School of Pop: Thomas Crow on the class of '57

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Thomas Crow

Probably the most inventive generation of complexity from such simple resources was provided by the ex-philosopher del Renzio, one Independent Group holdover who had professional expertise in graphic design and fashion. With his essay "Shoes hair and coffee," for which he also designed the spread, del Renzio brought to bear his professional experience in an informed discussion of feminine fashion in relation to the design of Italian-style coffee bars. The shifting imagery of the article's layout results from a single-color printing in red on a transparent yellow sheet, which per forms one configuration in the recto position and another in the verso. A turn of the page leads into a footnoted taxonomy of the varieties of espresso environments. But a look back at the previous page, transformed by the overlay of the red-on-yellow woman in her Italian frock, makes another pointed juxtaposition: She seems to peer into a painting by Coleman's close ally Robyn Denny, a work that had become something of a manifesto piece in their campaign against the figurative establishment in the painting faculty of the school.

A photo-essay by A.J. Bisley on professional wrestling, "On the mat at Lime Grove," eschews technical tricks and sets itself at the opposite expressive pole from del Renzio. Forgoing commentary altogether, its explosive, raging-bull exploitation of crude black-on-white printing demonstrated that subject matter of this power need not be sought only on the other side of the Atlantic. In many ways, the most effective deployment of Ark's minimal means appears in a layout and article by painter Richard Smith entitled "Man and He-man." One close-valued, monochrome illustration anticipates to compelling visual effect Warhol's fundamental principal of repetition, multiplying a single image of a man in formal dress with rolled umbrella (by the look of him an Eton College master, an inculcator of upper-class codes; the photograph is credited to Bisley). Another page shows a similar social type in a royal Ascot morning suit caught in more vigorous midstride, but jarringly juxtaposed with a proto-Pop catalogue of mythic Americana: Superman in midflight, the singing cowboy Gene Autry, and a stuttering overlay of actor Glenn Ford in gunfighter pose, inevitably calling to mind Warhol's palimpsests of the action-Elvis series (Smith refers in his text to the advertisements for Presley's first film vehicle, Love Me Tender, bannering its star as "fightin' man, singin' man, lovin' man").

Ark number 20 proved to be both the high point of this project--this pushing of expertise in the sources of a vernacular-based art to the point that it equals the potential of the most advanced expertise in fine art--and also its swan song: Student publications have changing personnel, and by the next issue (no. 21), Coleman had moved on, his designers too, leaving the replacement staff free to renew the journal's earlier celebrations of nature worship in a Romantic/mystical vein.

The short-lived, preceding moment of Pop experimentation then dropped almost entirely from view, its innovations left to one side while Coleman, as well as Denny and Smith, turned their energies back to significant fine-art ambitions (with Smith, like Hockney, gravitating toward the American art scene). What they and their collaborators had improvised in ephemeral form then came to be fortuitously reinvented, five years later, in another place and time, with lasting and legendary impact on the established art world. The difference between their obscurity and the success of the Pop artists in the States lay in the Americans' strategic packaging in paint on canvas, accompanied by their renunciation of any claim to knowledge superior to that of the average spectator. When fine art meets the late-twentieth-century media, expertise in the latter--that is, knowing your stuff--finds itself at odds with effectiveness in the system of art-world attention and celebrity, whatever the prescience of one's formal and thematic discoveries.