Oil on canvas, 16 x 20", 2019
Sometimes I think art historians don’t do art history very well. In 1961, Roy Lichtenstein was a family man, raising two little boys. He was not making paintings (copying magazine, newspaper and comic clippings) to emphasize orifices and blow up dolls. Graham Bader, Assistant Professor at Rice University, would disagree. His 2010 publication, Hall of Mirrors, is chock full of gooey sexual interpretations of Roy’s intentions with art. Bader writes masterfully, but gee whiz — what a bunch of kinky balderdash!
Professor Bader does not have a degree in “Subjective Interpretations of Someone Else’s Art”, and yet society supplies him an office with a desk and streams of students who pay with their time and money to one day take their seat beside him. Imagine if Howard Zinn, American history historian, wrote that Robert Kennedy used to dress up as a duck and make love to chicken wire. He had no proof — no recorded interview, not even personal anecdote from enemy Brezhnev’s autobiography. Would MIT Press publish wild speculation? Would Rice University tenure such nonsense?
Here is my subjective interpretation, knowing what I know about the world of 1961. Roy was a year and a half out of Oswego. He was a teacher in New Jersey, and his youngest boy a wannabe Mouseketeer. Mouths were not sexual orifices to Roy. Not openly anyway. Not yet. There is no pre-pop evidence that he was a sexually expressive person. He took his Girl With Ball to the Leo Castelli Gallery, and it was the first painting the latter purchased. Maybe Leo thought she had a sexy mouth hole. Roy just copied his beach-bather straight from a Poconos Advertisement in the New York Times. He made the mouth look like the ball, maybe.
Anyway, read the book for yourself. Good writing can be convincing. Bad writing too. I just wish professor Bader wasn’t awarded a hundred grand a year to help push the hordes of living artists further into obscurity holes. Us living painters have much to say about our work. Maybe professor Bader can shift gears in career to spearhead a pedagogic movement in art history a lá Studs Terkel. Teach the young to interview the prolific, professional, living painters. The ones to load their borrowed cars up with work and schlepp their creations all over hell, usually for payment of non-recognition with a pittance for a tip. Once the word is out that there are multitudes ready to tell a story about their lives as artists, total subjectivity (lies) will not dominate the mostly irrelevant, though highly profitable world of contemporary art “scholarship”. Always a win for high end galleries, museums, millionaire speculators, and just a few living artists who “get made” in their time. I bet there are many of us unknowns painting erotic blow up doll holes onto the faces of beach bathers. Some can even do it without a newspaper clipping for help.
Professor Bader, if you don’t know any living painters, then send a grad assistant into the wild to dig. We’re out here waiting, buried in obscurity, passed over by the billionaires on their way to the sex slavery orgy.
Some quotes picked out of chapter three in Hall of Mirrors :
“Lichtenstein’s girl is wearing a uniform, but it is one of bodily freedom and display... she is also shown engaged in a reach so emphatic that it appears [to] be stretching her body before our eyes...”
“...and though her dot-filled corpus intensifies the benday whispers of Lichtenstein’s attendant’s cheeks and lip, it is simultaneously pierced, at precisely the image’s center, by a gaping orifice that suggests both sexual invitation and complete bodily abandon.”
“Consider again Lichtenstein’s bather’s mouth. If the sexual suggestion of this orifice — placed directly at image’s center... is blatant...”
“This mouth rhymes not only with Lichtenstein’s dots, but with the red-and-white beach ball at the painting’s top edge, and with his mentor Sherman’s pedagogical illustrations of the “focal point” deemed crucial for the production of successful works of art, and — most strangely — the exaggerated orifices of plastic sex dolls, which are explicitly suggested by the clear correspondence between orifice and blow-up ball above.”
I put a Dali mustache on Girl With Ball to cool myself down because Bader was making me feel all hot and bothered inside.