch and entrance are obscured in viscous Blackness. Unlike Blake’s downscaled store in Toy Shop, with its bountiful collection of objects, in Bowling’s series, products are hidden from sight, intercepting the seductive pleasure of their consumption and the delight in the prospect of their ownership. Around the same time the screenprints were being produced, Bowling, penning a letter to an old friend, copied a poem by Ghanaian poet Kwesi Brew, which reads: And still I sit here in the dust Struggling to understand The world and its words And so I have some times to eat A hopeful glance over the shoulders of those Whose hoes have helped A friend to till a thorny ground And wondered whether to look In fear upon the past or to rejoice; To rejoice that we have achieved so much That so much has escaped

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The eyes of the gods we hold The rod of punishment; That the red-clay kitchen Of our ancestral homes still Team with the feasts of the year.53

Suggested within this poem is the desire for a pan-African community, one approached through hard work: tilling the ground and bearing the fruits of a labor hard earned, in the face of an enslaved past. Where Alloway’s “aesthetics of expendability” indicates a cornucopia of plenty and a surplus of commodities, Bowling’s series might instead propose the visual language of Pop as an aesthetics of excess, implying that consumption comes with heavy burdens: colonial violence, cultural erasure, marginalized subjectivity. Jamaican-born Londoner Stuart Hall, a pioneering cultural theorist, writing on visual and popular culture, has observed “there is no whole, authentic, autonomous ‘popular culture’ which lies outside the field of force of the relations of cultural power and domination.”54 Overt politicization was something Bowling and other Black artists were subjected to, both through critical reception but also the constant pigeonholing of Blackness as something residing outside of Britishness, as in the constructions of a cultural Commonwealth and the constant conception that racial and colonial subjectivity were integral ingredients in creating meaningful aesthetic significance. Bowling felt he was being isolated from his peers because, “I was Black. It seemed that everyone was expecting me to paint some kind of protest art out of post-colonial discussion.”55 The formal devices of Pop, for Bowling, rendered politicization aesthetically ambiguous and detached, by way of stenciled text distancing the mark of the hand, the limitless reproducibility of screen printing and the epidiascope—introduced to him by American Pop artist Larry Rivers—and the signification of multivalent imagery and subject matter. Pop ultimately proved a failure, for Bowling, however, who had gravitated towards expressionistic, and later, hard-edge and formal abstraction which provided, he claimed, “a setting in which I am able to test and ultimately prove my own freedom.”56 The cultural impact of artists like Frank Bowling during this period rendered visible Commonwealth immigration, labor and its processes which had been ignored in the canonical expressions of British Pop. With the screenprint of his mother’s house, Bowling attempts to recuperate the visibility and significance of Black presence in the UK in the context of Pop and beyond.

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Notes 1 My deepest gratitude to art historian, curator, and my advisor Eddie Chambers for his thoughtful feedback on earlier versions of this essay. 2 Frank Bowling, “Letter to Claude Rogers,” n.d., Claude Rogers Archives, TGA 8121/1/4, Tate Britain Archives, London. 3 Co-curated by Okwui Enwezor, with Anna Schneider, Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi (2017–18) begun at Haus der Kunst, Munich and traveled to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. 4 According to Bowling: So, there was this forum at the Metropolitan Museum, and I was one of the, the sort of, people who piped up and talked against this idea of, the Establishment telling artists what their station was and their position in society but not showing what they were doing. And there was an especial group of younger artists, artists around my own age, who were all making abstract art and they were very offended by the fact that they were not even consulted about this, the content of this exhibition called “Harlem on My Mind,” because, quite a few of them lived in Harlem, lived and worked in Harlem.

5

6 7 8 9

See, “Frank Bowling: On Beginning to Write for Arts Magazine and the Discussions about the Position of Black Artists in America in the 1960s,” British Library: Voices of Art, available at: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/frank-bowling-on-beginningto-write-for-arts-magazine. Recent revisionist exhibitions of international or British Pop excluding Bowling include Pop Art: US/UK Connections (Houston, TX: The Menil Collection, 2001), and International Pop (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2015). The artist is also omitted in recent accounts of Pop, including Thomas Crow, The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design, 1930–1995 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), and Marco Livingstone, Pop Art: A Continuing History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000). Kobena Mercer’s edited four-volume series, Annotating Art’s Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts, on the contribution of Black and decentered artists in modernism, for example, includes Bowling in Discrepant Abstraction rather than in Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures. Okwui Enwezor, “Mappa Mundi: Frank Bowling’s Cognitive Abstraction,” Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi (London: Prestel, 2017), 29. Ibid., 21. Between 1960 and 1970, twenty colonial states and protectorates would gain independence and join the Commonwealth. Eddie Chambers, Black Artists in British Art: A History since the 1950s (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 21.

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10 Lucy Lippard, “Introduction,” in Lucy Lippard (ed.), Pop Art (New York: Praeger, 1966), 9. Pop as an apolitical, optimistic visual language, however, was already being critically reassessed by the time Lippard’s text reached bookstands. More recently, the Tate Modern’s exhibition, The World Goes Pop (2015), widened the Eurocentric scope of international Pop by focusing on developments in Brazil, Argentina, Central Europe, and Japan, contradicting earlier canonical narratives that situated Pop as a universally optimistic approach to the rise of a globalizing consumer culture, expanding its transnational dimensions and the engagement with postcolonial critiques by Pop artists throughout the rest of the world. Pop, a direct descendent of “two abstraction-dominated decades,” according to Lippard, had all but abandoned the humanistic dimensions of a new figuration championed in Europe and the US. Rather, the embodied was approached through its consumer and material relationships. Recollections by artists from Brazil, France, and Argentina contradict “new figuration” as irrelevant and illustrate that postcolonial politics was, in fact, inextricably linked to Pop: the term “nouvelle figuration,” coined by French critic Michel Ragon in 1961, was connected to the massacre in Paris of Algerians protesting colonial violence in October that year. 11 In “The Development of British Pop,” in Lippard (ed.), Pop Art, 40, itself an adaptation of “Pop Art Since 1949,” The Listener, December 27, 1962, 1087, Alloway discerns Richard Hamilton as “the only British artist to use Pop Art . . . with a political or satirical point” due to his 1963 portrait, Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Film Land, that critiqued the failure of the leader of the Labour Party to reach a viable solution regarding the threat of nuclear war. 12 Alloway, “The Development of British Pop,” 36, reminisces: “The area of contact was mass-produced urban culture: movies, advertising, science fiction, pop music. We felt none of the dislike of commercial culture standard among most intellectuals, but accepted it as a fact, discussed it in detail, and consumed it enthusiastically.” 13 Anne Massey and Alex Seago, “Introduction,” in Massey and Seago (eds.), Pop Art and Design (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 11–23. 14 Alloway, “The Development of British Pop,” 40. 15 Between 1955 and 1964, self-governing states within the Commonwealth grew from 8 to 20. 16 This number includes British West Indies, India, Pakistan, and the Republic of Ireland. Of those numbers, 263,700 arrived from the British West Indies, named the Empire Windrush generation for the ship carrying 492 mostly Jamaican workers docking at Tilbury Docks at London in 1948. It signaled the first wave of immigration from the colonies and Commonwealth to Britain’s shores. Kenneth Leech, “Migration and the British Population, 1955–1962,” Race & Class, 7, no. 4, (April 1966): 401–8. 17 British industries, including the London Transport Service and the British Hotels and Restaurant Association, began actively recruiting their workforce from the

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21 22

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Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2010), 373. Alloway, “The Development of British Pop,” 40. Ibid. Commonwealth Day replaced Empire Day in 1958. “Commonwealth” cultural events and arts exhibitions proliferated, including the Commonwealth Biennales of Abstract Art in 1963 and 1965. The newly opened Commonwealth Institute, inaugurated by the Queen in1962, was widely publicized in London, with a televised speech. In 1965, the Commonwealth Arts Festival, a month-long program of music, dance, art, and theatre held throughout London, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and Cardiff, showcased varied acts, from Ravi Shankar at the Royal Albert Hall to the Sierra Leone National Dance Troupe’s performance in Trafalgar Square. New Vision Centre Gallery (1956–66), co-founded by Denis Bowen, originally from South Africa, Frank Avray Wilson from Mauritius, and Halima Nalecz from Poland, was dedicated to showcasing abstract painting and sculpture by emerging artists. Alloway, “The Development of British Pop,” 40–2, discusses the solo exhibitions of Peter Blake and William Green, followed by a group show by the Cambridge Four which were held at New Vision Centre. W. B. Hamilton (ed.), A Decade of the Commonwealth, 1955–1964 (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1966), viii. “Letter to the Tate, 1 December 1986,” reprinted in Leon Wainwright, “Varieties of Belatedness and Provincialism: Decolonization and British Pop,” Art History, 35, no. 2 (April 2012): 442–61. Quoted in Rasheed Araeen (ed.), The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain (London: Hayward Gallery, 1989), 40. Okwui Enwezor and Olu Oguibe, “Frank Bowling: A Conversation,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (Spring 1996): 18. Ibid. Ibid. In “Women in Pop: Difference and Marginality” (PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2009), 185, 6, 267, Minioudaki, conversely, argues for the significance of the inclusion of Digenis shortly after the liberation of Cyprus from British colonial rule amidst this collage’s mixed assortment of intellectual, political, and pop heroines and heroes as an early sign of the conjunction of radical sexual and social politics, and liberation struggles, including of “Third World” in Boty’s work, preceding the effect of her husband’s left politics, and central to her practice’s fanzine mode of “mapping” of what mattered to her. The role of gender, sexuality, race, and class in the intersecting injustices of postcolonial London’s patriarchal culture is cast through a critical lens also in her take on the Profumo Affair; see Minioudaki, “Scandalous Bodies and Feminist Art Politics: A Conversation across Time,” Fionn Wilson (ed.), Dear Christine (A Tribute to Christine Keeler) (London: Fionn Wilson, 2019).

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28 On March 21, 1960, the police fired on 69 Africans at the South African township of Sharpeville, during a peaceful protest against segregating pass laws. 29 Lawrence Alloway, Six More: An exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA : Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 1963), n.p. 30 “Pop Goes the Easel,” BBC Monitor, directed by Ken Russell, BBC, 1962. 31 Massey and Seago, “Introduction,” 19. 32 Wainwright, “Varieties of Belatedness,” 443. 33 Alloway, “The Development of British Pop,” 40. 34 Kobena Mercer, “Introduction,” in Mercer (ed.), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2007), 14. 35 Newspaper headlines indicated that many were against the amendment; Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party, called the amendment, “a plain anti-Commonwealth measure in theory and a plain anti-colour measure in practice.” Fryer, Staying Power, 162. As Churchill’s private secretary put it, “the minute we said, we’ve got to keep these black chaps out, the whole Commonwealth Lark would have blown up,” cited in Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), 225. 36 Commonwealth Art Today was a seminal undertaking, introducing a significant number of artists from 26 Commonwealth countries, all working and living in Britain, including Jean-Paul Riopelle, Sidney Nolan, Ahmed Parvez, and Anwar Jalal Shemza, to name a few. 37 Wainwright, “Varieties of Belatedness,” 450. 38 Ibid. 39 Mel Gooding, “Interview with Frank Bowling,” National Life Stories: Artists’ Lives, British Library (8 of 34). 40 Wainwright, “Frank Bowling and the Appetite for British Pop,” Third Text, 22, no. 2 (2008): 196. 41 The Times, April 13, 1962, 18. In 1960, the annual YCA exhibition was held at Woodstock Galleries. Robert Hyde’s essay in the exhibition catalogue for the annual 1962 Young Commonwealth Artists illustrates that sociopolitical significance took precedence over aesthetic considerations in these exhibitions. He writes: “in visual form here are reflected the cultural, geographic and racial differences which the world has to resolve. Here are artists caught in the very vortex of this problem. Negroes, Chinese, Indians, Canadians and Australians, all a long way from their homelands struggling for a new supra-national orientation,” reprinted in “Young Commonwealth artists on show in London,” The Sphere (April 14, 1962): 71. 42 According to Gooding’s monograph on the artist and Mappa Mundi, Bowling was excluded on a technicality from the 1961 Young Contemporaries. Yet, a review of the exhibition mentions four small works by Bowling exhibiting “interesting traces of Bacon’s influence.” See “Promising Art by Students,” The Times, Monday, February 13, 1961, 6.

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43 Bowling’s quote assuredly refers to South Rhodesia. Wainwright, “Appetite for British Pop,” 196. In 1944, the Commonwealth (then colonial) student population was 2,500; by 1964 the number had grown to 50,000. Of that number, over 90 per cent came from South Asian and Caribbean countries according to John Chadwick, CMG (Assistant Undersecretary of the Commonwealth Relations Office), quoted in Fryer, Staying Power, 127. 44 “Drawings and Watercolours by Famous Hands,” The Times, Thursday, March 3, 1960, 4. 45 David Sylvester, “No Baconians,” New Statesman, April 20, 1962, 573. 46 Enoch Powell, “Rivers of Blood Speech,” reprinted in The Guardian, November 6, 2007, available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-PowellsRivers-of-Blood-speech.html. 47 Mel Gooding, Frank Bowling (London: Royal Academy Publications, 2016), 21. 48 Gooding, “Interview with Frank Bowling,” (2 of 34). 49 Zoé Whitley, “Known Rivers: Frank Bowling’s Painterly Insights and Outlooks,” in Mappa Mundi, 55. In Pop Art and Design, Massey and Seago unpack the links between Pop Art and design at the Royal College of Arts (RCA). Barrie Bates, too, was a design major at the RCA. Althea McNish, from Trinidad, took courses in textile design from Eduardo Paolozzi and learned screen printing at the RCA and the London School of Printing. While design-oriented methodologies at the RCA dominated the student magazine ARK as well as student work by Blake, Boshier or Hockney, Bowling did not actively attempt to use screen printing while at the RCA. McNish, who graduated before Bowling’s arrival, unlikely crossed paths with Bowling until several years later. Rose Jones, personal correspondence, July 13, 2018. 50 Chris Stephens identifies the woman as Ole Higue, however this is the only reference that names the unknown woman known by the author. Further research is needed. See, “Image in Revolt: Bowling in London, 1959–66,” in Elena Crippa (ed.), Frank Bowling (London: Tate, 2019). 51 Mercer, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, 9. 52 Mervyn Levy, “Peter Blake: Pop Art for Admass: The Artist at Work: 23,” Studio International (November 1963): 184–9. 53 Frank Bowling, “Letter to Claude Rogers,” May 28, 1970, TGA 8121/1/4, Claude Rogers Archives, Tate Britain Archives, London. 54 Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’ ” (1981), in Stephen Duncombe (ed.), Cultural Resistance Reader (London: Verso, 2002), 187. 55 Colin Gleadell “Victory for a ‘Gifted Artist of Colour,’ 79,” The Telegraph, March 11, 2013, available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/artsales/9923044/ Victory-for-a-gifted-artist-of-colour-79.html. 56 Gooding, Frank Bowling, 59.

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Market Wares and Trade Marks Painting Pop in Indian Country, 19641 Kristine K. Ronan

In 1964, Apsáalooke (Crow) painter Kevin Red Star completed the first works of what became known institutionally as “Indian Pop,” a genre of Native art developed by students and faculty at the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico.2 Indian Pop artists deployed a range of early and late Pop Art techniques—including image play, printmaking techniques, assemblage, collage and commercial object references—to depict Native subject matter. Most students drew on their Native backgrounds, which were celebrated at the school in both classes and extracurricular activities.3 But IAIA pedagogy also uniquely exposed students to “art from all over the world, fine art, impressionism, Japanese art, the Renaissance masters, abstract expressionism— everything,” and many students incorporated techniques, media, or forms that were outside their personal traditions.4 The result was young Native artists who, as one curator put it, “have drawn on their traditional materials such as sand, bone, feathers, and beads and have used them to express themselves in contemporary terms.”5 Indian Pop was one variant that used such contemporary terms.6 As enumerated by Red Star, who had matriculated at IAIA in 1962 as a high school sophomore, “I was attracted to Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jackson Pollock. I liked them all, their attitude and creativity.”7 Plains Indian Medicine Bag, 1964 (plate 26) demonstrates how Red Star had begun to utilize Pop techniques by his senior year at IAIA. A central Nativemade hide bag with carrying strap rests against a solid bright-orange background. Two pinwheel medallions with strings of beads decorate the front flap, and these beaded strings repeat at the sides. Upon close examination, the background remains flat while the bag is multidimensional, its area built up with modeling 227

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paste and its surface highly glossed in a nod to the collage techniques of Red Star’s artistic models Johns and Rauschenberg. Etched marks and a dark outline are scattered across this built-up area to define the bag’s edges and crafted details, much like Warhol outlined his early lithographed and hand-colored shoes in the 1950s, or Wayne Thiebaud distinguished deli objects from monotone backgrounds with thick tinted outlines in the early 1960s. Between 1964 and 1966, Red Star continued to develop these elements—monotone backgrounds, heavy outlines, collaged and built-up layers, and high gloss finishes—as he painted a variety of Native-made objects: saddles, breastplates, shields, dresses, parfleche, and painted hides (plate 27). In this essay, I examine Indian Pop as one manifestation of Pop Art in a global context. Recent exhibitions have redefined Pop as a broad artistic language, shared by many across the globe, that emerged in the 1960s as a response to media-saturated environments.8 Global Pop contains many variants, but shares elements of graphic techniques and politically themed content. Around the world, such commonalities intersected with regional environments, traditions, and social and political histories. As a form of global Pop, Indian Pop was very much attuned to its local conditions. In the case of Red Star, these conditions were the tourist and folk art markets of the southwest. In the 1960s, when Indian Pop emerged, the counterculture was co-opting many of these market objects for their own cultural expressions. Plains Indian Medicine Bag certainly spoke to the historical material culture of Red Star’s Apsáalooke family and community, as has been detailed elsewhere.9 But in turning to canvas, Red Star also interrupted the commodity logics that dominated how such a bag was seen and valued outside that community in 1964. When framed this way, Red Star’s early works illustrate an engagement with what art historian Kobena Mercer has identified as “the vernacular:” the everyday among non-foreign, indigenous, and/or localized communities that have undergone colonization.10 The vernacular remains distinct from the “popular” that grounds (and names) Pop Art, which critically describes elements of mass culture, embraced by mass society. To call on the vernacular is to carve out a space from this mass, allowing for the self-definition of “the people”—any people group, self-defined—within the larger entity. Placing Indian Pop in the realm of the vernacular foregrounds the social and cultural divisions that distinguish “the people” of Native communities from the demographic or numerical numbers of mass society and “officialdom.”11 Bringing these divisions to the fore re-centers the genre’s utilized Pop techniques as tools

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that specifically comment on social relations, an element that has historically been ignored or written out of canonical Pop Art.12 As a vernacular strategy, rather than a popular one, Indian Pop stands out from the American Pop canon as a genre of critique, and one that dialogues with pop strategies employed globally in postcolonial spaces.

Re-embodied Pop Red Star entered IAIA at the same time that Pop criticism first emerged. Max Kozloff ’s 1962 essay in Art International, usually regarded as the first published on Pop Art in an art magazine, described the emerging art genre as sharing a “common concern with the problems of the commercial image, popular culture and metaphysical disgust.”13 Kozloff ’s focus on the commercial content of Pop continued to shape Pop criticism through the 1960s, mostly notably in the work of critics Lucy Lippard, Burton Wasserman, John Russell and Suzi Gablik.14 Such commercial connotations seem to have been part of the discourse around Pop Art at IAIA, however students encountered such ideas.15 As Red Star’s colleague and Indian Pop artist T. C. Cannon (Caddo/Ki’a gwu [Kiowa]) wrote in his sketchbook journal in 1965, “Popular art differs from ‘pop’ art, the way the pleasure of love differs from artificial insemination. The trouble with pop, is that it pays chilly, calculated homage to mass production.”16 Cannon’s diagnosis of Pop as “chilly” and “calculated” recalls the production metaphor of Andy Warhol’s famous 1963 quip: “I want to be a machine.”17 It also echoes what Wasserman would formulate in 1966 as “the Pop eye,” one “externalized and detached from the rest of the body as it confronts details from the surrounding commercial, social, or industrial landscape.”18 Such cold distancing may explain the little appeal that American Pop seems to have held for IAIA students, as few Indian Pop works reference commercial products, save Cannon’s occasional portraits of American foods and the sculpted clay versions of recognizable branded objects by Peter B. Jones (Onondaga) (pls 28, 29). The alternative to this commercial approach, suggests Cannon—and one truly in line with the people’s “popular” (read: vernacular)—returns to the body, as his evocation of sex re-embodies Pop and its detached gaze. The body is a particularly loaded site in post-colonial societies, as colonialism, in all of its forms and varieties—whether slavery, violence, penal codes, scientific racialism, bureaucratic visibilities, or drawn borders—has worked to discipline its subject bodies in service to markets.19 Thus, by engaging a Pop tied to the body, over and

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above one that merely acts as a disconnected sensory system surveying its environs, Cannon and his fellow Indian Pop artists invoked the social relations between the colonized and colonizers that underwrite and make possible the existence of those markets in the first place. The resultant works anticipate what took post-modernist critiques several decades to invent—namely, an art and art criticism that labor to reveal the social mechanisms of power.20

The Native Arts Market In Santa Fe in 1964, when Red Star began his senior year of high school at IAIA, a Plains medicine bag would have been found in the galleries and museums surrounding the IAIA campus. Santa Fe had been a trading post since its founding in 1607, in the province of Santa Fe de México Nuevo under the Viceroyalty of New Spain.21 When the railroads arrived in northern New Mexico in the late nineteenth century, along with their migrating artists, philanthropists, fledgling social scientists and tourists, Santa Fe became home to a thriving tourist market.22 In the 1920s, due to the patronage of numerous writers, artists and scholars, a variety of institutions were established in the mountain town. Archaeologist and anthropologist Edgar Lee Hewitt founded the New Mexico Museum of Art, 1917, the Laboratory of Anthropology, 1909/1927, and the Southwest Indian Market, 1922, in these early years, while Florence Dibell Bartlett, a wealthy Chicagoan who began visiting Santa Fe during the city’s cultural flourishing in the 1920s, later founded the city’s Museum of International Folk Art, 1953. Unlike the newly emerged postwar consumer economies that underwrote much of the early critical interpretations of British and American Pop, the Native arts market behind Indian Pop was bound by strict nineteenth-century rules of object making and display. These rules stemmed from the concept of authenticity, or “the originality of the work of art.”23 Authenticity standards deny authorial intentionality on the part of non-Western practitioners, demoting their marketdesigned objects to “non-art” while reproducing “the West” as the center from which to measure art production. Subsequent market assessments are then overdetermined, fixing non-western art within strict frameworks of creation, sale and interpretation. In the context of the American Southwest, authenticity has been closely linked to social science. Anthropologists endorsed what they perceived as “precontact” objects and ways of making as “authentically” Native, while tourists demanded objects, historical or contemporary, that physically attested to the

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“authentic” Native identity of their maker (an identity often defined through social science).24 In Santa Fe, these two market groups were often intertwined, with Native artists hired to paint and pot for both anthropologists and traders, and the same middlemen selling objects to both social scientists and tourists.25 When developed under the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1962, the larger IAIA project was designed to push against this idea of the authentic. As IAIA Director Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee) wrote: “[The Indian artist] learns to stand on his own feet, avoiding stultifying clichés applied to Indian art by the purist who sometimes unwittingly resents evolution in Indian art forms, techniques and technology.”26 Many subsequent Native artist statements and writings through the 1970s reflected New’s language of clichés and change, suggesting the potency of this self-conscious push against market standards among Native artists of the period.27 In the 1960s, if one were to change the market values and terms under which Native artists labored, one also had to create the very structures needed to support art production.28 As Red Star has stated, “I didn’t know any working artists [growing up in a small reservation town]. Everybody was too busy with their daily lives and art was not considered a means to generate income.”29 To address this lack of structural support for the creation and sale of Native American art, IAIA and Lloyd Kiva New served as conduits between both Native art histories and international art movements, and through the 1960s the school’s staff worked to promote the school and the work of its students within fine arts institutions and markets. Various efforts included a student-run gallery in Santa Fe, exhibitions at the local, national, and international levels, a collections loan program, annual shipments of student works to regional Indian art market invitationals, and strategic press placements throughout the country.30 Many of these elements served practical hands-on training needs while also working to expand markets and public awareness. A campus exhibition space, for instance, might be designed and hung by Museum Studies students, critiqued by Studio students, and visited by the local art buying public. When early IAIA students continued their work in Santa Fe studios after graduation, this exposed public was then ready to become their first patrons.31 Museum visits were complex elements of these trainings. Students had open access to collections in Santa Fe.32 In a 1965 brochure (figure 10.1) for the school, these collections visits were visually touted as an important part of the program. As Red Star recalled his time among the exhibition spaces of the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts: “It was like entering a cathedral. You didn’t want to say anything, just really absorb what was in there. It was such an experience to go into downtown Santa Fe and then have the campus to come back to. It was like

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Figure 10.1 IAIA students on a visit to the International Folk Art Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico. From Information Bulletin—Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe NM (US Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1961), 18. Image courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

having the best of both worlds.”33 Viewing historical Native-made objects remained an important practice for a number of IAIA-trained artists in Red Star’s cohort.34 Later, however, the school had to entice students to enter the campus Museum—they took to offering free tea and coffee for a period— “because,” as former IAIA museum director Chuck Dailey has recalled, “it was thought that ‘all museums were places for dead things.’ ”35 To peer into the glass windows of a museum display in order to view one’s own culture objects was (and remains) a complex practice. These viewings were a way to connect with the past, a sacred process to “really absorb what was in there.” But the windows and cases also literalized the processes of colonial markets and institutions, which severed such objects from their community meanings and uses and re-framed them, leaving them “dead things.” In taking up the layers and built-up surfaces of assemblagist Pop, Red Star practiced a pop “characterized by the participation of the artefact itself,” whereby the featured object is integrated into the work.36 Yet, in early Indian Pop, the

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“artefact” is present not in its original state but through a representation that operates via metaphor, whereby the work “is not what it assumes itself to be—the actual thing, or something terribly close to it.”37 In this, the featured Plains Indian objects on the canvases of early Indian Pop painters resemble Jasper Johns’s targets, letters, numbers and maps, which ontologically flit between the thing they claim to be and only that thing’s representation. These early Indian Pop works, however, concern themselves not with the nature of representation, as seen again and again in the work of Johns, Rauschenberg and Oldenburg, but with the violent nature of market frameworks. A medicine bag in a Native Plains community is entrusted to the care of a particular individual or cohort, who care for both the object and the knowledge and community history connected to that object and its interior, hidden elements. While contents can differ and come to the bag through various means, a medicine bag generally holds elements connected to community events, individual visions, or acts of bravery. Once on the market, such complex ties to a community’s specific ontological, cosmological and historical knowledge are severed. Red Star’s painted object is a Plains medicine bag, yet it is no longer this thing, and has never been this thing. It is now and has always been a “dead thing,” an emptied commodity devoid of connectivity to an original animating community and its knowledge keepers. The monotone background and thick outlines that highlight the desires beneath Warhol’s shoes and Thiebaud’s mass production of food here reenact the violence done to the central object through its forced transformation into a market commodity. At the same time, painting historical Native-made objects connected IAIA artists to their own living communities and cultures. As Red Star has described his early canvases: Rauschenberg was an inspiration to me in those early years. He was creating things from objects that he was used to seeing, whereas I was used to reservation life, its dances and rituals. I was pulling thoughts from that, to create something that would be recognizable to me, but also fun.38

Red Star was not the only student to work from home connections. When reporter Robert Coates visited the IAIA campus for the New Yorker in 1967, he found that many students had brought material culture to campus from their home communities, whether for studio work or for the many performances that students staged in various settings. One student was working on a pair of deerhide moccasins during Coates’s studio visit, having learnt the skill from his Comanche grandmother.39

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Red Star’s Plains Indian Medicine Bag sat in a both/and position with regard to its featured object: it was both a collected and commodified “dead thing” found in surrounding Santa Fe institutions and a living part of Red Star’s home community.40 Such a both/and position is precisely where vernacular Pop sits, its artists employing Pop strategies to both take up and put down popular and official cultures from a dissonant and de-centered viewpoint, one anchored in post-colonial conditions. Red Star made this dissonance visible through his surface handwork, so at odds with the finished mass-mechanized products of most canonical American Pop. The hand-etched lines that mark out the geometry of the quilled or beaded medallions, the discontinuous black outlines, the uneven quality of the bag’s built-up surface—all attest to the hand of the maker. There is no mechanized version of Warhol’s desired machine here. The artist’s traces, left by a body connected to its own historic Native community, re-creates the connections undone by the painting’s monotone surround and square canvas edges. In other words, the artist’s hand carries out Cannon’s re-embodied form of Pop, returning a market product to the handmade, the personal, the familial, the communal. Red Star has continued this multimedia handwork through much of his oeuvre, up to the present day.

Against Pop Primitivism In 1969, a number of IAIA graduates, including Red Star, received invitations to participate in Woodstock, the legendary countercultural music festival held on a farm in upstate New York. As described by artist Earl Eder (Yanktonai), another former IAIA student, the invitations were issued through “this millionaire guy who invited us as artists and craftspeople” to participate in an “art camp” on the Woodstock grounds.41 As Red Star has recalled, “We had a tipi village right above the stage, on a knoll, and people were selling their pottery and paintings and other things.”42 But Bill Belmont, the artists’ coordinator for Woodstock, remembered the artists’ participation in slightly different terms, describing an “Indian village” that sold Native-made objects to concert goers. “A brisk trade in Plains artifacts took place amidst the turmoil,” Belmont recalled—a trade later summarized by literature scholar Ann Charters as “moccasins and jewelry.”43 Eder described Native attendees as “artists and craftspeople”; Red Star named their temporary dwellings as an “art camp” and “tipi village.” The objects sold included “pottery and paintings and other things.” Belmont and Charters, in

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contrast, flattened their terms: participants lived in an “Indian village,” and the goods they sold were “Plains artifacts” and “moccasins and jewelry.” In their recollections, Belmont and Charters reverted to filtering Native art and artists through a primitivist folk-craft idiom, one whose language returns to the generic market wares and emptied terms—Lloyd Kiva New’s already discussed “stultifying clichés”—of nineteenth-century colonial markets and world’s fairs. In market terms, paintings and pottery (the latter a decidedly non-Plains material form) completely disappear, as do the distinguished occupations of “artists and craftspeople.” Primitivism had been paired with Pop as early as 1962, when critic Sidney Tillim named all of Pop Art’s early practitioners as primitivists.44 This “new kind of primitivism” was found “in mass man and his artifacts, his cigarettes and beer cans and the library of refuse scattered along the highways of the land with their signs, supermarkets and drive-in motels, the New American Dreamer”—a version of “Mass Man, a sort of Paul Bunyan made over by the Industrial Revolution.”45 Pop Primitivism stood as “a subversive form of reconciliation with society,” where mass culture and its made-over folk heroes give “refuge” in a “tradition of disaffiliation” from mainstream institutions, norms and politics.46 This early critical discourse overlaps with later post-modern theories, where the folk, the primitive and the authentic—a co-implicated set of terms—are imagined and enshrined as a space where resistance to global capitalism can still reside. Assuming a rampant global capitalism as the dominant shaping force of the present, post-modernism tends toward nostalgic lament for the loss of authenticity and its imagined “purity” from market pollution. The end result is the post-modern retention, at its core, of a primitivist fantasy of the Other, whose vernacular production can be claimed as sites of resistance for the mass majority even as it is forced to comply with the market’s hierarchy of values.47 IAIA artists faced this double bind at Woodstock. Invited to be present at one of the most symbolic events of the 1960s counterculture, these artists’ works were received as part of the event’s show of cultural resistance, but remembered in the Othering terms of folk art markets.48 In other critical spaces of the decade, categories of the folk and the primitive were redefined altogether, substituting a discontented underclass of Mass Men for the vernacular communities usually described by these terms. This move cast a largely White folk culture as the dissonant and de-centered viewpoint, erasing the post-colonial positionality of the vernacular altogether. Recent art historical work has returned to this heroic folk lineage and to the anthropological strain of early Pop criticism as a means to re-articulate the work

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of Pop in the twentieth century.49 This return, however, has not acknowledged the troubled social relations evinced by the Woodstock story and the racialized primitivist discourses connected to folk art markets. Nor has it been cognizant of its wholesale erasure of post-colonial positionality and possibility.50 The power of Indian Pop, then, rests not only in its artistic strategies deployed in post-colonial critique, but also in its demands for new critical discourses, ones that fully account for the trade marks left on Indian Pop’s artistic surfaces.

Notes 1 Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center, and Autry Museum of the West supported the research and writing of this essay. Special thank you to Janet Berlo, Marva Felchlin, Ryan Flahive, Jessica Horton, Hadley Jensen, John Joe, Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer, Polly Nordstrand, Liza Posas, and Paul Chaat Smith for sharing their knowledge and wisdom along the way. 2 The genre’s name of “Indian Pop” or “Pop Indian Art” was coined by IAIA faculty member, painter, and printmaker Fritz Scholder (Luiseño) in 1965, who continued to popularize the term among media and museums through 1973. While critics and curators used this terminology, it was not necessarily used by the artists discussed in this essay. The name reflects the dominant terms of the period, when “American Indian” and its shorthand form of “Indian” dominated legal, media, and Nativeauthored discourse. Today’s prevalent terms of “Native,” “Native American,” and “indigenous,” which I use throughout this essay, do not appear in any writing on Native arts in the 1960s. 3 Students’ Native backgrounds were the backbone of IAIA’s education programs; see Lloyd H. New, “Using Cultural Difference as a Basis for Creative expression,” in Ryan S. Flahive (eds.), Celebrating Difference: Fifty Years of Contemporary Native Arts at IAIA, 1962–2012 (Santa Fe, NM : Sunstone Press, 2012), 139–43. 4 Quotation by Red Star in Daniel Gibson and Kitty Leaken, Kevin Red Star: Crow Indian Artist (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2014), 34–5; the book is based on extensive interviews with Red Star and his family and colleagues. In its initial curriculum, IAIA followed the pedagogical model developed by the Southwestern Indian Art Project (1960–3); see Winona Garmhausen, History of Indian Arts Education in Santa Fe: The Institute of American Indian Arts with Historical Background 1890 to 1962 (Santa Fe, NM : Sunstone Press, 1988), chapter 3, and Joy L. Gritton, The Institute of American Indian Arts: Modernism and U.S. Indian Policy (Albuquerque, NM : University of New Mexico Press, 2000), chapter 2.

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5 Oriole Farb, typed exhibition statement for “Young American Indian Artists” at the Riverside Museum, New York City (1965–6), IAIA Archives, RG-1, IAIA Records, SG-5, 1965-Series 9, Exhibits, Box 5, Folder 7. 6 There were others. See, for instance, the exhibition Action/Abstraction Redefined (Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Santa Fe, NM, 2017–19), which looks at IAIA student work of the same period engaged with Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, and Hard-Edge Painting. 7 Gibson and Leaken, Kevin Red Star, 35. 8 “Sinister Pop,” Whitney Museum of American Art (2012–13), “International Pop,” Walker Art Center (2015), and “The World Goes Pop,” Tate Modern (2015–16). 9 This family and community framework is detailed in Gibson and Leaken, Kevin Red Star. 10 Kobena Mercer, “Introduction,” in Kobena Mercer (ed.), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2007), 9. Mercer’s local, non-foreign emphasis comes from the etymology of the term itself: the Latin root of verna named a “home-born slave”—a meaning that Mercer extends to post-colonized people groups in their homelands. 11 I here reference the fact that many Native language self-designations translate as “the people.” Barry M. Pritzker, A Native American Encyclopedia: History, Culture, and Peoples (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), xvi fn2. 12 Mercer, “Introduction,” 26. See also, Thomas Crow, The Long March of Pop: Art Music and Design, 1930–1995 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 201. 13 Max Kozloff, “Pop Culture, Metaphysical Disgust and the New Vulgarians,” Art International (February 1962), in Carol Anne Mahsun (ed.), Pop Art: The Critical Dialogue (1981; Ann Arbor, MI , 1987), 17–18. 14 Lucy Lippard, Pop Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966), Burton Wasserman, “Remember Dada? Today We Call Him Pop,” Art Education, 19, no. 5 (May 1966): 13–16, and John Russell and Suzi Gablik, Pop Art Redefined (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969). 15 Exposure to contemporary art at IAIA in this period came through the materials and techniques presented in Fritz Scholder’s art history and studio classes, studio mates, library materials, visiting artists, group exhibitions, museum visits, and other IAIA instructors. Published writings to date do not agree on a singular source for student inspiration. 16 Tommy Wayne (T.C.) Cannon, Sketchbook and Illustrations (1965), photocopy of original, n.p., IAIA Archives, James McGrath Collection, Box 11, F.5. 17 G. R. Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part I,” Art News, 62, no. 7 (November 1963): 26. 18 Wasserman, “Remember Dada?,” 13. 19 For a personal account of apartheid, for instance, that describes how market needs drove the system’s categorization, spatial organization, and disciplining of bodies, see

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22 23

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Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2016). Indian Pop anticipated the work and later critical discourses around the Pictures Generation, who were latecomers to the image-centric conversations already happening in Indian Country in the 1960s and early 1970s. For an account of how post-modernism changed Pop criticism, see Sylvia Harrison, Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Key texts in this postmodern genealogy are Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986), Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (1989), and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). For this early trade history, see Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2008). Jonathan Batkin, The Native American Curio Trade in New Mexico (Santa Fe, NM : Wheelwright Museum, 2008). Martin Hall, “The Reappearance of the Authentic,” in Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Gustavo Buntinx, Barbara KirshenblattGimblett, and Ciraj Rassool (eds.), Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2006), 72. See also Mercer, “Introduction,” 24. Margaret Dubin, Native America Collected: The Culture of an Art World (Albuquerque, NM : University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 16–20. For examples of these shared market relations, see James E. Snead, Ruins and Rivals: The Making of Southwest Archaeology (Tucson, AZ : University of Arizona Press, 2001). New, “Using Cultural Difference,” 142. This sentiment was repeated in New’s 1979 essay, “The Institute of American Indian Arts: Some of Its Goals, Problems, and Successes,” in Celebrating Difference, 153. See, for instance, R. C. Gorman (Diné) cited in Jamake Highwater, Song from the Earth: American Indian Painting (Boston, MA : Little, Brown, for New York Graphic Society, 1976), 114. When IAIA opened its doors in 1962, one of the tenets of the school was to create the vocational possibility of artistic work for young Native men and women. Part of the general War on Poverty conducted under President Johnson, the arts took its place within the educational and vocational emphases of the decade, launched to address income inequity found in rural and urban communities amongst various populations. This served IAIA well, as the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the Indian Arts and Crafts Board (IACB), and the Department of the Interior took special interest in the school’s success and funded many initiatives to publicize student work

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31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40

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on a national and international scale. See Philleo Nash, “The Indian Bureau and the war on poverty,” US Department of the Interior, press release, June 18, 1964. Nash’s remarks were originally delivered on the IAIA campus during a conference of BIA superintendents, with IAIA highlighted as a success story of the period’s BIA policy and direction. Thank you to Bob Haozous for his challenge on this link between IAIA and federal policy. Jo Ann Baldinger, “The Long Look Back,” FOCUS Santa Fe (April/May 1998): 51. See also Jo-Ann Swanson, “Kevin Red Star,” Southwest Art (July 1990): 85, and Gussie Fauntleroy, “Living Art, Giving Art: IAIA Alumni Share Their Gifts,” Tribal College Journal, 13, no. 1 (Fall 2001): 16. Red Star, like many IAIA graduates, has spent time supporting and strengthening arts institutions in his own community; see Christene C. Meyers, “Indians Join for the Arts,” Billings Gazette, n.d., 7-D. Chuck Dailey, “The Institute of American Indian Arts Museum: 1962 to 1992— Formation of the IAIA ‘Museum’: The First 10 Years,” typed manuscript, IAIA Archives, McGrath Papers; Gibson and Leaken, Kevin Red Star, 38. For a description of this early Santa Fe scene for Red Star and a number of his IAIA colleagues, see Gibson and Leaken, Kevin Red Star, 64–79. “A Conversation with James A. McGrath,” in Celebrating Difference, 95–7. Gibson and Leaken, Kevin Red Star, 42. On Red Star’s practice of looking at historical material culture, see Gibson and Leaken, Kevin Red Star, 71, and Rosanna Hall, “The Rising Red Star,” New Mexican, Weekend, n.d., 5. On that of his IAIA colleagues, see Joan Frederick, T.C. Cannon: He Stood in the Sun (Flagstaff, AZ : Northland Publishing Company, 1995), 68, 73, 103, Leslie Wasserberger, “An American Expressionist,” in Lowery Stokes Sims (ed.), Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian (Washington, DC : National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 2008), 27–9, 53, and the Artist File, Folder 1 for Alfred Young Man, IAIA Archives. Dailey, “The Institute of American Indian Arts Museum.” This practice was in place by 1973. José Pierre, Pop Art: An Illustrated Dictionary, trans. W. J. Strachan (1975; London: Eyre Methuen, 1977), 11. Kozloff, “Pop Culture,” 18. Gibson and Leaken, Kevin Red Star, 44. Robert M. Coates, “Our Far-Flung Correspondents: Indian Affairs, New Style,” New Yorker, 43, no. 17 (June 17, 1967): 102–12. This both/and position is illustrated again and again in contemporary Native arts writings, museology, and artistic practice. See, for instance, the conversation that emerges between Mique’l Askren, “Dancing Our Stone Mask Out of Confinement: A Twenty-First-Century Tsimshian Epistemology,” in Aaron Glass (ed.), Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century

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45 46 47 48

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Northwest Coast (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, n.d.), 37–47, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2007), chapter 1, Jeffrey Gibson’s video project “one becomes the other” (2015), available at: https://jeffreygibson.net/ video--/1, Robert Houle in conversation with Clara Hargittay, “The Struggle Against Cultural Apartheid,” Muse, 6, no. 3 (Autumn 1988), and David Treuer, “The Spirit Lives On,” Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2006), 153–8. Gibson and Leaken, Kevin Red Star, 52. Other IAIA-trained students who have described participating in this fair at Woodstock include T. C. Cannon and Billy Soza Warsoldier (Iviatim [Cahuilla]/White Mountain Apache). Ibid. Belmont cited in Ann Charters (ed.), The Portable Sixties Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 317, no original source given. Sidney Tillim, “Month in Review,” Arts Magazine, February 1962, reprinted in Mahsun (ed.), Pop Art, 10. Tillim specifically names Johns, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Indiana, Lichtenstein, and Saul in his review. Ibid., 10–11. Ibid., 11. See Mercer, “Introduction,” 24, for a discussion of this problem. Native artists were not the only ones subject to such language, as seen in the art criticism around Venezuelan-born Pop artist Marisol; see “Exhibitions: Venice, After All,” Time, July 5, 1968, “A Letter from the Publisher,” Time, March 3, 1967, “Sculpture: The Dollmaker,” Time, May 28, 1965, Grace Glueck, “It’s Not Pop, It’s Not Op—It’s Marisol,” New York Times, March 7, 1965, and Harold Rosenberg, “From Pollock to Pop: 20 Years of Painting and Sculpture,” Holiday, 39, no. 3 (March 1966): 96–7. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956–66,” in Kynaston McShine (ed.), Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York, 1990), 39–61, and Crow, The Long March of Pop. Both utilize early Pop critic Lawrence Alloway’s writings on anthropology. Another parallel is found in Mark Francis and Hal Foster, Pop (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2005), where Pop replaces the folk (p. 20) and colonization is equated with the spread of American mass culture (Works section #3). This erasure is literalized in Crow, The Long March of Pop, 358, who gives 1962 and the co-optation of Pop art styles into mass culture as the end of the genre—a date that explicitly cuts off the many postcolonial movements and discourses of the 1960s, as well as the entire field of global Pop, as defined in Jessica Morgan and Flavia Frigeri (eds.), The World Goes Pop (London: Tate Publishing, 2015).

11

Entangled Mythologies Race and Class in Hervé Télémaque’s Pop, 1963–5 Marine Schütz

The 1960s was a period of particular significance for the reconstruction of local modernities in Latin America and Africa in the wake of decolonization. As artists adjusted to their newly found freedom, the appropriation of general artistic categories became a way to simultaneously express oneself and to problematize the national ideologies underpinning European and American legacies of modernism. Pop provided artists around the world a path to visibility that allowed them to be readable from the outside—by conforming to modernist norms—and to explore their identity by assessing how imperialist frames, once negotiated and filtered, might impact the formation of subjectivity. In this respect, Haiti-born Paris-based artist Hervé Télémaque’s work is one of the most interesting examples of the way an artist seized Pop Art from beyond Anglo-American borders and reshaped its limits—reformulating Pop Art as a democratic language that captures the increasing transnational processes of a globalized culture. Télémaque is the very image of the transnational artist. He was born in 1937 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and, in 1957, when François Duvalier came to power, he moved to New York, where he attended the Art Students League and developed a pictorial language that married surrealism with abstraction. In 1961 he moved to Paris, where he met the painters of the last wave of French surrealism. From 1963 to 1966, he dedicated himself to what he calls his Pop period, “with clean, flat surfaces.”1 Figuration Narrative (Narrative Figuration), the French movement Télémaque was associated with, was launched in 1964 by Mythologies quotidiennes (Everyday mythologies), an exhibition that, marked by the aftermath of the Algerian War (1954–62), evinced a renewed faith in political art.2 The topic of art’s narrative 241

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potential has dominated French historiography, especially after the christening of Figuration Narrative in 1965 by art critic Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, eclipsing other salient issues underpinning the practice of the painters associated with it that are endemic to the history of global Pop, such as the importance of popular sources or the use of mass culture as a vehicle to express political issues involving class, race, and solidarity with the Third World. However, Figuration Narrative and, above all, Télémaque, as I argue, explored collective and individual mythologies, investigating identity as a form of entanglement linked to reimagining one’s position in terms of geography, class and race. This is eloquently corroborated by the retrospective rumination of the artist about his work: “It’s my story, a hybrid story, like me, a little bit Haitian, a little bit American, a little bit French, a little bit Surrealist, a little bit Mythologies quotidiennes.”3 A core element of this thesis concerns the agents of such rupture in the conception of identity, and there is no doubt that Frantz Fanon’s reconceptualization of class played a crucial role. Indeed, using images whose popular content resists the norms of high culture—seen as the product of the ruling class—Télémaque’s works not only address class but they also engage with a particular legacy of Marxism that links the struggles of race and class embodying the alliance of formerly colonized people and workers. The following questions subsequently arise: How do race and class emerge in his paintings? What narratives do they involve? and What is the aim of their entanglement? Though already evident in the work he exhibited in Mythologies quotidiennes,4 the political and social significance of Télémaque’s paintings’ entangled evocation of class and race was silenced by the critical discourse around Figuration Narrative in its focus on Télémaque’s relation to American Pop Art. The reception of Télémaque’s painting took place during the Trente Glorieuses, the thirty socalled “glorious years” of economic boom in France, which peaked in the 1960s.5 At a time when national media and cultural representations were anchored in narratives of equality—with the aim of halting the trauma of decolonization— critical assessments lacked an understanding of the identity politics that could appear in artwork. Yet, Télémaque’s use of mediated images of otherness in the paintings he made between 1963 and 1965 invites an investigation of the way in which representation emerges as a site where collectively imposed ideologies, inequality, coloniality, and imperialism are constructed. His attempt to disrupt class structures—through popular images of branded consumer goods—does not, however, mean that Télémaque wanted to follow the Warholian universalist yearning for a classless or uniform society.6 Rather, his major concern was to reveal his ire at the intersection of power relations between minority groups and

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hegemony in postcolonial France. This essay seeks to demonstrate how Télémaque’s Pop addressed a broader audience and advocated social as well as racial equality. It illuminates how the artist’s position on race and class troubles not only drew vertical distinctions between high and low culture but also how his work demonstrates the hierarchization that informed France’s systemic relation to otherness. An understanding of Télémaque’s idiosyncratic Pop in light of postcolonial texts might also further the recent opening of Pop Art’s historiography to issues of identity politics to reshape long-standing debates over its political neutrality. Given the unequal power relations in France in the 1960s, some artists came to terms with the importance of issues of identity,7 making use of relevant feminist or postcolonial conceptual frameworks of writers like Edward Said,8 who studied the misrepresentation of marginal groups and later argued for the persistence of coloniality and old hegemonic relationships in social relations.9 Télémaque’s practice supports Kobena Mercer’s claim that Pop, when viewed through a crosscultural and postcolonial lens, illuminates “the different cultural, national and ethnic identities that participated in the process of ‘democratisation’ ” of art.10 For Télémaque, race was a critical way to address the debate about social class in art.11 In July 1964, only weeks after Robert Rauschenberg had won first prize at the thirty-second Venice Biennale, Télémaque contributed four paintings to Mythologies quotidiennes: Éclaireur, Escale, La carte du tendre, and Banania no3 (plate 30). The latter was part of the Banania series, which he had begun in 1963, consisting of four large canvases based on the advertisement for the chocolate brand Banania, centered on the smiling face of a Senegalese tirailleur (rifleman). This offensive advertisement had been revised four years earlier by a designerillustrator who darkened the tirailleur’s skin and simplified the figure, drawing a chromatic link between the stereotypical big red lips and the kepi hat. While it had originally been made in the direct aftermath of the First World War— marked by the contribution of Senegalese tirailleurs as soldiers of the French Empire—the advertisement reproduced by Télémaque had completely removed this military context, as evidenced by the objects surrounding the African character. Based on stereotyping and commodification tropes—two processes connoting the mass culture to which Banania chocolate, a good largely consumed by people in France and worldwide, belonged—references to taste in the advertisement were highlighted by the slogan “Y’a bon” (It’s good) reproduced in red letters on a yellow background. Coinciding with the graphic designers’ desire to metaphorically domesticate a figure of fantasized violence, such visual

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decisions thereby embodied the change of context metonymically undergone by the tirailleur and his history, from war back home. Télémaque’s shift from an expressive description of Blackness to a dehumanized trope stemming from mass-media representations underscores the role of two foundational visual processes: commodification and stereotypes. Both have been denounced by anti-colonial literature and, later, cultural studies as means to ensure coloniality in representation. The commodification of the Black body is a critical issue at stake in the fifth chapter of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, titled “The Lived Experience of the Black.” Fanon’s in-depth analysis of his experience of alienation as a colonized Black man allows him to assess, in light of the Banania advertisement as its paradigmatic expression, how the “body schema collapsed . . . giving way to an epidermic racial schema.”12 In his 1981 text “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’” Stuart Hall examines the ways in which pop culture’s stereotypical images of otherness reinforced such views, suggesting that what is said about racial stereotypes “could be equally applied in many instances to other dimensions of difference, such as gender, sexuality, class, and disability.”13 Analyzing stereotyping as a “racialized regime of representation” that persists into the late twentieth century,14 Hall describes how stereotypes altered representation, reducing a person to a set of “simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped and widely recognized characteristics.”15 Using mass-media images of racial stereotypes, Télémaque signals the transformations that things, beings and words are subjected to in colonial ideology—and often with violence, as evidenced by the shadow of an arm swinging a baton. Besides exposing the role of visual tropes in the representation of Black people in French popular culture, it is through his reproduction of words that Télémaque knowingly reveals the role that language played in the “protocols of differentiation” that informed the Eurocentric image of the other,16 addressing the totality of the othering process as existing both on the visual and cultural levels, and doubly cementing the colonizers’ essentialist gaze on the colonized. In each of the three Banania paintings, there are words that refer to magic, such as “Bon magique,” and the incorrect use of French language is ascribed to the African man. As a phonetic contraction of the expression “Il y a bon,” the phrase “Y’a bon” evokes French dialects in overseas France, especially in the African colonies, where the language of the colonized was called, in a demeaning way, petit nègre. Télémaque deliberately reproduced the letters in order to reinforce the infantilizing tone of the ad, which was furthered by his depiction of the soldier, and particularly his attention to his kepi and the movement of its falling pompon.17 The insistence on language, which was used,

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according to Brett A. Berliner, “to place colonies along a civilizing index,”18 turns the series into a site that reveals two of the most prominent mass-media myths regarding the representation of Blackness: the Black as other, assessed by visual components, and the Black as a big child, investigated through language. Painting such works at a time when France had begun its decolonization process demonstrates that dismantling the empire as a political entity was not necessarily consistent with the end of coloniality. Thus, the Banania series’ critical stance on race relations and otherness, manifested in Télémaque’s use of advertisements and magazines, can be seen as lying at the intersection of two major concerns: race and class. It stresses the impossibility of dealing with each issue separately. While Télémaque investigated the realm of the media as a space saturated with imperial myths, such images helped renew the relationship between the artworks and their audience. Indeed, depicting low-culture signs was crucial to him, since it intensified the accessibility of his paintings: “My problem as a painter,” he says, “is how to move from . . . lived experience to pictures that can circulate and to do so with my only resources: the [picture] plane, the colors, and the titles.”19 The social content of Télémaque’s works exists on both iconographic and formal levels. To make textual elements and references, he relied on the projector—he was the first artist in France to incorporate this reproductive technology into his art practice. The resulting clarity of signs provided the Banania works with formal qualities that diminished the boundary between the spaces of mass media and art, making the works more “readable.” In his writings Lawrence Alloway has defined pop culture by its capacity to talk to masses through widely recognizable references.20 The written messages are a way to form a common space for both the audience and the artist, possibly engaging new classes in art consumption. The circulation of artworks like consumer goods in the art market clearly unsettles the dichotomy between consumption and contemplation. Such devices had social consequences, for in providing access to a mass audience and problematizing the often assumed artistic dichotomy between art and craft and between bourgeois and worker, these new conditions for art contemplation also resulted in undermining the established class structure. Télémaque’s own words lend further credence to the argument that the entanglement of race and class distinguishes his position within Pop and Figuration Narrative. The artist has stated that “the few Banania workers tucked into [his] pictures were, of course, small signs of [his own] blackness.”21 He recently confirmed such an alignment between Blackness and workers, claiming

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that at the time he believed that “racial solidarity could be seen as class solidarity.”22 The alignment of Marxism and class issues underpinning his reference to the category of workers also evinces the artist’s affinity with the Figuration Narrative group. Along with Pop art practices—art’s opening up to the fluctuating world of everyday life, participation, etc.—Télémaque’s works were conceptually involved, in part, in a refusal to distinguish between sociopolitical and artistic orders following the Marxist aim to undermine the authoritarian definition of what constitutes aesthetic value. Such concerns also fueled the works of Eduardo Arroyo and Antonio Recalcati, who, like Bernard Rancillac and Télémaque, had participated in Mythologies quotidiennes the previous year.23 Following the Althusserian view of art as a mystification produced by bourgeois thinking and an apparatus through which ideology can be spread, the artists’ adamant refusal of the ideal of a universalist culture and the assertion that there is no culture-transcending class led to a constructivist position marked by the possibility of turning painting into a social space wherein the lower classes’ concerns could be translated.24 However, the way in which Télémaque links Blackness and working-class groups using a language that favored White mass-culture consumers intersects precisely with Fanon’s actualization of Marxism.25 In Banania—a mass-cultural representation that both inscribes the experience of the lower classes and that of racialized people—Télémaque simultaneously translates the memory of two minority groups whose struggles for emancipation overlap. Fanon believed that Marxism’s political significance resided in the continued alliance of decolonized people and workers, in their subjectivity and emancipation. Indeed, the formation of a “universal race of the oppressed people” was fundamental to his liberation agenda.26 The entanglement of race and class in Banania marks other paintings from 1964, some of which allude to the artist’s personal history and roots in Haiti. Escale (plate 31), for example, which hung next to Banania n°3 in Mythologies quotidiennes, amounts to critical narrative of his personal experience of consumer society in the 1960s. The painting deals with class through the depiction of a series of goods, reproductions and images whose ubiquitous presence contributed to the flattening of postwar social and cultural differences. By way of a semiotic proximity between signs referring to realities as diverse as the Eiffel Tower and Bugs Bunny’s face, painted in the same simple and clear-cut language to create an aura of evenness, Télémaque stresses the new kinds of connections unifying French and US cultures in the 1960s. The narrative of a termination of difference marks a whole range of artistic gestures, from the

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content of branded goods to the composition of objects regularly painted on a unifying blue canvas. While Télémaque draws an analogy between France and the United States through their cultural and iconic symbols, Haiti is referenced differently, through the partial inscription of the name of its capital, Port-auPrince. The difference between naming and showing evokes the erasure of cultural otherness, as France’s colonialist agenda relied on cultural separation. As stated by Kristin Ross: If the consolidation of a broad middle class more or less transpires during these years, it is also during these years that France distances itself from its (former) colonies, both within and without: this is the moment of the great cordonning off of the immigrants, their removal to the suburbs in a massive reworking of the social boundaries of Paris and the other large French cities.27

The difference inscribed by Télémaque in the realm of signs reveals the gap between the representations constructed by France and its social realities, as well as the discrepancy between the dream of evenness and the entrenched processes of differentiation and hierarchization. The use of mass-media images amounted to a form of criticality located in identity politics. As a Haitian man shaped by the economic dissymmetry between the so-called Third World and Europe, the painter has linked his taste for mass culture to psychological and social forces, which originated from the “underdeveloped universe that watches with fascination such a wealth.”28 Likewise, his comments on the role of the Algerian War and the critical function of signs in his paintings provide an example of how mass culture seems to always be connected to the mechanisms of reimagining one’s position in terms of geography, class and race. Télémaque’s Pop Art coincided with his arrival in Paris in 1961, following his departure from Port-au-Prince in 1957 and a four-year stay in New York, where he witnessed the violence of social problems.29 As he recalls, the Algerian War had just ended, and the mood in Paris was tense. “I saw the [Paris] police patrols around the rue Saint-Denis where I was living then,” a reminder that the Algerian population there was under strict control. He continued, “In a way, I left the racial ghetto of New York for another apprehension of my marginality. That profession quite naturally implied a critical discourse in the use that I was to make of pop signs.”30 Arising from his own feelings of marginality, his identification with the Algerian people led to his disavowal of the passive position of a witness. Identity became a site where positions can be performed and fluidly reversed. The painter’s subversive use of signs encoded social dissidence as well as artistic engagement.

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And yet, especially when it comes to race issues, such poetics of heterogeneity and incessant substitutions and reversals echoed a more seminal dream: that of the formerly colonized taking the colonizer’s place, as seen in Fanon’s analysis in Black Skin, White Masks. Télémaque’s work My Darling Clementine, 1963 (plate 9), seems precisely to embody Fanon’s dialectic of masks and disguise. Indeed, in the painting, which refers to John Ford’s film, the main character bears Télémaque’s features and wears the White cowboy’s clothing but the artist keeps his black skin so as to rectify the absence of Black actors in the film. As Télémaque recalls, he depicted himself in the painting as a one-legged Black cowboy with straightened hair, holding a crutch and thereby confronting “the classic John Ford hero.”31 Interestingly, mass culture’s emancipatory potential is evidenced— as if cinema’s carnivalesque and phantasmagoric space, where doubles and displacements flourish, could pave the way—through the trope of acting, of another performance: that of identity. Such substitution, even if not entirely positive, attests to the painter’s faith, in 1963, in painting’s potential to challenge, contest and change dominant representations. He worked through a strategic “trans-coding,” central to the politics of anti-racist and other social movements as theorized by Hall.32 Popular images and their availability to the imagination became, in this sense, a way of reshaping hegemonic representation. As Télémaque states, he wanted to coin “a better image of the Black people.”33 Télémaque’s work, then, would benefit from a contextualization within contemporary visual culture studies, where visibilities and invisibilities, power relations and stereotypes are all regulated and contrasted. Télémaque also explicitly addresses Caribbean struggles for emancipation in his painting One of the 36000 Marines over our Antilles (figure 11.1), a major contribution to the 1965 exhibition La Figuration narrative dans l’art contemporain (Figuration Narrative in Contemporary Art).34 In most of the works in this show, the artists reappropriated images and events that, in their content or treatment, all manifested, to some degree, shared claims to overcome the conservative values that dominated social relationships and culture, expressing the need for social transformation and emancipation. This exhibition thus allows us to consider Pop’s radical attempt to break with various forms of hegemony.35 Télémaque’s own background—especially his leftist engagement, which goes back to his childhood36—laid the groundwork for the advent of a French political Pop, which the artist defines by its “critical eye on society,” something he felt was lacking in American Pop, except for the work of James Rosenquist.37 As the artist explains: “I realize that Americans are not interested at all in what is concerning us here, that is to say, political events. Even diffuse, there

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Figure 11.1 Hervé Télémaque, One of the 36000 Marines over our Antilles, 1965. Oil on canvas, 63.58 × 143.89 in (161.5 × 365.5 cm). © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris © Fondation Gandur pour L’Art, Genève. Photographer: Sandra Pointet.

was a political common thread in our concerns: the Algerian War, the Vietnam War, Jean-Paul Sartre, the Surrealists’ uncompromising opinions on revolution, that is the difference—of importance—between Paris, New York and London.”38 One of the 36000 Marines over our Antilles depicts a contemporary event—the invasion of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, by the US Army on April 28, 1965—employing a narrative rendition that aligned with one of the four modalities used to characterize Figuration Narrative according to its primary theorist, Gassiot-Talabot: “narration by portraits or fragmented scenes.”39 On a red background, Télémaque shows a military landing, taken from a magazine, surrounded by small signs—a man sitting at a table, a pair of trousers, four diamonds—and stenciled phrases and numbers: “with our mingled steps let us make a crown for his shade,” “À la française” and “1789.”40 Read as evidence of the ideological gap between Santo Domingo and US economic regimes,41 the painting amounts to a critique of US imperialism when Santo Domingo was invaded. References to 1789, however, reframe the struggle within a French revolutionary context, an experience of particular importance for the Haitian people, who counted Toussaint Louverture among the ranks of the Black Jacobins. Télémaque poetically suggests a continuity between contemporary exploitative power relations of race and class and those of the past. At this time, Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul—both historians and contemporaries of Télémaque—analyzed the French Revolution as a “Bourgeois revolution with popular support,”42 which progressively introduced rural and then urban masses into the ranks of the revolutionaries. Quite new in its alignment with Marxist

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and Jacobin models of the French Revolution, the coming together of several classes and geographies, from bourgeois, rural and urban worlds, was quite pertinent for Télémaque’s preoccupation with the entanglement of race and class.43 Louverture, the general and a formerly enslaved person, was painted at least twice by Télémaque. Beginning at the end of the 1950s, he conflated his own face with ciphers of the hero of the 1804 Haitian Revolution, which liberated Haiti and abolished slavery. In Toussaint Louverture in New York, 1960 and Voir ELLE , 1964 (figure 11.2), the general stood for a kind of personification of several forms of emancipation. Employing a joyful use of colors, Télémaque translated the exhilarating feeling of emancipation by mingling the pleasure of consumption with a zest for painting and chromatic experiments. Modern iconographies, such as the images of free bodies of women quoted from Elle magazine—a “real mythological treasure” for Barthes44—reinforced the theme of liberation that his eccentric use of colors conveyed. Set on a chromatic and formal divide between signs on a gridded blue-and-white background, on the right, and the faces of Fidel Castro and Louverture copied with the help of the projector, on the left, the canvas also opens up a meditation on how to paint revolutionary figures. Indeed, the subversive subtext of the images are captured in their depictions, as in Alberto Korda’s famous portrait of Ernesto “Che” Guevara.45 The agency of Pop images emerges here as a way to lure the viewers’ gazes and to bring them face to face with the Haitian hero turned Black icon. Contrasts of color and polychromatic surfaces spectacularize Louverture. Characterized by his black skin, yellow plume and green bicorne, the portrait contains nearly all of the colors present elsewhere in the work. Unlike Pop artists who emulated the mechanical through their use of color, Télémaque argues for another chromatic model: that of carnival. Carnival is indeed present in the painting of Télémaque. It is “in my relationship to color,” he explains; “the way you mix what is totally opposed, all colors together . . . I like to use colors in a big fight.”46 If Télémaque seems to suggest a correspondence between the subject and pigments used in Louverture’s portrait, then the green skin of the models from Elle nuances this contention in relating his use of color to aesthetic concerns impacted by popular culture and Haitian memory. Looking at carnival’s social implications, Télémaque’s use of color evokes the effects that Mikhail Bakhtin perceived as the carnivalesque, in its upending of hegemonic hierarchies imposed by the church and the state to distinguish social orders.47 While carnival appears, in the artist’s words, as an emancipatory and disruptive momentum connected to free expression and self-expression, it also allows the critique, in

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Figure 11.2 Hervé Télémaque, Voir ELLE , 1964. Casein and pasted paper on canvas, 76.77 × 51.18 in (195 × 130 cm). © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris. Private Collection. Courtesy Galerie Louis Carré & Cie.

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Télémaque’s work, of another kind of representation—that of race. As Fanon recalls, race is precisely constructed on the classification system ruled by color, what he calls the “epidermic racial schema.” Thus, the use of color severs the links between race and fosters new modalities of representation whereby a person is no longer reduced to their skin color. It appears that this search for an alternative Pop chromatic model was deeply informed by Télémaque’s need to question the legacy of race in the realm of representation. As the struggles for civil rights reached their peak with the protest in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 11, 1963, the artist explored this issue in turning to contemporary US events.48 For the painting Brise, 1965 (plate 32), Télémaque conceived an unusually centered composition, organized around large ladies’ underwear hanging in a window and framed by two images from the media depicting the brutal police confrontation with protesters during the Birmingham civil rights uprising. In contrast to Warhol’s series (1963–4), in which he appropriated the same sources and treated them as single photographic images to probe the tension “between the artwork and its media source,”49 Télémaque’s work relies on a more confrontational tone. Revolving around the notion of engagement, assessed both in its physical and social meanings, Brise, with its simple, framed and centered composition engenders a participatory ritual based on scopic and kinetic impulses (as attested by the gesture of a green hand touching the underwear). As it physically calls the viewers, mainly European, to move closer to the canvas, the work suggests that viewers look at social struggles with more scrutiny and presses them to become aware of the enduring racial conflicts in the United States. While Télémaque proved to be a French ally for the 1960s racial struggles in the United States, part of his need to locate himself in a network of global solidarity, in the present, with Black people seems to come from an older and common history: that of slavery. The extent to which Télémaque considers his identity to be shaped by a history of slavery is rooted in his familial history and anti-colonial engagement, further explaining how class and race became entangled histories in the present. His uncle was the Haitian and Négritude poet Carl Brouard. Télémaque read Aimé Césaire as well as Leopold Sédar Senghor, whose anti-colonial debates centered on the Banania advertisement. Senghor could not help but notice the discrepancy between its representation and the new African liberation cause. Seeing the soldier who came from sub-Saharan Africa to fight and die for France reduced to a childish smile could only inspire a feeling of anger in him. In 1948, he wrote a scathing commentary in the preliminary poem in Hosties noires: “I will tear off the Banania grin from every wall in France.”50

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Reframing the narrative related to the media representation of Blackness instead of removing it—as Senghor would have likely have done—is not uncommon in Pop. The year 1963–4 was marked by the making of Peter Blake’s Bo Diddley, 1963 and Warhol’s Birmingham Riot series,51 which also addressed mass-media representations of Blackness. They did so by aligning with the archetype that Mercer has called the “image of the other,” and this, I argue, could also be used to describe Télémaque’s approach. Mercer has cast light on the role of this archetype for these two emblematic artists in providing a reflection about class. But what he has perceived as a kind of restriction for Blake and Warhol, who tended to limit the critique in their representation of Blackness to an oppositional expression of “their own antipathy to bourgeois norms,”52 does not apply so simply to Télémaque’s Pop Art. As a Black man, he was guided by a truer “political desire for metaphorical equivalence” between Black and White people.53 Indeed, exaggerating visual and linguistic stereotypes in the Banania series does not mean that Télémaque accepts the ideology they carry. On the contrary, by associating signs derived from different images, the picture’s former meaning is constantly reinvented. For example, in Banania n°3, “Y’a bon,” which could denote a racialized discourse, is resignified through its association with other images. The model reproduced from Elle magazine as an answer to the Women’s Liberation movement also counters, as Télémaque has said, the puritanism of the New York Times.54 Similarly, a whole set of signs celebrating freedom brought about a renewed representation of Blackness. He created artworks that reflected mass media images in order to displace their meaning. Because of the relationship between the Banania advertisement and the images surrounding it, the series is a dialectical commentary on the impact of mass media in Black people’s experience of reification and liberation. By showing how images are aligned with dominant narratives, such as racial difference and colonialism in France, the Banania series mirrored the curatorial approach of Mythologies quotidiennes. Télémaque himself co-curated this exhibition, which brought together about thirty artists, with critic GassiotTalabot; Paris-based painters Rancillac and Peter Foldes, who were interested in developing a type of politically engaged art; along with curator Marie-Claude Dane. The everyday—its sacralization, or in Gassiot-Talabot’s words, the “holy objects of the civilization”55—was considered to be what the participants shared. Some New Realist artists, such as Martial Raysse and Niki de Saint-Phalle were included, even if the great majority of artists presented a visual practice closer to Pop Art: Samuel Buri, Peter Klasen, Jacques Monory, and others. As made manifest by the reference to Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957)—which

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Rancillac had just read—the painters had a particular iconographic and social interest in the everyday. Gassiot-Talabot’s desire to move away from the allegedly apolitical American Pop Art, as well as his intellectual proximity with painters who wanted to go beyond the sociological aspect of French New Realism, led him to help organize the exhibition.56 Embodying the need to reframe Africa’s contribution to the world within the context of a renewed sense of modernity, the very artistic technique Télémaque employed disrupts the inherently mythologizing French narrative. The Banania series’ emphasis on modernity highlights the French ideology used to silence its own colonial past, perceived as antagonistic to progress, and transforming the works into allegories for this myth. Seeking to deconstruct, as a painter, everyday mythologies—especially racism, representation, modernity and equality— through the representation of everyday imagery, his approach synthesized his co-curators’ exploration of the Barthesian notion of mythologies. The curators of Mythologies quotidiennes recognized the social importance that objects and popular culture had newly taken on as people turned away from the great beliefs that Second World War trauma had eroded. Objects assumed a ritual function that religion and the heroic national epic had once played in France. As explained by Rancillac, the notion of mythology, previously connected to antiquity, now had two meanings. First, it “was not reserved for our ancient ancestors”; it described the everyday, “the Tour de France as an Odyssey, as a modern epic, fashion, perfumes, the magazine Elle and the image of the woman it carried, etc.!”57 Moreover, the curators’ reference to mythologies quotidiennes (everyday mythologies) demonstrated the extent to which the French mass culture that Barthes had written about had become an inspiration for them, confirming, as Jessica Morgan argues, that “Pop did not just amount to North American popular culture.”58 Second, depicting mass objects that inscribed the working and middle classes’ collective representations in art, French Pop Art also had social implications by giving voice to classes usually considered as antagonistic to creativity. In this sense, the critical potential of everyday Pop Art, based on the symbolic disruption of the class system, seemed to dovetail with the subversion that Barthes saw as being irremediably linked to the status of the signs constituting the everyday. Like texts and objects, he argued that, flickering “between signifier and signified,” images were no longer “pure things” but “vehicles for social practices playing a role of active symbols in the daily life of everyone.”59 They stood simultaneously for real objects and for the representation of narratives or myths, such as capitalism, glamour, and good versus evil. In line with Barthes, mythology was a semiotic concept related to understanding how ideologies were

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made to naturalize new beliefs. Yet, Rancillac and Télémaque seemed to mobilize Barthesian concepts toward different ends. Rancillac insisted “on the need to deconstruct the visual ideologies of the real”—in other words on the capacity of the myth to act as a structural methodology.60 Though Télémaque did not find Barthes’s book so relevant, he engaged in an analysis of imperialist images. In so far as Barthes understood the empire as the “strongest mythological object,” his notion of mythology also underpins Télémaque’s pictorial commentaries.61 Additionally, the idiosyncratic way in which Télémaque Occidentalized an aesthetic language to fuel a capitalist critique in the early 1960s bears an analogy with the military strategy used by Che Guevara, whereby the fighter captured weapons from the enemy and turned them against him. As suggested by this logic of subversion of Pop as a mainstream form, Télémaque’s appropriation of Pop seems to negotiate identity and allegiances beyond borders. The ideal of cultural solidarity also relates to his own experience as a Creole artist—what Édouard Glissant defines as Antillanity.62 Through this term, which emerged in Glissant’s novel La Lézarde (1957), the writer coined a concept to channel the idea of a collective chain of identity in difference. Like his other concept, Creolization, which addresses Creole culture in its dimensions of connections and crossbreeding, Antillanity considers the reconstructive potential of Creole culture within a broader attempt to overwhelm the trauma induced by the transatlantic slave trade. Télémaque developed tactics that were entirely congruent with Creole vernacular environments. Therefore, the painter’s Antillanity would lie precisely in his idiosyncratic capacity to translate Caribbean imagery, or his solidarity with Africa, into the language of Pop.63 To conclude, the Banania series allows us to understand how Télémaque managed to address the issue of art’s democratization without waiving the ideal of equality, uniquely defined in terms of class, as well as in terms of race. It also enables us to unpack the complex history of 1960s French colonialism, which— as noted by Ross—was marked by specific cultural conditions leading to a “peculiar contradiction”: France was both an “exploiter and an exploited country,” dominant as well as dominated.64 It was simultaneously dominated by US capitalism—or, to be more precise, it was increasingly engaging in collaborations with this force—and exploiting colonial populations. From this point of view, Télémaque’s contributions need to be reframed as a narrative in which terms as complex as “appropriation,” “strategy” and “representation” overwhelm the strict limits of the artistic process, expanding the gestures he had to perform everyday as a Haitian artist in the European social arena. The very appropriation of Pop Art as a category provided him with a viable strategy of representation, enabling

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him to figure out how to present himself in a White art world. There is no question that Pop Art provided Télémaque with visibility. However, what makes his use of Pop Art particularly strategic is how he used it to avoid the trap for non-Western artists that Piotr Piotrowski describes as a loss of identity through a common artistic vocabulary.65 Indeed, his idiosyncratic way of Occidentalizing art was fueled by deeply transnational meanings. Race and class in Télémaque’s works demand a shift in Pop Art’s critical paradigm, from the reading defended by Hal Foster as the simulacrum reading,66 which remains central to the French discourse on Pop,67 to new understandings and insights that leave behind the conception of popular culture as a “hollow cosmos” and turn the surface of the Pop canvas into a metaphor for social transformation.68 Télémaque thus exemplifies a “global” Pop artist who overcame the regional versus the global binary through subversive forms of appropriation, wherein images of hegemonic representation are reinvested with subjective and personal meaning.

Notes 1 Hervé Télémaque, interview by the author and Mona Hadler, Villejuif, France, May 29, 2018. 2 The critical reception of Mythologies quotidiennes testifies to the many tensions that underpin the 1960s Parisian art scene, pertaining both to new feelings of cultural rivalry between French art critics and US culture, and to old national debates about abstraction and realism, and the need, in other words, to align artistic language with ideology. For the most part, critics resented painters who they thought had imitated their US counterparts. Michel Conil-Lacoste and Pierre Restany, for instance, opposed Mythologies quotidiennes due to its adherence to realism. This form had been resignified during the previous thirty years as Communism’s ideal language and seemed to serve, in the agenda of Mythologies quotidiennes, as a resource to address reshaped Marxist aims, which were, in the 1960s, reappraised as a critique of capitalism. For reproductions of press articles, see Jean-Paul Ameline (ed.), Figuration Narrative: Paris 1960–1972 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux and Centre Pompidou, 2008), 73–6. 3 Philippe Curval (ed.), Hervé Télémaque. Œuvres d’après nature (Paris: Espace Electra, Fondation Electricité de France, 1995), 7. 4 For a recent analysis of Figuration Narrative, see Ameline (ed.), Figuration Narrative. 5 See Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1998).

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6 For this reading of Warhol’s work, see Anthony E. Grudin, “A Sign of Good Taste: Andy Warhol and the Rise of Brand Image Advertising,” Oxford Art Journal, 33, no. 2 (June 2010): 211–32. 7 Responding to the need of images suitable to an African 1960s political agenda, as Senegal was gaining its political independence, Bernard Rancillac engaged media representations of Blackness aimed at renewing existing visual tropes. In Dîner des collectionneurs de têtes (1966), for example, he experimented with an innovative technique of silkscreening on yellow Plexiglas (Malcolm X, 1968) to explore how Blackness could be visualized in modern forms by staging Black figures as Pop icons. See Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 82–3. Black Cuban-born French artist (1936–2017) Hessie, also known as Carmen Lydia Djuric, is one of the artists whose work has been retrospectively analyzed in the wake of feminist identity politics. In a trajectory somewhat parallel to Télémaque’s, she arrived in Paris in 1962 and engaged in practices evoking the realm of the everyday by collecting different materials considered as useless. See Camille Morineau (ed.), elles@Pompidou: Artistes femmes dans la collection du musée national d’art moderne, Centre de création industrielle (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2009). 8 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 9 For postcolonial readings applied to the study of Pop Art, see Kobena Mercer (ed.), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2007). See also Jonathan Flatley’s recent analysis of identity politics in, “Skin Problems,” Like Andy Warhol (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2017), and Jessica Morgan and Flavia Frigeri (eds.), The World Goes Pop (London: Tate Publishing, 2015). 10 Mercer, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, 8. 11 Dominique Brebion has offered an analysis of Télémaque’s work in light of his Haitian identity in “Antilles, ‘je me souviens’ ou la Caraïbe dans l’œuvre d’Hervé Télémaque,” posted on the website of AICA on February 2016, available at: https:// aica-sc.net/2016/03/17/antilles-je-me-souviens-ou-la-caraibe-dans-loeuvre-dhervetelemaque/. See also Richard J. Powell, “The Brown Paper Bag Test: Hervé Télémaque’s Exploded Discourse,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, 42–3 (November 2018): 234–49. 12 Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Le Seuil, 1952), 92. 13 Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’ ” in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage/Open University, 1997), 225–79, 225. 14 Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’ ” 249. 15 Ibid. 16 Daniel Sherman, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire 1945–1975 (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 2011), 15.

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17 “J’ai focalisé mon attention sur le képi. Le pompon qui tombe indique un mouvement, en bougeant il crée une animation enfantine,” Hervé Télémaque, cited in Télémaque, exh. cat. (Valencia: IVAM, Center Julio Gonzalez, 1998), 157. 18 Brett A. Berliner quoted in Wulf D. Hund, Michael Pickering, and Anandi Ramamurthy (eds.), Colonial Advertising and Commodity Racism (Münster: LIT, 2013), 15. 19 Télémaque (IVAM, 1998), 157. 20 For Lawrence Alloway’s understanding of formal simplification as condition for Pop’s communication with a broader audience, see Alloway, American Pop Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American, 1974). 21 Télémaque (IVAM, 1998), 157. 22 Hervé Télémaque, phone interview by the author, November 12, 2017. 23 For Marxism’s impact on Figuration Narrative, see Liam Considine, “Screen Politics: Pop Art and the Atelier Populaire,” Tate Papers, 24 (Autumn 2015), available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/24/screen-politics-popart-and-the-atelier-populaire. 24 For an account of Louis Althusser’s ideas and French painting, see, “From Sartre to Althusser: Lapoujade, Cremonini and the Turn to Antihumanism,” in Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory, 40–63. 25 See Mathieu Renault, Frantz Fanon: De l’anticolonialisme à la critique postcoloniale (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2011). 26 This alignment lies at the heart of Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 73. Though the use of class as a lens to analyze Télémaque’s work is new, the relationship between Marxism and French painting in the 1960s shadows Wilson’s and Considine’s respective studies. Among Figuration Narrative painters, Marxism was a leading force that prompted artists to travel internationally, engage with countries governed by leftist leaders and explore the translation of class in painting. Gilles Aillaud and Eduardo Arroyo, who were associated with La jeune peinture, a group of painters at the heart of Figuration Narrative, had profound connections with Communist painters, such as Paul Rebeyrolle. The subject was, in 1960, replaced by an interest in the realm of the everyday because of their opposition to “bourgeois taste” and through the translation of proletarian experiences in the use of mechanical means in painting. See Considine, “Screen Politics.” 27 Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 11. 28 Télémaque (IVAM, 1998), 157. 29 For an account of Télémaque’s New York years, see Anne Tronche, Hervé Télémaque (Paris: Flammarion, 2003). 30 Télémaque (IVAM, 1998), 157. 31 Ibid., 158; English translation by the author. 32 Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’ ” 225. 33 Hervé Télémaque, phone interview by the author, June 2, 2018.

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34 This painting was exhibited in La Figuration narrative dans l’art contemporain (Paris: Galerie Creuze, 1965). 35 For more on Duchamp in light of this exhibition, see Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory, 34–5. 36 Télémaque, interview by the author and Hadler, Villejuif, France, May 29, 2018. 37 Ameline, Figuration Narrative, 331. 38 Télémaque, interview by the author and Hadler, Villejuif, France, May 29, 2018. 39 Gérald Gassiot-Talabot was the main critic of Figuration Narrative. He was born in 1929 in Algiers and died in Paris in 2002. La Figuration narrative, 5–40. 40 The first sentence reads, in French, “Faisons de nos pas emmêlés une couronne pour son ombre.” 41 Likewise, Télémaque sympathized with the Cuban Cause, struck by the fact that “US imperialism refused to admit that a 5 million-inhabitants island might choose its destiny,” Télémaque (IVAM, 1998), 156. 42 Michel Vovelle, “L’Historiographie de la Révolution Française à la veille du bicentenaire,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 1 (1988): 115. 43 Ibid. 44 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1975), 78. 45 See Frédéric Maguet, “Le Portrait de Che Guevara,” Gradhiva, 11 (2010): 140–61. 46 Télémaque, interview by the author and Hadler, Villejuif, France, May 29, 2018. 47 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1968). 48 The Birmingham campaign refers to the urban clashes between the Black leaders and the police, who allegedly carried out the bombings on the former. See Jonathan Foster, Stigma Cities: The Reputation and History of Birmingham, San Francisco, and Las Vegas (Norman, OK : University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). 49 Wendy Weitman (ed.), Pop Impressions: Europe/USA: Prints and Multiples from the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 90. 50 Léopold Sédar Senghor, Hosties noires, Poèmes liminaires in Œuvre Poétique (Paris: Le Seuil, 1948), 55–6. 51 Pink Race Riot was shown in 1964 in Paris at Gallery Sonnabend. 52 Mercer, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, 19. 53 Ibid. 54 Télémaque, interview by the author and Hadler, Villejuif, France, May 29, 2018. 55 Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, Mythologies quotidiennes (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1964). 56 Gassiot-Talabot, in ibid., argued for a distinction among the painters of the everyday, between those (the US Pop artists) involved in giving a “standardized look” to the objects and those (the Nouvelle Figuration painters) who “refused to be indifferent or blasé witnesses.”

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Bernard Rancillac, Devenir peintre (Paris: Hermann, 2016), 69. Morgan and Frigeri (eds.), The World Goes Pop, 15. Rancillac, Devenir peintre, 69. Ibid. Barthes, Mythologies, 143. The concept of Antillanity nurtured Glissant’s later theoretical conceptualization of Creolization. See Aliocha Wald Lasowski, Édouard Glissant, penseur des archipels (Paris: Pocket, 2015). See David Kunzle, Che Guevara: Icon, Myth, and Message (Los Angeles, CA : UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, 1997). Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 7. Annika Öhrner (ed.), Art in Transfer in the Era of Pop: Curatorial Practices and Transnational Strategies (Huddinge: Södertörn University, 2017), 23. Hal Foster and Mark Francis, Pop (London: Phaidon, 2005), 29. Alain Cueff and Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, French Warhol specialists, have advanced such understanding of Pop as no longer depending on the real but on representation. See Alain Cueff, Warhol à son image (Paris: Flammarion, 2009). Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London: Psychology Press, 1988), 57. This expression is just one of the numerous critiques of popular culture that fueled the conceptual and political project of cultural studies.

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Snap! Crackle! Pow! Robert Colescott and Pop Art Lowery Stokes Sims

Introduction: Whither Colescott in Pop? An Artforum post marking the passing of Robert Colescott in 2009, observed that Colescott’s imagery shared aspects with Pop Art although he “disdained its coolness.” Rather Colescott’s “improvisational approach had precedents in jazz and Abstract Expressionism.”1 Indeed, Colescott’s provocatively “funky” figuration would more aptly be contextualized within West Coast expressionist figuration such as that practiced by Joan Brown, Roy de Forest, William Wiley and H. C. Westermann as well the signature raunchiness—even coarseness—of cartoonist Robert Crumb.2 Nevertheless, in his deployment of advertising, brand identification, commercial commodities, and popular cartooning, Colescott’s imagery in the 1970s demonstrated what Michael Lobel described as a “simultaneous proximity to and distance from” Pop Art.3 Colescott is best known for his 1970s deconstructions of Western art history that inserted Black figures into familiar masterpieces. His riffs on works such as Jan Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434, Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, 1830, or Emanuel Leutze’s George Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1852, challenged long-standing taboos around racial stereotyping while forging new, unexplored social meanings for these compositions.4 When such works were exhibited in New York in 1975 at Razor Gallery, John Perreault described them as “Outrageous Black Pop.” He muses about the satire and humor he experienced looking at the paintings, but then wonders whether his reactions to the work were politically appropriate. In the end he concludes: “these paintings are a little too smart ass.”5

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This “smart ass” attitude can be seen in Colescott’s George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook, 1975, which garnered Pop Art bona fides when it was included in the 1978 Art on Art exhibition at the Whitney Museum. Reviewing it, Hilton Kramer argued that in its prevailing spirit—“the spirit of irony”—the exhibition demonstrated “the special strategies of Neo-Dadaism, Pop Art and their satellite styles.”6 “More often than not, this irony takes the form of parody, both the parody of actual works of art and parodies of commercial and pedagogical representations of it,”7 he explained, in what could be one of the most apt descriptions of Colescott’s own strategy. Numerous discussions of his work over the last five decades have focused on his adroit use of irony, satire, humor and parody8 as he pursued his aim to “put black people into history and art history.”9 Another association with Pop was suggested in 1989 by Regina Hackett who relating him with Jim Dine described both artists as getting “their start as 1960s Pop Artists.” Although she thought that neither artist fit the label neatly, she noted that Dine “really had more in common with West Coast Pop artists such as Wayne Thiebaud.”10 In comparing Colescott’s work with that of his Pop contemporaries, this essay will examine Colescott’s fraught relation to Pop and his voicing of difference. While his 1970s production has been most associated with Pop and his works of the 1960s engage gestural abstraction, this essay will include works that straddle this divide.

Homages and Parallels If Colescott shares the “spirit of irony” and a sense of parody that are “the special strategies of Neo-Dadaism, Pop Art and their satellite styles,” then his selfconscious Homage to Duchamp, 1973, is all the more pertinent to start as it is a purposeful reinterpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s iconic 1915–23 masterpiece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even (The Large Glass). What William Rubin described as the “intricate amatory iconography”11 of this hybrid creation was rendered in machines and devices that play on sexual puns of “lubrication” and loss of virginity, here ironically becomes a figural drawing of three men surrounding a demure naked woman wearing only a veil, stockings and high heels and a strategically-held bouquet. While the two to the left of the composition are sketchy specters, the man to her right is as fully drawn as she is and holds her

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Figure 12.1 Robert Colescott, The Green Glove Rapist, 1971. Acrylic on canvas, 78 × 59.25 in (198.12 × 150.49 cm). © 2019 Estate of Robert Colescott/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Private Collection.

girdle in his hand. There is no sense of resistance or dismay on the part of the woman, and our reception of the image may very well reflect what Jody E. Cutler describes as “private thoughts on the sexual act depicted.”12 Colescott also alludes to the Belgian surrealist René Magritte with a series of compositions from the 1970s on the theme of the Peeping Tom: The Green Glove Rapist, 1971 (figure 12.1), Nite Cream, 1974, and The Obscene Phone Call, 1978. Matthew Weseley has documented how these works demonstrate Colescott’s attraction to popular entertainment forms from newspaper cartoons, movies, as well as crime magazines and detective stories.13 In this context, Colescott’s Green Glove Rapist can be examined for its parallels with The Menaced Assassin, 1927, by Magritte who was an avid fan of the pre-First World War popular crime fiction such as the Fantômas series.

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Magritte created an enigmatic composition in a locale unspecified save the mountainous landscape outside the window at the center of the composition. Three anonymous men look through the window into a room that is the scene of a murder. A nude female victim lies on a red cushioned settee, a cloth at her throat and blood running out of her mouth. Her presumed killer, a dark-suited young man, pensively listens to the record playing on the gramophone. His suitcase is set on the floor, his hat and coat flung onto the chair, suggesting a planned escape to be thwarted by two detectives flanking the entrance holding a cudgel and a net.14 In Colescott’s The Green Glove Rapist, the setup is similar to that of the Magritte: an open window at the center of the composition, a female reclining on a bed in a room with an open entrance, and a detective waiting on the other side of the door. Instead of being in the room already, the green-gloved villain, leans into the window while espying the woman who lays seductively on the bed, seemingly asleep in a flimsy red camisole, her privates exposed, her discarded pink girdle on the bed. What is important, however, is the difference in the approaches to these tales of threat and invasion. As opposed to Magritte’s disquietingly orderly composition, where each action has a discrete space, Colescott has created a densely crowded arena where subterfuge seems impossible. The perpetrator, about to climb in out of the darkness, doesn’t realize that the woman is a police decoy with her uniform and badge hanging on the chair by the side of her bed and a loaded pistol in her hand. It is her male colleague in a hat and trench coat who stands in wait on the other side of the door, his own pistol drawn in anticipation of apprehending their perpetrator. Colescott’s painting nods to popular fiction in a comparable manner to Roy Lichtenstein’s screen shots from graphic romance novels, but he provides a terser version of the dialogue bubbles with the stenciled caption (that he composed) at the top of the painting: “The Green Glove Rapist Trapped by a Police Decoy.” Unlike the female victim in the Magritte, Colescott’s protagonist is no victim. However, he has positioned her so that she is still the object of our voyeuristic gaze. He sets up a gaze-within-a-gaze situation from the male detective to the potential rapist to the woman who looks towards the window with one eye open to the viewer who is implicated in the scene. Colescott reveals here a form of ambivalence arising from being a male of a certain age creating this work in a specific era of American culture.15 If the 1960s and 1970s marked both the generation of love, the jettisoning of sexual taboos, and the concurrent women’s movement, Colescott’s work, as we shall see reflects the ambivalence, confusion and even hostility of men as they navigated this new sexual landscape.

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Colescott’s painting reveals that relationships between the sexes are inevitably inflamed by historical attitudes based on race, as Jody Cutler reminds us.16 The artist himself noted in a lecture at the Portland Art Museum in 1980s, that The Green Glove Rapist was not totally an act of fiction but was inspired by a “true event” he remembered of a “man . . . terrorizing a certain neighborhoods in San Francisco in the 1940s.17 But, as he noted, the story had an ending that is familiar: while it was assumed the perpetrator was Black—resulting in police harassment of the Black community—when they created a decoy situation not unlike that shown in Colescott’s painting, it turned out the rapist was a Jewish man with a tan from his time in Hawaii. By the time of his trial his tan had worn off so none of the witnesses recognized him.18 In his decision to render the alleged rapist Black, Colescott trenchantly preempts and lays bare the fear and paranoia of White males about relationships between White women and Black men. He also implicates White men in their own violent and paranoiac impulses towards Black men who transgress in this matter—the most notorious case being that of Emmett Till, a young Black man who was lynched when he was alleged to have whistled at a White woman in a southern town in the 1950s. Can we say that Colescott stages the revenge of the Black male in his 1970 drawing Forbidden Fruit at Last, where the daydream of a happily grinning young Black man appears in thought bubble where White women with a slice of watermelon lounge as in a gathering in a harem? It is tempting to impose a presentist interpretation on this work in light of the continuing highly charged issues around cross-race relationships in the United States. One suspects, however, that Colescott was not specifically inured in race and gender theory in the 1970s but his instinctive comprehension of those issues can be seen in two paintings from his 1986–7 series Knowledge of the Past is the Key to the Future: Love Makes the World Go Round and Saint Sebastian. In the first, he shows a Black male and White woman in a passionate embrace, chained together at the ankles. In the distance spectral visions of the heads of a Black female (wearing an Egyptian headdress) and White male float in the sky along with large disembodied red lips—an homage to Man Ray’s 1936 Observatory Time: The Lovers (also known as The Lips). In Saint Sebastian the body of the Saint has become a perfectly bi-furcated hermaphrodite- Black male/White female—shot through with the arrows of social prescription against inter-racial relations, yet tethered to their “others”—again heads of a White male and the Black female. The skulls of previous perpetrators of these taboos pile up at the lower left.

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The Domestic Sphere and Pop Art One of the salient features of Pop Art, as Cécile Whiting noted, is that despite the overwhelming privileging of male art, in “the initial critical responses to Pop Art . . . the references to femininity and domesticity multiply.”19 Her words resound in the many paintings by Colescott of the 1960s that feature women in interiors, making pertinent the comparison, for instance, of Colescott’s 1963 Untitled, composition with Tom Wesselmann’s 1961 Great American Nude 2. Whiting writes that Wesselmann’s images from the early 1960s “expose the private sanctums of the home—the bathroom and the bedroom,” while revealing “an economy of domesticity characterized by the increased number of goods and services marketed to the female consumer and homemaker after the Second World War.”20 So too the Wesselmann features a nude blonde woman reclining on a bed, atop red and blue covers in an interior of a well-off home. The artist has collaged both a flower motif on the floor at the lower edge of the painting and a landscape view out a curtained window at the upper right. A painting is hung above a bowl of fruit sitting on a stand seen over the woman’s left shoulder, and the details of the door to the room have been rendered in black drawn lines in a white rectangle. As if to affirm the notion of “American” a swatch of white stars on a red background can be seen in the space between the woman’s torso and her left arm. Colescott also depicts a female nude in an interior replete with multiple patterning and domestic furnishings. Compared to Wesselmann’s, Colescott’s figure has more articulated facial figures and is upright, slouching in a chair at a table with a red and white-checkered tablecloth that has been displaced by the slack posture of the figure. To the left a bed with a white coverlet and a brown screen are set against a black-and-white patterned wall and a rug with large decorative emblems lies on the floor. Behind the seated figure, to the right, there is a blue chest of drawers and a view of a road leading out into an arboreal landscape seen through an elaborate window frame. A particularly revealing comparison can be made between Wesselmann’s Bathtub Collage #5, 1963 and Colescott’s Susanna and the Elders (Novelty Hotel), 1980, as they both feature women standing in bathtubs. Wesselmann’s figure is standing and drying her back with a towel while the artist focuses our attention on her pubic region. She is in actuality not merely a consumer but an entity seemingly ensnared within the trappings of prosperity where she has no real role except to be on display for the delectation of the [male] viewer. But

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the décor of the room is one of a prosperous abode with pristine fixtures and furnishings. Colescott on the other hand embraces the venality of this situation in his reinterpretation of the Old Testament tale of a woman falsely accused of seduction. While the Suzanna of the Bible rebuffs the men who spy on her at her bath, and is later vilified for rejecting their advances, Colescott’s Suzanna primps provocatively before a Black janitor and a White man dressed ready for bed and fun. She uses the semi-transparency of the shower curtain to tease the men who are now the seduced rather than the seducers. As suggested by the subtitle of the painting, this is not the staid middle-class suburban abode of the Wesselmann, but the basement accommodations of a seedy hotel. The artist himself is seen peeking in on the scene from the window at the upper left. Suzanne also is no mere cipher of unaware femaleness but a woman in charge of her sexuality. Fully aware of being observed she has taken charge of the situation. But Colescott pushes further to remind us how domesticity played out in the lives of Black women, who have both dominated the domestic arena and been victimized by it as household workers in a system that was a holdover from slavery. To this end he enlists the stock character of Aunt Jemima. There are also three paintings from 1972 that feature this character with that of Colonel Sanders. This pairing allows Colescott to remix his historical sources to comment on how Black cooking got co-opted by White commercial interests: Aunt Jemima was a fictional character created in the late nineteenth century as a character to brand a ready mixed self-rising flour for Pearl Milling Company and “Colonel” Harland Sanders was an entrepreneur who finalized his fried chicken recipe for public consumption in the 1940s.21 In Instant Chicken, for instance, the kitchen area of the restaurant is dominated by Colonel Sanders and a White maître d’, while all the cooks are Black and Aunt Jemima grins and claps her hands at the lower right. Breakthrough for the Colonel takes the metaphorical possibilities of chicken parts over the top. Under the caption that reads “Topless Chicken,” a drably attired couple, in a fried chicken franchise, clutch their red striped box and bucket as a blonde woman with large, thrusting breasts—only wearing a red apron and high heels—rings up their order. At the lower right a nude Black woman, wearing only red panties and a white tie that mirrors the black tie of the colonel at her side, presents a box of fried chicken to the viewer. But the real power struggle can be seen in Jemima’s Pancakes (plate 33) where the colonel pulls down the top of Jemima’s dress as she protests, “Ah can’t dance, Colonel.” He asserts, “Don’t hurt none.” The encounter is witnessed, rather passively, by three Black children around a table of pancakes, syrup and fried

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chicken. The younger boy comments, “No Shit.” The presence of the pancakes and syrup and the box of mix with Aunt Jemima’s image is Colescott’s way of directly addressing the commercial exploitation, and the perpetuation of an indelible stereotype. In these paintings dealing with the character of Aunt Jemima, Colescott re-directs Pop Art’s fixation with “the family-oriented space of the suburban kitchen” intensifying the dialogue around gender through the matrices of race and class. Aunt Jemima also appears in two compositions from 1977 that pair her with the character Cactus Jack, roughing it on the frontier as he pans for gold, though she is always cooking in these compositions. But the most layered version of Aunt Jemima is in Colescott’s 1978 appropriation of Willem de Kooning’s Woman I, 1952–3, one of the icons of abstract expressionism. I Gets a Thrill Too When I Sees De Koo replaces the grimacing grotesquerie of the de Kooning with a mischievous grinning avatar of Aunt Jemima. This painting is actually a riff off of a Pop Art riff, I Get a Thrill When I See Bill by Mel Ramos where the head of the woman in the de Kooning is replaced with a headshot of a contemporary 1970s model. Colescott navigates a path from the gestural distortion of the de Kooning, through the glamorized version by Ramos, imbuing his figure with some of that sexual gloss, and circles back technically to the gestural figuration of the de Kooning and the 1950s and 1960s figural trends which inspired his painting in the first place. A final example of Colescott’s dialogue with Pop domesticity comes ironically with an appropriation of Roy Lichtenstein’s 1991 wood and screenprint The Living Room from the “Interior series.” Interior I and II: Homage to Roy Lichtenstein (figure 12.2) are two small scale (16 x 18 inch) paintings in which Colescott disciplines his usual gestural style into an approximation of Lichtenstein’s pristine outline and block coloring. He inserts a Black man in version I, and then a Black woman in version II, into the interior depicted in the original print. The woman lounges casually in a pink bra and panties. The man enjoys a beverage with one foot on the coffee table, dressed in a sleeveless white shirt and brown pants. At first glance their insertion into the Lichtenstein image is curiously jarring. But there is no logical reason why they shouldn’t be there—after all, the growing presence of an affluent class among African Americans was not a strange idea in the 1990s. But as Michael Lobel points out: “Through his alterations to the image, Colescott forces us to see the literal but also figurative (read: racialized) whiteness on which the coolness and detachment of Lichtenstein’s image—and, by extension, that of Pop in general— depends.”22

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Figure 12.2. Robert Colescott, Interior II—Homage to Roy Lichtenstein, 1991. Acrylic on canvas, 16 × 18 in (40.64 × 45.72 cm). © 2019 Estate of Robert Colescott/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Private Collection.

“Product-conscious Consumer Themes” In addition to his better known deconstructions of art history, mentioned at the outset, in the 1970s Colescott also devised cheeky interpretations of imagery created to promote American consumer products such as Franco American spaghetti, Old Crow Whiskey, Mom’s Old Fashioned Root Beer, Aunt Jemima pancakes and Kentucky Fried Chicken. As noted in the compositions featuring Aunt Jemima and Colonel Sanders, however, Colecott’s depictions were relatively “hot” compared to what some have perceived as canonical Pop Art’s “cool” demeanor. This is readily seen if we compare Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola bottle paintings of the early 1960s Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962, to Colescott’s image for Mom’s Old Fashioned Root Beer, 1973. The Warhol features repetitive stenciling of green

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images of the Coke bottle (with some variations in color) in seven registers with the distinctive red script logo at the bottom of the composition. The Colescott features mugs of the foaming root beer in scenes where a bespectacled, whitehair “Mom” is seen exposing herself variously to hapless Black youth in the drawing for the painting, and to “Dad” in the painting. While there are plenty of images of nude or scantily clad women in compromising positions with foodstuffs and tobacco products in the oeuvre of Mel Ramos, in Colescott the root beer is a mere prop for the scenes of Mom cavorting with her dress hiked up, wearing no panties—just a garter belt and stockings—which only heightens the erotic effect of the image. Colescott pursues a similar path in his 1974 Rejected Idea for a Drostes Chocolate Advertisement where he sexualizes the original package image for the Dutch product, which had found a market in the United States in the early 1900s.23 Package images featured a young couple sitting on a bench in traditional Dutch costume; the boy offers the girl a cup of hot chocolate. Colescott transfers the couple from the bench onto the frozen canal where—à la the children’s story Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates—they are now skating together hand in hand. But Colescott modifies this image from the book by making the boy older and taller and the girl Black and winsome, which adds to the provocativeness of our seeing his penis emerging from his pants and pointing right at her. A seemingly more benign appropriation is found in Colescott’s gathering of a Black son, daughter and mother at the dinner table in Black Capitalism: AfroAmerican Spaghetti, 1971–3 (plate 34). Here the can of the pasta product is marginalized to a small depiction in the title sequence at the top of the painting. “Spaghetti” is the dominant graphic element. Thus, the title and captions ironically transform a popularized Italian food in the United States—that was actually created and popularized by a Frenchman in 191524—into an African American commodity. The boy extols the product, declaring “We eats it and we loves it”; his sister declares, “It is soul food”; and the mother assures us there are at least, “Two meatballs in every can.” These declarations embroil us in issues around fast food, quantitative produce and ethnicity. The reference to Black Capitalism in the title responds to the brand slogan of Franco-American that declared: “Who Can? Franco-American Can.”25 The implication is that eating this product will allow the consumers to achieve their wishes. Perhaps the earliest deployment of brand names came in Colescott’s 1970s Havana Corona of 1970 where a young Black woman in a red dress with a slit up the side displays an open box of cigars from Havana—at that point contraband due to the trade embargo with Cuba. Havana Corona became the prototype for

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several of Colescott’s compositions in the 1970s that featured a centralized female figure. They took on some of the aspect of the classic pin-up which could be observed both in Wesselmann’s pared down versions and Ramos’s detailed ones. For Colescott himself, the pin-up source emerges directly out of images he encountered as a soldier in the Second World War as seen in the image of the drum majorette in A Winning Combination of 1974 (to be discussed in the next section of this essay). Havana Corona addresses the dynamics of race in the Latin American context. While racism was expressed similarly to its manifestations in the United States, the cultural legacy of assimilation and mestijaje (mixture) often resulted in imagery that was contradictory on many levels. Colescott captures this situation by placing the disembodied hand of someone who is obviously a prosperous, upper-class White man at the margins of the composition. The hand holds a cigar, the smoke from which morphs into a “cloud” element that in turn frames a floral crown hovering over the head of the dark-skinned woman. A dandified mixed-race man is suspended at the right and to the lower left is a bubble enclosing a sexual encounter that would have produced this mixed-race individual. Again, Colescott creates a complex narrative that threatens to supplant the message of the brand. Not so with Mel Ramos’s 1965 serigraph, Tobacco Rose (Road), where an unashamedly nude woman sits on an out-sized package of Philip Morris cigarettes, which is open with five cigarettes coming out towards the viewer, as she leans on another that displays the logo for the viewer. Even though Ramos’s work also has a critical subtext,26 here, as in advertising, sex sells the product whereas in the Colescott the product is the foundation for a narrative about race and gender.

Beauty Queens, Pin-ups, and Starlets As noted above, the 1970s saw Colescott creating a series of paintings with centralized female figures who were embodied avatars of beauty both mainstream and alternative. An important precedent, Miss Black Oakland, c. 1967, manifests the graphic turn from coloristic abstraction that marks the development of Colescott’s figural style already in the 1960s, exemplifying what Kramer described as Pop Art’s “satellite manifestations.” Here Miss Black Oakland stands in her gold bikini and contestant sash smiling out at the spectator. Behind her is a more abstracted cartographic version of the colorful landscapes that appear in his paintings as of the mid-1960s. But she is practically upstaged by the White female,

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who stands in an arc of light from a flashlight held by a disembodied male hand. Her cast shadow is rather monstrous as if Colescott was commenting on the sham of appearances that we value. Even more mysteriously, the lower legs and shoes of three male figure—rendered in black and white—hang above the arch of the landscape. Colescott has eschewed usual perspective systems and reoriented our sense of order for despite their truncated presences—hand, legs and feet— and intrusive character, these male entities exude a power dynamic that makes it clear that the women in this composition are subject to their scrutiny. The work of the German-born artist Richard Lindner can also be considered one of Pop’s satellite artists particularly in his depiction of strong, physically imposing women rendered in crisp metallic effects. His work is suggestive in comparison with Colescott’s paintings of imposing women such as his Miss Black Oakland. In The Street, 1963, Lindner too places a winsome young woman at the center of his composition, surrounded by a bevy of sinister and enigmatic characters. Lindner’s woman in white is an alienated innocent among various denizens of the street: a dandy in a blue suit and hat walking with the cane but partly encased in armor, a laughing boy preternaturally in a grown up suit, a figure at the top of composition pointing what seems to be an automatic weapon at some unseen target, another suited dandy with what would be called a “Goth” companion in a blue shark skin outfit, and to the extreme right a somewhat displaced body builder looking for an audience. Colescott’s Nam Boogie of 1967 and Lindner’s Thank You of 1971 form yet another intriguing comparison. In both compositions the female figures are definitely in charge. The one in the Lindner has fulsome hair under a head hugging hat. She wears a type of uniform with a yellow jacket, purple leggings and red, yellow and blue high heeled boots with spurs. One thinks of the elaborate gear that the Beatles wore in the guise of an “alter ego band” in publicity shots for their album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was released in 1967.27 She is cueing a parrot, which squawks the fragment of an expression of gratitude painted off to its right. As in The Street, Lindner defines the space in a series of intersecting rectangular and circular shapes, and the figure is perched precariously on a red platform. In the Colescott, the female figure stands facing left, dressed in black shorts and an ocher top, which bleeds into a band to the left. The way Colescott renders her hair hints at the more “metallic” look of the Lindner but for the most part he adheres to his usual scrubby painting style. A masked combatant wearing a long green jacket—which almost seems to be more from the era of the First World War—approaches the female from behind on the right, brandishing a rifle, while a

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strangely wobbly pink and brown nude figure is seen at the lower right. The sarcastic tinge of the title relates most to the White spectral image of a figure in a coffin that floats in the upper quarter of the composition against a black background. Nam Boogie predicts the anti-Vietnam war sentiments of Colescott’s Bye, Bye Miss American Pie, 1971. The title evokes the epic popular song by Don McClean, which critiques the notion of opportunity and advancement in American society, which has colloquially been characterized as getting a slice of the American pie. Colescott places a piece of the pie—which is suspended over the central female figure—as a fig leaf element. We can think at the same time of Wesselmann’s Great American Nude, 47, 1963, where the female figure has a similar focus on her pubic area with the emphatic triangle of her red bikini pants. Allusions to patriotic sentiments can be seen in the red, white and blue elements and the arch of stars at the headboard of her circular bed. At the lower register of Colescott’s presentation of a White, blond woman as the personification of the American Dream, the Black soldier in camouflage seems to fire his rifle aimlessly at some unseen target to the right. While the protagonists in Lichtenstein paintings Whaam! in the collection of the Tate, and lithograph Crak! (both from 1963) are soldiers in the Second World War, they have their targets clearly in sight. Bolstered by Lichtenstein’s adroit appropriations from graphic stories, they are unambiguous in their actions. Colescott on the other hand goes to the heart of the matter with his deployment of images of women as vehicles of desire—specifically in the context of commentaries on war and nationalism. The dynamics of race intersect with gender and the promotion of mythic notions of what America was for its inhabitants and the world. Pin-up imagery therefore assumes a specific reference point for Colescott as he creates these female avatars of Black and White beauty. In her 2006 study, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture, Maria Elena Buszek traces the evolution of the pin-up from a Hollywood publicity vehicle, to an icon of conflicting visions of female power and display, to a propagandist image during the Second World War intended to lure men with a visualization of what they were fighting for by framing a new emancipated, scintillating image of women as they entered the work force as recruits to the war effort. Buszek records Robert Westbrook’s observation that during the Second World War “pin-ups were part of the national construction of women as ‘icons of obligation’ . . . presenting themselves as the sort of women their men would be proud to protect.”28 Such images accustomed the larger public to changes in gender roles, if only for “the duration.”29 This all has a special relevance for Colescott, who volunteered for the army right after he graduated from high school and was deployed in 1944, serving in

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France. Colescott alludes to the contradictory message of these images in his painting The Winning Combination, 1974. He sources an image with the same title that shows a drum majorette brandishing a huge American flag with flags of the Allied coalition at the end that was created by pin-up artist Rolf Armstrong.30 Colescott strips the flag of its embellishments and depicts a majorette dressed in the usual gear but wearing no pants or shorts. In another example, Café au Lait au Lit, 1974 (plate 35), the central figure is a Black woman in a short-skirted maid’s outfit holding a tray of coffee and cream, which can be viewed in juxtaposition with the maid character in pin-up images such as Gil Elvgren’s I Gave Him the Brush Off, 1947, who is topless and brandishing a duster. This particular painting by Colescott reminds us that the Black pin-up had an interesting trajectory in this story. Buszek notes that starting in 1945, publisher John H. Johnson, founder of Ebony magazine, employed pin-ups/centerfolds to cultivate an African American market for the publication. From the inaugural issue there were illustrated pin ups by E. Simms Campbell and photographs either on the cover or in the magazine.31 In addition to well-known actresses and performers such as Lena Horne and Josephine Baker, “glamorous, sexualized imagery of Black women from a range of backgrounds and professions” were also featured.32 The idea was to “demythologize” White beauty to show there was no difference if the pin-up were Black or White: the attractiveness was the same. As in the case of the pinups co-opted for the war effort, these depictions were accompanied by a story that described the ordinary aspirations of the women as well as the struggles they faced in their daily lives. This feature was not without its critics, some who thought there was an over emphasis on light-skinned women, and others who had moral objections.33 Whereas the Gil Elvgren image teases the viewer with hints at possibilities, Colescott tends to be more flat-footed in Café au Lait au Lit. The bubble inset showing a sex scene confirms that the maid will be serving the Colonel Sanders character—seen lying in bed in the background (au lit)—not only coffee but also herself. Through the title, Colescott comments on notions of Black female beauty based on skin color and most likely hair texture, it also suggests the cruder dynamics of miscegenation that produced a female who was considered more beautiful because she was the product of Black with White miscegenation (café au lait). Additionally, the moniker “Delta Cream” on the milk bottle references a brand of chocolate biscuit with a vanilla cream filling.34 As Gregory Battcock noted, the presence of Colonel Sanders in this painting (as well as the trio of 1972 paintings with Aunt Jemima discussed above) exposes the hypocrisy that

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for so long colored—if you will—the dynamics of race, socialization, economics and politics in this country.35 The figural representations of women in Colescott’s work of the 1970s are particularly embellished, set in the context of endlessly witty and exasperating puns that deconstruct popular advertising slogans and popular idiomatic sayings. They are displayed as busty, hippy, even cellulite-y characters at the service of the artist’s sardonic humor. But the question is: are they agents or vehicles? What lies behind those winsome, seemingly vacuous gazes? Are they sharp numbers masquerading as Betty Boop, or forbearing ingénues ready to get what they want à la Mae West? What the consideration of popular imagery and its reception in the wider American cultures reveals is that what is there is more to the story. Colescott’s 1976 Moonlighting in Porno: Sex on the Slope forms a fitting conclusion to this section.36 Standing against a drop cloth of a snowcapped mountain scene, an aspiring actress poses seductively for a cameraman and a director who issues instructions through a megaphone. She is dressed only in a winter hat, gloves, a scarf, stockings and red high heels. The storyline is made clear by the presence of a man standing behind her in a winter hat, jacket, red gloves and boots, but without trousers and only clad in red polka dot briefs. The nuances of the scene are highlighted by the large scrawled “Starlet” at the top of the composition. Colescott’s 1974 avatar of a Beauty Queen had laid out the workings of the beauty industry in rather graphic terms with a black-and-white story board behind the victorious contestant (who significantly is dressed in a white bikini rather than the usual evening grown worn at the conclusion of the beauty contest) where the protagonist is seen in flagrante delicto with one of the contestant judges. Colescott significantly is exposing the workings of the system which created the stars Andy Warhol celebrated such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor (Liz), who became the subjects of two of Warhol’s most famous compositions. If Warhol appropriated mass media images of the stars that effectively “unmask[ed] the . . . individuals who lay behind the public personas,” in each of these instances we are considering an image of a woman who is a “sexsymbol created by society; a woman that is everything society wishes her to be.”37

Conclusion In her study of Colescott’s iconic painting, George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook, Jody Cutler reiterates that Colescott’s deployment of advertising, brand identification and commercial

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commodities and popular cartooning—effectively “[pick] up on the productconscious consumer themes of mainstream Pop Art.”38 She furthermore notes that his career can be situated with those of “a number of mainstream artists on both coasts [who] were mining art history for art laughs in late Pop Art gestures that would become associated with postmodernism, [including] the San Francisco artist, Peter Saul.”39 While political context was not absent from the tortured contortions of Saul’s figures, or a critique of modern consumerism and media from Warhol’s appropriations, Colescott inevitably insinuated “matters of race into the (traditionally white) mainstream in such blunt form that it could not be ignored.”40 If, as Michael Lobel asserts, “Pop’s customary distance and neutrality may also function as a refusal of difference, racial and otherwise,”41 then it was Colescott’s steadfast focus on that difference and his determined attempts to celebrate the contributions that difference brings to the course of society that ultimately demonstrates Colescott’s “simultaneous proximity to and distance” from Pop Art.42

Notes 1 “Robert Colescott (1925–2009),” posted on Artforum’s home page on June 10, 2009, available at: https://www.artforum.com/news/robert-colescott-1925-2009-23074. 2 International Times, February 9, 1973, 17–20. 3 Michael Lobel, “Black to Front,” Artforum International (October 2004): 266. 4 It might be said that Colescott set a model for his younger contemporary Fred Wilson, who, through his astute interventions in museum collections, has highlighted the presence of Black figures in Western artistic conventions and unearthed heretofore ignored implications of its meaning. Both artists represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and 2003, respectively. 5 John Perreault, “Outrageous Black Pop,” Soho Weekly News, May 1, 1975, 19. 6 Hilton Kramer, “Art: ‘About Art’ Parodies, at Whitney,” New York Times, July 21, 1978, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/07/21/archives/art-about-art-parodiesat-whitney.html. 7 Ibid. 8 Lowery Stokes Sims, “Frontpage: The Postmodern Modernist: Robert Colescott (1925–2009),” Art in America (September 2009): 32. 9 Jerome Tarshis, “Made in the USA: When American Art Finally Came into Its Own,” San Francisco Focus, April 1987, 41. 10 Regina Hackett, “Two Former ’60s Pop Painters are Art Worlds Apart Today,” Seattle Post Intelligencer, May 24, 1989, P-1. 11 William S. Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 20.

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12 Jody E. Cutler, “The Paintings of Robert Colescott: Race Matters, Art and Audience” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2001), 20–2. 13 See Matthew David Weseley, “Robert Colescott’s Search for Identity” (MA thesis, University of California, Davis, 2013; revised draft, 2016), 3. 14 See at: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79267. It has been suggested that the placement of the two detective figures, flanking the doorframe in The Menaced Assassin, was inspired by the Le Mort qui tue (The Murderous Corpse), a film based on Fantômas first released in 1913. 15 See Lowery S. Sims, “Bob Colescott Aint’ Just Misbehavin’,” Artforum (March 1984): 56–60. 16 Cutler, “The Paintings of Colescott.” 17 Colescott quoted in Weseley, “Colescott’s Search for Identity,” 6. 18 Ibid., 7. 19 Cécile Whiting, A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender and Consumer Culture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1. Whiting quotes Lucy Lippard’s “Household Images in Art,” Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1976), 56, originally published in Ms, March 1973. 20 Ibid., 51, 52. 21 Aunt Jemima was first “played” by Nancy Green, a Black domestic servant born into slavery in 1834. She and her character came to fame at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and became the advertising world’s first living trademark. See Dave Tabler, “Nancy Green, the first ‘Aunt Jemima,’ ” Appalachian History, March 1, 2017, available at: http://www.appalachianhistory.net/2017/03/nancy-green-first-auntjemima.html. See also Amy Halloran, “The History of Aunt Jemima’s Mill,” Lancaster Farming (November 21, 2013), B21, available at: http://www.amyhalloran.net/ wp-content/uploads/2008/01/AuntJemima_LF_11.13.pdf. See also Maurice M. Maning, The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Richmond, VA : University of Virginia Press, 1998). 22 Lobel, “Black to Front,” 266. 23 This is documented at: http://www.droste.nl/english/about_droste/ history/1918_-_1939_droste_becomes_a_world-famous_brand_name.php. 24 See Harvey Levenstein, “The American Response to Italian Food: 1880–1930,” Food and Foodways, 1(1985): 78, available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108 0/07409710.1985.9961875. 25 Ibid. 26 We should not fail to notice the subtle reference in Ramos’s title to the 1932 novel, Tobacco Road, by Erskine Caldwell about White sharecroppers in Georgia. Even though Caldwell’s Depression era characters were poverty-stricken cotton farmers of the Depression era, Georgia’s sharecroppers were involved in tobacco production. Tobacco Road is more a designation of the road where tenant farmers lived. See Billy Bowles, “The Truth Behind ‘Tobacco Road’ Fiction,” Chicago Tribune, April 26, 1987,

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37

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available at: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1987-04-268702010074-story.html. See at: https://www.thebeatles.com/album/sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band. Maria Elena Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 224–5. Ibid., 215. See Charles G. Martignette and Louis K. Meisel, The Great American Pin-Up (Cologne: Taschen, 2002), cover image and 89. Although my original research into this image noted that it was created in 1942 to be sold to raise funds for the war effort, Martignette and Meisel date it as 1947. Other internet sources indicate 1944, 1945, and 1946. Campbell also created pin-up imagery, cartoons and advertisements that appeared in magazines such as Esquire. Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls, 250. He was also one of the important early influences on the renowned artist Romare Bearden. See Albert Murray, “The Visual Equivalent of the Blues,” in Jerald L. Melberg and Milton J. Bloch, Romare Bearden: 1970–1980, exh. cat. (Charlotte, NC : Mint Museum, 1980), 21. Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls, 250. Ibid., 251. See “Delta Creams,” posted March 10, 2010, available at: https://chillikebab. wordpress.com/2010/03/01/delta-creams/. Gregory Battcock, “New York,” Art & Artists (July 1973): 50, reprinted in Gregory Battcock, Why Art: Casual Notes on the Aesthetic of the Immediate Past (New York: Dutton, 1977), 103. One cannot help but suppose that Colescott was indulging in a malapropism, where “Porno” slips into “Provo” in reference to the well-known ski resort in Utah that is evoked in the snow-capped mountain backdrop. “The Truth Behind Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe and the Pop Art Movement,” available at the website for Catawiki Auctions: https://www.catawiki.com/ stories/3059-the-truth-behind-andy-warhol-marilyn-monroe-and-e-pop-artmovement. Jody E. Cutler, “Art Revolution: Politics and Pop in the Robert Colescott Painting George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware,” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, 8, no. 2 (Fall 2009), available at: http://www. americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2009/cutler.htm. Ibid. Ibid. Lobel, “Black to Front,” 266. Ibid.

13

Against the Heroes Revolution, Repression, and Raúl Martínez’s Cuban Pop Art Mercedes Trelles Hernández

Within the Revolution, Everything . . . The Cuban Revolution, a movement associated with socioeconomic redistribution along with massive efforts for literacy and universal healthcare, blazed trails when it came to culture. Rejecting the imposition of Soviet Socialist Realism, it established the possibility of a socialist state in which multiple aesthetics could flourish. In painting and graphic design, abstraction, New Figuration, and even Pop Art coexisted with naïve renditions of Fidel Castro and his barbudos, the bearded warriors that accompanied him in the forests of the Sierra Maestra mountain range during the guerilla war that led to the Cuban Revolution in 1959. “Within the Revolution, everything, outside the revolution, nothing,” the words uttered by Castro during his famous speech, “Words to the Intellectuals,” became the slogan for a new approach to culture that was assumed to be open and liberal. In this essay I explore the limits of the unfulfilled premise, “Within the Revolution, everything,” by studying the characteristics of Pop Art as developed by Cuban artist Raúl Martínez beginning in 1966. Martínez’s brand of Pop achieved the goals of the revolutionary government insofar as it appeared contemporary and international, while simultaneously creating a national and revolutionary imagery by repeating the faces of leaders and heroes of the Revolution, such as Castro, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and José Martí in grid structures. Yet, it also touched on the limits of the Revolution due to the artist’s sexuality. Martínez’s images shoulder the burden of secrecy and repression laid on Cuba’s gay population from the 1960s onwards.1 In his works, as I argue, the artist knowingly and sometimes unknowingly “contaminates” the 279

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heroic vision of the revolutionary leaders with femininity and homoeroticism, creating a uniquely gendered and subversive Pop.

Outside the Revolution . . . The context of Castro’s speech is often forgotten. The year was 1961, and the reason for his words were a series of meetings with writers, filmmakers, and artists at the National Library in response to the revolutionary government’s prohibition of PM , a short documentary film by Orlando Jiménez Leal and Sabá Cabrera Infante. The film, shot in black and white, shows ordinary Cubans dancing and drinking in a Havana harbor neighborhood. Its portrayal of nightlife constitutes a love letter to the city and its pleasures. Yet, the government saw the film as inappropriate, too close to the mores of dictator Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba, bent on drinking, gambling, and prostitution. Pleasure in revolutionary Cuba was suspect. Not only could it be linked—as in the case of PM —to counter-revolutionary attitudes by placing the self and its enjoyment above the cause of revolution,2 it was insistently linked to Havana’s corrupt past under Batista. A hotbed of tourism and gambling, Havana was also a thriving destination for sexual tourism, both straight and gay. After the nationalization of international property and the prohibition of gambling, prostitution became associated with imperialism and its mores. Decadent and illegal, prostitution was also inherently linked to North-South politics.3 Like sexism and racism, it was seen as a symptom of the capitalist disease. According to Castro, the removal of economic inequalities and capitalism resulted in the eradication of sexism, racism, and eventually prostitution from Cuban soil.4 But sex is not the same as prostitution.5 Moreover, issues of identity— whether one identifies with the heteronormative social and moral codes or not—are inarguably different from issues of political faith.6 However, in Castro’s Cuba, being homosexual became irrevocably associated with corruption, prostitution, and capitalism, thus marginalizing further sexual practices that were previously tolerated only if they were underground and private. In Castro’s Cuba, being gay branded you as being, at best, a second-class Communist. While in a 1965 interview with American photojournalist Lee Lockwood Castro argued that “nothing prevents a homosexual from professing revolutionary ideology and, consequently, exhibiting a correct political position,” he did reveal as much:

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And yet we would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true Revolutionary, a true Communist militant. A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant Communist should be.7

There are many accounts of how sexual orientation became problematic in the revolutionary space.8 Historicizing the widespread prejudice against homosexuals Susan Peña explains: After the 1959 Cuban revolution, the homophobia and heterosexism that already existed in Cuba became more systematized and institutionalized. Gender and sexuality explicitly entered political discourse even as vaguely worded laws increasingly targeted gender-transgressive men believed to be homosexual. Male homosexuals, in particular, were targeted under these laws, and male homosexuality became a visible and publicly discussed vice, whereas lesbianism remained unnamed and invisible.9

Indeed, Cuban laws, both pre- and post-Revolution, demonstrate how invested homosexuality was with public (in)visibility. The crime regarding homosexuality in the 1936 Penal Code was associated to “public scandal” and pederasty. Under the revolutionary Penal Code of 1999, the wording for pedophilia was dropped, but the concept of “public scandal” remained, now worded as “flaunting” homosexuality in public space.10 Prominent gay intellectuals were arrested and otherwise harassed. Reynaldo Arenas, a leading novelist, is perhaps the best-known example: several of his books were censored and he was intensely persecuted. A series of mechanisms were set in place, through neighborhood watch groups called Comités de Defensa de la Revolución (CDR) and public courts, to police and correct offenses to the Revolution, including homosexuality. Within a few years, counterrevolutionaries were sent to be reeducated at the Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (Military Units to Aid Production) known as UMAP. Described as modern-day concentration camps and highly controversial since specifics regarding their creation, processes and demise are scarce, they frequently targeted gay, lesbian and trans people.11

Cuban Pop Raúl Martínez (1927–95) was Cuba’s pre-eminent Pop artist. Born in the provincial town of Ciego de Ávila, he moved to Havana at the age of 14 and

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began a career as a maker of electric signs, later as an advertising executive at the firm Organización Técnica Publicitaria Latinoamericana (OTPLA), and finally as an avant-garde artist. In 1952 he studied for a year as a non-degree seeking student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he showed a particular interest in design, photography, and printmaking. A member of the radical group of abstract artists known as Los once (The Eleven), involved in anti-Batista activities, he continued painting in an abstract vein after 1959, although the artist found it increasingly difficult within the revolutionary climate.12 In 1966 he created 15 repeticiones de Martí, his first Pop painting.13 The existence of Cuban Pop is certainly surprising, given Cuba’s vehement anti-imperialist discourse and actions, which included, in the field of culture, the persecution of youths for their adoption of rock and roll music and hippie culture.14 Pop Art, while strongly associated with capitalism and Anglo-American culture, had several advantages to it, primarily its return to figuration. Moreover, its apparently “anti-aesthetic” treatment of art, its rejection of composition, tonal values, and fine arts mastery, aligned it with a rejection of the past. This was a useful attitude in a revolutionary culture that paid great homage to naïve and popular art forms. After the initial shock of its reception, Pop was put to work in favor of the Revolution with portrait after portrait of Fidel Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Che Guevara, as well as the common working man, encased in grid-like structures, with heavy outlines and bright colors.15 While other artists incorporated elements of Pop Art into their work, among them Antonio Fernández Reboiro, Alfredo González Rostgaard, Antonio Pérez González, Umberto Peña, and Elena Serrano, most worked exclusively as poster designers. By contrast Raúl Martínez cultivated painting, while also delving into design. The artist’s strong focus on portraiture gave his works a decidedly heroic reading, while his use of the grid and repetition created a link between his practice and that of Andy Warhol, which he acknowledged in an interview with Shifra Goldman first published in 1984: In my own work, when I had an image I wished to enrich, I used the same image repeatedly, which created a magic world of repetitions. Later I noticed that Andy Warhol had also used repetitions and I said to myself, “How stupid, how could I forget?” But the aspirations of Warhol are different. My art is pop in the sense of being popular.16

After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution (indeed, since before), Castro had become a photographic icon, and “Che” would soon follow suit. Newspapers in the United States and throughout Latin America became enthralled with the image of

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the guerrillero. A new image of masculinity, clothed in military fatigues, sporting facial hair and smoking cigars, emerged, codifying a hyper-masculine persona, insofar as the warrior was conflated with the visual attributes of the patriarch. The cigar clinched the deal, suggesting further phallic associations. Throughout the 1960s, both in Cuba and abroad, Castro became more than a politician. His image and that of his comrades, especially Korda’s famous print of Guevara wearing his trademark beret, became ubiquitous symbols of manliness and rebellion.17 The photographic referents and iconic nature of the revolutionary heroes were important in creating a new iconography for Cuban Pop. But equally important was the artist’s engagement with “cultura popular” or popular culture. The term cultura popular in Latin America carries connotations of folklore and national identity, as well as low social class, in ways that distinguish it clearly from the notion of Kitsch in Anglo-American society, identified with mass culture. By substituting one kind of popular (debased, photographic, aesthetically impoverished, industrial) for another (naïve, draftsmanly, authentic, local) Cuban Pop managed an amazing transformation, harnessing an international style for a profoundly nationalist discourse. If in Cuba’s brand, Pop occasionally still resembled advertisement, that could be overlooked, or better yet, used to advertise and export its Revolution.18 The problem is that, apart from being a well-respected artist and professional, Martínez was gay and shared his house in calle 25 of the Havana neighborhood of El Vedado with playwright Abelardo Estorino from 1964 until his death. Thus, his heroic portraits of Fidel, Che and Martí, among other revolutionary leaders, could be construed as carrying a surplus: a homoerotic charge beyond the pieties of politics and art.19

Gender Politics Martínez seems to have been aware of his sexual orientation and its effect from a very young age. In his posthumously published memoirs, Yo Publio, he recounts an incident that took place in a rural enclave of Cuba, while Martínez, then a youth, rode the bus with some of the agricultural workers, heading to the sugar mill: Another time, when I was at the window seat, a young worker sat next to me and pressed his leg against mine, while his hand landed on my thigh. He asked me what I was going to do at the Central, and I answered him I was taking food over to my father. Suddenly he addressed those near him and asked:

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—

Anyone know whose son this beautiful boy is?

—

He is Martínez’s son, the one who works in the boilers, someone answered.

After a short time laughter erupted and a voice from somewhere said: —

You want to screw him don’t you, you bugger?20

By his own account, Martínez was persecuted for his sexual preferences from 1965 onwards.21 His memoirs allude to the prejudice he experienced and the despair caused by the Cuban Revolution’s unfair treatment of homosexuals. He was removed from teaching posts at the Escuela de Arquitectura de la Universidad de La Habana and later, from the Escuela Nacional de Arte. Although he exhibited at prestigious group exhibitions in and outside Cuba, he spent close to two decades without an individual exhibition and he was similarly restricted from travel from 1967 until the 1980s.22 Throughout this period, however, he continued to paint images of Martí, Castro, and Guevara, as well as to design posters— among them the iconic poster for the film Lucía—and graphic materials, produce theater set designs, all while working as book designer for the newly created Instituto Cubano del Libro, from 1967 to 1979.23 This situation is baffling. How can an artist be both persecuted and commissioned pieces by the government officials, all while working for a government run institution? As Armando Armengol explains: Thus existed certain sheltered spaces, especially among cultural institutions like La Casa de las Américas, ICAIC and the National Ballet. They were considered a “cage aux folles,” and also forbidden places . . . The respected homosexual exerted a double role: his impunity was at once a privilege and a taunt.24

According to Armengol, sexual preferences in Cuba became a way to elicit extraordinarily visible political faith for the revolutionary government. Homosexuals achieved a certain prominence only if they developed a particularly active revolutionary persona. Political passivity, when conflated with homosexuality, was met with severe consequences. Within this context, Martínez’s abrupt turn from abstraction and collage to heroic (Pop) figuration takes on a new meaning. Pop’s figurative nature allowed him to declare an active political faith in the heroes of the Revolution that shielded him from even greater persecution. At the same time, the espousal of this strong revolutionary iconography produced the possibility of creating difference inside the Revolution’s heteronormative discourse. Martínez’s brand of Pop not only shouldered the burden of secrecy and repression placed on homosexuals in Cuba, but subverted the hyper-masculine construction of the revolutionary leaders. This was accomplished in several ways in

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his painting and poster work. Among the artist’s strategies was the use of repetition as a tool to foster ambiguity, the implication of the leaders and the heroic peasants in the feminine sphere, be it by colors and decorative elements widely associated with the domestic and, finally, by the metonymic association of Revolutionary leaders and everyday Cubans, in works where gay couples are placed next to straight couples, creating a queering of sorts, that breaks the homophobic cycle of repression and implicates all Cubans in a homosocial environment. Martínez’s first Pop canvas was 15 repeticiones de Martí, 1966 (figure 13.1), and it declares its political commitment by working with one of the most revered figures in Cuban history, poet and essay writer José Martí, dubbed “the Apostle of Independence” for his role in the nineteenth-century struggle to free Cuba from Spain. In a canvas divided into fifteen rectangles, a simplified outline of Martí’s recognizable face rendered in thick black lines is repeated over color fields varying from purple to green, from blue to red and yellow, creating a

Figure 13.1 Raúl Martínez, 15 repeticiones de Martí (15 Repetitions of Martí), 1966. Oil on canvas, 77 × 88 in (198.5 × 222.5 cm). Collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana, Cuba.

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coloristic effect similar to stained glass windows. In each of the Martí heads, the figure’s trademark handlebar mustache and small goatee is exaggerated until the mustache is conflated with the mouth. Although the painting uses the grid as a foundation for its structure, the Martí heads are drawn in a strong, wavering outline, a simplified rendition that makes reference to the popular images and placards that could be seen throughout Cuba. Placed between the remnants of an abstract style, the allusion to Pop Art and to naïve, popular art, the painting removes Martí from the field of history and the past and places him squarely in the terrain both of contemporary art and of the people by its relentless flattening of the image. As art historian Corina Matamoros has stated: The absolute flatness, absence of perspective, the arbitrariness and stridency of the colors, mixture of images of varying stature, apparent irregularity and imperfections, element of kitsch, and similarity to posters and street murals painted by amateurs, among other features, made these paintings a new visual experience.25

This new type of visual phenomenon was dubbed Cuban Pop Art, and while accepted in the press as a new “art of the everyday,”26 the works were not as popular as Martínez would have liked. In an interview, years later, Martínez recalled: The work was praised, but also criticized, rejected, and I received many negative comments that put a stop to my creativity and my joyful impulse of which, for the first time in my life, I was completely proud. These paintings were not lucky enough to be exhibited as I would have liked and were only shown by themselves in collective shows.27

It is tempting to think that the difficulty resided exclusively in the break with academic tradition: the arbitrary use of color, the simplified outlines. Yet, the repetition itself must have bothered Cuban audiences, used to the idea of Martí as an icon, father of the homeland (padre de la patria). In Martínez’s hands, the grid, that instrument of order and sameness wielded by Warhol to avoid composition and flatten artworks, becomes a tool for ambiguation and calls forth Roland Barthes’s assessment that, “Repetition of the portrait induces an adulteration of the person (a notion simultaneously civic, moral, psychological, and of course, historical).”28 Martí, the iconic figure, is transformed into a silent head, the trademark handlebar mustache and goatee becoming an irregular shape, somewhere between a gigantic mouth, a mustache, and a gag. A quote from the artist seems to point out in the direction of dissimulation, ambiguity, and the play of difference in his choice of aesthetic: “I chose popular

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art because of its spontaneous beauty and the sincerity of its clumsiness. I too was clumsy in this new suit to which I could not adjust.”29 Martínez’s works acted in part as a “suit” to cover up desires and attitudes that were no longer (and perhaps never were) permissible in Cuba. Several authors concur that the problem regarding homosexuality in Castro’s Cuba had to do with visibility and signs of virility and effeminacy. In a chauvinist, traditional culture, homosexuality is an issue of performativity. However, this is not a social performance of gender, but rather a sexual performance of penetration.30 Brad Epps, studying the work of Arenas, summarizes it nicely: The maricón, very much more than the “active,” “insertive,” “masculine-acting” bugarrón is here the subject in question. The latter indeed is a figure who, as Roger Lancaster puts it, is not or not necessarily, “labeled” or “stigmatized” as homosexual, and who may even find his masculinity reinforced by penetrating other men. This is a crucial point, pointing to a difference between homosexuality as generally understood and experienced in, on the one hand, North America and Western Europe and, on the other hand, Latin America and the Middle East. It also points to a difference between a homosexuality of identity, regardless of the position therein assumed, and a homosexuality of performance and appearance, in which positionality is the dominant, or more visible, mark.31

Persecution of homosexuals in Cuba was based on the notion of “public scandal” and being homosexual became a matter of becoming invisible or, at any rate, unrecognizable in order to avoid persecution. Martínez did not stop with Martí, but rather began to portray the contemporary figures—Fidel Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, Ernesto “Che” Guevara—that embodied the new Cuba. The painting 9 repeticiones de Fidel y micrófonos, 1968 (plate 36) exemplifies how Pop could and did work for Cuba. In this painting the likeness of Castro is repeated 9 times on a grid, rendered in the heavy outline and rough wavering line familiar from 15 repeticiones de Martí. Unlike the evocation of mechanical reproduction by Warhol’s silkscreened images, Martínez’s likenesses are intensely handcrafted. In each square, Castro appears with his mouth wide open, dressed in his signature military cap. Behind him is a red triangle similar to the one on the Cuban flag, and a series of brightly colored horizontal lines. In the lower edge of each of the grid’s squares, four long elements—microphones which, in their softness, resemble stems with bulbs at their ends—frame the figure. Of all the nine renditions of Castro, the center face seems darker and larger than the rest, the mouth bigger, a dark point absorbing the viewer’s attention.

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Garishly colored in red, brown, olive green, mustard, purple, and blue, this image definitively delivers on the promise of an art that is both sophisticated—it is unmistakably cognizant of the Pop language—and distinctly Cuban. Moreover, it glorifies the leader of the Revolution, unrelentingly confronting the viewer with his image. And yet, there is something disturbing about the piece. Perhaps it is the coloring which startles. Or it could be the fact that the flag, with which Castro’s image is conflated in each square, does not have the white star floating in the center, and the stripes coloring has changed (the Cuban flag, a symbol of independence, is an image that was seldom, if ever, toyed with). The image feels claustrophobic; the stems/microphones make this feeling more intense. The viewer feels hemmed in by the repetition of that open mouth, as the face of Castro is cramped between the outlines of the square, the triangle, the stripes. The repetition of the image and the subtle differences in its rendition create a sense of instability, while the open mouth becomes a sign to be deciphered. 9 repeticiones de Fidel y micrófonos constitutes a homage to naïve painting and a final rejection of the sophisticated abstraction Martínez had espoused, yet the painting also imbues the figure of Castro with the formal values of his draftsmanship: clumsiness and torpidity. Furthermore, the grid, which at first sight appears to be deriving directly from Warhol’s pursuit of multiplicity and planarity, takes on a new context if we look at a photograph of Martínez in his studio-home in Old Havana taken by Iván Cañas (figure 13.2). The painting, placed on the floor, appears to continue the patterns of the multicolored tiles of the apartment. These tiles—staples of Caribbean architecture known as losas hidráulicas—have the same type of garish coloring that marks 9 repeticiones de Fidel. Graceless, caged heads of Castro are thus rendered in colors reminiscent of a domestic interior, the space least associated with public life and the Revolution due to its de facto identification with femininity. The grid, at first associated by us with Warhol’s strategy for abstraction and planarity, can also be traced to the domestic sphere.32 The heroes of the Revolution—the often photographed and definitively iconic Fidel and Che—were not the only portraits to appear in Martínez’s work. An avid photographer, Martínez took countless pictures of guajiros (peasants). The types that appear in many of his works are part of a repertoire of images culled from his photographic practice and repeated with variations in color and composition. These figures are at once types and, as is evident from the photos, the objects of the author’s homoerotic gaze. These photographs were later used as the basis for figures in his paintings, which strove to elevate the everyday man to the status of revolutionary hero.33 His poster ¡Van!, 1970, is a good example.

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Figure 13.2 Raúl in his home-studio at work on the poster Cuba, 1969. Photograph by Iván Cañas. Courtesy of the artist and the Iván Cañas Archive.

¡Van!, 1970 (plate 37), forms part of a large output of silkscreen posters created by Martínez and others during the first fifteen years after the Cuban revolution. Revolutionary governmental agencies such as the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, Instituto Cubano del Libro, and Casa de las Américas, turned to the silkscreen poster—a form used primarily for advertising films and products prior to the Revolution—to give publicity to a dramatically different set of experiences: rallies, book presentations, films, etc. that promoted the agenda of the revolutionary regime. ¡Van! was made to encourage Cubans to participate in the famous ten million zafra, an initiative to harvest ten million tons of sugar meant to be exchanged for fuel and other goods with the Soviets. Virtually all of the Cuban population was mobilized to help achieve this goal and several artists worked on billboards and

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posters to promote the effort. Martínez’s poster uses the classic format of heading and image but keeps the lettering to a minimum. In the heading, the year 1970 is cut out of a lime green ground. Both heading and image are outlined in a bright pink and the image features a smiling young man wearing the Cuban peasant’s traditional broad brimmed hat. Discernible only from the head up, his face is flanked by a hand holding a red machete, the principal instrument for cane cutting. All around him, cane stalks in variations of blue and green form a tapestry that both hides and frames him. On the brim of the guajiro’s hat is written van between exclamation points. The word is a reference to the slogan, “Los 10 millones van” (The 10 million are a go), and the exclamation points turn the word both into a celebration and an imperative. As a propaganda poster, ¡Van! is quite successful. It succinctly models the correct action for the Cuban citizen in this heroic zafra. Designed in the Pop style—bright, unmodulated color, simple figuration, strong outlines—the poster is surprising in its predilection for the color pink and the inexplicable inclusion of daisies among the cane stalks. Although flowers and colors need not necessarily be gender coded, countless reports from revolutionary Cuba, from the 1960s up until the 1980s, emphasize that certain manners of dressing, certain colors, certain attitudes were sure to alert authorities to the “deviants” in their midst. Susan Peña writes: Long hair, tight pants, colorful shirts, so called effeminate mannerisms, “inappropriate clothing,” and “extravagant hairstyles” were seen as visible markers of male homosexuality. Such visible markers not only facilitated enforcement of homosexual repression; more broadly, visibility and gender transgressions themselves constituted a central part of the problem identified by the revolution.34

The choices made by Martínez, from the color pink to the inclusion of the flowers decorating the peasant and the occlusion of the heroic body in favor of the face and the machete, which symbolize work but in no way glorify heroic labor, seem deliberate ways of “flaunting” what was seen as effeminate and infiltrating with it the space of the Revolution.35 As the 1960s progressed Martínez diversified his compositions, increasingly including everyday workers into silkscreens and paintings in which revolutionary Cuban heroes also appeared. Perhaps the biggest example of such nonhierarchical comingling from this period, ironically painted for the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the same organization that persecuted homosexuals and sent them to the UMAP concentration camps, is the painting Isla 70, 1970

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(plate 38). Painted on the same year of the heroic zafra, this billboard-sized work features portraits of Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Cienfuegos, Castro, Guevara, and Martí along with portraits of peasants, young men and women organized in an implied grid structure. Martínez himself appears smiling left of the painting’s center. All figures are portrayed from the waist up in strong, sure outlines that convey with simplicity their features over a bright foliate background suggestive of sugarcane fields. Mango trees and tropical vegetation with an almost artnouveau feel also compose the background, which is dotted with simplified renditions of daisies and hibiscuses on the lower half. Although most of the portraits are of men, five women are included in the bottom two-thirds of this picture. Cats, monkeys, and a few babies complete the ensemble. Letters spelling Isla, C and F dot the canvas, and the CDR logo appears at bottom. The immense (78.74 x 177.55 in, 200 x 451 cm) size of this canvas announces it as an official commission, as does the CDR logo. The euphoric combination of both the heroes of the Cuban Revolution and the ordinary men and women needed for the zafra of the 10 million tons speaks of an increasing inflection of Cuban political culture by collectivization. As in the poster previously discussed, Martínez displays a strong outline, no longer wavering and ungainly. The figures are not distorted, except for their unnatural coloring in various shades of green, while the background is rendered in shades of orange, yellow, and pink. The painting is rife with hints of the coded homoerotic. Throughout there is a strong emphasis placed on male faces, both of heroes, heroic peasants, and urban youths. In the context of the 10 million-ton zafra for which both men and women were mobilized to the countryside, but which required a predominantly male workforce in order to achieve the goal, this male-centered gaze would seem a reasonable bias. Yet some men, like the shirtless young boy to the left of Martínez, appear far from heroic. The figure, a young man, wears a cap but no shirt. His physique is soft, his pose, turning for a last look, is alluring. Another peasant at the extreme right-hand side of the canvas, sports the upturned machete of the ¡Van! silkscreen, and again is given a pink hat, an unusual and controversial choice, as previously discussed. Subtle clues throughout the painting point to a different view of sexuality. It is not just young shirtless men and pink hats, but rather, the placing side by side, on the middle register of the painting, of a heterosexual couple and two male torsos in close proximity. Referencing perhaps same-sex love representations in classical antiquities, one of these men is featured topless and bearded as he stands behind the pink-haired head of a young man. On the other side of the canvas, to the left, two women clothed in orange appear in suggestive proximity, as one’s hand is resting on the

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shoulder of the other. Young men in pensive poses, appear to the extreme right and left. They use their hand to support their chin in a gesture that highlights their mouths. One man consumes a decidedly phallic pink ice cream cone, while another, a James Dean look-alike, demurely and suggestively dangles a lighted cigarette from his lips. In the foliage just above them, a hidden phallic pattern is interspersed among leaves and cane stalks and becomes camouflaged by the intensely decorative background. My close reading of this major iconic work by Martínez may seem exaggerated. And yet, Cuban society’s and the Revolution’s mistrust and persecution of any display of same-sex affection, of any deviance from the hyper-masculine parameters of gender, validate this reading. It is because visibility had to reflect heteronormativity that choices such as these by Martínez become suspicious, ambiguating the image of the heroic leaders. Lost in the jungle of sugar canes and flowers, included in the idealistic “us” of the heroic zafra, Castro, Guevara, Cienfuegos . . . even Martí become enmeshed in the sexual desires of a population that cannot be reduced to the heterosexual couple and includes people like Martínez, emphatically located in the upper left quadrant. His very presence is at once an affirmation of Cuba’s policy that all citizens should participate in the heroic harvest, and an infiltration of gay sexuality in the sphere of revolutionary politics. Representations of potentially gay and lesbian Cubans in Isla 70 appear not as “scandal” but as an open secret, something that LGBTQI populations would identify and read immediately, as well as an inclusion as part of a collective, plural Cuba.

Conclusion Martínez continued making paintings and posters throughout the 1970s and into the 1990s, but their distinct Pop inflection began to fade. While the iconographic formula became fixed—the heroes of the revolution and the anonymous men representing the heroic revolutionary effort became staples— formal arsenal began to change. The grid, with its emphasis on abstraction and flatness, and the repetition of the portraits, with its insinuation of ambiguity gave way to assemblies of portraits of individuals rendered with strong tonal variations reminiscent of the light gradations of black-and-white photographs. Towards the end of his career, the artist returned to the figure of Martí, recuperating the iconic mustache as a gag, obscuring the poet’s mouth, an allusion to Martínez’s own continued need for silence in order to avoid persecution.

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(In)visibility and silence were the conditions that allowed homosexual artists to continue to work in and for the Cuban Revolution. In the case of Martínez, his choice of Pop Art opened the door for a contemporary rendition of the heroes of the Revolution, who had themselves achieved iconic status long before the artist began to paint them. But Martínez’s choices in draftsmanship, palette, and subjects, and Cuban society’s homophobia, repression, and double standards allowed him at once to praise the heroes and work against them. His work, which has long been accepted as a “revolutionary” type of Pop Art, should be carefully analyzed and its radicality reframed in light of his sexuality and the repression he suffered because of it.

Notes 1 “Gay” and “LGBTQI” are the terms currently used both in social and academic discourse. Throughout this essay, you will see that these terms are interspersed with the term “homosexuality,” which was the one used in the 1960s. While homosexuality was a term that led to the marginalization and criminalization of desire and sexual practices, I find that terms like gay and LGBTQI do not adequately reflect the emphasis on sexual positioning and penetration that haunted male same-sex desire and produced terms that were vulgar and demeaning, but also understood within heteronormative society. A history of LGBTQI art in Latin America needs to take into account this persistent emphasis on sexual mechanics and appearance of the feminine or the masculine in social space. 2 Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba” (1966), available at: http://ri.ues.edu.sv/9704/1/Revista_La_Universidad_12bc14.pdf. 3 For the different treatment of prostitution, dubbed a “social injury,” and the often unsuccessful solution of prostitutes’ reeducation in Cuba, see Rosa del Olmo, “The Cuban Revolution and the Struggle against Prostitution,” Crime and Social Justice, no. 12, Articles on Women (Winter 1979): 33–40. 4 Issues of race and gender appeared early on in the Revolution. See Devyn Spence Benson, Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC : University of North Carolina Press, 2015) and also Michelle Chase, Revolution Within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952–1962 (Chapel Hill, NC : University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 5 The criminalization of homosexuality lent itself to an association between homosexual sex and prostitution. This was the case not only in Cuba, but also in the United States and elsewhere. See Kerwin Kaye, “Male Prostitution in the Twentieth Century : Pseudohomosexuals, Hoodlum Homosexuals and Exploited Teens,” Journal of Homosexuality (February 2003): 1–78.

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6 According to Krissie Butler, author of “Deconstructing an Icon: Fidel Castro and Revolutionary Masculinity” (PhD diss., University of Kentucky, 2012), masculinity and its definition became central to ideas of revolutionary faith through the figure of Fidel and his stressed, hyper-masculine persona. 7 Lee Lockwood quoted in Rafael Ocasio, “Gays and the Cuban Revolution: The Case of Reinaldo Arenas,” Latin American Perspectives, 29, no. 2 Gender, Sexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Latin America (March 2002): 82 (1965 quote). 8 Interestingly, most analyses of the Revolution’s persecution of homosexuals have focused on literary figures or the case of the Mariel boatlift. Critical interest in the subject of the repression of homosexuals was sparked by the release of Conducta impropia (1983), a documentary by Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal but the literature throughout the 1980s remained deeply politicized. 9 Susan Peña, “ ‘Obvious Gays’ and the State Gaze: Cuban Gay Visibility and U.S. Immigration Policy during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 16, no. 3, Latin American Sexualities (September 2007): 487. 10 Ibid., 282–314. 11 Lourdes Argüelles and B. Ruby Rich, “Homosexuality, Homophobia and Revolution: Notes toward an Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience, Part 1,” Signs, 9, no.4 (Summer 1984): 683–99. 12 For an excellent account of how abstraction commingled with politics in Batista’s Cuba, see Abigail Mc Ewen, Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 13 The new style of painting was exhibited immediately. In fact, it was included in an international group show, Pittura cubana contemporanea at the Galeria due Mondi in November of 1966. 14 Frank Jack Daniel, “Cuba’s Journey from Rock Labor Brigades to the Rolling Stones,” available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-rollingstones/cubas-journeyfrom-rock-labor-brigades-to-the-rolling-stones-idUSKCN0WQ2OD. 15 Abelardo Estorino, “El latido del hombre que conozco,” in Corina Matamoros, Raúl Martínez: La gran familia (La Habana: Ediciones Vanguardia Cubana, 2012). Matamoros, the author of this handsomely illustrated monograph on Martínez also mentions a controversial reception of Martínez’s Pop paintings, although the articles that were printed on his work were all positive. 16 “Painters into Poster Makers: A Conversation with Two Cuban Artists,” reprinted from Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, 3 (1984), in Shifra Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1994), 149. 17 Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War and the Making of a New Left (London: Verso, 1993), and Arpad A. Busson Foundation (ed.), Cuba in Revolution (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2013).

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18 The distinction of how the term cultura popular is understood in Latin America vis-à-vis the idea of popular culture in Anglo-American culture, which invokes ideas of media and commerce is key to understanding the difference and also the success of Cuban Pop. I explore this issue further in my dissertation, “The Contested Object: Pop Art in Latin America, 1964–1974” (Harvard University, 2002). 19 The ample literature on Andy Warhol’s representation of homosexuality and homoeroticism throws light on how subject matter could work simultaneously in two spheres: the sphere of mass culture and the sphere of gay culture and how both intersected through camp sensibility. To my knowledge, there is no written testament of an awareness of a similar double-reading in Raúl Martínez’s works, but his persistent sense that his art was “censored” and the fact that Martínez belonged to a community of well-known homosexuals who sought to survive and continue producing within the Revolution suggests that just such a double-reading existed in Cuba. 20 Translation from Spanish is mine. Raúl Martínez, Yo Publio: Confesiones de Raúl Martínez (La Habana: Arte Cubano editories, 2007), 56. The existence of this book of confessions, mostly of a sexual nature, is baffling considering the persecution homosexuals were subjected to during the 1960s and 1970s and again during the 1990s, when homosexuals and drug addicts infected with the HIV virus were placed in confined medical facilities known as Sidatorios. Yo Publio was published after Martínez’s death in 1995. 21 In his memoirs, he recounts how his two-week trip to Montreal as part of the official delegation for the Cuban Pavilion of Expo ’67 was cut short, alluding to his sexuality as the cause for this. Another incident recounts his desperate visit to René Portocarrero and Raúl Milián, a gay couple who enjoyed great respect in the Revolutionary regime, to inquire why homosexuals were persecuted. 22 While the Revolution created several new institutions for art and culture, it also retained traditional institutions like the National Museum of Fine Arts and some art galleries. It was common practice for artists to have individual exhibitions. 23 Matamoros, Raúl Martínez. 24 Alejandro Armengol, “El clóset político,” July 23, 2006, translation from Spanish by the author; available at: http://www.cuadernodecuba.net/2006/07/el-closet-politico. html. 25 Matamoros, Raúl Martínez, 221. 26 Reinaldo González, “Pop art cubano,” Bohemia (February 3, 1967) año 59, no. 5. 27 “Raúl por dentro” en Nosotros (La Habana: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1988), n.p. 28 Roland Barthes, “That Old Thing Art . . .,” in Paul Taylor (ed.), Post-Pop Art (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1989). 29 Martínez, Yo Publio, 231–83.

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30 Judith Butler’s seminal study Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990) established a difference between sex and gender, analyzing gender as a performative act. However, the performativity alluded to both by Brad Epps and Roger Lancaster is not social but sexual and is framed within a “machista” society. The matter here is about active/insertion of the penis and passive/reception of the penis during sexual intercourse. The receptive partner is marked in the social sphere, regardless of whether the sexual act is performed in private, while the active partner retains the gender privileges of maleness. 31 Brad Epps, “Proper Conduct: Reinaldo Arenas, Fidel Castro, and the Politics of Homosexuality,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 6, no. 2 (October 1995): 233. Martínez has a similar analysis on the validity of insertive homosexual practices and the stigmatizing of passive positions in Cuba. See Yo Publio, 56–7. 32 While Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, and Oldenburg were interested in the oppositionality between high culture and manufactured or commercial culture, the type of kitsch in Latin American Pop is more in tune with the opposition between the culturally significant and the sentimental, private, and the feminine. The term used in Spanish for this type of kitsch is “cursi,” the translation of this term in English favors “camp,” a term that invokes a gendered and playfully challenging sense of culture. See Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Lo cursi y otros ensayos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1943), and Carlos Monsiváis, Los rituales del caos (Biblioteca Era, 2006). 33 Matamoros’s monograph includes a great many of Martínez’s photographs, including adulterated images in which he hand-colors or draws over the photographic print. Clearly, they were central to his working process. 34 Peña, “ ‘Obvious Gays’ and the State Gaze,” 487. 35 It is possible to draw a parallel between Martínez’s feminization of the “guajiro,” an archetypically masculine figure, and Warhol’s feminization of Elvis, as discussed by Richard Meyer in, “Warhol’s Clones,” Yale Journal of Criticism, 7, no. 1 (1994): 79–109.

14

Myriam Bat-Yosef World Citizen, Artist of the Pop Era Sarah Wilson

Why do we know so little of Myriam Bat-Yosef, the most important female Israeli artist of the Pop era?1 Issues of identity and sexuality feature constantly in her work.2 She exhibited internationally from Reykjavik to Tokyo; she had two shows at Arturo Schwarz’s famous Dada/surrealist gallery in Milan; she participated in feminist art events in Los Angeles. Above all, in 1971, she conceived Total Art, a Pop Gesamtkunstwerk inside and outside the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Painter, performer, and installation artist, she was also a lover, wife, and mother. Of Lithuanian-Jewish descent, she was close to the family of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. An émigré in Paris she would repudiate a national passport, participating in Garry Davis’s short-lived “World Citizens” movement. She continues the lineage of women surrealist artists: “Valentine Hugo, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Unica Zürn, Jane Graverol, Toyen, Bona, Manina, Myriam Bat-Yosef,” to quote an admiring critic.3 She traverses the style-transformations of the 1960s and 1970s, where psychic automatism spills into the age of Pop Art and psychedelia; she is not the only post-surrealist woman artist to move later into esoteric art.4 Her art set out to rhyme the most powerful moments of human existence: its rites of passage. Few are the women artists who have consciously orchestrated their later phase of life or staged a ritual of death and transcendence. Born in Berlin to émigré parents, she moved with the family to Jaffa, Palestine in 1934. Her father Yosef Hellerman lectured on Zionism and was a member of the Haganah; he died in 1936, aged 34. The young Marion Hellerman became Myriam. Her mother, Godda Promnick, took her to Paris where Myriam learned French at school. The couple moved back to Tel Aviv at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. The next year, Myriam started courses at the Tel Aviv 297

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Art Academy and in 1942 adopted the name Bat-Yosef (daughter of Joseph). Two years compulsory military service preceded her escape to Paris and the École des Beaux-Arts where, unregistered, she studied for a couple more years before her first solo show at the Israeli Club in 1955. The abstract geometric artist Yaacov Agam, the sculptor Dani Karavan, and figurative painter Avigdor Arikha, were among the guests. She left for Florence in 1956, enrolling for a year at the art academy (partly to have a student visa), fell in love with the Icelandic painter Ferro (born Guðmundur Guðmundsson), and at the 1956 Venice Biennale discovered the international art world with Ferro and artist JeanJacques Lebel. She also met the critic Alain Jouffroy and surrealist painter Roberto Matta. Joint shows with Ferro in Milan and in Rome followed. The couple married back in Paris, enabling Myriam to avoid army call-up at the crucial moment of the Suez crisis in the Middle East. She followed Ferro to Iceland, discovering its dramatic landscape, the Northern lights and resonances with her own Northern ancestry. Reciprocally, she would introduce Ferro to Israel, where he exhibited at the important museums in Bezalel, Tel Aviv, and Haifa in 1958. In Paris in the late 1950s, they became members of the surrealist group involving Lebel, Jouffroy and a spectrum of talented women. The transition to 1960s Pop in Paris took place via surrealism, initiated with Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed, 1955, installed in the International SuRrealist Exhibition (EROS) of 1959. Ileana Sonnabend brought Pop masters to Paris through the early 1960s, working with her ex-partner Leo Castelli, based in New York: Rauschenberg, Dine, Warhol, Rosenquist, Chamberlain, Lichtenstein.5 All were visible in the capital prior to Rauschenberg’s shocking Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale in 1964.6 In 1965, Pop Por Pop Corn Corny, demonstrated the Parisian take on the Surrealism-to-Pop transition at the Galerie Jean Lacarde, including the late work of Salvador Dali. The competing Nouveau Réalisme movement, neo-Dada in its relationship to Duchamp, Johns and Rauschenberg, critiqued the transformation of everyday life including the Americanization of French culture, rather than celebrating American Pop. It boasted FrancoAmerican Niki de Saint Phalle as a highly visible artist, friend and collaborator with Johns and Rauschenberg in Paris, including for her performances of Tirs or “shoot-outs.”7 Pierre Restany, the movement’s critic, prefaced Axell’s nudes in 1969, but reproached Chryssa Romanos for her use of collage instead of found objects, in her critique of consumerism and the violence of the Cold War era.8 In general, the impact of Pop per se was very much a boys’ affair. Following the show Bande dessinée et figuration narrative, 1967, which included James Rosenquist’s militarized F-111 painting installation, the Narrative Figuration artists’

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responses—including Erró’s (Ferro’s new name)—focused on appropriation, comics-based parody, and a critical, anti-American détournement.9 Erró took his collage-based painting into realms of both Cold War critique and a “commodity delirium.” All were informed by left-wing politics and a revolutionary romanticism. These artists had little space or time for women—except as models—in a context fed by new theories of desire and “libidinal” economies.10 Can one argue here for a veritable gender divide? Late surrealism seemed more sympathetic to female creativity, as featured in the journal Le Surréalisme même, 1956–9. Its premises anticipated the discourses around écriture féminine: an automatism-based “female” drawing or painting embraced interiority, spontaneity, experimentation and elaboration, like a jazz improvisation. BatYosef felt liberated from any vestiges of her academic training in this milieu. The artists Manina, wife of critic Alain Jouffroy, and above all Bona, wife of the poet André Pieyre de Mandiargues would become close friends, as would Unica Zürn, the companion of Hans Bellmer, who like Myriam, was born in Berlin. Zürn’s linguistic anagrams in their rapport with the tangled female limbs of Hans Bellmer’s drawings, may be seen as fascinating precursors to Bat-Yosef ’s installation and dance-piece, Erixymaque.11 It was in the context of the Algerian war that Lebel and Erró branched out from painting and collage and turned to happenings.12 Myriam participated in the events and exhibitions named Anti-procès (Paris, Venice, and Milan, 1960). Lebel’s happenings continued with Pour conjurer l’esprit de catastrophe (To Conjure Away the Spirit of Catastrophe), Paris, 1962 and 1963. Its political parodies included Erró as “sex priest,” with two naked women wearing Khrushchev and Kennedy masks, strangling each other in a bath of blood: here, the legacy of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty overrode Allan Kaprow’s claims as originator of the genre.13 Lebel’s organizing role for events at the American Art Center in Paris at this time was important. As violence in Algeria and Indochina was followed by violence in Vietnam, the cult of Sade as a political revolutionary became an alibi, subtending many artists’ thoughts and actions. Bat-Yosef found 1962 a stressful year, as the single mother of 2-year-old Tura. By 1963, Erró was engaging with Carolee Schneemann in New York, photographing her, naked and paint-smeared, for Eye-Body: 36 Transformative Actions.14 In May 1964, at the Festival of Free Expression, where Bat-Yosef exhibited, Schneemann, her rival in Erró’s affections, staged Meat Joy. Innocently orgiastic, with dead chicken, fish, and pop songs—above all filmed—it was Schneemann’s work which has passed into history.15 Later in 1964, for Gold Water, an anti-Vietnam happening, focusing on the belligerent US Republican

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Barry Goldwater, Erró with a tank of colored water on his back peed his “golden shower” through a metal pipe into various female mouths. Simulated sex acts and feminization signified political humiliation: women participants were abject here, in contrast with the easy to and fro of male and female in Meat Joy. Finally, in response to Erró’s ultimatum to be a painter or his wife, Bat-Yosef chose her art. The couple divorced. An alternative path beckoned towards self-renewal. From this point, her Israeli identity became an explicit feature of the work. Hebrew characters featured in her post-surrealist, proto-psychedelic drawings exhibited at the Sydow Gallery in Frankfurt: the first show in postwar West Germany by an Israeli artist. “The delusions of an inner apocalypse become visible” . . . “a purely feminine automatism,” declared Alain Jouffroy in the catalogue. His vocabulary strives for an inner/outer relationship between a psyche, perceived as feminine, and Bat-Yosef ’s forms, her mixed techniques on canvas.16 He described her work as a “rose window.” More significantly, however, “Orientalism” became an issue: Bat-Yosef ’s oriental motifs, with paisley swirls, signaled the Indian interests of the international hippy movement: since 1962, she had been reading Krishnamurti. Yet, they also recall (with perhaps, a hint, of Kandinsky) the book of Pushkin’s fairy tales illustrated, surely, by Ivan Bilibin around 1900 and read to the young Myriam by her Lithuanian grandfather. She now extended her practice to the painting of objects. Night Table was exhibited with thirty-eight delicate works on paper in her first major Paris show at the Galerie Garnelle in 1964. Bat-Yosef enjoyed two moments of triumph within what one could call the Pop period: one in 1965, one in 1971. Arturo Schwarz’s gallery was the mecca of European post-Dada and Pop Art in 1965.17 Her multi-colored psychedelic style was used literally to coat—to cover up—Schwarz’s iconic ready-mades re-edited: Duchamp’s coffee grinder, Man Ray’s toothed iron or Dali’s telephone. These machines and implements, ironically “domestic” and gendered, become deranged in androgynous liquid ecstasies, their functions obliterated (plate 39, figure 14.1).18 These works provided the blueprint for a family of psychedelicallypainted objects, striking, uncanny, Kleinian “part objects” (mannequin’s limbs, hat molds) that she would continue to produce through her career, often echoing the painted bodies of her performers.19 Responsive to the psychedelic climate, they are successors to Sophie Taeuber Arp’s painted mannequin head of 1925, or Eileen Agar’s wartime Angel of Anarchy, 1940, a draped and feminized bust.20 In Paris, Bat-Yosef conceived and designed the performance Erixymaque (plate 40), staged four times at the fourth Paris Biennale, 1965. Here, the Uruguayan dancer Teresa Trujillo, trained by Martha Graham, became a body-

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Figure 14.1 Myriam Bat-Yosef, Fer Femelle (Hommage à Man Ray), 1964. © Myriam Bat-Yosef. Courtesy of the artist and Tura Milo.

in-action painting, flashing colors as she moved, while rolling psychedelically streaked diabolos within a triangular space.21 Object: White Zone, a collaboration between Markus Rätz, Andreas Christen and Willy Weber (Switzerland’s Biennale contribution) was entirely neo-modernist: a white floor, with white reliefs hung on three high walls, with gaps for entrance and exit at each point of the triangle.22 Spectators stood at each open angle as sound, a body or objects ricocheted off the construction. Trujillo wanted to dance with them; Myriam’s idea was to extend their painted surfaces to the dancer herself: a confusion of body and object would take place via both movement and rhythm. Recalling Nijinsky’s faun, body-costumed by Léon Bakst, Trujillo realized the androgynous ideal central to poet René de Solier’s description of Myriam’s oneiric universe.23 Vision as well as gender became bewildered as objects and bodies fused. The diabolo-like stools irresistibly recall Freud’s paradigm of the infant playing with the cotton reel: Fort-Da, throwing it away, pulling it back: a symbolic game of control, a recognition of the “real” and of separation from the mother, producing both pleasure and panic.24 For Bat-Yosef, the experience of pregnancy and motherhood had been determining as an artist: “From then on the surface that I

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work on and the space I work in is for me a womb.”25 Trujillo’s dance thus challenged the “ungendered” universalist claims of modernism’s neutral spaces, as did the alliterative soundscape performed by poet François Dufrêne, from the point of view of rational sense: Vite vétyver Yvette vétuste Arbuste Lambruche myrte buste Jasper Johns flasque. Roach Max Rauschenberg à masque . . .26

This experiment in a fusion of art forms looks back to the surrealism of dancer Hélène Vanel (who became Myriam’s friend in 1979), while specifically challenging Yves Klein’s blue-smeared naked models, whom he called “female paintbrushes” (femmes-pinceaux). Their meek compliance with their master’s directions had deeply angered Bat-Yosef; she recalled Guatterio Jacopetti’s parodic, indeed fatal use of Klein’s performance footage in his film Mondo Cane, 1962.27 Her painted diabolo stools were later exhibited as an object-piece, Eryximaque, at her second solo show in Arturo Schwarz’s Milan gallery in 1969. Bat-Yosef ’s second performance, Le Viol du violoncelle (The Rape of the Cello), 1967 (figure 14.2), used painted costumes for mime artist Théo Lesoualc’h with a drum accompaniment by Daniel Humair and a painted cello from the 1965 Schwarz exhibition. From Pop Art’s point of view, 1967 was a year of American domination, with the Buckminster Fuller pavilion at Montreal’s Expo ’67, and again at the 9th São Paulo Biennale (in itself a colonizing operation). The counter-exhibition in Fidel Castro’s Havana, the Mural Cuba Collectiva, created overnight for TV and involving Erró, the critic Jouffroy and a planeload of art and artists from Paris, was premised entirely upon a concept of “man-toman” internationalism.28 In politics, the explosion of violence in Vietnam and the US race riots, contrasted with the hippies’ “Summer of Love.”29 For Bat-Yosef, however, the situation in Israel was paramount; her attention was brusquely displaced. “The Six-day war breaks out in Israel and I’m alarmed by the Arab Countries’ declaration that they are going to drive the Israelis into the sea,” she said. “The war is over. Israel has won . . . I leave to show in New York . . .”30 Her Manhattan show in the Gallery of Israeli Art was dedicated to the first three days of the war when Israel’s survival was assured. Autofigure with Map of Israel, 1967, offered a self-portrait: a self-confident artist embracing a painted object that evokes both female mannequin and cello, an object transformed from the victim of the violeur to a body pregnant with Bat-Yosef ’s dream of fecundity and peace for her homeland: “the geographical map of Israel

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Figure 14.2 Myriam Bat-Yosef, Le Viol du violoncelle (The Rape of the Cello), 1967. Photograph of the performance, Théâtre du Bilboquet, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris. © Myriam Bat-Yosef. Courtesy of the artist and Tura Milo.

becomes an organic symbol,” Pierre Restany would remark. “The spearhead becomes a pubis, the delta, a vagina: a lone woman in the midst of veteran soldiers, pierced in the hollow of her thighs by a thousand envious darts.”31 “Since I live and breathe only through my art, the image of Israel which I traced in my work was a guarantee of its survival,” recalled Bat-Yosef.32 However Bat-Yosef ’s politics may be interpreted retrospectively, her desire for peace impelled her to become a member of Garry Davis’s World Citizen Movement.33 Attracted in 1968 to the idea of living in Jerusalem, a cosmopolitan city, she renounced her hard-won French citizens’ rights and national passport, and liquidated her assets. She became itinerant, driving her car filled with works towards her shows arranged in Milan (the second Schwarz show), in Scandinavia, at the famous Gmurzynska Gallery in Cologne—where her shaven-headed unisex dancer provoked some political consternation—only to discover, when reaching Jerusalem that her World Citizenship ideas were considered “arty” fantasies. In 1971, Bat-Yosef appropriated part of Jerusalem’s Israel Museum, the Billy Rose pavilion, for a triumphant psychedelic environment-cum-Gesamtkunstwerk Total Art (plate 41). It marked the high point of her career: her Jewish identity as

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well as her feminism were at stake. She appropriated empty Mirage jet petrol tanks offered by the Zahal defence army, stranding them on the museum esplanade, then painting them by hand. Pregnant, colorful, they appeared suspended in flight, perched high on vertical masts. Total Art is the largest-scale, most explicit antimilitary action of a female artist in the era of Pop. Precisely because of size and location, this work has been omitted from the art-historical canon—let alone accounts of Pop Art—when it should be considered in conjunction with, for example, Kiki Kogelnik’s Bombs in Love, 1962, the counterpoint to her female silhouettes and dislocated arms, legs and body parts. Kogelnik’s “psychedelic” colors here acquire a garish post-nuclear glow. In terms of complex performance Bat-Yosef expands vastly, on, for example, Charlotte Moorman’s Bomb Cello, 1965; she moves the action from terrestrial Cold War considerations to the eschatological. The flaming spaces inside the Museum, called Hell and Paradise, were also called Exile and The Kingdom: the show thus had a double, quasi-autobiographical identity (1970 was the year when “The Personal is Political” became the slogan of choice in New York34). With the assistance of students from the Bezalel art school, 362 square meters were painted over a six-week period, day and night, night and day. Bat-Yosef also worked with Arab women from East Jerusalem, who painted 500 cork spheres, later installed in a glass cube in the Hell section. Over 1,000 people attended the opening. Inside the museum, her piece Judith and Holofernes was enacted to Jossef Mundi’s script and improvised music by Yossi Mar-Chaïm on the artist’s painted piano brought over from Paris (figure 14.3). The protagonists’ bodies were again transformed with paint: the audience was invited to play with the objects. The Old Testament story was not merely enacted but transformed: Bat-Yosef recast the classic scene of role-reversal and symbolic castration (Judith decapitating the sleeping enemy warrior-male with her sword). Judith is, in fact, shot by Holofernes. The heroine becomes victim. Transgressive with regard to the Old Testament source, this is far from feminist triumphalism: Bat-Yosef unflinchingly points a finger to an unredeemed aggressor in a context of contemporary conflict. Back in Paris, the Warhol retrospective of 1970 seemed embarrassingly passé, its triumphalist blandness vitiated by the US’s defeat in Vietnam and the numbed aftermath of May 1968. The critical installations of Ed Kienholz were now touring Europe.35 In France, with the left traumatized by the Soviet invasion of Prague and the compromise of Fidel Castro, a Maoist wind of change was having its impact. The colder critique of hyperrealism with its photography-related reflection and glassy surfaces arrived in Paris in 1971; the impact was immediate upon the Narrative Figuration movement.36

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Figure 14.3 Myriam Bat-Yosef, Piano Droit Alphonse Blondel (Alphonse Blondel Upright Piano), 1970–1. As exhibited in the “Paradise” room at Myriam Bat-Yosef ’s Total Art exhibition, Billy Rose Pavilion, Israel Museum. © Myriam Bat-Yosef. Courtesy of the artist and Tura Milo.

Self-financed, thanks to her exhibitions, lectures and slideshows, Bat-Yosef embarked on a “six-month world tour” in 1972–3: lecturing in Quebec, a show in Pittsburgh, and a lecture-screening in Womanhouse, the cooperative linked to Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro in Los Angeles. Many installations in the house ironically replicated women’s enforced domesticity such as Sandy Orgel’s Linen Closet, or were inward-turning such as Faith Wilding’s crocheted Womb Room. Bat-Yosef ’s free life in Paris and Jerusalem could not have been further from this other hell (first described in Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique).37 The domestic prison was indeed a theme for French artists such as Agnès Varda with her film Blow Up My Town, 1968; or gay artist Michel Journiac’s photo piece, 24 Hours in the Day of an Ordinary Woman, 1974, but Paris-based contemporaries such as Niki de Saint Phalle or the Turkish conceptual artist Nil Yalter were too busy with their projects for any such scenario . . . During her month in Los Angeles, Bat-Yosef also learned lithography.38 The exhibition Douze ans d’art contemporain en France, 1960–1972 at Paris’s Grand Palais, was symptomatic of the contemporary problem. Only two women artists, Niki de Saint Phalle and Sheila Hicks, accompanied the seventy or so

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male exhibitors.39 Yet, this was the moment of the expansion of the women’s movement which, unfurling on the cusp of the 1970s, coincided with a complete change of taste. The museum world also turned to symbolism, pre-Raphaelites, to Aubrey Beardsley. The flickering, flame-like nature and implicit phallicism of Bat-Yosef ’s graphic style is contemporary with the new cult of Beardsley.40 Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic “Laugh of the Medusa”—an incitement to women to speak and to write—was surely generated by Beardsley’s Salomé: “Who has killed? Who kills? One never knows who is the Medusa . . . Salomé and again Salomé; danse? Medusa-like she turns (herself) to stone.”41 For Cixous, the dancing body as representation is caught in a tautological twist: “a kind of double fiction, a faked, theatrical fiction that sustains the comedy of signifiers: representation never refers to anything other than a representation,” equated with “the double space of castration (or death).”42 Evidently the Old Testament Salome story is in itself an “Oriental” trope of the castrating woman. Myriam Bat-Yosef, once the abandoned wife and mother, became “Oriental” herself as an Israeli-born independent artist, in the eyes of Western (male) critics. René de Solier was the first to attempt a critical monograph on her work. Poet, critic and a collaborator with the sculptor Germaine Richier, he visited Bat-Yosef ’s apocalyptic Total Art installation in Jerusalem. Bat-Yosef was invited for two weeks to Brussels in 1974, to visit de Solier and his companion Renée Miesse. No doubt in discussion with the artist, his poetic postwar style found itself colliding with the latest psychoanalytic sources: Paul Ricoeur, Melanie Klein, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard.43 De Solier’s text fell instantly, however, into Salomé-inspired tropes, fusing Bat-Yosef with her art. Fascinated by ornament and tattoo, he links the très sexy girl to concepts of transfer/transvestism, frottage/autofrottement (rubbing and self-pleasuring). “Everything undulates, snake-charmer . . . charms of the Orient, Hebraic lasciviousness at dawn . . .”44 His strictly gendered, indeed, racialized compartmentalization was challenged by the erotic androgyny of dancer Alain Guémard’s “female” fusions, which Bat-Yosef encountered in Bali. He danced at the Galerie de l’Aigle, Brussels, in Bat-Yosef ’s performance which de Solier organized. Wearing traditional Balinese dance costume, embroidery, flowers and a sword, Guémard, as a mirage flying past her paintings was immortalized in a photo, later used for her writing paper, above Khalil Gibran’s words: “Work is love made visible.” De Solier’s book project was cut short by his death. How and, indeed, where should one end any narrative about Myriam BatYosef and Pop? Already, by dint of both her sex and her style, she defined herself via its margins. In his lecture “Limits, not frontiers of surrealism” André Breton,

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denouncing political and artistic nationalisms in 1936, attempted to reassert surrealism’s centrality by seeing it not as a bordered territory but a crossing place of generative forces and ideas at a particular moment.45 Pop, of course, lacked its Breton; it had its nationalisms, its “boys’ club,” its internationalisms and female protagonists.46 Yet, there is a huge difference in the situation of, say, a Pauline Boty—a stylistic disciple of Peter Blake, a feminist “follower of fashion”—and BatYosef, who followed a post-surrealist path to find her own graphic and sculptural modes. In her Paris of the 1960s, Pop was all around, but responses were not all “Pop”; Bat-Yosef ’s works embraced the psychedelic moment and indeed the turn to India via her friendships with Théo Lesoualc’h, or her devotion to Krishnamurti, just as the Beatles themselves turned to India in early 1968.47 Let us say that for Bat-Yosef—the Israeli artist whose Mirage-Jet Pop should reenter the canon— there was a deep encounter with Pop’s generative forces as it spread across Europe, but her relationship was one of the fringe, in its best, most liminal, most experimental sense, as indeed she expanded her territories into theatre and dance. Let us end in Israel, with her toughest work—her most “not like Pop” piece: an extraordinary fence or boundary grill made of spare car parts for a school in Giloh, on the outskirts of Jerusalem in 1975. As with the Mirage fuel tanks, the discarded is turned into art, function encounters détournement, the male encounters the female: the effect from afar is a “limit,” but transparent, made of rusty lace.48 Still resident in Israel, Bat-Yosef continued to create spectacles. A “spectacle of combined arts,” involving painted Verner Panton prototype chairs and a painted dancer, was presented together with Camillo Baciù’s theatre piece, Chairs, at the Universities of Tel Aviv and Haifa and the Binianei Ha-Uma theatre in Jerusalem in 1975–6. There followed the death of her mother, a performance based on Henri Michaux’s A Certain Plume in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and a sixmonth residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. The climate of Israeli expansionism became finally intolerable: she moved permanently back to Paris in 1980. Our very close friendship from 2004–5 covered the period of the preparation of her bilingual monograph accompanied by a DVD of videos including studio shots.49 Here, I followed her performance pieces, from Erixymaque to A Certain Plume, 1978, and My Last Will, 1990, created for Israel’s Ramat Gan Museum: an extraordinary culmination of work on ritual, anticipating her own death.50 Only with the publication Myriam Bat-Yosef: Paintings, Objects, Performances, did the richness of her life become apparent: her world travel, her international exhibitions career and links with New York and Los Angeles. Myriam Bat-Yosef was also a “World Receiver” in the tradition of Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af

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Klint, and Emma Kunz, using abstraction, color and bilateral symmetries in so many esoteric, symbolic pieces, often informed by the Talmud.51 Fabrice Pascaud’s study of her “inner sky” in this monograph offers an astrological reading, and considers Kabbalah-inspired works such as Adam-Kadmon, 1993.52 For me, the complexities of the relationship to Israel and to Europe’s tragic past present the most compelling questions, as her emotions shifted between her homeland and Paris’s international art scene from the 1960s onwards. Myriam Bat-Yosef could not have been more explicit about sexuality, memory and the sublimatory dimensions of her art: “The most faithful of my lovers is my art: the more I give it my attention the more it fulfills me. I draw on different papers and paint on different surfaces and materials. Each time it’s like caressing the skin of another man. It’s my desire that I expose in my works.”53 Her most recent exhibition Désir (Desire), was held in Nogent-sur-Marne, at the Maison Nationale des Artistes in 2018.54 At the time when Myriam, a young student, was singing Hebrew folk songs to his baby son Michael, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was elaborating similar thoughts, perplexed by the “absolute otherness” of the feminine: “A caress is the expectation of this future pure and without content. It stems from an increasing hunger, from always richer promises, opening new perspectives towards an ungraspable reality. I propose voluptuousness as the very event of the future . . .”55

Notes 1 See Myriam Bat-Yosef, “Painter-Woman-Mother-Woman Painter” (Peintre— Femme—Mère—Peintresse) Art et Thérapie, September 7, 1983, 295, trans. Shân Veillard-Thomas, Woman Artists Slide Library Journal, 26 (December–January1988): 12; Myriam Bat-Yosef: Objets peints, peintures, 1979–1991 (Paris: Galerie 1900–2000, 1992); Oddný Sen, A flugskörpum vaengjum: Lifssaga Myriam Bat-Yosef (Reykjavik: Fró∂i, 1996); Fabrice Pascaud (ed.), Myriam Bat-Yosef: Paintings, Objects, Performances (Paris: Somogy, 2005); and Rakhee Balaram, “ ‘Beauty is exuberance’: A Journey into the Visionary World of Myriam Bat-Yosef,” n.paradoxa, 17 (2006): 83–8. 2 Her identities changed with her names: Marion Hellerman, Mimi, Myriam Gudmunsson, Myriam Josefsdottir, Myriam Bat-Yosef, “Daughter of Yosef.” 3 René de Solier, Jane Graverol (Brussels: André de Rache, 1974), 66. 4 See the “Feminist Surrealism” of London-born Penny Slinger and Richard Kovich’s film, Out of the Shadows, 2017.

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5 Clémence Bigel, “Le Pop’Art à Paris, une histoire de la réception critique des avant-gardes américaines entre 1959 et 1978,” (Mémoire de Master 2, Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2013)—with details of works and layouts of the Sonnabend shows. Both Alain Jouffroy and Jean-Jacques Lebel were involved in the catalogues. 6 See Four Germinal Painters, Four Younger Artists (New York: Jewish Museum for the 32nd Venice Biennale, American Pavilion, 1964); Richard Leeman, “Before the Catastrophe: Pop in France in 1963. Selected Excerpts,” Critique d’Art, 46 (Spring– Summer 2016): 130–50. 7 See Sarah Wilson, “The Sacred, the Profane and the Secret in the work of Niki de Saint Phalle,” Niki de Saint Phalle (Liverpool: Tate, 2008), 11–26, online, see index at: http://sarah-wilson.london/. 8 Pierre Restany, “Pierre et les Opalines,” in Axell, Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, November 1969. For Chryssa Romanos see Kalliopi Minioudaki, “Other(s’) Pop: The Return of the Repressed of Two Discourses,” in Angela Stief (ed.), Power Up: Female Pop Art (Vienna: Kunsthalle and DuMont, 2010). 9 See Bande dessinée et figuration narrative (Paris: Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 1967) and Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (London: Yale University Press, 2010), 32, 76. 10 Take Adriana Bodgan, the sultry film actress model in Jacques Monory’s work, and one of Jouffroy’s later wives. Monory’s wife, Sabine, pursued a career as an artist, Sabine Monirys, after they separated. Jean-François Lyotard’s, Économie libidinale (Paris: Minuit, 1974), added to the desire-led theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. 11 Marianne (“Manina”) Tischler was the wife of Alain Jouffroy; Bona, (Bona Tibertelli de Pisis) was the wife of poet André Pieyre de Mandiargues. Bat-Yosef contributed as late as 2011 to the commemorative number of the surrealist review Supérieur Inconnu, dedicated to Sarane Alexandrian. See also Sarah Wilson, “Unica Zürn: Binding Truths, Double Tongues, Searching Eyes,” in Kate Macfarlane, Michael Newman, Sharon Kivland, and Louis Mason (eds.), On Figure/s: Drawing after Bellmer (London: MA Bibliothèque, 2021), 229–40. 12 Ferro (born Guðmundur Guðmundsson) was sued by his homonym Gabriel Ferraud and changed his name to Erró in 1960. See Pascaud (ed.), Myriam Bat-Yosef, 117. 13 “À l’œil, note sur les happening” (transcript of poster), in Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov (ed.), Jean-Jacques Lebel (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 2019), 121–2. See Alyce Mahon, “Outrage aux bonnes mœurs: Jean-Jacques Lebel and the Marquis de Sade,” in Jean-Jacques Lebel: Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig, 1998), 93–112. 14 See Carolee Schneemann, “Eye Body : 36 Transformative Actions” and “Meat Joy”, in Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2002), 55.

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15 Ibid., 61–2, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4i4hLtqLOs. 16 Alain Jouffroy, Bat-Yosef (Frankfurt: Galerie Sydow, 1964), text in French, German, English and Hebrew. 17 Lebel and friends were go-betweens, bringing Dada and surrealist works by train from Paris to Milan and Schwarz in the context of avoiding the Algerian War draft. 18 Alain Jouffroy, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Myriam Bat-Yosef (Milan: Galleria Arturo Schwarz, 1965). 19 See Pascaud (ed.), Myriam Bat-Yosef, 36–9 and 76 and CD-Rom, for Love Objects, 1971; Lady Time, 1978; A Break for Sighs, 1982–3; Just for the fun of It (a leg upon a head), 1986. 20 See Yann Chateigné (ed.), IAO Explorations psychédéliques en France, 1968–∞ (Bordeaux: CAPC , 2008). 21 See “Radical Women in Latin American Art, 1950–1985,” Online Digital Archive, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, available at: https://hammer.ucla.edu/radicalwomen/artists/teresa-trujillo. 22 See Max von Mühlenen: “Suisse,” Biennale de Paris, 1965, 111–12. 23 René de Solier, “Univers ornirique (sic). Image et fascination,” Bat-Yosef (Paris: Galerie Garnelle, 1964). The double-sided brochure published in a series of colors was “underprinted” with her “Eight Years of Work” catalogue from Reykjavik, May, 1963. 24 Bat-Yosef had discovered diabolo-shaped, heavy wooden stools designed by Nana Dietzel in the Maison du Danemark. See Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (24 vols, 1953–73), xvii, 14–15. 25 Bat-Yosef, “Painter—Woman—Mother—Woman Painter,” 12. 26 Eryximaque’s source is Paul Valéry’s “L’Âme et la danse” (1921), in Jean Hytier (ed.), Œuvres complètes, II (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 148–76, 1406–10. It exists as a film, and Dufrêne’s sound piece is available in the 3 CD Box Set François Dufrêne, Œuvre désintégrale (Antwerp: Guy Schraenen éditeur, 2010). François Dufrêne, “Pourquoi Eryximaque et comment” (a calligraphed text dated November 1965) in Eryximaque: Poésie danse, peinture, Paris, 1965–6, Cidouille pliée, 16, Paris, n.d. 27 Conversation with Bat-Yosef, April 11, 2005; the femmes-pinceaux event must have been at Antagonismes II, l’Objet, March, 1962, though a Klein performance has not been officially recorded at this event, see: www.yvesklein.net. 28 See Sarah Wilson, “Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Pop in a Divided World,” in Jessica Morgan and Flavia Frigeri (eds.), The World Goes Pop (London: Tate, 2015), 113–19, online, see index at: http://sarah-wilson.london/. 29 See Christoph Grünenberg and Jonathan Harris (eds.), Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the West, Tate Liverpool Critical Forum, vol. 8 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005).

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Bat-Yosef, chronology in Pascaud (ed.), Myriam Bat-Yosef, 120. Pierre Restany, preface to Bat-Yosef (Stockholm: Galerie Latina, 1969). Bat-Yosef, “Painter—Woman—Mother—Woman Painter,” 295. Peace activist Garry Davis created a travel document based on Article 13 (2) of the International Declaration of Human Rights. See Garry Davis, My Country is the World: The Adventures of a World Citizen (New York: Putnam, 1961). See Carol Hanisch, “The Personal is Political,” in “Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation,” 1970, available at: www.carolehanisch.org/Chwritings/PEP. html. See Avec le CNAC: Edward Kienholz (Paris: Centre National d’Art contemporain, 1970) including the sensational Portable War Memorial. See Wilson, The Visual World, 136, 142–4, for the impact of American hyperrealist exhibitions in Paris, from 1971 to 1975. Womanhouse (January 30 to February 28, 1972) was an installation and performance space organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. Was Bat-Yosef there at this period? (She recalls the “Women’s Co-op Gallery, Los Angeles,” in Pascaud (ed.), Myriam Bat-Yosef, 122–3). See Stephanie Crawford, “A (Re)(Re) Re-Telling of the Narrative of Womanhouse, or in the Beginning there was a Woman with a Hammer” (February 16, 2016), available at: http://www.womanhouse.net/related-content, and Camille Morineau and Lucia Pesapane (eds.), Womanhouse (Paris: Monnaie de Paris; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Manuella editions, 2018). Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963) was published in France as, La Femme mystifiée (Paris: Gonthier, 1964). Bat-Yosef cites the “Editions Press lithography workshop”—she surely means Tamarind Lithography Workshop, a California non-profit corporation founded in Los Angeles by June Wayne on Tamarind Avenue in 1960, available at: https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarind_Institute. François Mathey (ed.), Douze ans d’art contemporain en France, 1960–1972 (Paris: Grand Palais, 1972); Sheila Hicks together with pioneer artist Meret Oppenheim visited Total Art in Jerusalem in 1971 (as did Pierre Restany, whom the artist took to the Dead Sea). Beardsley featured in Peinture romantique anglaise at the Petit Palais, 1972; see also André Pieyre de Mandiargues, “Le Tombeau d’Aubrey Beardsley,” Le Musée noir [1946] (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1973), 158 ff. Hélène Cixous: “Qui a tué? Qui tue? On ne sait jamais qui est la Méduse . . . Salomé; et encore Salomé; danse? Médusante: elle (se) pétrifie.” “L’affiche décolle,” Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, 83 (1973 [Aubrey Beardsley issue]): 31, 34–5; and “Le Rire de la Méduse,” L’Arc, 61 (1975): 39–54. Cixous: “le double espace de la castration (ou de la mort),” in “L’affiche décolle,” 33.

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43 René de Solier’s unpublished thoughts on “BY” are informed by Paul Ricoeur, “L’Art et la systématique freudienne,” Entretiens sur l’art et la Psychanalyse (Mouton, 1968); Melanie Klein, “Technique de l’analyse par le jeu,” La Psychanalyse des enfants (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (PUF), 1972); Gilles Deleuze’s “corps sans organes” and, above all, Jean-François Lyotard’s Discours-Figure (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1971). 44 René de Solier; “Tout ondule, charmeur d’ombilic . . . charmes d’Orient . . . lascivité hébraïque à l’aurore,” untitled and unpublished typescript (1975, for Brussels editor André de Rache’s, “Mains et Merveilles,” series), 26, 19. For the stereotyping of the “Jewess” (Deborah, Judith, Salomé, etc.), see Tamar Garb and Linda Nochlin (eds.), The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996). 45 André Breton, “Limites non-frontières du surréalisme,” first published in English in Herbert Read, Surrealism (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 95–116; La Nouvelle Revue française, 281 (February 1937): 200–15 and anthologies. See Elza Adamowicz, in Adamowicz (ed.), Surrealism: Crossings/Frontiers, European Connections 18, (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 11–13. 46 Besides the female emphasis in The World Goes Pop, see Katalin Timár, Stephan Diederich, Luise Pilz, Walter Grasskamp, Katalin Keserü, Dávid Fehér, Miklós Erdély, and Luis Camnitzer, Ludwig goes Pop + The East Side Story (Budapest: Ludwig Museum, 2015), revealed superb Pop artists such as Ilona Keserü. 47 From 1956 to 1959, Nil Yalter and Lesoualc’h made a journey from Paris to Istanbul, Teheran and Bombay. The Indian experience was formative. Mime program, courtesy of Nil Yalter. 48 See the photograph in Pascaud (ed.), Myriam Bat-Yosef, 123. 49 The DVD bears precious witness to performances and the “total installation” of the artist’s studio. It includes the film of Erixymaque, made in 1990, after the performance of My Last Will, using stills and Dufrêne’s soundtrack. Trujillo made a film in Uruguay; the performance negatives she was sent were lost, only contact sheets remain. 50 See Sarah Wilson, “Rites of Passage, Myriam Bat-Yosef and Performance,” in Pascaud (ed.), Myriam Bat-Yosef, 92–110, the basis for this essay with extended treatment of the later works; online, see index at: http://sarah-wilson.london. 51 See Karin Althaus, Matthias Mühling, Sebastian Schneider (eds.), World Receivers: Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus/Hirmer Verlag, 2018). Compare Bat-Yosef ’s mystic diptych Marriage and Divorce, 1964, two T-shaped arrangements of canvases with Indian ink, in Pascaud (ed.), Myriam Bat-Yosef, 72–3. The artist acknowledges Rabbi Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Le Livre brûlé: Lire le Talmud (Paris: Lieu Commun, 1986).

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52 See Fabrice Pascaud, “The Permanence of the Ephemeral: The Inner Sky of Myriam Bat-Yosef,” in Pascaud (ed.), Myriam Bat-Yosef, 65–76. 53 Myriam Bat-Yosef, “Une Peintresse dans l’espace du désir,” Supérieur Inconnu, 13 (1999): 102. 54 Désir was held from June 8 to August 26, 2018, at the Maison Nationale des Artistes, Nogent-sur Marne (no catalogue). See Valentin Glover, “Myriam Bat-Yosef: Desire into Flesh,” AWARE Review, July 27, 2018, available at: https://awarewomenartists. com/en/magazine/myriam-bat-yosef-le-desir-au-corps/. 55 “La caresse est l’attente de cet avenir pur, sans contenu. Elle est faite de cet accroissement de faim, des promesses toujours plus riches, ouvrant des perspectives nouvelles vers l’insaisissable [. . .] Notre thèse [. . .] consiste à affirmer la volupté comme l’événement même de l’avenir.” Emmanuel Levinas, Le temps et l’autre, Paris, Fata Morgana, 1979, (four lectures given at Jean Wahl’s Collège philosophique, 1946–7), p. 82, my translation.

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Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow Feminism and the (Pop) “Image” in Chicago’s Black Arts Movement Rebecca Zorach

In 1965 the Chicago photographer Billy (Fundi) Abernathy inserted the words “Pop Art” into the title of one of his photographs. Brother and Pop Art makes a humorous statement about what can be considered art under the regime of “pop.” In this photo, a Black demolition worker, the “Brother” of the title, perches atop a wall he is in the midst of tearing down. On the wall, still visible, are the remains of a large advertisement, painted on plaster, featuring a dinosaur— specifically, “Dino,” the Brontosaurus that had been trademarked by Sinclair Motor Oil in the 1930s.1 The photo flattens out the distance between the depicted Dino and a more distant brick wall, creating a collage effect. Abernathy seems to be joking both about whether the advertising image qualifies as Pop Art in and of itself, without any help from an artist, and also about the “brother’s” resistance to being impressed by its status as art as he proceeds in his work of demolition.2 Abernathy, a brilliant Black photographer who would go on to work with OBAC (the Organization of Black American Culture) on the Wall of Respect, and with Amiri Baraka on the book In Our Terribleness, positions himself not as a Pop artist but as a witty observer of an artworld trend that was, after all, well publicized. There’s a gap of a few years between this moment and the artworks I focus on in this essay, works by Black women artists in particular, working in Chicago, who incorporated media imagery into their work, and developed their own “popular” idioms, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By that point, it could be argued, the moment of Pop Art had passed. In examining the place in art history of artists of color and women artists (including, of course, women artists of color), we sometimes encounter a sense of belatedness with respect to the 315

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artworld trends considered to be of major importance. It has long been easy for critics and historians to assume that artists who operated outside the mainstream artworld circuits—some by choice and others because of rampant discrimination—were simply not all that aware of what was going on in them. They came to them late, and absorbed and applied their lessons late. We might imagine this question would arise when we turn to the work of Black women artists in Chicago whose work seems to have affinities with Pop, who used similar strategies in the later 1960s and early 1970s, well past peak-Pop—and who never, ever claimed that name for themselves. Pop Art was a well-publicized movement, and many Black artists in Chicago must have been well aware of it, given how much it was discussed—often as a kind of joke—in the media, including in Black publications.3 Kalliopi Minioudaki’s work, along with that of other scholars writing in the catalogue for the exhibition Seductive Subversion, makes clear that women artists were a presence in Pop from early on, even as later feminist artists and feminist scholars played up a feminist rift with Pop.4 But Pop strictly defined did not find a meaningful presence among Chicago artists. What was a presence was the ambivalent use of popular imagery, widespread visual strategies of collage and appropriation, and the gleeful tearing down of aesthetic and cultural hierarchies. Many of these things were associated with the Chicago Imagists—especially the Hairy Who and their colleagues. These White artists made a splash with freewheeling exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center, a neighborhood art center on the South Side of Chicago whose exhibition director, Don Baum, was not afraid to experiment and shake up Chicago’s artworld orthodoxies.5 Black artists also deployed many of the qualities that have typically been associated with the Imagists, and they often pursued a more overtly political approach to art making. In this essay, I will address work by Black artists, in particular works by three Black women: Barbara Jones-Hogu, Yaoundé Olu, and Evelyn Patricia Terry. Their work can help us to track how a Black feminist sensibility emerged within the visual discourse around “image” in the work of artists in Chicago. All of the works I discuss date from the Black Arts Movement of the later 1960s and 1970s.6 They are politically charged works in which the politics of representation are entangled with the body and sexual politics. The modes in which these artists worked were not like Pop Art in many respects—the look was colorful but often rough and variegated, not slick. There were no massive canvases, and no cool distancing. Indeed, the intimacy between artist, work, and viewer was part of the point. But these works offer a distinctive engagement with popular media, current events, and consumer culture that we might see as explicit political

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critique—and implicit aesthetic critique—from the informed perspective of creative observers. If these artists do not engage overtly with the legacy of Pop Art as a movement, it is not for lack of awareness of it—but because their distinctive approach to popular imagery does not require it. If you had visited an exhibition at the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago at the height of the Black Arts Movement, from around 1967 to 1972, you might not have realized how many women-identified artists were involved in the movement. Several women took part in OBAC, the organization that created the Wall of Respect, and prominent women performed and read poetry at the Wall (more than just a mural of heroes, it became a performance and rallying space as it intervened in the visual culture of Black Chicago). Jae Jarrell and Barbara Jones-Hogu were among the founding members of the major group AFRICOBRA in 1968, and Carolyn Lawrence joined shortly thereafter. The center itself had a long history with women artists, most notably the indefatigable Margaret Burroughs, who helped spearhead its initial founding.7 So, it is a bit surprising that the center presented almost exclusively male artists in the oneand two-person shows held there in the 1960s and early 1970s. But in 1973—in an apparent acknowledgement of a need to redress the situation—the center began featuring more women artists in these exhibition slots. Yaoundé Olu had a two-person show along with Douglas Williams in September of that year.8 Next was a one-person show featuring Geraldine McCullough.9 In 1974, a twoperson exhibition featured Mary Reed Daniel together with Sylvester Britton, and the center presented exhibitions of work by Margaret Burroughs and Marva Alvita Spaulding Fields. It also presented an all-woman group show entitled Fem-Images in Black.10 Fem-Images in Black manifested a rising feminist consciousness among Black women artists in Chicago. This consciousness was not a mere extension of White feminism into the Black community. Black women were keenly aware of the ways in which White feminism failed to speak to Black women.11 Many also felt a commitment to supporting Black men who were under assault by racist White society, a sentiment that is especially clear in Carolyn Lawrence’s iconic image, Uphold Your Men. But Black women in Chicago also developed a critique of gendered oppression on their own terms. Activists created the multidisciplinary League of Black Women in 1971, predating by two years the National Black Feminist Organization, founded in New York in 1973. The League’s mission was “to seek solutions to the cruel sufferings thrust upon us by society’s double indictment—the cross of being Black and the burden of being female.”12 In doing so, they connected to the broader development of Black feminism evidenced by

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writings such as the 1970 anthology The Black Woman, edited by Toni Cade (later Toni Cade Bambara). As with OBAC and the cultural nationalist movement, they saw culture as a potential vehicle for change. In 1974, the League created a curatorial committee composed of Barbara Jones-Hogu, Yaoundé Olu, Shirley Sullivan, and Betty Wilkins to create exhibitions of work by Black women artists. Fem-Images in Black was their first effort, and it included a large number of women artists, from the famous (Elizabeth Catlett) to the as-yet-unknown.13 Some were already working as professional artists. Many were young artists who went on to distinguished careers in the arts. The exhibition title, Fem-Images in Black, could be taken as simply synonymous with “works by Black women.” But its use of the work image suggests a more substantive characterization of the work in the show. The idea of “image” is of course contained in the designation “Imagists,” where it represented a shift away from abstraction and toward a playful approach to figurative image-making. It had other resonances for Black artists, but its use in the exhibition title suggests an engagement with a more general idea of “image” that can also be put in dialogue with Pop Art. But image is not just a synonym for artwork. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was understood to relate to a broader field of images that include those of advertising, film, and television, and in a more conceptual sense, mental images, including self-image. Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to PseudoEvents in America, which used this term to analyze the media’s construction of events and promotion of particular values, appeared in Britain in 1961 (under a slightly different title) and in the US in 1964. Major American cultural figures (including James Baldwin) debated the role of “image” in American society and media.14 Black artists established a doctrine of “positive images” (to counter negative images of Black Americans in popular and elite culture) and emphasized the need to control one’s own representation. In remarks made during a reading at Wayne State University, and recorded on his album Rappin’ & Readin’, Don L. Lee (later Haki Madhubuti, poet, educator, and the founder of Third World Press) emphasized the question of “image” and advocated Black control over it: “Understand that images control our lives . . . our lives in most cases are being controlled by alien images.” After giving an account of the damaging images of Blacks created (for television in particular) by Whites, he urges his audience to action: “It’s very important that we as Black people take it upon ourselves to . . . project as positive an image of ourselves as possible . . . We have to project images of ourselves . . . we’ve got to control our own images.”15 In this context, engagement with consumer culture and popular media, images we could call “pop,” was also a way to connect with Black audiences that

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were not already consumers of elite art forms, and a way to bring together political urgency with sophisticated visual art. Indeed, it bears mention that the Black Arts Movement sometimes used “pop” imagery in pursuit of connection with the broader Black community, including, notably, poor and working-class Black people. AFRICOBRA’s use of “coolade colors” reflected the vibrant colors they saw people wearing on the streets. In Wadsworth Jarrell’s 1971 painting Revolutionary, the artist began with an iconic news photograph of Angela Davis and rendered it as an explosion of color, using popular media source material as part of an effort at developing a distinctive pop idiom for displaying Black heroism. Certainly, in a society permeated by White supremacy, celebration was not the only possible mood for Black artists in the use of media images. Take, for example, the use of the Stars and Stripes. Several Chicago artists used the flag— both a national symbol and an element of popular visual culture—as a vehicle to address national identity. Points of reference for the use of the flag in art came from Jasper Johns’s famous Flag, 1954–5, but also Faith Ringgold’s repeated and highly critical use of in such works as The Flag Is Bleeding, 1967 and Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger, 1969. Barbara Jones-Hogu, alongside many Black artists in Chicago—Nathan Wright, Norman Parish, Jr., Murry DePillars—used elements of the US flag to critique American politics.16 DePillars used the flag as a backdrop for his figure of a militant Aunt Jemima which also calls to mind works by Jeff Donaldson and Betye Saar.17 The stars on the flag, in DePillars’s work, are police badges, each with a surveilling eye framed by the words “Chicago Police.” In many of these instances, the flag appears as a more or less realistic object within a fantasy space of politically charged symbolism. In contrast to this strategy, Jones-Hogu deconstructed it, transforming the elements of the flag into a sinister set of repeated icons that could almost blend into the background as ornaments. In the America series, developed as part of her Master’s thesis project at the Institute of Design (ID) at the Illinois Institute of Technology, she began by mutating the stars into white-robed Ku Klux Klan (KKK) figures. Then the stripes twist and turn, becoming swastikas, as in In Land Where My Father Died. Elsewhere she adopts the colors of the African liberation flag, black, green, and red, to suggest the revolutionary potential of a very different “nation.” In Nation Time, figures representing members of different gangs, loosely indicated by their different beret colors, come together in a single Pan-African nation, suggesting a stark contrast with the US flag. The iconography of American identity also appears regularly in the work of Ralph Arnold, a Black queer artist in Chicago who often worked in the mediums

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of collage and assemblage. Greg Foster-Rice, curator of the recent exhibition The Many Hats of Ralph Arnold, identifies Arnold’s use of a “Pop Art” idiom.18 In her contribution to the catalogue, Jacqueline Francis elaborates on this designation, understanding it as one of the many styles with which Arnold experimented throughout his career. Collage provided Arnold with opportunities for a type of imaginative masquerade with imagery from popular culture displaced into unexpected contexts. Arnold often created complex layers of reference between image and text. In his Who You/Yeah Baby, Arnold queered national imagery by juxtaposing the hortatory image of Uncle Sam with images of fashionable male figures and bodybuilders from magazine ads (plate 42).19 He contained them within geometric lines and licked surfaces, taking a playful, cool, ironic approach. This marks a distinction with the work of many of the Black women who also worked with popular imagery. Jones-Hogu’s large woodcut Mother of Man can provide a fruitful counterpoint to Arnold. In it, she meditates on gender and violence in the context of America and, in particular, the Vietnam War. A skeletal figure wearing a large Afro appears before a flowing flag, its stars transformed into Jones-Hogu’s signature KKK figures. The viewer is positioned at a low angle with respect to the tall, proud figure. This positioning draws attention to the knotted white form at the center of the figure’s deep black pelvis, which appears like an abstracted icon of female reproductive power. In the essay that accompanied her Master’s thesis project, Jones-Hogu describes the skeletal form as a reflection of the deaths of soldiers in Vietnam—the sons of the “mother” of the title, whose bodies merge with hers, their deaths annihilating her body. The “stars” and stripes flow backwards; Jones-Hogu symbolically reverses the flag to denote “the racism in American democracy,” according to the text portion of her thesis.20 The complex embodiment of Mother of Man makes visceral demands on the viewer. Like Jones-Hogu, several of the women artists involved in FemImages in Black worked within the sphere of media images but allowed the lines between categories like mind and body, self and other, to blur. They become, or remain, messy, in contrast to Arnold’s cool. Yaoundé Olu was one of Jones-Hogu’s co-organizers of the Fem-Images exhibition. Her brilliant 1972 painting Conflict (plate 43) allegorizes racial struggle as a fight between two wiry boxers, one Black and one White. Olu riffs on the George Bellows painting Stag Night at Sharkey’s, 1909. She abstracts the figures’ musculature into bright, monochromatic swaths, and gives the central position to a Black fighter whose upper back and shoulders reflect the tension of his defense against the White boxer’s uppercut.

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From 1968 to 1982, Olu ran an independent, multi-use art space called Osun in the South Shore neighborhood, holding concerts, art exhibitions, classes, and other events. A musician and educator as well as a visual artist, she also drew on her work as an editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Crusader in creating her visual idiom. Typically, rather than incorporating popular media into her work, she created extended projects in which she established her own characters and narratives, as well as isolated, evocative scenes. One body of work, The Adventures of Carbon Adams, created using markers on board (and, in some cases, staged photographs) presents a visual narrative of a futuristic Black superhero named Carbon Adams—a name that also refers punningly to the element carbon, i.e., “carbon atoms.” For Olu, carbon suggested the color black, and as she knew well from her background in science, it is one of the elemental foundations of life on Earth. Olu’s sleek, brightly colored paintings, with futuristic figures adorned with African-inspired motifs, allude to extended background narratives and alternate universes that resonate with Sun Ra’s fabulations. The paintings generally don’t deliver identifiable specifics, instead creating a sense of a world of which we are getting just a glimpse—an elaborate world of space travel and African and ancient Egyptian symbolism, humming with music and dance, as in her painting Celebration of Life in a New Land.21 Olu’s Super Fly Revisited of 1972 (plate 44) engages in a dialogue with popular media in a direct way. During the early 1970s, Black artists and cultural workers in Chicago pursued an extended critique of the Blaxploitation trend in Hollywood. First, the Kuumba Theater Workshop’s director Val Gray Ward launched a multi-part critique of Melvin Van Peebles’s film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadaasssss Song in the pages of the Chicago Defender in the summer of 1971. Lerone Bennett, Jr. wrote his own critique of Sweetback in the September issue of Ebony.22 In 1972, a pamphlet by Francis Ward critiqued Super Fly.23 The mediasavvy group FORUM (Full Opportunity Redirected to Uplift Mankind) also made performative interventions near theaters showing Super Fly. These groups emphasized and critiqued what they saw as a profoundly negative image of the Black community—glorifying the drug trade and pimps—presented by Blaxploitation films. Olu’s painting builds on this critique, mobilizing stock Blaxploitation figures—a gun-toting pimp clad in a white suit and a sexualized, subordinated (and purple) woman—but using wicked humor to deflate their appeal. The pimp’s face is a skull, suggesting the deathly consequences of glamorizing criminality. But although he crosses his arms in a gesture of dominance, he seems to be produced as a projection from the eye of a giant

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actual fly (that is, the animal) that hovers in the air menacing the prone female figure. In his Sweetback essay, Lerone Bennett argued that “nobody ever f***ed his way to freedom.”24 The idea that sexual liberation and revolutionary politics might be a poisonous brew for Black women in particular was apparent to Don L. Lee, whose poem “The Revolutionary Screw” suggests this problem succinctly, conjuring a scene of Black male revolutionary expectations of what women should do for the revolution: & when u ask for a piece of leg/ it’s not for yr/self but for yr/people———it keeps u going & anyway u is a revolutionary & she wd be doin a revolutionary thing (. . .) she really had it together when she said: go fuck yr/self nigger. now that was revolutionary.25

Olu’s painting Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow, c. 1971 (the title derives from the title song of Funkadelic’s second album, released in 1970), suggests a similar message. The painting presents a heavily foreshortened figure—it’s not clear where the figure’s legs are—in flight, punching his (?) way through a brick wall (plate 45). With the title, Olu associates the challenge of the wall and the muscle required to break through not with the body but with the mind. “Ass” has multiple possible meanings here: the self, the body, the body in its sexual nature, or plain and simply the body part. In the context of debates around the sexual revolution, Olu’s suggestion is that revolutionary consciousness will not be obtained through the shortcut of sexuality (that is, the point is not to free your ass first). Indeed, from this perspective, the “sexual revolution” might in fact be counterrevolutionary from Black women’s (and men’s) perspective. Olu radically destabilizes any sense of real space in the painting with blue and red pattern on the “wall” and with the asymmetrical “frame” consisting only of supports on the

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left and right of the canvas. (These pieces appear to be painted frame sections, their angled ends parallel rather than mirrored as they would be if squared as a complete frame.) An ambivalence toward the intertwining of sexuality with patriarchy is also evident in Evelyn Patricia Terry’s work. While Jones-Hogu and Yaoundé Olu were members of the exhibition committee, established artists already working as educators, Terry was still a student in 1974 when her work was chosen for FemImages; she was a single mother working toward her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In her work, she gave a stronger emphasis to gender issues, as she worked through ideas about relationships between men and women in connection to major political issues of the early 1970s. The screenprints and pastel drawings with collage she was making at that time paired imagery from different sources in an upper and a lower field, creating ambiguous symbolic relationships between the two fields. Typically, they were neither starkly opposed nor equated, but ambiguously related or entangled. One of her entries in the exhibition, a screenprint entitled Love, Flowers, War, and More Love made in 1973 (plate 46), presents, in the lower register, repeated images—a strongman stomping through a loosely sketched cityscape, with scattered military helmets, flowers and hearts— with a body print of breasts and hands above. According to Terry, she was exploring how it was possible that men could toggle emotionally between the aggression and trauma involved in warfare, the defenses built up to handle it, and the tenderness involved in making love. Terry created a physical impression of her own breasts and hands to constitute the upper register of the print, implying her own embeddedness in the issues she symbolically explored in the lower register: that she was “part of all this, an intimate part of what’s going on on this earth.”26 Another print from the same 1973 screenprint series, Naked Lady Picture with Dolls operates not by vertical juxtaposition but by superimposition. It was based on an oil painting, Hijack a Plane to Cuba (plate 47), also completed in 1973. In the painting, Terry presented a woman spread-eagled and lifting her breasts in cupped hands in a standard pornographic trope, with an unexpected surprise below the waist: three male faces that mask (or emerge from?) the figure’s genital region, above an airplane, are based on mug shots of three men— Melvin Cale, Louis Moore, and Henry D. Jackson, Jr.—who, in fact, hijacked a plane in Birmingham, Alabama, in November 1972 and forced the pilot to fly to several different airports around the US before proceeding on to Cuba. (All the hijackers were Black; two of them, Moore and Jackson, had been arrested on trumped-up charges of rape in Detroit and had the threat of falsely obtained prison sentences hanging over their heads.)

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The incorporation of newsphoto-like imagery, especially relating to current events connected to the Black struggle, draws on a visual strategy that Terry could have seen in works by several artists associated with the Black Arts Movement in Chicago. In a painting entitled Ghetto, José Williams used a newspaper image of a boy sitting on a front stoop in Chicago, with the city swirling around him.27 Yaoundé Olu used a similar strategy in her acrylic selfportrait that was included in Fem-Images, also entitled Human Transformers— We. A painted figure on the far left, its head covered with a multitude of antennalike adornments, blows a zigzag of color toward the photo (a portrait of Olu with facepaint mimicking that of the painted figure), as if to sing a new self into existence. But the most relevant point of reference was perhaps Jeff Donaldson’s 1970 J. D. McClain’s Day in Court, which incorporates black-and-white news photos of a politically charged event into a painting. The title alludes to the Marin County Courthouse incident of August 1970, in which Jonathan Jackson took several hostages in a courtroom in Marin County Courthouse in an attempt to obtain the release of his brother, the imprisoned activist George Jackson. Defendant J. D. McClain, along with the judge in the case, were among those shot and killed in the aftermath.28 The painting combines the seemingly objective representation of a collaged-in newspaper image with painted imagery that elaborates on the events in a fantastical mode—the judge is presented as a ghoulish skeletal form. Like Donaldson’s, Terry’s painting addresses a major media event that relates to the Black liberation struggle. Terry’s approach raises more questions about the advisability of violence as a strategy for liberation, associating it with masculinity by rhyming the hijacking event with pornographic objectification of women. She confronts the viewer with an incitement to erotic pleasure conjoined with, or blocked by, the projecting phallic airplane and the three faces. Grappling with male taste for pornography, she likens it to the impulsive and ultimately selfdestructive act of hijacking an airplane as a form of protest. In a move that we could see as indicative of questions of the economic sustainability of critical art practices for Black women artists in the 1970s, Terry modified the explosive imagery of the painting when adapting it as a screenprint, making it more palatable to her potential audiences (plate 48). After seeing an African figurine that rhymed visually with the women in her painting, she replaced the three faces and the airplane with a repeated image of the sculpture, a fertility figure. Rather than abstracting from the painting, the print added touches of realism like pubic hair and grass on the ground beneath the figure; it also heightened the woman’s Black features and reclaimed her as a fertility

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goddess. On the one hand, it suited the growing taste for Afrocentric imagery among middle-class Black audiences—and did not rock the boat so much; on the other hand, it could be seen as a gesture of reclamation of Black female sexuality from the patriarchal logic of the first version. Political turmoil and the quest for political identity led artists to look for visual language in popular media, and thus to cross into “popular” territory in their own way. I suggested earlier that it might seem that these artists, beginning to engage with “Pop” concerns after the “moment had passed,” might seem belated. They cannot be considered Pop artists in any straightforward way; they do not respond directly to Pop. Perhaps it does them a disservice, therefore, to consider them in this light; but what puts them in the same universe as Pop is that they do respond directly to questions surrounding image in the fullness of its cultural and political valences. They deploy images from mass media and popular culture, or develop personal idioms drawn from popular visual language, and do so in a way that collapses the distance between viewer and work—offering sincere critiques that make visceral political demands, or should I say: that make their political demands visceral.

Notes I have preserved the wording of original titles and texts by Black artists/authors for historical accuracy, while recognizing that they may contain language that is offensive when taken out of context. 1 The Brontosaurus debuted in Chicago in the Century of Progress fair in 1933–4. 2 I first became acquainted with Billy Abernathy’s work in connection with his involvement in the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) and his contributions to the Wall of Respect. See Abdul Alkalimat, Romi Crawford, and Rebecca Zorach (eds.), The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Evanston, IL : Northwestern University Press, 2017). The Abernathy photograph is included in the 2018 exhibition I curated, The Time Is Now! See the catalogue, co-edited by me and Marissa H. Baker, The Time Is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side, 1960–1980 (Chicago, IL : Smart Museum of Art, 2018). The research for the exhibition project also informs this essay in a more general way; many of the works that could not be illustrated for reasons of space in the present chapter can be found in the catalogue. 3 There are many examples. In a notable one in the pages of Negro Digest, Woodie King, Jr. argued that Pop Art was the result of McCarthyism: “Pop Art emerged

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because the artist could say it meant A when really it meant B.” (“Black Theater: Weapon for Change,” Negro Digest, April 1967, 38). Sid Sachs and Kalliopi Minioudaki (eds.), Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968 (Philadelphia, PA : University of the Arts, and New York: Abbeville Press, 2010). The most extensive single treatment of the Imagists is the 2014 film Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists by Pentimenti Productions and the accompanying archive at: https://www.pentimentiproductions.org/chicago-imagist-archive/. Scholarship on Black women artists of this time period has focused primarily on New York and West Coast artists. See Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley (eds.), We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–1985, A Sourcebook (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2017) and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–1985, New Perspectives (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2018). Little discussion of artists in Chicago appears in either text. Created in 1940 with the support of the federal government’s Works Progress Administration and made possible by the energetic work of a—largely female— group of dedicated volunteers, the SSCAC became a key site for the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s. See Bill V. Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and AfricanAmerican Cultural Politics, 1935–46 (Urbana, IL : University of Illinois Press, 1999) and Anna M. Tyler, “Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden: Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center,” International Review of African American Art, 11, no. 4 (1994): 3–7. “Black Art is Alive and Well in Chicago: Yaoundé Olu, Douglas Williams,” Flyer, SSCAC Part III, Box 20, Folder 1973(1). “Fragments: Geraldine McCullough,” News Release, November 1, 1973, Part III, Box 20, Folder 1973(1); Flyer, Part III, Box 20, Folder 1973(1). “Mary Reed Daniel & Sylvester Britton,” Flyer, SSCAC, Part III, Box 20, Folder 1974. “Burroughs Exhibit at Center,” Chicago Daily Defender, June 19, 1974. “Art Legacy to Go Public,” Chicago Daily Defender, September 25, 1974. “Art and the Black Woman,” Chicago Daily Defender, October 12, 1974. See Toni Cade (ed.), The Black Woman (New York: Mentor, 1970); “Panther Sisters on Women’s Liberation,” Black Panther, September 1969. “League of Black Women,” letter, SSCAC Archives, III, 20, Folder “1974.” “Art Legacy to Go Public,” Chicago Defender, September 25, 1974. Exhibition flyers, letters, SSCAC Archives, III, 20, folder “1974.” Included in the exhibition were Ophelia Adams, Juanita Anderson, Anita Arrington, Sheree Blakemore, Patricia Bohannon, Lettie Boone, Sonya Egan Brock, Margaret Burroughs, Dorothy Campbell, Elizabeth Catlett, Irene Clark, Mary Reed Daniel, Mikki Ferrill, LiFran Fort, Betty Gaskin, Lucille Giles, Sandi Gober, Sylvia Golden, Madeline Haydon, Eselean Henderson, Carolyn Lawrence, Maxine Lowe, Patricia Martin, Maurine

Feminism in Chicago’s Black Arts Movement

14

15 16 17

18

19

20 21

22 23

24 25 26

327

McDaniel, Annie Pierce, Madeline Murphy Rabb, Veronica Saddler, Joann Coleman Sanneh, Doris Seymore, Spring Stone, Laurel Stradford, Shirley Sullivan, Donna Terry, Evelyn Patricia Terry, Lorraine Thomas, Maude Waites, Tisa Warren, and Jennie Washington. This list was gleaned from the labels of a box of 35 mm slides, representing installation shots of the exhibition, present in the collection of the SSCAC. No other full list has been discovered. Along with Boorstin, see, for example, Malcolm Preston, “The Image: Three Views— Ben Shahn, Darius Milhaud and James Baldwin Debate the Real Meaning of a Fashionable Term,” in Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (eds.), Conversations with James Baldwin (Jackson, MS : University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 24–31. Comments preceding reading of “Blackman/An Unfinished History,” on Don L. Lee, Rappin’ & Readin’, recorded at Wayne State University, 1970. See Nathan Wright’s Bound and Norman Parish, Jr.’s Gyrations of American Gothic, both in The Time Is Now! See Kevin Concannon, “Agency: Art and Activism,” in Kevin Concannon and John Noga (eds.), Agency: Art and Advertising (Youngstown, OH : McDonough Museum of Art, 2008), 6–23, 9. Greg Foster-Rice, “Will the Real Ralph Arnold Please Stand Up?,” in Foster-Rice (ed.), The Many Hats of Ralph Arnold (Chicago, IL : Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2018), 11–52, 11. Jacqueline Francis, “Orientations: Facing Ralph Arnold’s Constructive Practice,” in ibid., 65–77, 69. See Timothy Stewart-Winter, “Ralph Arnold’s Queer Chicago: A Life at the Intersections,” ibid., 113–26, 120–2. On queerness and Pop Art, see also Jennifer Sichel, “ ‘Do you think Pop Art’s queer?’ Gene Swenson and Andy Warhol,” Oxford Art Journal, 41, no.1 (March 2018): 59–83. Barbara J. Jones, “Black Imagery” (MA thesis, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1970), 40. A reproduction of this painting appears in Rebecca Zorach, “The Positive Aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement,” The Freedom Principle (Chicago, IL : Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2015), 95–107. Lerone Bennett Jr., “The Emancipation Orgasm: Sweetback in Wonderland,” Ebony, 26, no. 11 (September 1971). Val Gray Ward, “Black Artists Here Assail ‘Sweetback,’ ” Chicago Daily Defender, July 12, 1971, followed by several other installments; Francis Ward, “Super Fly”: A Political and Cultural Condemnation by the Kuumba Workshop (Chicago, IL : Institute of Positive Education, 1972). Bennett, “Emancipation,” 118. Don L. Lee, “The Revolutionary Screw,” in Don’t Cry, Scream (Detroit, MI : Broadside Press, 1969), 57. Evelyn Patricia Terry, interview with author, July 2018. In Woman Screaming, a brightly colored head representing Ericka Huggins, the Black Panther leader, appears

328

Pop Art and Beyond

in the lower register with an electric scene of uprising—rioters silhouetted against a burning city—above. Neither strictly the same nor entirely different, the two outbursts react to similar situations, but use different modes of expression. 27 Mary Ellmann, “Chicago! Behind the ‘I Will’ Spirit, It is Nervous and Erratic,” New York Times, July 14, 1968. 28 Jackson escaped the courtroom with three prisoners and five hostages, but was killed along with three others—including the judge—as they drove away. The event led to the arrest of philosopher and activist Angela Davis, because the guns Jackson used were registered to her.

Index Page numbers in italics represent illustrations. Names of works will be found under the author’s name. Abernathy, Billy (Fundi), 315, 325n2 Brother and Pop Art, 315 In Our Terribleness (with Baraka), 315 Abramo, Lívio, 159 abstract expressionism, 81, 95, 100, 104, 109, 110, 122, 139, 178, 215, 227, 237n6, 261n268 abstraction BAM and, 308 Bat-Yosef and, 308 of Bowling, 206, 217, 220, 221n5 Colescott and, 271 comic, 123 Drexler and, 180 geometric, 186 gestural, 139, 262 Kant’s injunction regarding, 92–3, 96 lyrical, 74 Martínez and, 279, 284, 288, 292, 294n12 in Pop Art, 5, 19n23, 222n10 Segal and, 180 Télémaque and, 241, 256n2 Weber and, 182 Achebe, Chinua, Arrow of God, 60 Adderley, Cannonball, This Here (song), 213 Addy (friend Diafode and M. Diawara), 48 Aderne, Isa, 163 Adorno, Theodor, 43 af Klint, Hilma, 307–8 African American community. See race and ethnicity Africanism, concept of, 60–1 AFRICOBRA, 113, 317, 319 AFZ (Antifascist Women’s Front), Yugoslavia, 75, 76, 87n9 Agam, Yaacov, 298

Agar, Eileen, Angel of Anarchy (1940), 300 agency in Pop aesthetics, 5, 6, 84, 85, 87n5 Aillaud, Gilles, 258n26 Akerman, Chantal, 203n109 Algerian War (1954-62), 122, 242, 247, 249, 299, 310n17 Ali, Muhammad, 57 alienation and labor, 192–3 Allen, Woody, 114 Alloway, Lawrence, 16, 43–4, 120, 194n16, 205–10, 213, 215, 216, 219, 220, 222n12, 240n49, 245, 258n20 Almendros, Néstor, 294n8 Amado, Jorge, 166 Amara/“Harley-Davidson” (friend Diafode and M. Diawara), 48 Amaral, Aracy, 156 America, Paul, 114 American Pop. See also Black Arts Movement; Chicago; Indian Pop; labor, race, and gender in American Pop; specific artists Brazilian Pop Art compared, 159 Colescott’s critique of, 16–17n3 French art movements and, 298 mass/consumer culture and, 18n13 Tom Max and, 13, 135, 148, 150n14 New York Pop, 7, 178 social class and, 12–13 Télémaque and, 242, 248–9, 254 Anglo-American Pop, 1, 3, 13, 19n17. See also American Pop; British Pop Angry Brigades, 39 Anthony, Susan B., 184 Antifascist Women’s Front (AFZ), Yugoslavia, 75, 76, 87n9 Antillanity, 255, 260n62

329

330 Anti-procès exhibitions (Paris, Venice, and Milan, 1960), 299 apartheid in South Africa, 56, 224n28, 237–8n19 Apple, Billy. See Bates, Barrie Applin, Jo, 22n35, 196n45 Araújo, Emanoel, 155 Arenas, Reynaldo, 281, 287 Arikha, Avigdor, 298 Ark (magazine), 34–5, 114 Armengol, Armando, 284 Armstrong, Rolf, 274 Arnold, Ralph, 10, 14, 319–20 Who You/Yeah Baby (c. 1968), 10, 320, plate 42 Arp, Sophie Taeuber, 300 Arroyo, Eduardo, 246, 258n26 Art International, 229 Art & Language group, 32 Art on Art exhibition (Whitney Museum, 1978), 262 Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, 299 Artforum, 261 ARTnews, 99 Arts Magazine, 205–6, 221n4 Astérix comics, 131n78 Atkinson, Terry, 32–3, 43 Aunt Jemima, 111, 183, 184, 190, 198n54, 202n106, 267–8, 269, 274, 277n21, 319, plate 22, plate 33 Avedon, Richard, 66 Axell, Evelyne, 22n42, 298 Baciù, Camillo, Chairs (1975), 307 Bacon, Francis, 206, 210, 215, 224n42 Bago, Ivana, 88n12 “Bahia” exhibition, 5th Art Biennial (Ipirapuera park, São Paulo, Brazil, 1959), 156, 168n21 Baker, Chet, 30 Baker, Houston, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, 60–1 Baker, Josephine, 274 Baker, La Vern, 212–13, 216 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 110, 117, 122, 125, 132n80, 132n82, 250 Bakst, Léon, 301 Baldwin, James, 24n57, 114, 318 Ball, Hugo, “Dada Fragments,” 105n32

Index BAM. See Black Arts Movement Bamako, Mali. See Mali in the 1960s Bambara, Toni Cade, ed., The Black Woman (1970), 318 Bande dessinée et figuration narrative (1967 exhibition), 298 Banham, Reyner, 43–4, 208 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones) Blues People, 60 In Our Terribleness (with Abernathy), 315 Barth, Belle, 118, 119, 130n63 Barthes, Roland, 250, 286 Mythologies (1957), 253–5 Bartlett, Florence Dibble, 230 Bates, Barrie (Billy Apple), 207, 209, 215, 225n49 Drunk (1960), 215 Batista, Fulgencio, 280, 282 Battcock, Gregory, 274 Bat-Yosef, Myriam, 9, 297–308 artistic significance of, 297, 306–8 biblical/Talmudic influence on work of, 304, 306, 308 biographical information, 297–300 Désir exhibition (2018), 308 eroticism and gender fluidity in work of, 8, 297, 300, 301, 303, 306, 308 French art scene and, 298–302, 304–5, 307 Israeli identity, focus on, 300, 302–4, 307 names used by, 297–8, 308n2 Orientalism of, 300, 306 psychedelic style of, 8, 297, 300–1, 303–4, 307 world tour (1972-3), 305 Bat-Yosef, Myriam, works Adam-Kadmon (1993), 308 Autofigure with Map of Israel (1967), 302–3 A Certain Plume, (1978), 307 Divorce (1964), 312n51 Erixymaque (dance-piece, 1965), 299, 300–2, 307, 310n26, plate 40 Exile (1971), 304 Fer Femelle (Hommage à Man Ray, 1964), 300, 301 final work of, 307 Hell (1971), 304

Index Judith and Holofernes (1971), 304 The Kingdom (1971), 304 Marriage (1964), 312n51 Mirages Suspendus (Suspended Mirages, 1971), 303–4, plate 41 My Last Will (1990), 307 Night Table (1964), 300 Offrande pour le Minotaure (Offering to the Minotaur, 1968), 300, plate 39 Paradise (1971), 304, 305 Piano Droit Alphonse Blondel (1971), 304, 305 Total Art (1971), 9, 297, 303–4, 306, 311n39, plate 41 Le Viol du violoncelle (1967), 302, 303 Baudrillard, Jean, 200n73 Baum, Don, 316 Bearden, Romare, 278n31 Beardsley, Aubrey, Salomé, 306 Beatles, 47–8, 50, 55, 217, 307 Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), 39, 114, 272 Beauvoir, Simone de, 20n28 Beckett, Samuel, 114 Bellmer, Hans, 299 Bellows, George, Stag Night at Sharkey’s (1909), 320 Bell-Smith, Peter, 215 Belmont, Bill, 234–5 Bennett, Lerone, 322 Berle, Milton, 121 Berliner, Brett A., 245 Bernes, Jasper, 175, 196n43 Berry, Chuck, 33 Beyond the Fringe (stage review), 109, 114, 119–20 Bhabha, Homi, 111, 122 BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs), 231, 238–9n28 Biba (London store), 38–9 Bilge, Sirma, 7 Billy Liar (film, 1963), 45n17 Birmingham (AL) protests (1963), 252, 253, 259n48 Birmingham School, 42 Black Arts Movement (BAM), 2, 6–7, 315–25. See also specific artists Bowling’s involvement with, 205–7

331

Chicago Imagists and, 2, 315, 316, 318, 326n5 consumerism and, 318–19 Fem-Images in Black exhibition (1974), 8–9, 317–18, 320, 323, 324, 326–7n13 iconography of American identity, use of, 319–20 intersection of gender/feminism and race, 8–9, 317–18, 321–5 LGBTQ community and, 10 media, engagement with, 128n27 presence and visibility of women artists, 315–17 (See also JonesHogu, Barbara; Olu, Yaoundé; Terry, Evelyn Patricia) South Side Community Art Center and, 8, 317, 326n7 Télémaque and, 122 U.S. flag, use of, 319 Black Atlanticism, 15 Black community. See race and ethnicity Black cowboys, 10–11, 110, 124–5, 133n95, 248 Black Panthers, 4, 12, 112, 113, 141, 327–8n26 Black Power movement, 6, 10, 57, 124, 184, 191 Blake, Peter, 12, 33, 34, 198n63, 207, 208, 212, 219, 223n20, 225n49 On the Balcony (1957), 212 Bo Diddley (1963), 213, 253 Drum Majorette (1957), 213, 217 La Vern Baker, 212–13 Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, 39, 114 Toy Shop (1962), 219 Blaxploitation movies, 10, 124, 321–2 Blazing Saddles (film, 1974), 125 Blow Up My Town (film, 1968), 305 Bo Bardi, Lina, 156–8, 165, 166, 167n15, 167n19, 168nn21–3 Bogdan, Adriana, 309n10 Bolan, Mark, 30 Boltanski, Luc, 25n70, 120, 131n66 Bona (Bona Tibertelli de Pisis), 297, 299, 309n10 Bontecou, Lee, 130n55 Boorstin, Daniel, The Image (1961), 318

332

Index

Bosch + Bosch, 75, 82, 88n21 Boshier, Derek, 28, 207, 209, 212, 214, 225n49 England’s Glory (1961), 212 Man Playing Snooker and Thinking of Other Things (1961), 210–12, 211, 217 Rethink, Re-entry (1962), 210 Botelho, Adir, 159, 163 Boty, Pauline, 8, 22n42, 36–7, 37, 45n17, 114, 207, 209, 210, 212, 213, 223n27, 307 5-4-3-2-1 (1963), 7, 36, 37, 38 Picture Show (1960-1), 210 Scandal 63 (lost work), 36, 37 Bourdieu, Pierre, 51, 53, 54, 120 Bourgeois, Louise, 116 Bowen, Denis, 223n20 Bowling, Frank abstractionist, viewed primarily as, 206 Arts Magazine and, 205–6, 221n4 BAM, involvement with, 205–7 Beggar series, 219 critical exclusion from British Pop narrative, 205–7, 209–10, 218–19, 224n42 diasporic imagery of, 13, 14 Map series, 205, 207 The Martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba (1961), 209–10 Mirror (1966), 206, 217 race/ethnicity and, 16n3 Bowling, Frank, Mother’s House series, 3, 205–20 Barticabather (1966-7), 205, 218 Blazing Cane Field with Rum Shop (1967), 218 Bowling’s Variety Store (1966-7), 205 British Pop, narrative of, 207–13, 218–20 Commonwealth internationalism and, 207, 208, 209, 212, 214–16, 220 consumerism and, 207, 216–17, 219–20 Cover Girl (1966), 14–15, 205, 206, 217–18, 218, plate 24 critical exclusion from British Pop narrative, 205–7, 209–10, 218–19, 224n42 female figure in, 217–18, 218, 225n50

labor and class issues raised by, 207, 216–18 Map series and, 205, 207 Middle Passage (1970), 205 Mother’s House (Untitled) (1966), 217 Mother’s House with Beware of the Dog (1966), 205, 217, 219, plate 25 My Guyana (1966-7), 205, 218 photo used as basis for, 205, 206 in photo with Bowling, Michele Delderfield, and Cover Girl, 217–18, 218 Plus Mother’s House (1968), 205 postcolonialism and, 207, 216–18 Bowstead, John, 32, 33, 45n8 Branch, Enobong Hannah, 201n91 Brando, Marlon, 49 Brazilian Pop Art, 4, 153–66, 164. See also specific artists cordel literature and woodcuts, 159–60, 163, 170n43 cultura popular and, 156–8, 163–6 military coup (1964), 158, 159, 161, 163 Orisha Yemanjá (Afro-Brazilian nature deity), 7, 21n35, 153–5, 154, 165–6, 166n1 printmaking, lithography, and metal engraving, 154, 158–64, 164 women, gender, and feminism, 6–7, 154–5, 160–1, 165 Brebion, Dominique, 257n11 Breton, André, 306–7 Brew, Kwesi, 219–20 British Empire exhibition, Wembley (1924), 214 British Guiana. See Bowling, Frank; Brew, Kwesi; Mother’s House series British National Party, 216 British Nationality Act (1948), 208, 214 British Pop. See also labor in Britain; teenage cults and British Pop; specific artists Anglo-American Pop, 1, 3, 13, 19n17 Commonwealth internationalism and, 207, 208, 209, 212, 214–16, 220, 223n20 consumerism and, 207, 210, 212–13, 216, 219–20 critical narrative of, 207–13, 222n10

Index Haworth and, 184–5, 187, 189, 203n110 immigration to Britain and, 208, 215, 216, 222–3nn16–17, 224n35 music and, 30–2, 31, 33, 35, 39–40, 43, 212–13, 216, 217 political awareness and postcolonial theory in, 208, 209–12, 211 race/ethnicity and, 27, 30–1, 31, 39, 209, 212–13, 215, 218–19 RCA (Royal College of Art) and, 28–9, 33, 205, 209, 214–15, 225n49 sociopolitical concerns of, 193n8 Britton, Sylvester, 317 Brooks, Mel, 124–5, 133n97 Brouard, Carl, 252 Brown, James Live at the Apollo (album, 1967), 57–9, 58, 62–5 Mali in 1960s and, 48, 49, 50, 55, 56–65, 58, 66, 67, 69, 70 Nommo, invocation of, 48, 49, 50, 55, 56–65, 58, 66, 67, 69, 70 Sidibé compared, 48, 67 Brown, Joan, 261 Bruce, Lenny Jewish and Black comedians and new comedy, 13, 109–12, 114–16, 115, 124 Pop Art and, 125 on Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, 114 social class and, 120 women comedians/artists and, 116–18 Bryan-Wilson, Julia, 199n66 Bućan, Boris, 74 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), 231, 238–9n28 Buri, Samuel, 253 Burroughs, Margaret, 317 Burroughs, William, 112 Buszek, Maria Elena, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (2006), 273, 274 Butler, Judith, 119, 296n30 Butler, Krissie, 294n6 Cabrera Infante, Sabá, 280 Cactus Jack, 268 Cade, Toni (later Bambara), ed., The Black Woman (1970), 318

333

Caldwell, Erskine, Tobacco Road (1932), 277n26 Caldwell, Raymond, 87n5 Cale, Melvin, 323 Callas, Maria, 98 camp, 7, 10, 12, 109, 120, 295n19, 296n32 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 30 Campbell, E. Simms, 274, 278n31 Cañas, Iván, 288 Cannon, T. C., 229–30, 234, 240n41 Cardin, Pierre, 217 Carnaby Street, 38 carnival and carnivalesque, 4, 122–4, 126n5, 132n82, 163, 185, 212, 248, 250 Caro, Tony, 198n62 Carrington, Leonora, 297 Carter, Hurricane, 56 Casas, Melesio, Humanscape 68 (Kitchen Spanish, 1973), 201n90 Castelli, Leo, 120, 298 Castro, Fidel, 4, 56, 176, 250, 251, 279–84, 287–8, 302, 304, plate 36. See also Martínez, Raúl, and Castro’s Cuba Catlett, Elizabeth, 318 Caulfield, Patrick, 209 Cavett, Dick, 130n54 Centros Populares de Cultura (CPC). Brazil, 157–8, 169–70n37 Césaire, Aimé, 52–3, 65, 252 Chamberlain, John, 298 Chambers, Eddie, 16n3, 206, 207 Charles, Ray, 213 Charters, Ann, 234–5 Chaui, Marilena, 157, 164 Checker, Chubby, 196n44 Cheetham, Mark A., 102n5 Chicago Columbian Exposition (1893), 277n21 Democratic National Convention (1968), 113 intersection of comedy, class, gender, and race in, 121 OBAC’s Wall of Respect in, 113, 315, 317 Playboy Club, 188 Second City, 121 South Side Community Art Center, 8, 317, 326n7

334

Index

Chicago, Judy, 308 Womanhouse (with Miriam Schapiro, 1972), 305, 311n37 Chicago Black Arts Movement (BAM). See specific entries at Black Arts Movement Chicago Crusader, 321 Chicago Imagists, 2, 315, 316, 318, 326n5 Chicana/o Movement, 191 Chikuma-gawa Zesshō (A Song for Chikuma River, film, 1967), 141 Christen, Andreas, Object: White Zone (with Markus Rätz and Willy Weber, 1965), 301 Christie, Julie, 38–9, 45n17 Cienfuegos, Camilo, 282, 287, 291 Cissé/Paris (one of Beatles of MedinaCoura), 47–8 Civil Rights movement, 6, 56, 113, 117, 181–2, 188–9, 191, 252, 302 Cixous, Hélène, 306 class. See social class Cleaver, Eldridge, 24n57 Coates, Robert, 233 Cohen, Harold, 198n62 Cohen, Phil, 40–2 Colescott, Robert, 6–7, 261–76 beauty queens, pin-ups, and starlets in work of, 271–5 comedy and satire, use of, 113–14, 261–2 consumerism and, 267–8, 269–71 homages to/parallels with Pop Artists, 262–5, 263, 268 masculinist gaze of, 14, 264, 273–5 Pop Art, relationship to, 261–2, 275–6 race in works of, 16–17n13, 261–2, 265, 267–8, 269, 270–6 sexuality and eroticism in work of, 263, 263–5, 267–8, 270, 271–5 women in domestic interiors, works involving, 266–8, 269 Colescott, Robert, works Beauty Queen (1974), 275 Black Capitalism: Afro-American Spaghetti (1971-3), 11, 270, plate 34 Breakthrough for the Colonel, 267 Bye, Bye Miss American Pie (1971), 273 Cafe au Lait au Lit (1974), 274, 275, plate 35

Forbidden Fruit at Last (1970), 265 George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware (1975), 261, 262, 275–6 The Green Glove Rapist (1971), 263, 263–5 Havana Corona (1970), 270–1 Homage to Duchamp (1973), 262–3 I Gets a Thrill Too When I Sees De Koo (1978), 267–8 Instant Chicken, 267 Interior I and II: Homage to Roy Lichtenstein (1991), 268, 269 Jemima’s Pancakes (1972), 267–8, plate 33 Knowledge of the Past is the Key to the Future: Love Makes the World Go Round (1986-7), 265 Miss Black Oakland (c. 1967), 271–2 Mom’s Old Fashioned Root Beer (1973), 269–70 Moonlighting in Porno: Sex on the Slope (1976), 275, 278n36 Nam Boogie (1967), 272–3 Nite Cream (1974), 263 The Obscene Phone Call (1978), 263 Rejected Idea for a Drostes Chocolate Advertisement (1974), 270 Saint Sebastian (1986-7), 265 Susanna and the Elders (Novelty Hotel) (1980), 266–7 The Winning Combination (1974), 271, 274 Colin, Paul, 123, 132n85 collage BAM and, 315, 316, 320, 323, 324 Bat-Yosef and, 298, 299 British Pop and, 210, 223n27 comedians/new comedy and, 116, 124, 129n40 labor, race, and gender in American Pop and, 180, 181, 182 Martínez in Castro’s Cuba and, 284 Pop Art’s use of, 3, 7, 10–11, 13, 14 Télémaque’s use of, 10–11 Yemanjá’s use of, 153, 155 Yugoslav female artists and, 13, 75, 80, 82–5 Collins, Lisa Gail, 23n49 Collins, Patricia Hill, 7, 184

Index Colonel Sanders, 267, 269, 274, plate 33, plate 35 colonialism. See postcolonial theory Columbian Exposition, Chicago (1893), 277n21 comedians and the new comedy, 109–26. See also specific comedians Black and Jewish male comedians, 111–16, 112, 115, 117 Colescott’s art and, 113–14, 261–2 comics and, 120–1, 131–2n78, 131n66 intersectional entanglement with gender, race, and class, 109, 110–11, 120–6 Nilsson’s art and, 8, 110, 121–2 politicized stance of, 109–11, 113 Pop Art’s use of the comic, 109–10, 126n5, 261–2 social class and, 13, 109, 110–11, 119–20 Télémaque’s art and, 10–11, 24n60, 110, 122–5, 123 women artists and comedians, 116–19, 118 Commonwealth Art Today (Commonwealth Institute exhibition, 1962), 214, 224n36 Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962), 214, 224n35 Commonwealth internationalism and British Pop, 207, 208, 209, 212, 214–16, 220, 223n20 Communism, 5, 88n19, 95, 137, 143, 210, 256n2, 258n26, 280–1 Conceptual-Art collective, 33 Condé, Maryse, Segu, 60 Conducta impropria (documentary film, 1983), 294n8 Conil-Lacoste, Michel, 256n2 Connor, “Bull,” 181 consumerism BAM, women and feminism in, 318–19 Bowling’s Mother’s House series and, 207, 216–17, 219–20 British Pop, critical narrative of, 207, 210, 212–13, 216, 219–20 Colescott and, 267–8, 269–71

335

comedians and, 128n27 embodiment versus consumerism in Indian Pop, 229–30, 234 Native arts market and Indian Pop, 230–4, 237 Pop Art’s approach to, 18n13 postcolonial theory and, 15 race/ethnicity and, 11, 132n93 social class and, 11 Télémaque’s critique of, 11, 14, 24n61, 124, 133n93, 243–5 transnational and diasporic engagement with, 14 Warhol and, 11, 26n83, 99, 100 Yugoslav women and, 76, 77–9, 80, 82, 86–7n4 Cook, Peter, 119 cordel literature and woodcuts, Brazil, 159–60, 163, 170n43 Corso, Gregory, 112 counterculture, 6, 39 Courbet, Gustave, 100 cowboys, Black, 10–11, 110, 124–5, 133n95, 248 CPC (Centros Populares de Cultura). Brazil, 157–8, 169–70n37 Craven, David, 102n5 Cravo, Mário, Jr., 154 critical realism, 159 Croatian Spring, 81, 88–9n24 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Four-Way Street, 48 Crow, Thomas, xiv, 4, 5, 11, 12, 15, 27, 140 The Long March of Pop, 125, 240n50 Crumb, Robert, 110, 116, 117, 121–2, 125, 130n55, 261 Cuba. See also Castro, Fidel; Martínez, Raúl, and Castro’s Cuba Colescott’s Havana Corona (1970), 270–1 Mariel boatlift, 294n8 Mural Cuba Collectiva (1967), 302 Pop Art in, 281–3, 286 Télémaque and, 250, 251, 259n41 Terry’s Hijack a Plane to Cuba, 323–4, plate 47 Cueff, Alain, 260n67 Culbert, William, 215

336

Index

cultura popular, 4, 156–8, 163–6, 283, 295n18 cultural nationalist movement, 318 Cultural Studies, 12, 15, 40, 42, 244, 260n68 Cutler, Jody, 114, 265, 275–6 Cypriot war of independence, 210, 223n27 Dabčević-Kučar, Savka, 81 Dada, 96, 105n32, 310n17. See also Neo-Dada Dailey, Chuck, 232 Daily Mirror, 40 Dali, Salvador, 298, 300 dance and dancing Bat-Yosef’s dance-pieces, 299, 300–2, 307 British Pop and, 36, 40, 43, 213 Cixous on, 306 Mali in 1960s and photos of Malick Sidibé, 15, 57–60, 58, 62–6, 69 Dane, Marie-Claude, 253 Daniel, Mary Reed, 317 D’Arcangelo, Allan, 86n3 Darling (film, 1965), 38–9, 45n17 Darren, James, Her Royal Majesty (song), 212 Davis, Angela, 56, 66, 201n91, 319, 328n28 Davis, Garry, 297, 303 Davis, Miles, 30–1, 31, 39 Davis, Ossie, 133n95 de Duve, Thierry, 97, 106n36 de Forest, Roy, 261 de Kooning, Willem, 95, 96, 125 Woman I (1952-3), 268 Dean, James, 66, 292 decolonization. See postcolonial theory deconstructive impulse, 8, 183, 197n46, 202–3n107 Delacroix, Eugene, Liberty Leading the People (1830), 261 Delderfield, Michele, 217–18, 218 Deleuze, Gilles, 95, 103n11, 103n14, 308 DePillars, Murry, Aunt Jemima, 319 Derrida, Jacques, 94–5, 97 détournement, 84, 299, 307 Dexy’s Midnight Runners, 39 Diafode (friend of M. Diawara), 47–8, 50, 70 Diario de noticias, 156 Dias, António, 159

diasporas. See transnational and diasporic identities Diawara, Manthia, xiv, 5, 15, 47 Diddley, Bo, 213, 216 Dietzel, Nana, 301n24 Digenis (Georgios Grivas), 210, 223n27 Dimitrakaki, Angela, 194n17 Dimitrijević, Branislav, 86–7n4, 87n7 Dine, Jim, 86n3, 146, 262, 298 disidentification, 6, 10, 20–1n33 Dixon, Joe, 205 Django Unchained (film, 2012), 125 Djuric, Carmen Lydia (Hessie), 257n7 domestic labor, paid and unpaid, 182–91, 187, 192, 203n108 Donahue, Troy, 99 Donaldson, Jeff, 198n54, 319, 324 J. D. McClain’s Day in Court (1970), 324 Doris, Sara, 12 Douglas, Betty Asche, 100 Douglas, Emory, 4 Douze ans d’art contemporain en France, 1960–1972 (exhibition, Paris), 305–6 Dr. Strangelove (film, 1964), 110 Drexler, Rosalyn, 110, 114, 127n18, 130n54, 177, 178, 180–2, 192, 195n34, 196n44 The Dream (1963), 117, plate 7 Fresh News (1965), 181 Hold Your Fire (1966), 181 The Investigation (play), 117 Is It True What They Say About Dixie (1966), 181–2 Kiss Me Stupid (1964), 117 The Lesson (1962), 181 Men and Machines (1966), 181 The Syndicate (1964), 181, 196n36, plate 19 Du Bois, W. E. B., 111 Duchamp, Marcel, 97, 105n32, 123, 298, 300 The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even (The Large Glass) (1915-23), 262–3 Dufrêne, François, 302, 310n26 Duvalier, François, 241 Dylan, Bob, 114 Džuverović, Lina, xiv, 5, 73

Index Easy Rider (film), 49 Ebony magazine, 274 écriture féminine, 299 Eder, Earl, 234 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 199–200n72 Ekman, Marie-Louise, “Gunnel” print series, 194n11 Elizabeth II (queen of England), 209 Elvgren, Gil, I Gave Him the Brush Off (1947), 274 embodiment versus consumerism in Indian Pop, 229–30, 234 English, Darby, 19n23 English Pop. See British Pop Enwezor, Okwui, 206, 207 Epps, Brad, 287, 296n30 eroticism. See sexuality and eroticism Erró (Guðmundur Guðmundsson/Ferro), 298, 299–300, 302, 309n12 Gold Water (1964), 299–300 Esquire magazine, 278n31 Essence magazine, 133n93 L’Essor, 55 Estorino, Abelardo, 283 ethnicity. See race and ethnicity Fanon, Frantz, 13, 20n28, 52, 65, 242, 246, 252 Black Skin, White Masks (1952), 244, 248, 258n26 fashion and dress Mali in 1960s, 47–9, 49, 57–8, 58, 66, 67, 68 teenage cults and British Pop, 27–32, 37–42 Federici, Silvia, 204n117 Feld, Mark, 29, 30 Fem-Images in Black exhibition (South Side Community Art Center, 1974), 8–9, 317–18, 320, 323, 324, 326–7n13 feminists and feminism. See women, gender, and feminism Fernández Reboiro, Antonio, 282 Ferro. See Erró Festival of Britain exhibition (1951), 214 Festival of Free Expression (1964), 299 Fields, Marva Alvita Spaulding, 317 Fields, Totie, 118–19, 130n63

337

Fight Censorship Group, 116 figuration BAM and, 318 Bat-Yosef and, 298 of Bowling, 206, 207, 215, 218 in Brazilian Pop, 153, 155, 158, 159, 160, 163 of Drexler, 180 gestural, 268 of Haworth, 186 labor, race, and gender in American Pop and, 178 Martínez and, 282, 284, 290 New Figuration (nouvelle figuration), 155, 158, 222n10, 259n56, 279 in Pop Art, 5, 13, 19n23, 222n10, 284 of Weber, 182 in Yugoslav Pop, 75, 81 Figuration Narrative (Narrative Figuration), 2, 122, 241–2, 245–6, 248, 249, 258n23, 258n26, 259n39, 298–9, 304 La Figuration narrative dans l’art contemporain (1965 exhibition), 248 figurative expressionism, 159, 206, 215, 261 Fine-Artz Associates, 15, 32–5, 43, 44 Kandilac Kustomized Asterod Action Seat (1963), 34 Fini, Leonor, 297 Finney, Albert, 45n17 Fischer, Vera, 8, 80 Pasji život (A Dog’s Life, 1968–72), 80, plate 2 Fitzpatrick, Jim, Viva Che poster (1968), 140, 143, 144 Flatley, Jonathan, 23n54, 257n9 Foldes, Peter, 253 Ford, John, 124, 125, 248 Fortune, John, 120 FORUM, 321 Foster-Rice, Greg, 10, 320 Foucault, Michel, 87n5 France. See Algerian War; Bat-Yosef, Myriam; Télémaque, Hervé Francis, Jacqueline, 320 Frankfurt School, 36, 40, 43, 192 Franklin, Aretha, 66 Fraser, Robert, 39 Freire, Paolo, 157

338

Index

French Revolution, 249–50 Freud, Sigmund, 117, 301 Fried, Michael, 99, 103n16, 106n43 Friedan, Betty, 201n87 Feminine Mystique, 305 Frost, David, 114 Fuller, Buckminster, 302 Funkadelic, 322 Gabara, Esther, 193n10 Gablik, Suzi, 229 Gadsby, Hannah, Nanette (2017), 119 Gaines, Malik, 14 Gaiter, Colette, 128n27 Gaitskell, Hugh, 224n35 Gandhi, Mahatma, 56 Gassiot-Talabot, Gérald, 242, 249, 253, 254, 259n39, 259n56 Gates, Henry Louis, 111, 127n12 gay and lesbian community. See LGBTQ community Geiger, Anna Bella, 171n55 gender. See also women, gender, and feminism comedy and Pop Art intersecting with gender, race, and class issues, 109, 110–11, 120–6 female gaze, 22–2n42 hyper-masculinity and Cuban revolution, 283, 284, 287, 292, 294n6, 295n35 intersection of gender, race, and class with Pop Art, 1–3, 8–9, 13–14 male gaze, 7–8, 14, 21n42, 264, 273–5 performativity of, 287, 296n30 sex differentiated from, 287, 296n30 in sixties, 6 gender fluidity abstract sculpture, transgender capacity of, 23n55 Ralph Arnold and, 10 Bat-Yosef, work of, 8, 297, 300, 301, 303, 306, 308 of Deborah Kass, 119 in Pop Art generally, 10 Gerchman, Rubens, 159 German expressionism, 159 Getsy, David J., 23n55

Gibran, Khalil, 306 Gil, Gilberto, 163 Ginsberg, Allen, 112, 114 Glamrock, 30 Glissant, Edouard, 255, 260n62 global Pop concept of, 2, 3–4 Indian Pop as manifestation of, 228 Glueck, Grace, 190, 202n102 Goeldi, Oswaldo, 159, 163 Goldman, Shifra, 282 Goldwater, Barry, 300 Gonçalves, Martim, 156 González Rostgaard, Alfredo, 282 Gooding, Mel, 206, 224n42 Goodwin, Clive, 45n17 Goscinny, René, 131n78 Graeber, David, 95 Grafenauer, Petja, 87n7 Graham, Martha, 300 Graverol, Jane, 297 Green, Nancy, 277n21 Green, William, 223n20 Greenberg, Clement, 43, 91–6, 101–2n5, 102–3n10, 104nn21–2 Gregory, Dick, 109–14, 118, 120, 121, 124, 125, 128n32 Griaule, Marcel, Dieu d’eau, 61, 63 Griffin, Merv, 115 Grimstead, Eddy, 34 Grins or youth clubs in Mali, 55, 56, 59, 67, 69 Grivas, Georgios (Digenis), 210, 223n27 Grudin, Anthony E., xiv–xv, 9, 10, 11, 12, 91, 115–16, 120 Guémard, Alain, 306 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 56, 140, 143, 144, 250, 255, 279, 282, 283, 284, 287, 291 Gullar, Ferreira, Cultura posta em questão (1963), 157–8, 170n44 Guyer, Paul, 102n5 Hackett, Regina, 262 Hadler, Mona, xv, 1, 10–11, 17–18n10, 109, 196n42 Hairy Who, 121, 316, 326n5 Haiti. See Télémaque, Hervé Hall, Kim, 95

Index Hall, Stuart, 6, 14, 111, 220, 248 “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’ ” (1981), 244 Hamilton, Jack, 20n24 Hamilton, Richard Hommage á Chrysler Corp (1957), 208–9 Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956), 213 Hanson, Duane, Bunny, 190 happenings, 22n45, 299–300 Hara-Kiri comics, 132n78 “Hard Mods,” 39 Harlem on My Mind (Met exhibition, 1969), 206, 221n4 “Harley-Davidson”/Amara (friend Diafode and M. Diawara), 48 Hawkins, Coleman, 111 Haworth, Jann, 6, 8, 114, 177, 184–90, 192, 198n57, 198nn62–3, 199n66, 200n81, 203nn110–11 Cowboy (1964), 187, 200n73 Maid (1966), 186–90, 187, 192–3, 200n84 Old Lady I (1962), 186, 199n70 Old Lady II (1965-7), 9, 186, 191, plate 23 Old Man, 186 Pom Pom Girl (c. 1964), 187, 200n73 Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, 39, 114 Surfer (1965), 187, 200n73 Haworth, Miriam Severy, 198n57 Haworth, Ted, 198n57, 203n111 Hefner, Hugh, 188 Hellerman, Yosef, 297 Hendricks, Barkley L., 121 Hendrix, Jimi, 50, 55, 66, 69 Herkenhoff, Paulo, 159 Heseltine, Michael, 29 Hessie (Carmen Lydia Djuric), 257n7 Hewitt, Edgar Lee, 230 Hewitt, Paolo, 30–1, 39 Hicks, Sheila, 305, 311n39 Higue, Ole, 225n50 Hip Hop, 70 Hispanics. See Latinx community and Latin American Pop HMS Destruction, 212

339

Ho Chi Minh, 141, 291 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 199–200n72 Hockney, David, 28, 33, 209, 215, 225n49 Hogarth, William, 178 Hollywood and film industry, 125, 185, 187–9, 191, 198n57, 199n69, 200n77, 200n82, 201n86, 202n95, 203nn110–11, 212, 273, 321. See also specific films homosexuality. See LGBTQ community hooks, bell, 14, 201n87 Horne, Lena, 274 Hoshi Yuriko, 141 Hotere, Ralph, Human Rights series (1962), 215 Houghton, Georgiana, 307 Huggins, Ericka, 327–8n26 Hugo, Valentine, 297 Hulanicki, Barbara, 38 Hultén, Pontus, 86n2 Humair, Daniel, 302 Hyde, Robert, 224n41 hyperrealism, 304 IAIA (Institute for American Indian Arts), 227, 229–35, 237n15, 238–9n28 ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts), 43, 213 Iceland, 298 identity politics, 6, 242, 243, 247, 255 Ikegami, Hiroko, xv, 5, 13, 135 Image in Revolt (Bowling/Boshier exhibition at Grabowski Gallery, 1962), 214 image repetition and seriality, 4–5 Imagists, 2, 315, 316, 318, 326n5 immigration to Britain, 208, 215, 216, 222–3nn16–17, 224n35 Independent Group, 12, 25n72, 28, 35, 43, 208 Indian Pop, 2, 227–36. See also specific artists agency in Pop aesthetic and, 5 BIA and, 231, 238–9n28 development of genre, 227–8 embodiment versus consumerism in, 229–30, 234

340

Index

global Pop, as manifestation of, 228 IAIA and, 227, 229–35, 237n15, 238–9n28 Native arts market and museum practice/studies, 230–4, 237 Pictures Generation and, 238n20 postcolonial theory and, 235–6 primitivism and, 234–6 Red Power movement, 6 terminological discussion of, 236n2 vernacular versus popular and, 228–9, 235 Woodstock, IAIA graduates invited to participate in, 234–5, 236 Indiana, Robert, 125, 240n44 poster for opera The Mother of Us All (1967), 184 Iñigo Clavo, Maria, 169–70n37 Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA), 227, 229–35, 237n15, 238–9n28 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), 43, 213 International Pop (Walker Art Center exhibition, 2015), 3, 87n7 International SuRrealist Exhibition (EROS, 1959), 298 “international” versus “global,” 4 Isaak, Jo Anna, 117 Islam in Mali, 51, 59–60, 64 Israel, Pop Art in. See Bat-Yosef, Myriam It Ain’t Me Babe (feminist comic collaborative), 116 Ivanjicki, Olja, Graphic Collective Gallery exhibition (1964), 73–4, 77–9, 78, 80, 85, 88n19, 89n25 Iveković, Sanja, 74, 75, 80–2, 85 Double Life (1975-6), 8, 82, plate 4 Hrvatsko Proljeće (The Croatian Spring, late 1960s), 81, 88–9n24, plate 3 Sweet Violence (1974), 89n25 Tragedy of a Venus, Sweet Life, and Bitter Life (1975-6), 82 Iwo Jima, photo of raising of U.S. flag over (1945), 136, 143–4 Jackson, George, 56 Jackson, Henry D., Jr., 323 Jackson, Jacquelyne Johnson, 201n91 Jackson, Jonathan, 324, 328n28

Jacopetti, Guatterio, 302 Jagger, Mick, 66 Janaway, Christopher, 95 Japan. See Max, Tom (Makishi Tsutomu), and U.S. occupation of Okinawa; Tokyo Pop Jarr, Ahmad, 215 Jarrell, Jae, 317 Jarrell, Wadsworth, Revolutionary (1971), 319 Jay, Martin, 192 The Jazz Singer (film, 1927), 213 Jeffs, Roger, 32, 33, 45n8 Jennings, Bernard, 32, 33 Jesih, Boris, 74 Jews and Judaism. See also Bat-Yosef, Myriam Black and Jewish male comedians, 111–16, 112, 115, 117, 124 Drexler and, 127n18, 180 female Jewish comedians, 118–19 Segal and, 180, 195n22, 195n27 social class and Beyond the Fringe, 119–20 Jiménez Leal, Orlando, 280, 294n8 Johns, Jasper, 139, 227, 228, 233, 298 Flag (1954-5), 319 Johnson, John H., 274 Johnson, Lyndon, 238n28 Johnson Products Company, 11, 24n61, 133n93 Jolson, Al, 196n38, 213 Jones, Allen, 86n3, 209 Jones, Amelia, 20n28 Jones, Barbara, 208 Jones, Caroline A., 102n5 Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Amiri Jones, Peter B., 229 Banana, from the Indian Brand series (1968), 229, plate 29 Joy Bottle, from the Indian Brand series (1968), 229, plate 28 Jones-Hogu, Barbara, 8, 113, 316–20, 323 America series, 319 Land Where My Father Died, 319 Mother of Man, 320 Nation Time, 319 Jouffroy, Alain, 298, 299, 300, 309n5, 309nn10–11

Index jouissance, feminist notions of, 117 Journiac, Michel, Hours in the Day of an Ordinary Woman (1974), 305 jus soli, 214 Kalajić, Dragoš, 74 Kandinsky, Wassily, 300 Kant, Immanuel abstraction, injunction to, 92–3, 96 American art-critical paradigms and, 91–6, 101–2n5 Critique of Judgment, 91–2, 95, 102nn5–6, 103n14 Warhol, anti-Kantianism of, 96–8, 101 Kaprow, Allan, 299 Karavan, Dani, 298 Kass, Deborah, 110, 119, 130n63 Double Yentl (My Elvis, 1993), 119 Katz, Jonathan D., 6, 10, 33nn53–4 Katz, Renina, 159 Keeler, Christine, 36 Keinholz, Ed, 304 Keita, Seydou, 50–1 Kennedy, John, 11, 299 Kent, Corita, 13, 175–7, 192 my people (1965), 176 that they may have life (1964), 175–6, plate 18 wonderbread (1962), 175, 193n5 Kerouac, Jack, 112 Khrushchev, Nikita, 11, 299 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 7, 56, 154–5 King, Woodie, Jr., 325–6n3 Kitaj, R. B. (Ron), 33, 209, 215 Murder of Rosa Luxembourg (1961), 210 “kitchen debate” between Nixon and Khrushchev, 11 kitsch, 67, 92, 102–3n10, 283, 286, 296n32 KKK (Ku Klux Klan), 319, 320 Klasen, Peter, 253 Klein, Melanie, 306 Klein, Yves, 300, 302, 310n27 Knight, Nick, 43 Kogelnik, Kiki, Bombs in Love (1962), 304 Kojima Nobuaki, 139 Korda, Alberto, 140, 250, 283 Korner, Alexis, 213 Koščević, Želimir, 86n2

341

Koza riot (1970), Okinawa, 141, 142, 145 Kozloff, Max, 229 Kramer, Hilton, 262, 271 Krašovec, Metka, Kokošja Juha–Sporočilo (Chicken Soup–The Message, 1968), 80, 85, plate 1 Krishnamurti, 300, 307 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 319, 320 Kubrick, Stanley, 110 Kuh, Richard H., 114 Kunz, Emma, 308 Kurtzman, Harvey, 121 Kuspit, Donald, 195n27 labor, race, and gender in American Pop, 6, 175–93. See also Drexler, Rosalyn; Haworth, Jann; Rosler, Martha; Saar, Betye; Segal, George; Weber, Idelle alienation and, 192–3 Black women in labor force, 189, 201n91, 202n95 domestic labor, paid and unpaid, 182–91, 187, 192, 203n108 public realm of work, 177–83, 179, 192 sociopolitical concerns of Pop Art and, 175–7 labor in Britain black labor force, 208, 222–3n17, 201n89 Bowling’s Mother’s House series, labor and class issues raised by, 207, 216–18 immigration laws and concerns, 208, 215, 216, 222–3nn16–17, 224n35 Ladik, Katalin, 13, 74, 75, 82–5, 88n21, 89nn27–8, 116 Eil-Nitt (1976), 83 Kraljica od Šebe (Queen of Sheba, 1973), 82, plate 5 Laž Papir (1973), 83 Laing, Gerald, 86n3 Lamoni, Giulia, xv, 4, 7, 153 Lancaster, Roger, 287, 296n30 Latinx community and Latin American Pop. See also Brazilian Pop Art; Cuba; Martínez, Raúl, and Castro’s Cuba Chicana/o Movement, 191 Colescott’s Havana Corona (1970) and, 271

342

Index

cultura popular, 4, 156–8, 163–6, 283, 295n18 domestic service in America and, 189, 191, 201n90, 203n109 mestijaje, 271 social class in, 25n78 Lauand, Judith, 4, 163 Sem título (1970s), 163, 164 Lautréamont, Isadore Ducasse, le comte de, 44 Lavantes, Jean, 132n85 Lawrence, Carolyn, 9, 317 Uphold Your Men, 317 League of Black Women, 317–18 Lebel, Jean-Jacques, 298, 299, 309n5, 310n17 Pour conjurer l’esprit de catastrophe (1962-3), 299 Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude, 260n67 Lee, Don L. (later Haki Madhubuti), 318 “The Revolutionary Screw” (poem), 322 Lefebvre, Georges, 249 Lehrer, Tom, 129n49 Leirner, Nelson, 163 Lenin, Vladimir Illich, 291 Leonardo Da Vinci, Last Supper, 116 lesbian and gay community. See LGBTQ community Lesoualc’h, Théo, 302 Leutze, Emanuel, George Washington Crossing the Delaware (1852), 261 Levinas, Emmanuel, 297, 308 Lewis, John, 139–41, 143, 150n15, plate 11 LGBTQ community, 9–10. See also gender fluidity Gay and Lesbian Liberation movement, 6 Deborah Kass and, 119 Martínez and Castro’s Cuba, 7, 280–1, 283–5, 287, 290–3, 293n5, 294n8, 295nn19–21 terminology of, 293n1 transgender sexual revolution, 23n55 Warhol, subaltern voices (female, queer, working class) in work of, 7, 11, 12, 96, 98–101, 120, 295n17 Licensed Agencies for Relief in Asia, 142 Lichtenstein, Roy, 86n3, 101, 110, 114, 123, 125, 128n27, 145, 240n44, 264, 298

The Living Room (1991), 268 Whaam! and Crak! (1963), 273 Life magazine, 146, 176 Ligon, Glenn, 111, 114 Lijn, Liliane, 22n45 Lily (TV show), 117 Lindner, Richard, The Street (1963) and Thank You (1971), 272 “line drop-out” technique, 140, 143, 148 Lippard, Lucy, ed., Pop Art (1966), 206, 207–8, 210, 222n10, 229 Loach, Ken, 30 Lobel, Michael, 16–17n3, 21n40, 261, 268, 276 Lobo, Lotus, 3, 4, 13, 161–2, 165 Sem título (Untitled, 1969), 162, plate 17 Lockwood, Lee, 281 Logar, Lojze, 74 London Playboy Club, 188 London Pop. See British Pop López, Yolanda M., 203n109 Lorde, Audre, 189 Los Angeles Times, 176, 189 Lucía (film), 284 Lumumba, Patrice, 49, 53, 56, 209–10 Lyotard, Jean-François, 306, 309n10 Mabley, Jackie “Moms,” 13, 109, 110, 113, 117–19, 118 MacInnes, Colin, Absolute Beginners (1959), 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 44n1 Macmillan, Harold, 208 Mad magazine, 110, 120–2, 124, 132n91, 211 Madhubuti, Haki. See Lee, Don L. Magalhães, Roberto, 159 Magnin, André, 47 Magritte, René, The Menaced Assassin (1927), 263–4 Mailer, Norman, 114 Maiolino, Anna Maria, 4, 159–60, 165 Alta Tensão (1968), 163 A Espera (1967), 160 O Bebê (1967), 159, plate 15 O Heroi (1967), 159 Makishi Tsutomu. See Max, Tom, and U.S. occupation of Okinawa

Index Malcolm X, 12, 56 males and masculinity. See gender Mali in 1960s and photos of Malick Sidibé, 5, 15, 47–70. See also Sidibé, Malick, photos of, for specific works James Brown and, 48, 49, 50, 55, 56–65, 58, 66, 67, 69, 70 copying copiers, Sidibé’s photos as, 65–70, 68 dance and dancing, 15, 57–60, 58, 62–6, 69 decolonization movements and postcolonialism, 49–50, 51–4, 56, 59–61, 64–5 fashion and dress in, 47–9, 49, 57–8, 58, 66, 67, 68 Islam, Christianity, and traditional African religion in, 51, 59–60, 64 Seydou Keita, photos of, 50–1 movement, space, and narrative in Sidibé’s photos, 69–70 music, importance of, 47–50, 55, 56–65, 58, 66 Nommo, James Brown’s invocation of, 61–5, 70 race/ethnicity and, 50, 55–7, 59, 64–5, 66 social class and, 65 socialist government in Mali and, 51, 53, 57 transnational and diasporic identities in, 50, 56–7, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65 young women and, 51, 57–9, 58 youth culture, development of/reaction against, 47–56, 49, 66–70 mammy figure, 14, 117, 184, 189, 190, 197–8n54 Mandiargues, André Pieyre de, 299, 309n11 Manina (Marianne Tischler), 297, 299, 309n11 Mann, Manfred, 37 Mao Zedong and Maoism, 5, 56, 146, 304 Mar-Chaïm, Yossi, 304 Mariel boatlift, 294n8 Marisol, 10, 24n56, 201n88, 240n48 Martí, José, 279, 282, 283, 284, 285, 285–7, 291

343

Martínez, Raúl, and Castro’s Cuba, 5, 279–93 biographical information, 281–2, 283–4, 295nn20–1 Cuba (1969), 287, 288 cultura popular, engagement with, 4, 283 hyper-masculinity of revolution, 283, 284, 287, 292, 294n6, 295n35 Isla 70 (1970), 290–2, plate 38 LGBTQ community, 7, 280–1, 283–5, 287, 290–3, 293n5, 294n8, 295nn19–21 multiple aesthetics of Cuban Revolution, 279–80 9 repeticiones de Fidel y microfonos (1968), 287–8, plate 36 pleasure in revolutionary Cuba, suspect nature of, 280–1 Pop Art in Cuba, 281–3, 286 portraits of revolutionary leaders by, 4, 283–8, 285, 291, 296n35, plate 36 posters for Cuban regime, 13, 284, 287–90, 289, 292 15 repeticiones de Martí (1966), 282, 285, 285–7 !Van! (1970), 7, 288–90, plate 37 weaponization of feminine, 10 Yo Publio (book; 2007), 295n20 zafra campaign, 288–92 Martins, Wilma, 4, 8, 160–1, 162, 165, 171n62 A mãe (1967), 160 Retorno (1967), 160, 161, plate 16 Marx, Chico, 127n18 Marxism, 13, 14, 30, 91, 137, 176, 192, 194n13, 195n30, 208, 242, 246, 249, 258n23, 258n26 mass audience, concept of, 2, 16, 36, 113, 245 Massey, Anne, and Alex Seago, eds., Pop Art and Design (2018), 207, 213, 225n49 Mastnak, Tanja, 87n7 Matamoros, Corina, 286, 294n15 maternity and motherhood, 9, 153, 160–1, 171n53, 301–2, 320. See also Bowling, Frank, Mother’s House series

344

Index

Matković, Slavko, 75 Matsamoto, Hiroko, 217 Maurício, Jayme, 172n64 Max, Tom (Makishi Tsutomu), and U.S. occupation of Okinawa, 135–48 Battle of Okinawa (1945), 136, 143–4 biographical information, 138–9 Commemorating the Reversion to the Great Empire of Japan (1972), 135–6, 136, 142–5, plate 10 continuity of U.S. military bases on Okinawa after reversion, 5, 135, 142 Countdown (1976), 146–8, plate 12 Expo ’75 and, 146 history of Okinawa, 135, 148, 150n4 Koza riot (1970), 141, 142, 145 Left Alone (1979), 148, 149 “line drop-out” technique, use of, 135–48 New York, year spent in (1972-1973), 145–6 “Okinawan Inferno” and, 138, 146, 147, 148 posthumous reputation of, 151n36 reversion movement of 1960s, 137, 141, 144–5 seriality and image repetition, use of, 4, 5 social class in work of, 13, 137, 145 Tōjō Hideki, portrait of, 4, 136, 143–4, plate 10 Tokyo Pop and, 13, 139, 148 Untitled (c. 1975), 146, 147 Warhol and Makishi compared, 136, 137, 139, 144 women and, 141, 145 The World According to John Lewis (1967), 5, 138–42, 140, 143, plate 11 May, Elaine, 109, 121 McCarthyism and Pop Art, 325–6n3 McClean, Don, Bye, Bye Miss American Pie (song), 273 McCullin, Don, 29, 29–30 McCullough, Geraldine, 317 McGowan, Cathy, 37–8 McNish, Althea, 225n49 MCP (Movimento de Cultura Popular), Brazil, 157 Mekas, Jonas, 114 Melville, Robert, 189–90

Mercer, Kobena, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007), 1, 19n23, 20n31, 110–11, 126n5, 183, 206, 207, 213, 218, 228, 237n10, 243, 253 Meskimmon, Marsha, 18n11 mestijaje, 271 Michaux, Henri, A Certain Plume, 307 Middleman, Rachel, 116 Miesse, Renée, 306 Miller, Jonathan, 119–20 Mills, C. Wright, 182 Minioudaki, Kalliopi, xv–xvi, 1, 6, 15, 17n10, 117, 175, 196n42, 223n27, 316 Mods, 15, 27–32, 28, 29, 36–8 Moffatt, Tracey, 203n109 Le Monde, 55 Mondo Cane (film, 1962), 302 Monirys, Sabine, 309n10 Monory, Jacques, 253, 309n10 Monroe, Marilyn, 200n77, 203n110, 209, 210, 275 Montreal Expo (1967), 302 Moore, Louis, 323 Moorman, Charlotte, Bomb Cello (1965), 304 Morais, Frederico, 158, 160, 161, 165 Morgan, Jessica, 2, 254 Morgan, Lee, 39 Morley, Lewis, 36, 37 Morrison, Toni, Playing in the Dark, 60 motherhood and maternity, 9, 153, 160–1, 171n53, 301–2, 320. See also Bowling, Frank, Mother’s House series Motta, Flávio, 163 Mouffe, Chantal, 20n31 Movimento de Cultura Popular (MCP), Brazil, 157 Mucha, Patty, 185 Mudimbe, V. Y., The Invention of Africa, 60 Mulligan, Gerry, 30 Mundi, Jossef, 304 Muñoz, José Esteban, 20–1n33 Musić, Zoran, 86n2 music and Pop Art. See also Woodstock; specific musical artists album covers, seriality and image repetition on, 5 BAM artists and, 322

Index

345

Black roots, rock music purged of, 20n24 Brazilian printmaking and, 163 British Pop and, 30–2, 31, 33, 35, 39–40, 43, 212–13, 216, 217 Lenny Bruce, on Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, 39 Mali in 1960s and, 47–50, 55, 56–65, 58, 66 Tom Max’s The World According to John Lewis (1967), 5, 138–42, 140, 143 My Darling Clementine (film), 124, 125, 248 Mythologies quotidiennes exhibition (1964), 241, 242, 243, 246, 253–5, 256n2

Niare (friend Diafode and M. Diawara), 48 Nichols, Mike, 109, 121 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 301 Nilsson, Gladys, 8, 110, 121–2 Mt. Vonder Voman During Turetrush (1967), 122, plate 8 Nixon, Richard, 11, 142 Nkrumah, Kwame, 53, 56 Noah, Trevor, 238n19 Noble, Denise, 199n66 Nolan, Sidney, 224n36 Notting Hill riots, London (1958), 27, 216 Nottingham riots (1955), 216 Ntiro, Sam, Celebration (1960), 215 Nuhun (one of Beatles of Medina-Coura), 47–8 Nuttall, Jeff, 110

Nadasen, Premilla, 202n104 Nagayama Nobuharu, 142 Narrative Figuration (Figuration Narrative), 2, 122, 241–2, 245–6, 248, 249, 258n23, 258n26, 259n39, 298–9, 304 Nash, Philleo, 239n28 National Black Feminist Organization, 317 National Front, 216 Native Americans and Pop Art. See Indian Pop Nazor, Vladimir, 88n16 Nelson, Admiral Horatio, 212 Neo-Dada, 139, 146, 148, 262, 298 New, Lloyd Kiva, 231, 235 “New Art Practice” networks in Yugoslavia, 75, 85 new comedy. See comedians and the new comedy New Figuration (nouvelle figuration), 155, 158, 222n10, 259n56, 279 New Generation (Whitechapel Gallery exhibition, 1964), 209 New Realism, 159, 253–4, 298 New Realists (Sidney Janis exhibition, 1962), 19n17 New York Pop, 7, 178 New York Times, 99, 114, 202n102 New Yorker, 233 Newhart, Bob, 121 Newton, Huey, 113

OBAC. See Organization of Black American Culture Observer, 217 Ohadi-Hamadani, Maryam, xvi, 15, 205 O’Hara, Frank, “Ode to Joy,” 98, 100 OHO Group, 75 Öhrner, Annika, 18–19n15 Okinawa, American occupation of. See Max, Tom (Makishi Tsutomu), and U.S. occupation of Okinawa Oldenburg, Claes, 10, 101, 105n30, 110, 114, 126n5, 129n38, 185, 196n42, 227, 233, 240n44, 296n32 Oliver, Valerie Cassel, 19n23 Olu, Yaoundé, 6, 8, 316, 317, 318, 320–3 The Adventures of Carbon Adams, 321 Celebration of Life in a New Land, 321 Conflict (1972), 320, plate 43 Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow (1971), 9, 322–4, plate 45 Human Transformers – We, 324 Super Fly Revisited (1972), 321–2, plate 44 Onaga Naoki, 147 Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy, 81 Los once (The Eleven), 282 Ongiri, Amy Abugo, 12, 112 Oppenheim, Meret, 311n39 Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), 318 Wall of Respect, 113, 315, 317

346 Orgel, Sandy, Linen Closet, 305 Orisha Yemanjá (Afro-Brazilian nature deity), 7, 21n35, 153–5, 154, 165–6, 166n1 Osborne, John, 114 Otašević, Dušan, 74 Ouellet, Maurice, 193n6 Ouloguem, Yambo, Bound to Violence, 60 Oz Magazine, 114 Paar, Jack, 113 “pagan modernism,” 61, 65 Palmer, Phyllis, 190 Pan-Africanism, 6, 15, 50, 56, 207, 220, 319 Paolozzi, Eduardo, 213, 225n49 Moonstripes Empire News (1967), 172n70 Pape, Lygia, 163, 170n48 Paret, Kid, 196n44 Paris Biennale, 300 Parish, Norman, Jr., 319 Paris-Match, 55 Parker, Rozsika, 199n66 Parks, Sheri, 12 Paros/Cissé (one of Beatles of MedinaCoura), 47–8 Parvez, Ahmed, 224n36 Pascaud, Fabrice, 308 “Peanuts,” 39 Pedrosa, Mário, 25n78 Pedrosa, Misabel, 171n62 Peña, Susan, 281, 290 Peña, Umberto, 282 Perelman, S. J., 127n18 Pérez González, Antonio, 282 Perreault, John, 261 Pethick, Jerry, 214, 215 Phillips, Peter, 29, 86n3, 207, 209, 212 For Men Only, MM and BB Starring (1961), 209 photomontage, 75, 80–2, 89, 116, 183 Pictures Generation, 238n20 Pinter, Harold, 114 Playboy Club and Playboy Bunnies, 188, 190 PM (documentary film, 1961), 280 Pollock, Griselda, 22n48, 197n46 Pollock, Jackson, 227

Index Pop Art, 1–16. See also Black Arts Movement; comedians and the new comedy; Indian Pop; music and Pop Art; specific artists and countries agency in aesthetics of, 5, 6 as agonistic space for social and political concerns, 2 defining as phenomenon rather than movement or style, 3 gender issues, 6–10 (See also gender; gender fluidity; LGBTQ community; women, gender, and feminism) geo-cultural expansion of, 2, 3–4, 19n17 intersection of gender, race, and class with, 1–3, 8–9, 13–14 mass and consumer culture, approach to, 18n13 (See also consumerism/ consumption) mass audience, concept of, 16 postcolonial theory and, 13–15 (See also postcolonial theory) race and ethnicity, 10–11 (See also race and ethnicity) seriality and image repetition in, 4–5 sexuality and eroticism in, 7–8 (See also sexuality and eroticism) sixties and identity politics, 5–6 social class in, 11–15 (See also social class) transnational and diasporic identities in, 14 (See also transnational and diasporic identities) Pop Art (touring exhibition, 1966), 73, 81, 86n3 “Pop eye,” 229 Pop Goes the Easel (documentary film, 1962), 207, 212–14 Pop Impact: Women Artists (exhibition, 2015), 22n43 Popović, Mića, 86n2 postcolonial theory, 13–15 Bowling’s Mother’s House series and, 207, 216–18 British Pop, critical narrative of, 208, 209–12, 211

Index Decolonization Movements and women’s work, 191 Indian Pop and, 235–6 Mali, decolonization movements and postcolonialism in, 49–50, 51–4, 56, 59–61, 64–5 Télémaque and, 241, 243, 245, 254, 255–6 post-Marxism, 14 post-modernism, 3, 109, 110, 230, 235, 238n20, 276 post-surrealism, 9, 297, 300 Powell, Enoch, 216 Powell, Richard J., 24n61, 122 Power Up: Female Pop Art (exhibition, 2010), 22n43 Presley, Elvis, 99, 296n35 primitivism, 234–6 Private Eye, 114 Profumo, John, and Profumo scandal, 36 Promnick, Godda, 297 prostitution in revolutionary Cuba, 280, 293n3, 293n5 Protić, Miodrag B., 86n2 Pryor, Richard, 10, 13, 109–14, 112, 117, 119, 121, 123–5, 127n12, 133n97 psychedelia, 8, 67, 297, 300–1, 303–4, 307 Pushkin, Alexander, 300 Quant, Mary, 217 race and ethnicity, 10–11. See also Black Arts Movement; Indian Pop; Jews and Judaism; labor, race, and gender in American Pop; Latinx community and Latin American Pop agency in Pop aesthetics and, 5 Black cowboys, 10–11, 110, 124–5, 133n95, 248 Black Panthers, 4, 12, 112, 113, 141, 327–8n26 Black Power movement, 6, 10, 57, 124, 184, 191 Blaxploitation movies, 10, 124, 321–2 Britain, black labor force in, 208, 222–3n17 British Pop and, 27, 30–1, 31, 39, 209, 212–13, 215, 218–19

347

British society, use of “black” in, 198n63 Civil Rights movement, 6, 56, 113, 117, 181–2, 188–9, 191, 252, 302 Colescott and, 261–2, 265 in Colescott’s works, 16–17n13, 261–2, 265, 267–8, 269, 270–6 comedians, male, Black and Jewish, 111–16, 112, 115, 117 comedy and Pop Art intersecting with gender, race, and class issues, 109, 110–11, 120–6 comedy of Moms Mabley and, 13, 109, 110, 113, 117–19, 118 comics and, 121 consumerism/consumption and, 11, 132n93 feminism, Black critiques of, 190–1, 202n106, 203n112, 317–18 gender/feminism and race, intersectionality of, 8–9, 317–18, 321–5 immigration to Britain and, 208, 215, 216, 222–3nn16–17, 224n35 intersection of gender, race, and class with Pop Art, 1–3, 8–9, 12, 13–14 machismo of Black nationalist imagery and rhetoric, 24n57 Mali in 1960s and photos of Malick Sidibé, 50, 55–7, 59, 64–5, 66 mammy figure, 14, 117, 184, 189, 190, 197–8n54 Okinawan sympathy with Black American soldiers, 141 Pan-Africanism and Black Atlanticism, 6, 15, 50, 56, 207, 220, 319 in Pop Goes the Easel (documentary film, 1962), 212–13 pressure on Black artists to represent, 19n23 stereotypes, interrogating, 111, 117, 123, 184, 244, 261 Télémaque and, 242–6, 248, 252–6 terminology of “Black” and “African American,” 16n2 Third World liberation movements, 6 U.S. flag, use of, 319 visibility of Black musicians, 5 Rainer, Yvonne, 109, 122, 132n80

348

Index

Ramos, Mel, 86n3, 270 I Get a Thrill When I See Bill, 268 Tobacco Rose (Road) (1965), 271, 277n26 Rancière, Jacques, 95, 106n36 Rancillac, Bernard, 246, 253, 254, 255, 257n7 Raphael, Frederic, 38 Rätz, Markus, Object: White Zone (with Andreas Christen and Willy Weber, 1965), 301 Rauschenberg, Robert, 125, 139, 146, 227, 228, 233, 240n44, 298 Bed (1955), 109, 298 Dante drawings, 146 Raven, Arlene, 190 Ray, Man, 300 Observatory Time: The Lovers (The Lips, 1936), 265 Raysse, Martial, 253 RCA (Royal College of Art), 28–9, 33, 205, 209, 214–15, 225n49 Ready Steady Go (TV show), 36–7 Rebeyrolle, Paul, 258n26 Recalcati, Antonio, 246 Red Power movement, 6 Red Star, Kevin, 5, 227, 229–34, 239n29, 239n34 Crow Saddle (1964), 228, plate 27 Plains Indian Medicine Bag (1964), 227–8, 233, 234, plate 26 Reggae, 39, 40, 43 religion and spirituality. See also Jews and Judaism Bat-Yosef, biblical/Talmudic influence on work of, 304, 306, 308 Bruce’s use of religious tropes, 116–17 feminism, invocation of goddess imagery/spirituality in, 7, 21nn35–6 Islam, Christianity, and traditional African religion in Mali, 51, 59–60, 64 Nommo, James Brown’s invocation of, 61–5 Orisha Yemanjá (Afro-Brazilian nature deity), 7, 21n35, 153–5, 154, 165–6, 166n1 “pagan modernism,” 61, 65 Restany, Pierre, 256n2, 298, 303, 311n39 Rhodesia, 56, 225n43

Ricoeur, Paul, 306 Ringgold, Faith, 114 The Flag Is Bleeding (1967) and Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger (1969), 114 Riopelle, Jean-Paul, 224n36 Rivers, Joan, 118, 121, 130n63 Rivers, Larry, 114, 125 Robbins, Trina, 116 Robertson, Bryan, 209 Rocha, Glauber, 168n25 Rockers British teenage cult of, 34, 39, 42 in Mali youth culture, 55 Rolling Stones, 50, 55, 66 Romanos, Chryssa, 298 Ronan, Kristine K., xvi, 5, 227 Rose, Barbara, 98 Rosenberg, Harold, 91–6, 101, 103–4n16, 103n12, 104n21, 296n32 Rosenquist, James, 86n3, 146, 248, 298 F-111 (1967), 298 Rosenthal, Joe, 136 Rosler, Martha, 6, 20n32, 80, 110, 116, 177, 183–4, 190 House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967-72), 80, 116 Tijuana Maid (1976), 203n109 Woman with Vacuum (or Vacuuming Pop Art) (1966-72), 183, plate 21 Ross, Kristin, 247, 255 Roth, Ed “Big Daddy,” 33 Roth, Gary, 24n62 Rottner, Nadja, 196n42 Rowe, Dorothy, 18n11 Rowland, Kevin, 39, 42 Royal College of Art (RCA), 28–9, 33, 205, 209, 214–15, 225n49 Rubin, William, 262 Russell, John, 12, 178, 229 Russell, Ken, 207, 212 Ryūkū Shinpō (Okinawan newspaper), 139, 142 Saar, Betye, 6, 8, 14, 177, 183–4, 186, 190–2, 197n53, 199n54, 202–3n107, 319 The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), 111, 183–4, plate 22 Sachs, Sid, 182 Sahl, Mort, 109, 112, 117, 129n49, 130n54

Index Said, Edward, 243 Saint Phalle, Niki de, 22n42, 253, 298, 305 Salut les copains (magazine), 55 Sanders, Harland, 267 Sandoval, Chela, 8, 47n22, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, U.S. invasion of (1965), 249 São Paulo Biennale, 156, 162, 165, 168n21, 302 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 65, 249 Satō Eisaku, 151n33 Saul, Peter, 240n44, 276 Saville, Philip, 45n17 The Scalphunters (film 1968), 133n95 Schapiro, Miriam, Womanhouse (with Judy Chicago, 1972), 305, 311n37 Schendel, Mira, 172n64 Schlesinger, John, 38, 45n17 Schneemann, Carolee, Eye-Body (1963) and Meat Joy (1964), 299–300 Scholder, Fritz, 237n15 Schütz, Marine, xvi, 13, 14, 122, 241 Schwarz, Arturo, 297, 300, 302, 303, 310n17 scooters, as Mod icon, 27, 34–5 Scull, Robert, 98, 120 Second City, 121 Second Vatican Council, 176 second-wave feminism/Women’s Liberation movement, 6, 190–1, 200n72, 204n113, 253, 306, 317–18 Sedgwick, Edie, 115 Seductive Subversion (exhibition, 2010), 22n43, 316 Segal, George, 139, 177, 178–80, 182, 192, 195n27, 195n30, 195nn21–2 The Bus Driver (1962), 178 The Butcher Shop (1965), 180, 192n22, 196n44 The Cinema, 180 The Diner (1964-6), 180 The Dry Cleaning Store (1964), 180 The Farm Worker (1963), 178 The Garage, 180 The Gas Station (1963-4), 180 Man Installing Pepsi Sign (1973), 178 Man on a Ladder (1970), 178 Man on Scaffold (1970), 178

349

The Tar Roofer (1964), 178, 179 The Truck, 180 Senegalese tirailleur, in Télémaque’s work, 243–5 Senghor, Leopold Sédar, Hosties noires (1948), 252–3 seriality and image repetition, 4–5 Serrano, Elena, 282 sexuality and eroticism, 7–8 BAM artists and, 321–3 Bat-Yosef, work of, 8, 297, 300, 301, 303, 306, 308 Lenny Bruce, new comedy of, 114–17 in Colescott’s work, 263, 263–5, 267–8, 270, 271–5 French art scene and, 299–300, 302 gender and sex differentiated, 287, 296n30 Haworth’s Maid and, 190 pleasure in revolutionary Cuba, suspect nature of, 280–1 prostitution in revolutionary Cuba, 280, 293n3, 293n5 sexual revolution, 6, 8–9, 321–3 transgender sexual revolution, 23n55 transgressiveness of, 10 of Warhol, 9–10 Shankar, Ravi, 223n20 Sharpsville massacre, South Africa, 210, 224n28 Shemza, Anwar Jalal, 224n36 Shinohara Ushio Drink More (1963) and “Imitation Art” series, 139 Oiran series (1965-6), 148 Shuster, Joe, 120 Sichel, Jennifer, 9, 23n53, 99 Sidibé, Malick, photos of. See also Mali in 1960s and photos of Malick Sidibé Les Amis dans la Même Tenue (1972), 67, 68 Au cours d’une soirée, les positions (1964/2013), 49 Fans de James Brown (1965/2008), 57–9, 58, 62–5 Friends (1969), 47–8 Siegel, Jerry, 120 Silver, Erin, 20n28 Silver, Kenneth, 12

350

Index

Sims, Lowery Stokes, xvi–xvii, 7–8, 11, 261 Six-Day War (1967), 302 sixties, Pop Art in, 5–6 Skinheads, 39, 40–2, 41 Sly and the Family Stone, 48 Smith, Cherise, 26n82, 127n15 Smith, Ian, 56 Smith, Mimi, 199n68 Smith, Richard, 33 Soares, Teresinha, 132n82 Soboul, Albert, 249 social class, 11–15. See also labor, race, and gender in American Pop; labor in Britain Bowling’s Mother’s House series, labor and class issues raised by, 207, 216–18 comedians/new comedy and, 13, 109, 110–11, 119–26 historical changes in, 11, 196n43 intersection of gender, race, and class with Pop Art, 1–3, 12, 13–14 in Latin American Pop, 25n78 Mali in 1960s and photos of Malick Sidibé, 65 Tom Max, in work of, 13, 137, 145 Nilsson and, 121–2 Okinawans and, 137 in sixties, 6, 11 teenage cults in British Pop and, 12, 27, 30, 41, 42 Télémaque and, 13, 14, 242–3, 245–7, 254, 256 Warhol, subaltern voices (female, queer, working class) in work of, 7, 11, 12, 96, 98–101, 120 Yugoslav female artists and, 13, 83–4 social realism, 5, 159, 177 social reproduction theory (SRT), 89n33 socialism, 5, 51, 53, 57, 73, 75–7, 79, 86, 102n10, 180, 279 socialist realism, 279 Solier, René de, 301, 306 Solomons, Delia, 24n56 Sonnabend, Ileana, 298, 309n5 South Africa, 56, 224n28, 237–8n19 South Side Community Art Center, Chicago, 8, 317, 326n7

Southern, Terry, 112 Soviet socialist realism, 279 Sports Illustrated, 146 SRT (social reproduction theory), 89n33 Stalin, Joseph, 73 stand-up comedy. See comedians and the new comedy Steckel, Anita, 110, 114, 116–17 Collage, New York Landscape Series (1970–80), 116 “Mom Art” (1963), 116 Stein, Eli, 129n40 Stein, Gertrude, 184 Steinem, Gloria, 188 Stephen, John, 38 Stephens, Chris, 225n50 stereotypes, interrogating, 111, 117, 123, 184, 244, 261 Stilinović, Mladen, 75 Stocker, Neil, 214 Streisand, Barbra, 119, 200n74 Strider, Marjorie, 204n113 Stylists, 15, 34–6, 42 subcultural model, 40–2 Sullivan, Shirley, 318 “Summer of Love,” 302 Super Fly (film), 321–2 surrealism, 241, 297, 298–9, 302, 307, 310n17. See also post-surrealism Le Surréalisme même (journal), 299 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadaasssss Song (film, 1971), 321–2 Swenson, Gene, 9, 99 Sylvester, David, 215 Tanji, Miyume, 137, 144–5 Tanning, Dorothea, 297 Tarantino, Quentin, 125 A Taste for Pop (Whiting), 7 Tateishi Kōichi, 139 Tavora, Maria Luisa, 163 Taylor, Clyde, 61 Taylor, Elizabeth, 275 teenage cults and British Pop, 15, 27–44 Alloway, street style of, 43–4 consumerism and, 15, 36 counterculture and, 39 dance and dancing, 36, 40, 43

Index female Mod counterpart, emergence of, 37, 37–9 Fine-Artz Associates, 15, 32–5, 43, 44 identity politics in work of, 242, 243, 247 Independent Group, 12, 25n72, 28, 35, 43 Mods, 15, 27–32, 28, 29, 36–7, 39–40, 42 music and, 30–2, 31, 33, 35, 39–40, 43 race/ethnicity and, 27, 30–1, 31, 39 Ready Steady Go (TV show), 36–7 Rockers and Mod-Rocker dust-ups, 34, 39, 42, 55 Skinheads, 39, 40–2, 41 social class and, 12, 27, 30, 41, 42 Stylists, 15, 34–6, 42 Trads, 32 Teixeira Leite, Roberto, 159 Télémaque, Hervé, 241–56 agency in Pop aesthetic and, 5 American Pop and, 242, 248–9, 254 biographical information, 241, 247, 252 color and polychromatic surfaces, use of, 4, 123, 124, 250–2 consumerist critique of, 11, 14, 24n61, 124, 133n93, 243–5 Cuba and, 250, 251, 259n41 Figuration Narrative (Narrative Figuration) and, 241–2, 245–6, 248, 249, 258n23, 258n26, 259n39 global and local, interplay of, 4 Haiti/Haitian carnival referenced in work of, 4, 123, 124, 247, 249–50 identity politics of, 242, 243, 247, 255 interrogation of Black masculinity by, 10–11 Marxism and, 242, 246, 249, 258n23, 258n26 Mythologies quotidiennes exhibition (1964) and, 241, 242, 243, 246, 253–5, 256n2 new comedy and, 10–11, 24n60, 110, 111, 113, 116, 122–5, 123 postcolonialism and, 241, 243, 245, 254, 255–6 race in work of, 242–6, 248, 252–6 social class in work of, 13, 14, 242–3, 245–7, 254, 256 stereotypes, interrogating, 111, 123, 244

351

transnational and diasporic identities of, 241–2, 252, 255–6 Télémaque, Hervé, works Banania no3 (1964), 243, 246, 253, plate 30 Banania series, 243–6, 252, 253, 254–6, plate 30 Brise (1965), 252, plate 32 La carte du tendre (1964), 243 Eclaireur (1964), 243 Escale (1964), 243, 246–7, plate 31 My Darling Clementine (1963), 10–11, 124–5, 133n93, 248, plate 9 Notes Pour La Piste (1964), 123, 132n85 One of the 36000 Marines over our Antilles (1965), 248–50, 249 Petit célibataire un peu nègre et assez joyeux (1965), 123 Toussaint Louverture in New York (1960), 250 Voir ELLE (1964), 250, 251, 253 Terry, Evelyn Patricia, 6–7, 8, 9, 316, 323–5 Hijack a Plane to Cuba (1973), 323–4, plate 47 Love, Flowers, War, and More Love (1973), 323, plate 46 Naked Lady Picture with Dolls (1973), 323–5, plate 48 That Was the Week That Was (TV show), 114, 119 Theatre of Cruelty, 299 Thiebaud, Wayne, 262 Third World liberation movements, 6 Thompson, Cheryl, 198n54 Thompson, Robert Farris, Flash of the Spirit, 60 Till, Emmett, 265 Tillim, Sidney, 235 tirailleur, Senegalese, in Télémaque’s work, 243–5 Tito, Josip Broz, 84 Tōjō Hideki, 4, 136, 143–4, plate 10 Tokyo Pop, 13, 139, 148 Tomlin, Lily, 117 Tomšič, Vida, 76 Toscano, Albert, 95 Touré, Ali Farko, 65 Touré, Sékou, 53, 56

352

Index

Toussaint Louverture, FrançoisDominique, 249–50, 251 Town magazine, 29 Toyen, 297 Toynton, Norman, 209 Traba, Marta, 25n78 Trads, 32 transgender. See gender fluidity; LGBTQ community transnational and diasporic identities, 14. See also Bowling, Frank, Mother’s House series Bowling, diasporic imagery of, 13, 14 Haworth and British/American Pop, 184–5, 187, 189 Mali in 1960s and, 50, 56–7, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65 Pan-Africanism and Black Atlanticism, 6, 15, 50, 56, 207, 220, 319 printmaking in Brazil and, 155 of Télémaque, 241–2, 252, 255–6 Yugoslavian artists exposed to international culture, 73–4 Trelles Hernández, Mercedes, xvii, 5, 10, 279 Trujillo, Teresa, 300–2, plate 40 Tupynambá, Yara, 171n62 Tzara, Tristan, 105n32 Uncle Sam, 10, 320, plate 42 Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (UMAP), 281, 290 United Kingdom. See specific entries at British “utopian consumerism,” 74, 77, 86–7n4 Valentim, Rubem, 165 Valéry, Paul, “L’Âme et la danse” (1921), 310n26 Van Eyck, Jan, The Arnolfini Portrait (1434), 261 Van Peebles, Melvin, 321 Vanel, Hélène, 302 Varda, Agnès, 305 Vatican Council II, 176 Velasco Alvarado, Juan, 176 Veloso, Caetano, 163 Venice Biennale, 276n4, 288 Vespa scooters, as Mod icon, 27, 34–5

Vietnam War, 55, 129n49, 135, 137, 141, 142, 147, 191, 249, 272–3, 299, 302, 304, 320 Voeks, Robert A., 21n35 Volpi, 165 Vučetić, Radina, 87n7 Wages for Housework movement, 204n117 Wainwright, Leon, 213, 214 War on Poverty, 191, 194n12, 238–9n28 Warburg Institute, 44 Ward, Francis, 321 Ward, Val Gray, 321 Warhol, Andy, 9–10, 91–101 American art-critical paradigms and, 91–6 anti-Kantianism of, 96–8, 101 Bat-Yosef and, 298 comics and, 110, 120 consumerism in work of, 11, 26n83, 99, 100 on the maid, 175, 191–2 Factory and collaborative nature of work of, 105, 105n28, 178 “liking,” 23n54 “machine” quip of, 229, 234 Martínez and, 282, 286, 287, 295n19, 296n32, 296n35 Tom Max compared, 136, 137, 139, 144 new comedy and, 114–16, 125 Paris retrospective (1970), 304 in Pop Art (Philip Morris International touring exhibition, 1966), 86n3 Sidibé influenced by, 66 subaltern voices (female, queer, working class) in work of, 7, 11, 12, 96, 98–101, 120, 295n17 Swenson interview, 9, 99 Télémaque compared, 242, 252 Troy and Elvis paintings, 99 Yugoslav feminist artists and, 80, 81 Warhol, Andy, works Batman Dracula (film, 1964), 120 Birmingham Riot series, 252, 253 Campbell’s Soup series, 80, 98, 101, 175 Cow series, 139 Feet with Campbell’s Soup Can (c. 1960), 99

Index Green Coca-Cola Bottles (1962), 269–70 Jackie (1961), 81 Liz, 275 Mao portraits, 146 Marilyn Monroe/Three Marilyns (1962), 91, 275, plate 6 Race Riot series, 17n3 Warsoldier, Billy Soza, 240n41 Washington, Fredericka, 201n86 Wasserman, Burton, 229 Watkins, Mel, 111, 123, 128n22, 128n24 Watts Rebellion, 176 Wayne, Michael, 95 Weber, Idelle, 177, 178, 182, 192 Lever Building 2 (1970), 182, plate 20 Munchkins I, II & III (1964), 182 Weber, Willy, Object: White Zone (with Markus Rätz and Andreas Christen, 1965), 301 Weeks, Kathi, 175 Wesker, Arnold, 114 Wesley, John, 86n3 Wesselmann, Tom, 86n3, 114, 129n40, 271 Bathtub Collage #5 (1963), 266–7 Great American Nude 2 (1961), 266 Great American Nude 47 (1963), 273 West, Mae, 203n110, 275 Westbrook, Robert, 273 Westermann, H. C., 261 Whiting, Cécile, 7, 121, 266 Wilding, Faith, Womb Room, 305 Wiley, William, 261 Wilke, Hannah, 110, 116 Wilkins, Betty, 318 Williams, Aubrey, 214 Williams, Douglas, 317 Williams, José, Ghetto, 324 Williams, Raymond, 54 Wilson, Frank Avray, 223n20 Wilson, Fred, 276n4 Wilson, Sarah, xvii, 9, 131n66, 297 Wollheim, Richard, 27, 32 women, gender, and feminism, 6–10. See also labor, race, and gender in American Pop; Yugoslav Pop, female artists, and feminist agency; specific female artists BAM, presence and visibility of women in, 315–17

353

Black critiques of feminism, 190–1, 202n106, 203n112 in Brazilian Pop Art, 6–7, 154–5, 160–1, 165 Colescott’s beauty queens, pin-ups, and starlets, 271–5 Colescott’s work involving women in domestic interiors, 266–8, 269 comedians and artists, female, 116–19, 118 comedy and Pop Art intersecting with gender, race, and class issues, 109, 110–11, 120–6 deconstructive impulse, 8, 183, 197n46, 202–3n107 écriture féminine, 299 French art scene and, 22n45, 298–300 gaze, female, 22–2n42 goddess imagery/spirituality, invocation of, 7, 21nn35–6 intersection of gender, race, and class with Pop Art, 1–3, 8–9, 13–14 Mali in 1960s and photos of Malick Sidibé, 51, 57–9, 58 mammy figure, 14, 117, 184, 189, 190, 197–8n54 Tom Max, women in works of, 141, 145 Mods, female counterpart to, 37, 37–9 motherhood and maternity, 9, 153, 160–1, 171n53, 301–2, 320 Warhol, subaltern voices (female, queer, working class) in work of, 7, 12, 96, 98–101 Women’s Liberation movement/ second-wave feminism, 6, 190–1, 200n72, 204n113, 253, 306, 317–18 Wonder, Stevie, 127n12 Wonder Bread, 175, 193n5 Wood, Wally, 121 Woodstock IAIA graduates invited to participate in, 234–5, 236 “Woodstock in Bamako” (Mali), 48, 56 Works on Paper (MoMA exhibition, 1973), 146 World Citizen movement, 297, 303

354 The World Goes Pop (Tate Modern exhibition, 2015), 3, 82, 87n7, 89n25, 222n10 Wright, Nathan, 319 Wu Tsang, 203n109 Yalter, Nil, 305 YC (Young Contemporaries) exhibitions, 207, 215, 224nn41–2 YCA (Young Commonwealth Artists), 207, 215–16 Yêdamaria, 4, 8, 116, 153–5 fishermen’s sculpture of Yemanjá (1976), 165–6 Lunch (1979), 154 Proteção de Yemanjá (1972), 153, plate 13 Yemanja com luz (1972), 7, 154–5, plate 14 Yemanja todos iguais (1972), 153 Yemanjás (1975), 153, 154, 165 Yemanjá. See Orisha Yemanjá Young Commonwealth Artists (YCA), 207, 215–16 Young Contemporaries (YC) exhibitions, 207, 215, 224nn41–2

Index Yugoslav Pop, female artists, and feminist agency, 5, 73–86. See also specific artists and collectives consumerism and, 76, 77–9, 80, 82, 86–7n4 “Countercultural Pop,” 74, 75 Croatian Spring, 81, 88–9n24 exposure of Yugoslavs to international culture, 73–4, 86n2, 87n7 feminist Pop conceptualism, engagement with, 80–6 Ivanjicki’s 1964 Pop announcement and exhibition, 73–4, 77–9, 78 “New Art Practice” networks, 75, 85 “Pop Reactions,” 74–5, 79–80 shifting image of Yugoslav women, 75–7, 87n10 social class and, 13, 83–4 socialism and, 73, 75–7, 79, 86 “Woman and Society” lecture series, 85, 89n32 Zap, 122 Zoglin, Richard, 109 Zorach, Rebecca, xvii, 6–7, 8–9, 315 Zürn, Unica, 297, 299

355

356

357

358

Plate 1 Metka Krašovec, Kokošja Juha—Sporočilo (Chicken Soup—The Message), 1968. Acrylic on canvas, 69.29 × 55.11 in (176 × 140 cm). Signed and dated bottom right. Photo: Damjan Švarc. Courtesy of Ana Šalamun and Maribor Art Gallery, Slovenia.

Plate 2 Vera Fischer, Pasji život (A Dog’s Life), 1968–72. Collage, 22.44 × 34.05 in (57 × 86.5 cm). Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art.

Plate 3 Sanja Iveković, Hrvatsko Proljeće (The Croatian Spring), late 1960s. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 4 Sanja Iveković, Dvostruki Život (Double Life), 1975–6. Photograph on paper and printed paper on paper, originally published as book. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 5 Katalin Ladik, Kraljica od Šebe (Queen of Sheba), 1973. Collage on paper, 9.05 × 12.79 in (23 × 32.5 cm). Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) Collection. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 6 Andy Warhol, Three Marilyns, 1962. Acrylic, silkscreen ink, and pencil on linen, 14 × 33.50 in (35.6 × 85.1 cm). Collection of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 7 Rosalyn Drexler, The Dream, 1963. Acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 40 × 30 in (101.6 × 76.2 cm). Signed and dated, verso. © 2021 Rosalyn Drexler/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

Plate 8 Gladys Nilsson, Mt. Vonder Voman During Turetrush, 1967. Watercolor on handmade paper, 30 × 22 in (76.2 × 55.88 cm). Collection Michael J. Robertson and Christopher A. Slapak. Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

Plate 9 Hervé Télémaque, My Darling Clementine, 1963. Oil on canvas, collage, box, and doll, 76.57 × 964.56 × 9.84 in (194.5 × 2450 × 25 cm). © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Philippe Migeat. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 10 Makishi Tsutomu, silkscreens for Commemorating the Reversion to the Great Empire of Japan, 1972. Silkscreen on paper, each 11.69 × 8.26 in (29.7 × 21 cm). Courtesy of Makishi Tamiko.

Plate 11 Makishi Tsutomu, detail of The World According to John Lewis,1967. Courtesy of Makishi Tamiko.

Plate 12 Makishi Tsutomu, Countdown, 1976. Oil on canvas, 63.77 × 51.18 in (162 × 130 cm). Okinawa Prefectural Museum and Art Museum. Courtesy of Makishi Tamiko.

Plate 13 Yêdamaria, Proteção de Yemanjá (Protection of Yemanjá), 1972. Mixed media, 88 × 124 cm. Collection Raimundo Floriano de Oliveira. Courtesy of Cíntia Dias.

Plate 14 Yêdamaria, Yemanjá com luz (Yemanjá with Light), 1972. Mixed media, 100 × 70 cm. Collection Marília Ferreira. Courtesy of Cíntia Dias.

Plate 15 Anna Maria Maiolino, O Bebê (The Baby), 1967. Woodcut, 26.77 × 15.74 in (68 × 40 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Luisa Strina.

Plate 16 Wilma Martins, Retorno (Return), 1967. Woodcut, 34.25 × 22.04 in (87 × 56 cm). Artist’s collection. Photograph: Wilton Montenegro.

Plate 17 Lotus Lobo, Sem título (Untitled), 1969. Lithograph on polyester and acrylic, 23.62 × 47.24 in (60 × 120 cm). X Bienal de São Paulo—Acervo Aliança Francesa BH. Photograph: Koiti Mori. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 18 Corita Kent, that they may have life, 1964. Serigraph, 30 × 38.75 in (76.2 × 98.42 cm). © 2021 Corita Art Center/Immaculate Heart Community/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 20 Idelle Weber, Lever Building 2, 1970. Collage and gouache on Color-aid paper, 24.5 × 18 in (62.23 × 45.72 cm). © Idelle Weber. Courtesy of the artist and Hollis Taggart Galleries.

Plate 19 Rosalyn Drexler, The Syndicate, 1964. Acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 68 × 79.5 in (172.7 × 201.9 cm). Signed and dated, verso. © 2021 Rosalyn Drexler/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

Plate 22 Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972. Mixed media assemblage, 11.75 × 8 × 2.75 in (29.85 × 20.32 × 7 cm). Collection of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California; purchased with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts (selected by The Committee for the Acquisition of Afro-American Art). Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California. Photo: Benjamin Blackwell.

Plate 21 Martha Rosler, Woman with Vacuum (or Vacuuming Pop Art) from Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain, 1966–72. Photomontage. © Martha Rosler.

Plate 23 Jann Haworth, Old Lady II, 1965–7. Fabric, thread, wood, stuffing, leather, and rocking chair, 40.15 × 38.58 × 20.07 in (102 × 98 × 51 cm). Photo: Alex Johnstone. Courtesy of Jann Haworth.

Plate 24 Frank Bowling, Cover Girl, 1966. Acrylic on canvas, 58.89 × 39.92 in (149.6 × 101.4 cm). © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London. Photograph: Rose Jones.

Plate 25 Frank Bowling, Mother’s House with Beware of the Dog, 1966. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London. Photograph: Rose Jones.

Plate 26 Kevin Red Star, Plains Indian Medicine Bag, 1964. Mixed media, oil, modeling paste, and gloss medium on canvas, 24 × 24 in (60.96 × 60.96 cm). CR-33, Honors Collection, 1964. Courtesy of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM.

Plate 27 Kevin Red Star, Crow Saddle, 1964. Red Star won a specially created Student First Prize for Crow Saddle at the Contemporary Indian Artists Annual Exhibition, New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe (May 30 to July 18, 1965)—potentially the first prize taken by an IAIA student or faculty member at an open invitational, 42.5 × 39.5 in (107.95 × 100.33 cm). Lost original—slide from Artist Files, Kevin Red Star. Image courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM.

Plate 28 Peter B. Jones, Joy Bottle, from the Indian Brand series, 1968. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (25.5420). Photo by NMAI Photo Services.

Plate 29 Peter B. Jones, Banana, from the Indian Brand series, 1968. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (25/5421). Photo by NMAI Photo Services.

Plate 30 Hervé Télémaque, Banania n°3, 1964. Oil on canvas, 76.77 × 51.18 in (195 × 130 cm). © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Private Collection. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 32 Hervé Télémaque, Brise, 1965. Oil on canvas, 63.77 × 51.18 in (162 × 130 cm). © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris. Collection Jean, F & J Lavantes.

Plate 31 Hervé Télémaque, Escale, 1964. Oil on canvas, 44.80 × 57.48 in (113.8 × 146 cm). © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. © Fondation Gandur pour L’Art, Genève. Photographer: André Morin.

Plate 33 Robert Colescott, The Colonel Sanders Trilogy: Jemima’s Pancakes, 1972. Acrylic on canvas, 78 × 59 in (198.12 × 149.86 cm). © 2019 Estate of Robert Colescott/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Private Collection, New York City, NY. Photo Credit: Adam Reich.

Plate 34 Robert Colescott, Black Capitalism: Afro-American Spaghetti, 1971–3. Acrylic on canvas, 77.75 × 59 in (197.48 × 149.86 cm). © 2019 Estate of Robert Colescott/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Private Collection. Image courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo. Photo credit: Joshua White.

Plate 35 Robert Colescott, Café au Lait au Lit, 1974. Acrylic on canvas, 78 × 60 in (198.12 × 152.4 cm). © 2019 Estate of Robert Colescott/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Collection Unknown.

Plate 36 Raúl Martínez, 9 repeticiones de Fidel y micrófonos (9 Repetitions of Fidel and Microphones), 1968. Oil on canvas. Private Collection. Courtesy of the Raúl Martínez Archive.

Plate 37 Raúl Martínez, ¡Van!, 1970. Silkscreen poster. Courtesy of the Raúl Martínez Archive.

Plate 38 Raúl Martínez, Isla 70 (Island 70), 1970. Oil on canvas, 78.74 × 177.55 in (200 × 451 cm). Collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana, Cuba.

Plate 39 Myriam Bat-Yosef, Offrande pour le Minotaure (Offering to the Minotaur), signed 1968. Gouache and ink on motorcycle saddle. © Myriam Bat-Yosef. Courtesy of the artist and Tura Milo.

Plate 40 Teresa Trujillo dances Myriam Bat-Yosef ’s Eryximaque, 4th Paris Biennale, 1965. © Myriam Bat-Yosef. Courtesy of the artist and Tura Milo.

Plate 41 Myriam Bat-Yosef, Mirages Suspendus (Suspended Mirages), 1971. Three Mirage fighter-jet fuel tanks on the Israel Museum esplanade, during Myriam Bat-Yosef ’s Total Art exhibition in the Billy Rose Pavilion, Israel Museum, Jerusalem. © Myriam Bat-Yosef. Courtesy of the artist and Tura Milo.

Plate 42 Ralph Arnold, Who You/Yeah Baby, c. 1968. Collage. DePaul Art Museum. Reproduced with Permission from The Pauls Foundation.

Plate 43 Yaoundé Olu, Conflict, 1972. Acrylic on canvas, 30 × 40 in (76.2 × 101.6 cm). South Side Community Art Center, Chicago, IL. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 44 Yaoundé Olu, Super Fly Revisited, 1972. Acrylic on canvas, 40 × 50 in (101.6 × 127 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 45 Yaoundé Olu, Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow, c. 1971. Acrylic on canvas, 50 × 48 in (127 × 121.92 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 46 Evelyn Patricia Terry, Love, Flowers, War, and More Love, 1973. Screenprint, 30 × 23 in (76.2 × 58.42 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 47 Evelyn Patricia Terry, Hijack a Plane to Cuba, 1973. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 48 Evelyn Patricia Terry, Naked Lady Picture with Dolls, 1973. Screenprint. Courtesy of the artist.