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In making his "combines"—works that involve combinations of painting, college and construction—Rauschenberg shows himself to be a man of ingenuity and imagination. "Every minute," he says, "is an assemblage of materials and conflicting ideas and desires." It is this feeling that Rauschenberg tries to catch in his art: all the crossfires of a split second bashed together into a single, isolated work. The fact that many viewers find Rauschenberg's materials ugly baffles him. "When they find so much ugliness and lack of interest in the things around them, I wonder how they get through their miserable days."
Which Is the Flag? Jasper Johns, 32, is, along with Rauschenberg, a dean of the movement. His paintings have a beauty that is rare in pop art. In his early flag paintings, he was concerned with the elusive borderline between reality and art, that moment of ambiguity when an object could be either or both. The flag posed a problem: "You don't see it because you are busy knowing it is a flag." The problem was to turn it into "a visual situation only. How could it be altered so that it could become a painting?" Sometimes, Johns painted the flag in its normal colors, and the flag became flag first and then painting. Sometimes he made it all grey or all white, and made the painting appear first. He was also mesmerized by the seeming permanency of the flag: "I stopped painting it when they changed the number of stars."
Of all the artists, Andy Warhol. 31, best plays the part of what a pop artist might expectably be. In his studio, a single pop tune may blare from his phonograph over and over again. Movie magazines, Elvis Presley albums, copies of Teen Pinups and Teen Stars Albums litter the place. Warhol is known for his literal renditions of soup cans, his rows of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor and Troy Donahue. He stencils them onto the canvas by the silk-screen process, then touches in the colors. Though the result can be excruciatingly monotonous, the apparently senseless repetition does have the jangling effect of the syllabic babbling of an infant—not Dada, but dadadadadadadada. In his own way, Warhol is perhaps the truest son of the age of automation. "Paintings are too hard," he says. "The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine, wouldn't you?"
Obviously, most people want to be human beings and to look at human art. Pop art has exposed as rarely before the wholesale gullibility of the kind of people who fear that unless they embrace every passing novelty they will some day be labeled Philistine.