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And so it happened. During the late '60s, much was written to show how pop, in its tendency toward large formats, taut plain surfaces, heraldic forms and flat color, had its resemblances to minimal abstraction. This has a germ of truth. A Lichtenstein like Blam, for instance, has more in common with a geometrical painting by Frank Stella than it, or the Stella, has with a De Kooning.
But, as Alloway insists, what really mattered in pop was not its formal devices but its imagery. "Pop art," he argues. "is neither abstract nor realistic, though it has contacts in both directions. The core of pop art is at neither frontier. It is, essentially, an art about signs and sign-systems."
An art that addressed itself with cool and cunning to the nature of signs was unfamiliar in the early '60s. Thus a Jasper Johns like Three Flags, 1958, was—and still is—maddening in the questions that it puts. Just what are these three canvases, one glued to the next? American flags are made of cloth; can one imagine an American flag made of paint? And if there were an American flag made of paint, would it be a flag, or a painting, or both, or neither? And is a flag made of paint a painting of a flag, or does the fact of its being painted return it to the realm of pure abstract design? The rendering of such a configuration in paint contrives in an extremely subtle way to change its symbolism. For it will now attract closer attention than any flag normally gets. Johns' surface takes care of that—an even, sumptuous, almost edible skin of wax encaustic, so full of nuances and textural incidents that the eye travels every inch of it with relish. A real flag is a sign, which can only be stared at; these painted flags become an image, which demands to be studied.
Inclusive Monsters. If Johns was pop's laureate of aesthetic doubt, Rauschenberg and Oldenburg were (and are) its monsters of inclusiveness. Rauschenberg's Monogram, 1959, once seemed a perverse resuscitation of Dada, with the blots and smears of paint on the Angora goat's nose forming a cruel parody of abstract expressionism. No longer; the threatening air of the tire-girdled animal has gone, and the residue is like a culmination of the collage tradition in modern art. "There is no reason," Rauschenberg once remarked, "not to consider the world as one gigantic painting."
His combines of junk, photos and paint betoken a Rabelaisian generosity in the face of that world—art as an affable bombardment. There are no "Irrelevant" details in a Rauschenberg combine, and his belief that "there is nothing that everything is subservient to" became of immense importance to later pop artists. That article of faith connects to Oldenburg's art in an obvious way, for Oldenburg too wished to reject nothing: electric fans or fried eggs, toilets and Chrysler airflows, lipsticks and drum sets—all were subjected to bewildering change, robbed of their identity, skinned and stuffed and softened, arrogantly rescaled in what now looks like a monumental recapitulation of the child's primal will to dominate his surroundings. Oldenburg is America's justification of Baudelaire's remark that "genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered at will—a childhood now equipped for self-expression."