Pop Art and the Cult of "Cool"

In the world of painting, the term "cool" refers to one of the defining aspects of the Pop Art movement. This aspect is certainly more prevalent in the American version of Pop Art, but it is also traceable in the British version of it. Cool can best be described as a certain attitude adopted by the artist in relation to his or her works. Specifically, it is an attitude of casual disaffection, or emotional distance. The word originally comes from the world of jazz, where it designates the attitude of detachment that a virtuoso musician assumes while producing a particularly moving strain of abject misery. In Pop Art, cool similarly designates this kind of emotional detachment assumed by the artist in regard to his or her work.

Contrary to what one might think, the "cool" attitude of a given artist is readily amenable to critical analysis. Accordingly one may speak of the specific dimensions of coolness that are broached by this or that particular work. Generally speaking, there are three basic dimensions of coolness in Pop Art: coolness with respect to subject, coolness with respect to object, and coolness with respect to style and technique.

Regarding a subject coolly amounts to manifesting an attitude of detachment from the theme that is evoked by one's work. Thus, the traditionally elevated themes of art are irreverently treated with studied disinterest or even disdain by Pop artists. For example, subjects like sex, romantic love, and patriotism are all treated with exaggerated superficiality, and are thereby deliberately made to seem trite and shallow. What Pop Art here attempts to convey by way of this coolness is not some profound insight into its subjects, but rather a sense of the way its subjects have been casually incorporated into the decorative wallpaper of American popular culture. By artistically exaggerating such surface features as layout and design in their works, cool artists are accordingly able to portray sex without any traditional aura of mystery, romantic love without its usual pretensions to sincerity, patriotism without personal commitment, and so forth.

Subject: Paolozzi's I was a rich man's plaything, 1947

Object: Rosenquist's Joan Crawford Says, 1964

Similarly, regarding an object coolly amounts to assuming a detached attitude towards the specific persons, places, and things portrayed in one's work. This kind of detachment is achieved in a variety of ways. Typically, the object might be rendered in the glossy, highly saturated colors commonly used in magazine advertisements. Or the object might be reiterated twice or even several times in the work, thereby destroying any sense of its uniqueness. Or the object might be juxtaposed to other, obliquely related objects so as to wrench it out of its ordinary context of connotations and focus the viewer's attention solely on the object's physical appearance and decorative value. In any case, the cool treatment of the object always underscores the fact that we are only dealing with the visual image of a thing and not the thing itself. Our own common sense tells us that it is easier to remain cool when contemplating "images" of things than it is to remain cool when we contemplate the actual "things themselves." What the cool artist tries to illustrate for us is that the modern world (of America) is a world comprised almost entirely of images. Things, if they still exist at all, are buried so far beneath their images that they hardly seem to matter. This, apparently, is what renders the objective coolness of Pop Art so appropriate for our culture in its current phase.

Finally, regarding style and technique with a cool attitude amounts to manifesting a sense of detachment between the artist and the act of creation. Works evoking this dimension of coolness seek to conceal every trace of the artist's personal, creative presence within his or her work. Such works seem to suggest that they were "produced" or "manufactured," rather than "created." One example of this kind of cool art is Lichtenstein's comic-strip works. These paintings are executed in a quasi-pointillist manner with a uniform arrangement of tiny dots effectively mimicking the Ben-Day dots by way of which printing presses cheaply mass-produce comic book images. With their flagrant disregard for conventional artistic integrity, Andy Warhol's series of silk-screen paintings are another, more infamous example of coolness with respect to style and technique. These works, rendered in a medium that immediately calls attention to its capacity for mass-production, effectively demonstrate the degree to which the artist might easily remove himself entirely from the productive process at the moment when a given silk-screen image is printed. To underscore this dimension of coolness in the production of his work, Warhol christened his studio "the factory"--scandalously implying that "his" works were not the unique creations of his own hands, but instead the mass-produced commodities manufactured by the hands of anonymous workers.

Style: Lichtenstein's Wham!, 1963

Ultimately, cool has come to designate the triumph of popular decorative display over thematic profundity. Cool thereby signals something much more significant than the casual disaffection of a certain group of eccentric artists. It signals the emergence of a controversial new way of looking at the world we live in today.