From Pop to Postmodernism: A Survey Where Less Is More
U-Md. Exhibit Embraces Lesser-Known Works by Famed Artists

By Jessica Dawson
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, April 11, 2008

For "Power to the People: The Influence of Popular Culture on Contemporary Art," the University of Maryland fashioned a small-scale pop to postmodernism survey from the school's modest collection. Although significantly constrained, curator Jennie Fleming produced a remarkably solid exhibition.

The show -- which art history undergrads might even use as a makeshift CliffsNotes on pop art's segue into postmodernism -- begins when everyday imagery entered the art world in force. In wall text, Fleming starts in 1950s England, where British artists and writers were examining the mass culture mushrooming around them.

Another show, and many an art historian, might have dated this entrance of the everyday into high art much earlier -- to Duchamp, perhaps, or to Rauschenberg. But Fleming had to work with only the gallery's 1,500-piece collection -- strongest in mid- to late 20th-century American work, but veering widely into African objects and Japanese prints.

Her options included lesser-known works by well-known artists, including Andy Warhol and R.B. Kitaj. Many date from the least significant moments in the artists' careers.

To get "Power to the People" off the ground, Fleming compromised significantly and often. Her inclusion of British artist Eduardo Paolozzi -- a figure with ties to the Independent Group, a circle of writers, architects and artists active in the early 1950s and linked to the earliest inklings of pop -- is an exercise in concession. The work that represents him -- 12 images from the so-called "General Dynamic F.U.N. Series" -- date a full decade later, by which time Paolozzi had left the vanguard. Yet despite their late date, these works can pass for early pop, what with their appropriations of advertising and television.

Again and again, Fleming relies -- ingeniously, really -- on works from the 1970s to tell a story that spans several decades.

As a theme, mass culture's encroachment on high art hardly rates -- it's been discussed and exhibited nearly to death. But at Maryland, the collection's limitations, and Fleming's calculated compromises, enhance the undertaking. Fleming evokes familiar themes using unfamiliar artworks, lending liveliness to the proceedings.

"Power to the People" opens with Paolozzi's interest in collage techniques using the strategies of advertising and mass media. As the exhibition moves on, images from magazines, TV and product packaging turn up everywhere.

Larry Rivers's 12-panel commissioned work for a Boston bank juxtaposes images from the Vietnam War, the Boston Massacre and '60s-era civil rights activists. Taken out of context and rearranged, the images become a commentary on sex and violence. In Rivers's hands, Revolutionary-era battle garb looks fetishistic; the horrors of war assume erotic overtones. Neither condemnation nor celebration, the work instead analyzes war's psychodynamics.

As the show moves on, we encounter moves toward the kind of artistic self-consciousness that we now label postmodernism. By the mid-1970s, works of high art were so entrenched in mass culture that an artist such as Mel Ramos used famous paintings similarly to how Rivers used magazine photographs. At Maryland, two works by the artist substitute women from soft-core pornography magazines for women in famous paintings -- one plays on Manet's "Olympia," the other a languid nude by the rococo painter Francois Boucher.

The small color catalogue accompanying "Power to the People" proves its only major disappointment. With essays by the curator and school staff (significantly, not art history professors), the publication comes off as a flawed student exercise. In an overview essay about pop culture and art, Fleming includes avoidable errors of fact, which prove exceptionally unfortunate in a university context.

So when you read that "the fall of 1962 announced the arrival of Pop art in the United States," remember that earlier that summer Warhol had hung his soup cans in a solo exhibition at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. That same summer and early fall, Los Angeles played host to a number of other pop group shows. Likewise, when Fleming writes that "the fusion of high and low culture was unthinkable" in 1962, remember that Rauschenberg had pasted everyday stuff onto his canvases many years earlier.

The gripes are an unfortunate coda to an otherwise clever exercise in making more with less.

* * *

The University of Maryland's rear project room screens five video works by Oliver Herring. The German-born, New York City-based artist is the university's artist-in-residence this semester. He is known for photo-based works and sculptures, as well as works based on social interaction.

Here, each video involves strangers -- or near strangers -- performing for the camera. At turns acting in pairs or in small groups, Herring's subjects prance, pirouette or yuk it up in the artist's studio, on city sidewalks or in hotel rooms.

The art, then, is about interactions rather than the video that Herring produces. As with much of Herring's event-based work, the artist's ideas are more affecting than his documents.

Take the one called "Howard Street," which begins on a city sidewalk in a gritty neighborhood of Philadelphia. There, a few young art students jump off street furniture and into each other's arms, looking as if they're trying to fly (or engaging in HR department-mandated trust exercises). Gradually, passersby and loiterers join in the action. As the video proceeds, students and residents break down barriers of social class and circumstance.

For Herring, it's a joyous piece uniting a fragmented society. But to watch? In the gallery, Herring's videos bring more bewilderment than joy.