Upstairs And Downstairs at MOMA

By ROBERT HUGHES

Not in a long time, perhaps never, has a major show at New York City's Museum of Modern Art started with such awful press as "High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture," which kicks off MOMA's 1990-91 season. For the past few months one has heard the baying of critics as they hurled themselves against the turkey wire, eager to fix their fangs in it. Old-style formalities like seeing the exhibition or reading its catalog were dropped as writers like Barbara Rose in the Journal of Art expressed their proleptic disapproval of what the show would be and do. And when at last it opened, Roberta Smith in the New York Times denounced it as "a disaster . . . arbitrary, peculiar and maligning." More maligned than maligning, one might think.

There have been two lines of attack. The first: by putting "low" culture -- graffiti, mass print, caricature, comic strips and so forth -- in the museum along with "high," MOMA, under the new curatorial leadership of Kirk Varnedoe, has abandoned its sacred mission of cultural discrimination. The second, and more hip, version: MOMA is too hidebound and elitist an institution to deal with popular culture, or with the recent "high" culture of the '80s, at all. As the clippings pile up, one may expect to see many variations on these themes. One, common to both, is that the show has too many familiar works -- as though there were a slew of undiscovered Cubist, Surrealist or Pop masterpieces lurking out there, miraculously ignored by the world's museums.

It has been the unlucky fate of "High and Low" to attract more than the usual dose of the New York art world's free-floating anxiety. Art-world anxiety is not like real-world anxiety: it is even more paranoid. What the art world frets about is how Varnedoe, whose appointment as director of painting and sculpture at MOMA has made him America's most powerful museum figure in the modern and contemporary field, will represent all its factional interests. Hence his every action is scrutinized and picked to bits, as Etruscan haruspices once examined sacrificial livers for a sign of the future.

Varnedoe and the show's co-curator, Adam Gopnik (art critic of the New Yorker), have taken on a sprawling, slippery, tangled theme -- a survey of the transactions between fine art and popular culture over three-quarters of a century, from Cubism to the '80s. They set out to show how some "high" artists raided "low" (popular and mass) culture for their own purposes. Not all of them, needless to say, did. You won't find the visual argot of advertising, news photography, graffiti or comic strips in the work of the great Apollonians of the past hundred years, from Monet and Matisse to Richard Diebenkorn. But this vernacular, Gopnik and Varnedoe rightly argue, is essential to a grasp of Cubism, Dada, Russian Constructivism, Surrealism and their European offshoots, along with a great deal of American art produced after 1950.

Artists have always been much less snobbish about their sources than the idealizing critics who erect value systems on the back of their work. The process came to a climax in the '60s with Pop art. Moreover, since "low" sources cycle into "high" products that are then cycled back, as style, into "low" areas again, the supposedly rigid divisions between fine and popular art are more like a maze of mirrors, one reflecting the other ad infinitum.

The idea that "low" sources somehow debase the integrity of "high" art is moonshine, of course. It always has been: Goya's Caprichos, for instance, draw heavily on folk proverbs, crude popular drama and 18th century (mainly English) caricature. Miro was inspired by comic strips and folk scatology. And Philip Guston in the 1970s was able to attain his measure of greatness as a tragic painter only through a free, uncondescending use of motifs from George Herriman's great strip Krazy Kat and the underground comics of Robert Crumb. Nor can MOMA be accused of pandering to mass taste by exhibiting old comic strips, since what mass taste really likes these days is Van Gogh and Picasso.

The show's problems lie elsewhere. The first is the subject's diffuseness, its almost limitless size. Gopnik and Varnedoe have taken four categories to look at: graffiti, caricature, advertising and the comics. But what about the movies, TV or photography? One can sympathize with the curators' problem: any story must have a narrative core, and to secure one this account has been heavily edited. Nevertheless one misses references to these forms -- even though, if exhibited with any density, they would have made the show unendurably prolix.

The size of the subject virtually ensures that the kind of narrative Gopnik and Varnedoe present works better in the catalog than on the walls. In fact, it is hard to see how any museum installation -- linear and one-track by + nature -- could convey a real sense of the peculiar eddies of cultural flux and reflux that they have set out to describe. Abstract Expressionism, for instance, tended to set itself above popular culture -- yet one of its true icons, De Kooning's 1950 study for Woman, had a smile cut from an ad for Camel cigarettes. The work does not appear in the show. There are shallow passages: the bay devoted to Russian Constructivism, Futurism and the Bauhaus, for instance, is mingy. Yet many excellent works of art proliferate, from Cubist collages to exquisite, large-scale paintings by Cy Twombly and some of Robert Rauschenberg's early combines, like Rebus, 1955; from James Rosenquist's room- size F-111, 1964-65, and a reassembly of some of the passionate, gaudy fragments from Claes Oldenburg's Store of 1961-62 to Brancusi's phallic bronze, Princess X, 1916, and one of the greatest of all Legers, The City, 1919.

Nevertheless, though the show affords plenty of opportunity for aesthetic enjoyment, it is about argument, and works of art don't "argue" in a discursive way. Meanwhile the lost environment of popular culture to which they relate can only get into the museum as emblematic snippets, without the casual encircling power it once had. To popular culture the '70s are already medieval and the century's teens virtually Pleistocene. The curators do their best with this, reprinting front pages of Parisian newspapers that Picasso, Braque and Gris cut their collage materials from, or hanging photographs of the kinds of shopwindow display that, they persuasively argue, reinforced the cult of the Surrealist object in the '20s. But the effort to put long-gone popular culture in a museum is like trying to resurrect an old perfume in a room.

Consequently, the show reads as a set of illustrations to the book, for only in the book can the comparison of demotic source with final object be done with the necessary detail. Varnedoe and Gopnik have gone into their subject with vast scholarly elan, mining arcana from the areas where art and life, under the impulse of a modernism striving to refresh itself, are layered. If you want to know what was the catalog model of Marcel Duchamp's urinal, which nursery book Max Ernst got a particular collage element from, or which frame panels from 1962 war comics drawn by Russ Heath were conflated by Roy Lichtenstein to produce Okay, Hot-Shot, 1963, you need look no further.

But the catalog is not a mass of fanzine trivia. It is the indispensable text on its subject, whose every page vibrates with the authors' enthusiasm for the "high," their curiosity about the "low" and their richly inflected sense of the complex traffic between the two. Gopnik and Varnedoe write better than their critics. The next-to-last essay ("Contemporary Reflections," by Gopnik, covering a wide swath from David Salle and Cindy Sherman to the short- lived graffiti movement) is, on its own, the best summary yet written of American art in the '80s.

Yet the art the essay covers is scarcely represented on the walls. Why should these artists be considered worth writing about but not worth showing? You can see why MOMA might object on grounds of quality, since so much of the work was so poor. And you can't put lost subway graffiti in a museum anyway. But to restrict one's coverage of the '80s to Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer and the admirable Elizabeth Murray is tokenism. If the media-obsessed art of the '80s was worth putting in the catalog it should have been on the walls, if only to illustrate how mass media became gradually exhausted as a topic of fine-art reflection.