Howard Singerman on Pop noir

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Despite the bluntness with which Schimmel attacked the LA look and what critic Peter Plagens once dubbed the "aroma of Los Angeles in the sixties--newness, postcard sunset color, and intimations of aerospace profundity," (2) one could argue that "Helter Skelter" starts the way so many other stories of LA art in the '60s do: at the Chouinard Art Institute and the Ferus Gallery. Chouinard was the alma mater of LA Pop, among its graduates were not only Joe Goode, Kenny Price, and Ed Ruscha but also Foulkes, who attended in the late '50s, and Robert Williams, another of a small group of older artists in "Helter Skelter," who was there in the mid-'60s. Foulkes went on to show at Ferus in the summer of 1961 (Warhol would have his first commercial show there a year later) and at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962, where his solo show ran concurrently with Walter Hopps's early Pop survey, "The New Painting of Common Objects"' (which included Goode, Ruscha, Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Wayne Thiebaud). As his presence in "Helter Skelter" suggests, Foulkes's story comes out differently. His brand of Pop never quite fit the LA Look in the 60s--it was always too indebted to assemblage and too content driven--but in 1992 he was one of the critics' favorites. In Newsweek (Mar. 2, 1992), Peter Plagehs called Foulkes's paintings the show's "lone adult soliloquy," while Peter Kosenko, in a review for In These Times (Apr. 1, 1992), nominated his 1985-90 bas-relief painting installation Pop as the exhibition's "theme piece." But it is a phrase of Robert Hughes's in Time magazine (Apr. 20, 1992), part of his overall dismissal of the show rather than a direct shot at Foulkes, that now seems the most evocative description of his work: "the stale recycled leavings of Pop." The title of Foulkes's Pop refers both to the movement and to the dad he pictures, sitting zoned out in front of the television, clutching a soda, dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans. A Superman outfit peeks from underneath his shirt, a castoff from the fresh Pop of Warhol or Mel Ramos, and an image of optimism and youth gone stale. This is Pop via Edward Hopper, isolated and defeated. What Foulkes's art lacked in the '60s was the flat, hard-edge brightness of high Pop, and his work in "Helter Skelter" remains marked by a gloomy chiaroscuro, by what Ralph Rugoff in the LA Weekly (Jan. 31-Feb. 6, 1992) called "pop noir."

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