The Doors (15 page)

Just What Is It
—in the picture you see the ancestor portrait on the wall next to the gigantic, framed
Young Romance
comic book cover, the nearly naked Charles Atlas muscleman and the even more naked wife with a party-animal lampshade on her head and one hand cupped under her huge, tinfoil-nippled, torpedo-shaped left breast. You see the Ford logo, the movie playing just outside the enormous picture window—Al Jolson's
The Jazz Singer
, as if a harbinger of the blackface pop that culture would wear across the coming decade. You see the tape recorder running on the floor, the TV on, the Hormel ham displayed as an art object on the coffee table, which actually has coffee on it—when I look at the picture today I think I can see what I would have seen in 1956, but wouldn't have been able to put into words.

I see a world where everything is of equal value, but where everything is valuable: where, therefore, cultural distinctions are meaningless, and impossible to make even if they are meaningful.

I see sexual anarchy: precisely the sort of suburban sexual anarchy—from
Playboy
to wife-swapping to the 1950s epidemic of adultery and divorce—that would sell American magazines across the coming decade, until the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s made it all seem redundant and
quaint. In documentaries about the time, you can see a teenage Marianne Faithfull speak in grainy footage, from a long-forgotten British interview show; it's about 1965. “If everyone did what you seem to be advocating,” an overstuffed man says to Mick Jagger's then-girlfriend, future heroin addict, and punk avenger, the harrumphing man speaking to the thin blonde girl with the angel's face and convent voice, “do you not agree that the whole structure of society would just collapse?” “Yes,” she says with a gay smile, her tone summoning up a kingdom of indulgence her interrogator will never know, “wouldn't it be lovely? I think I'm really powerful. They could—they'll smash me, probably. But I want to
try
.”

That was the future contained in
Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?
Looking into Hamilton's picture I see a beckoning into a dangerous funhouse—not all that different from the beckoning of the witch who lures the children she eats into her oven by means of a house made of candy.

The piece is not very big: twelve inches by eighteen and a half inches. It is balanced and elegant. You can sense the fun Hamilton had making it, and you can sense his nervousness—
Have I said enough, have I said too much,
is
this what makes today's homes so different, so appealing, so diabolical?

There is an unlocking going on here—the creation of a bizarre but nevertheless obvious tableau in order to get behind the mask pop culture was already placing over the face of modernism, modern living, modern life. Comparing Hamilton's collage to most of what has gone down in history as pop art is like comparing a polite cocktail party to a drunk backing you into a corner and ranting about the price of gas, his whore of a wife, and how the Jews rule the world.

You can see the same divide between the 1960s pop art appropriations of comic strip characters by Andy Warhol and Lichtenstein—their paintings of Dick Tracy and the like—and the
Dick Tracy
rewrites practiced by the late San Francisco collage artist Jess. Jess's
Dick Tracy
is in his
Tricky Cad
casebooks, a vast, obsessive project he pursued from 1954 to 1958 by means of the full-color front page of the Sunday
San Francisco Chronicle
comics section. This is not appropriation. As Jess cut up
Dick Tracy
strips every weekend, pasting pieces of the images back in the wrong places, tricking the characters into speaking a gibberish that was at once blank and threatening, paranoid and superrational, gibberish you can now just barely translate, he was engaged in a wrestling match, or declaring war.

First appearing in 1931 as a call to clean up police forces corrupted by Prohibition, by 1954 Chester Gould's
Dick Tracy
had become the comic strip version of McCarthyism, the Red Scare, the search for the Enemy Within—but in Jess's hands, the great crusade to cleanse the country turns dyslexic. DICK TRACY—the words lose their gravity, tumbling into ICK TRA, TRICKD, DICK RACY, TICK R—titles Jess ran across his first
Tricky Cad
. DIRAC, they go on, KID RAT, ICKY TAR, ICKIART, TRACKY DIRT.

Only barely leaving out the real name hiding in the anagrams—which would have been TRICKY DICK, in the 1950s the liberal's nickname for Red Hunter Richard Nixon—Jess called his work “a demon-stration of the hermetic critique lockt up in Art.” He was going to provide the key, unlock the art, expose the critique: the story
Dick Tracy
was telling in spite of itself.

A lot was at stake. This was a time when every form of media carried the message that Your Neighbor Could Be a Communist—or a homosexual, as Jess was. With
Tricky Cad
as his foil, Jess let the hermetic critique out of its cage: he diffused suspicion throughout the whole of society. “You haven't given us a naïve answer,” says a policewoman to an old woman in custody. “Lock her up, Murphy.”

“As you know,” says a judge to another woman, stylishly dressed except for her head, which has been replaced by what looks like an upside-down typewriter, “you've been found guilty of
jail
abandonment, and living at home!” “I
need
no baby,” says the woman in the next panel, suddenly with a head again, taking her stand against everything the American 1950s demanded of her. “Take her away for one year!” says the judge, and we never see her again.

Richard Hamilton joined in this sort of obsessive creation, the nervous exhilaration of collage at its most intense—but he too fell victim to the anxiety of identification and self-affirmation, the anxiety of the dissolution of the artist into his or her material, the anxiety that kept the hands of so many other artists cleaner than his. “Is there anything,” he said in 1976, remembering the question he had asked himself twenty years before, “is there any ingredient which these pop art phenomena have which is incompatible with fine art? I said, is big business incompatible with fine art? No. And I went through a long list of all the things I associated with the art of the mass media and the only element which I thought was not compatible was expendability.

“. . . When Elvis Presley produced a record, you didn't get the feeling he was making it for next year, he was making it for
this week and it really didn't matter very much when it sold the first four million whether the thing was ever heard again. And I thought, this is something the fine artist cannot stomach, he cannot enter the creative process of making a work of art with an understanding that it's not going to last until next year or for very much longer than that. He has to approach it with the idea that it has some qualities which are enduring.”

Now, never mind the ignorance here—the blindness to the fact that as part of a tradition, Elvis Presley's reimaginings of blues and country forms implied a future as well as a past, that just as Elvis Presley's performance changed the way people looked at their culture and themselves in the present, it changed the demands people would make on the future, and changed the way they understood the past. Never mind that the Los Angeles rock 'n' roll vocal group the Medallions put out a record called “Buick '59,” in 1954—because they hoped that post-dating it by five years might keep it on the radio at least that long. Never mind that the Doors saw themselves as much in the tradition of fine art—a tradition within the tradition, the stream of art maudit that carried Blake, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Jarry, Buñuel, Artaud, and Céline to their doorsteps—as in the tradition of rock 'n' roll, or that for them rock 'n' roll itself was already a tradition, as full of heroes and martyrs as any Hamilton might appeal to. What's really interesting is this: if a pop artist as complete as Richard Hamilton can talk like this, did pop art—as a form, as a school, as opposed to those places and moments where it appeared without need of a name, as with “Twentieth Century Fox,” or, four years later, in a stranger, far more shifting shape, with “L.A. Woman,” which is a pop art map of a city, not a person—even exist?

Pop—the sound describes what, in the hermetic critique locked up in the art, the art might have wanted to be. Pop—it's a balloon, any color you like. It makes an image, then it makes a noise, then it's gone. All that's left are shreds of rubber, modern pottery shards, junk you could, if you wanted to, paste into another picture instead of throwing it away. The joke culture has played on certified pop artists is that what they thought was transient, ephemeral, certain to disappear—comic books, 45s, LPs, advertisements—have all lasted. They are stored in expensive art books and CD boxed sets; they are immediately accessible online anywhere in the world.

They cast spells now just as they did thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years ago—and perhaps the purest, the simplest, and most complete of all pop art works are about this casting of spells. These are the untitled Verifax collages the California assemblage artist Wallace Berman made from the mid-1960s to his death in 1976: sheets of images, like sheets of stamps, sometimes twelve, sometimes dozens, each image that of a hand holding up a tiny transistor radio, sometimes five radios at a time, spread out in a crescent like a poker hand.

Every picture was that of the same hand, the same radio—but for every replicated picture there was a different image where the radio speaker should have been. You spot a nude couple; you see Charlie Watts and Mick Jagger, a key, a motorcycle, a football player, a gun and an iron cross, a Hebrew letter, a hospital bed that looks like someone just died in it, a still from a porn movie, an astronaut, leaves, a rose, a spider, Kenneth Anger as a teenage actor, a clock, an ear, Allen Ginsberg, James Brown, fancy people emerging from a restaurant, Bob Dylan, a torn concert ticket. The Doors weren't there—
Berman was not a fan
⁹
—but it didn't matter: the form Berman created included them even in their formal absence. As he worked, they were on the radio, and the kind of music they made raised Berman's hand, holding the radio, to the ear, to a friend's ear, even a passerby's, to the air. Except that, in the greater game of appropriation that is advertising, finally the Doors were there. In 2011, an iPhone/iTunes commercial showed various albums popping up on the iPhone screen. Visually it was precisely a new version of Berman's transistor, and as clear a transposition as could be: one modern moment after another,
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
, Justin Bieber's
My Worlds Acoustic
, PJ Harvey's
Let England Shake
, the Clash's
London Calling
, Bright Eyes'
The People's Key
, Au Revoir Simone's
Still Night, Still Light
, Hayes Carll's
KMAG YOYO,
a score more albums against a bright white background, ending, in the border of a glowing black iPhone, with a visual gong, like an anchor dropped in time, with
The Doors
.
¹⁰

Berman's gesture, the way the radio was held, turned the sets of pictures into an incantation—and turned every variation into a talisman. Taken together, the little pictures made a field of images, a force field; the field vibrated. It was the most casual sort of creation, made of the most ephemeral materials—the radios no longer exist, the pop culture references were supposed to be yesterday's news a week later, no one knows anymore what the photocopying trademark Verifax signifies, but the embrace of everyday culture as a lost mine, as a repository of secrets, as an open-air museum filled with clues hidden in plain sight, was absolute.

With this cheap, easy to make, infinitely copyable art, Berman did everything pop ever implied. And he caught its theory, which is really just a dare. What is certain to disappear is certain to last, the pop dare says to whoever is afraid of pop—but what
is
certain is that the standard of value, on which the presupposition that certain things were made to endure and others were made to be forgotten, will change. Don't worry about what will last, and what won't; don't flatter yourself that your intent, your commitment to the enduring, is anything but vanity. What lasts for a decade is no more than a conspiracy of taste. What lasts for a century is an accident.

In 1986 the punk artist Shawn Kerri talked about her 1980 work in Los Angeles, her handbills and posters for local punk bands like the Circle Jerks or the Germs—work that not so many years later was being included in an expensive art book. “There are a lot of my handbills that became classics in their day,” she said. “Like the one with the mohawked skull breaking through the Germs' ‘coat of arms'—a blue circle, either worn on a black armband or spray-painted wherever you found a flat surface. The true initiates had a cigarette burn on
their left wrist, and quite a few people had it tattooed on themselves. The ‘Germs Return' flier had quite an impact on people. It was done for the show they performed shortly before Darby Crash, their lead singer, killed himself with an overdose.” Crash had shot up before going on stage; the idea was to die on stage, in the middle of a song. It didn't work; by the time he died the band had run out of songs and the performance was over.

“He didn't know what I was going to do,” Kerri said. “He didn't tell me what he wanted—he only said, ‘do a flier.' I did it, and when I showed him the art, he was strangely excited by it. It was like a pre-post-mortem. I wondered later if he liked the Death's Head motif (the skull and hairdo are undoubtedly him) because he had suicide on his mind at the time.”

“I was proud as hell of my handbills,” Kerri said, summing up, looking for what made her work a thing in itself, what made it art, a step back from life, a look right into it, a picture of what life would be if life could see itself as the woman looking saw it. “I'd see them all over the place. And you know, I've never gotten the same thrill out of having one of my cartoons printed in a magazine as much as seeing one of my old fliers—something I did for a gig the week before—laying in the gutter. Seeing it all mashed and dirty
thrilled
me, because that was how I was living, too. It looked exactly like my life.”