Pop Pop

Pop art is popping out all over. On view last week at the Los Angeles County Museum was a twelve-man pop show with a coast-to-coast geographical spread. Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum had sent out its six-man show of pop art (TIME, May 3) and added works by six California practitioners, enabling viewers to compare the pop fashions of the two coasts.

To the casual eye, West and East seemed much the same. And why not? A soup can is a soup can, whatever the clime. Like their New York counterparts, California pop painters gaze not upon nature or the human form but upon the most banal man-made objects or the most routine images of everyday life--a milk bottle, an advertising trademark, a scrap from a comic strip. These things are the same all over the nation; here indeed is expectable conformity. But upon closer scrutiny the Californians shared common aspects and a sort of group triumph: their stuff was even drearier than that of the Easterners. It might be labeled pop pop. The six: MELVIN RAMOS, 28, holder of an M.A. in art history from Sacramento State College, paints straightforward portraits of comic-book heroes and heroines. He professes a distinct liking for banality. "I'm a product of the affluent society," he says. "I just bought a secondhand color television set." If pop art lasts much longer, he will doubtless be able to afford a brand-new color set, with remote control.

BILLY AL BENGSTON, 29, an ardent affluent-society motorcyclist (he owns four), goes in for concentric emblems, usually centered on a symbol such as a sergeant's stripes. Bengston sometimes uses an auto-body painter's spray gun to lay on glossy hot-rodder colors. "I use a lot of the concepts used in motorcycles," he says. "It's a kind of companionship I can understand."

JOSEPH GOODE, 26, carries simplification about as far as it can go. He just covers a canvas with a single color, then places on a shelf just below it a milk bottle painted the same color.

PHILIP HEFFERTON, 30, specializes in cartoonish depictions of U.S. bank notes. "There is so much to explore in American money," he explains. A typical Hefferton, called Sinking George, is a rough representation of a dollar-bill fragment with Washington's head sinking out of sight. Hefferton's favorite bill, however, is the twenty, because it has a "free feeling."

EDWARD RUSCHA, 25, paints what he calls "commercial landscapes. " Sometimes they consist of nothing more than enlarged scraps of lettering from comic strips. "I'm very amused by the subject matter," says Ruscha. "Just like Rembrandt-- he probably had fun too."

WAYNE THIEBAUD, 42, paints food. The catalogue calls him "a laureate of lunch counters and diners."

Pop art appears to arouse experts to belligerence, pro or con, and at the opening of the Los Angeles show, two prominent New York museum officials got into a public altercation. The antagonists: Peter Selz, curator of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, and Lawrence Alloway, curator of the Guggenheim. The paintings in the show are "limp and unconvincing," said Selz in a short talk. "It is the want of imagination, the passive acceptance of things as they are, that makes these pictures dull and unsatisfactory. It is as easy to produce as it is to consume."

Alloway was so upset that he spent much of his rebuttal time attacking Selz instead of defending the paintings. He charged Selz with "talking nonsense" and holding "an elite view of culture." After Alloway finished, somebody in the audience asked a question: "Will you explain the value of pop art? You explained only in criticism of Mr. Selz's opinion." Alloway lamely referred the questioner to the catalogue.

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