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Nude Affirmations. The primary reality could once be fairly stated as what one sees in nature. But the retina of modern man is deluged with a thousand images that are themselves manmade, not the least of which flash from the television screen. To be true to reality means to include such images; so what is more logical than to tuck a TV screen into a painting. Or at least so thinks Tom Wesselmann, 34, who fiddles with the girl who doesn't exist, the supersex symbol, the Great American Nude, and sets her in homey seraglio scenes decorated with real radiators. Lift the Venetian blind, and there is a calendar painting of a Japanese harbor. Or, as in one recent Nude, the whole scene is stamped out of multicolored translucent plastic and glows from within by electric lights.
"I refuse to draw the line between flat painting and three-dimensional structures," says Wesselmann. "I'm aware of the differences between real and imi tation, but I don't attach much significance to the distinction. A painter from Belgium was up to my studio and thinks my works have to do with capitalism because I use real products. Not so; it's really an affirmation of the whole world."
Mattress-Sized Popsicles. In turning art into a supermarket display, artists are reacting violently against the grandiloquent gestures of yesterday's abstract expressionists, whose work often looked like a square inch of Constable blown up to jumbo size. As the life went out of such abstract handwriting on walls, artists fell back on the visible world. In their embrace of reality, they state that art is no longer that which only looks like art.
Believing, too, that art is no longer something better than life, these artists have made collage—by definition, a simple matter of gluing things on canvas—into a baroque explosion. Junk, advertising images, taxidermy, cups and saucers are now all straining beyond the frame, blurring the division between painting and sculpture, making art into a scavenger hunt for the perishable produce of the day.
The pursuit is undertaken with relish and good humor, much as a Claes Oldenburg delights in making a mattress-sized Popsicle on a limp stick. Beauty seems no longer at stake; the word itself is rarely used. But tough, satirical commentary abounds. "An artist should be an evangelist for looking," says Rauschenberg. Yet in creating a second, magical reality, the artist often ends up with whole stage-sets, creating a future problem: What's to keep the museums of the future from looking like a decayed Disneyland, or the whole back lot of MGM?