Pop Art & Minimalism, Albertina Museum, Wien

Pop Art & Minimalism - The Serial Attitude
Albertina Museum, Wien
March 10 - August 29, 2004

As different as a drawing by Albrecht Dürer and one by Pablo Picasso may be in perspectives of time and of art, they are still connected by their being bound the same concept of the drawing, which is carried by the idea of subjective artistic signatures, and which is accompanied by the qualities of spontaneity and singularity, of caprice or masterful virtuosity. Even long before it was defined into an apparently generally valid definition, the art of drawing was immediately related to the history of genius and the signature-like externalisation of a singular personality. The ideal birthplace of the drawing is the private, intimate drawing cabinet, its locational opposite is the public billboard, technically the mechanic reproduction in an era of mass media is its diametrical opposite.

Against this background of the history and the alleged trans-chronologically valid nature of the idea of the drawing, the Albertina exhibition Pop Art & Minimalism: The Serial Attitude thus essentially marks a break with its own tradition, taking as its subject the common preference for the principle of „seriality“ in the allegedly non-related art movements of Pop and Minimal Art. Indeed, since the 1970’s a number of works that are marked by „seriality“ as a technical, conceptual and methodological process were acquired for the Albertina’s collections. The current exhibition clearly demonstrates the points of contact between the contrasting art movements without blurring the differences between the individual works.

The exhibition understands its subtitle The Serial Attitude essentially as guiding light, taken from the article by the same name published by the artist, critic and curator Mel Bochner in 1967 in the magazine Artforum. Bochner bids goodbye the traditional concept of an expressive art, whose origin is understood as the artist’s intuition in this essay – which is simultaneously analysis and manifesto – and proclaims a planned method following a pre-decided system analogous to contemporary modes of production. One could not imagine a greater difference to a Rembrandt drawing, the spontaneous capture of a coincidental observation.

Pop Art and Minimalism both consequentially include industrial production of series, preferably by screen printing and other mechanical methods of production, into the technical creation of a single work of art – as different as the appearance of the individual works may be. While Minimal Art is characterized by the radical negation of contents, Pop Art practically lived off the materiality of a commercial iconography spread by mass media.

Pop Art was the answer to an era of mass communication, of television, newspapers and magazines, and of advertising. Andy Warhol and Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg reproduced the images of goods and objects of daily life, of billboards and of celebrities honoured as icons, spread far and wide via magazines’ offset print.

Minimal Art, on the other hand, negates in its self-reflection any form of representation. It prefers abstract primary structures and basic geometric forms. No subject and no motif, no ever so slight materiality feeds the illusion that was married to art for five centuries. The modules taken from the principle of industrial mass production break with any traditional idea of an artistic medium of the image.

Nevertheless, these differences must not obstruct the view of the commonalities. Serial methods such as addition, combination, permutation and mirroring shape the appearance and the design structures of the accordant print works by Donald Judd, the serigraphs of the Mao series by Andy Warhol or the 14-part series „Alex“ by Chuck Close.

Seriality, however, is not only present in multi-part works: the multi-part picture series is just one special case of the principle of seriality. (Pop Art and Minimal Art used the techniques of mechanical production of images.)

Seriality becomes the real subject in the mechanical reproduction technique of screen printing. The principle of repetition is immanent here in the single work itself. This moves the form of technical production into focus: the matrix dots of offset print. The industrial printing methods from the entire realm of photo-graphics is the answer to Jackson Pollock or Franz Klime’s physical expressionism. These methods of mechanical printing preferred by Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden as much as by Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and Sigmar Polke can moreover be read as an answer to the crisis of structure of the printing method that had become too technical and artisan. When Lichtenstein and Judd made a woodcut, it became a conscious aping of a screen print without wood grain, without the material’s resistance. The photo-mechanical printing technique of screen printing was seen by printing aficionados for a long time as reproduction without its own artistic value for a good reason.

The exhibition Pop Art and Minimalism: The Serial Attitude is dedicated to this process of gaining independence from the traditional concept of drawing and print work via the principle of seriality. As wide as the spectrum of this principle’s application may be: in its entirety this exhibition seems to be telling of the end of a historical idea of drawing and print that was once the raison d’etre for our collection’s birth. However, it does certainly not speak against our collection that all exhibited works are part of the Albertina collection. Quite to the contrary, this fact underlines the high degree of critical self-reflection of our own raison d’etre, it is witness to our consciousness of our collection’s historicity: that of its creation and its reason, its nature and its structure.

Klaus Albrecht Schröder

Exhibited Artists:

Josef Albers, March 19, 1888 Bottrop (Germany) - Orange (Connecticut) March 25, 1976

Donald Baechler, Born 1956 in Hartford, Connecticut

Chuck Close, July 5, 1940 Monroe, Washington; lives in New York

Jim Dine, June 16, 1940 Cincinnati, Ohio; lives in New York and Putney, Vermont

Jasper Johns, May 15, 1930 Augusta, Georgia; lives in New York and Saint-Martin (Caribbean)

Donald Judd, June, 3 1928 Excelsior Springs, Missouri - New York February 12, 1994

Alex Katz, New York July 24, 1927; lives in New York

Imi Knoebel, December 31, 1940 Dessau as Klaus Wolf Knoebel; lives in Düsseldorf

Sol Lewitt, September 9, 1928 Hartford, Connecticut; lives in Chester (Connecticut) and Bari (Italy)

Roy Lichtenstein, October 27, 1923 New York - New York, September 29, 1997

Robert Mangold, October 12, 1937 Tonawanda, NY; lives in New York

Brice Marden, Bronxville, New York, October 15, 1938; lives in New York, Hydra (Greece) and in Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania

Agnes Martin, March 22, 1912 Maklin (Saskatchewan, Canada); lives in Taos, New Mexico

Blinky Palermo, June 2, 1944 Leipzig - Kurumba (Maldives) February 17, 1977

Sigmar Polke, February 13, 1941 Oels (Silesia, now Poland); lives in Cologne

Robert Rauchsenberg, October 22, 1925 Port Arthur, Texas; lives in Captiva, Florida

Robert Ryman, May 30, 1930 Nashville, Tennessee; lives in New York

Sean Scully, June 30, 1945 Dublin; lives in New York, Barcelona and Munich

Richard Serra, November 2, 1939 in San Francisco; lives in New York and Novia Scotia (Canada)

James Turell, May 6, 1943 Los Angeles; lives in Flagstaff, Arizona and Inishkeame, Ireland

Andy Warhol, August 6, 1928 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - New York, February 22, 1987

Tom Wesselmann, Born 1931 in Cincinnati, Ohio, lives in the USA

ALBERTINA
Albertinaplatz 1, 1010 Wien
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