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Off the Billboard. The nude in Wesselmann's Great American Nude might have been done by a distant—very distant—relative of Henri Matisse. But only a pop artist would insert her between a panorama photograph of a city and a bed of red and white stripes straight from Old Glory. Wesselmann, 32, talks a good deal about the "esthetic relationship" between what is painted in a collage and the object that is stuck onto it, but his esthetics often turn out to be a bag of raucous gimmicks that merely assault the nerves. He pictures one of his nudes with a real TV set, and he once put a telephone into a collage in order to "make it come alive when the phone rings."
James Rosenquist, 29, used to paint billboards, where he found that "sometimes things get so close that they disappear, and only the strength of the arabesque is left." In Lines, for instance, the background is a woman's face over which swirl images that might be in her mind. Rosenquist uses space "to bring about mystery," and however billboardlike his technique, the mystery is there.
If there is any mystery in the work of Claes Oldenburg, 34, the son of a former Swedish consul general, it is in his extraordinary explanations for doing what he does. He calls his giant Floorburger a "metaphor of the human body" because its skin feels a bit like flesh and it is an object that only a human being would create. "I create forms from a living situation: a hamburger is something a living form would create."
What Is Art? Roy Lichtenstein, 39, is best known for blown-up comic strips full of POWS, BLAMS, and unfinished quotes in big balloons. He says that such things are not done so easily as they seem. Though he uses real comic strips as models, he does not copy them exactly; there is enough change so that he can claim to impose his own order on them. This, he says, makes the viewer "wonder what the original was. It brings out the question, 'What is art?' " Indeed it does.
Lichtenstein should ask it of himself more often, and so should Jim Dine, 27. When Dine builds up paint into outsize neckties, suspenders or coats, he says he is after "a personal statement, memories. I am interested in things that have happened and have to be recorded." Just what the urgency of such memories is is hard to figure out, but Dine switches projects with every season. He has made a painting out of a green-spattered lawnmower, has exhibited in Europe a whole series of tools. He has also produced bathrooms.
Robert Rauschenberg, 37, remembers an art teacher who "taught me to think 'Why not?' " Since Rauschenberg is considered to be a pioneer in pop art, this is probably where the movement went off on its particular tangent. Why not make art out of old newspapers, bits of clothing, Coke bottles, books, skates, clocks? "A painting is not art simply because it is made of oil and paint or because it is on canvas," Rauschenberg argues. He also uses waste materials because, with Manhattan being torn down and built up, "this is our landscape, and I love it."