Pop goes the Easel

Sky Gilbert

 

In one of his artist’s statements John Abrams speaks of Andy Warhol and General Idea. But his work also makes me think of the poet Frank O’Hara (and his collaborations with the painter Larry Rivers). There is something easy and breezy about Abram’s paint- ings; something that dares you to believe they might be art. They are of course (and there’s nothing easy about their execution). I think their artistry comes very much from their relationship to pop culture. But hey — haven’t we been there and done that? Didn’t Roy Lichtenstein do pop culture already, and didn’t pop art die when all the fun, drugs and promiscuity is supposed to have died (or so legend has it) somewhere in the 70s?

 

Abrams’ work is born of a tradition and an important one. What pop artists discovered was the power of consumerism. We ignore it at our peril. Andy Warhol’s soup cans dared us not only to revere the ordinary, but to confront the notion that everything we hold dear in our culture could be bought and sold. O’Hara wrote deep, chatty homages to his favorite Hollywood movies in his poems, and scribbled words on Larry Rivers’ chaotic, trashy, figurative, scrawled paintings. Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoons defined camp (“I just hope Brad will understand!”). And General Idea — by producing magazines and consumer products that were a tad more ironic (and queer) than Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine — made certain we wouldn’t forget camp’s bitter edge.

Abrams goes one step further. He dares to make pretty pictures (Like Lichtenstein) that jump out and grab you, and he also dares to mix words and text and to steal images from movies (like O’Hara and Warhol). But he does all of this at a time when, well, he really shouldn’t — at a time when 9/11, global warming and the general polarisation of a desperate world makes us believe we ought not only to be very serious, but also make serious art. So artists continue to be ‘serious,’ while all the little Neros in the general public (intent on fun) continue fiddling.

As Rome burns.

 

Don't be fooled: there is love, and there is also hate, in these paintings. We don’t make fun of things unless they mean a lot to us. But more than that, these paintings offer a frightening thesis: life in not like the movies, but the movies (and television, and computer games and internet chat rooms) are increasingly all we know. We are more intimate with electronic dreams than we are with reality, and a painter who creates only high art (with no relationship to Youtube) ignores something we chew and spit out every day. Who is to say what is high and low really; doesn’t the difference all have to do with wit and skill? Abrams is replete with both. Wittgenstein won’t let me have an aesthetic opinion; so I won’t. I just like these damn paintings, and I think they’re a lot of fun.

 

I dare you to like them too. I