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Chapter 5 The Pop Camp Andy Warhol's cover for Flash - November 22, 1963 was a characterisncally pop deformation of news imagery. A newspaper headline declaring "President ShotDead" is overlaid with a pattern offlower-shaped decals. The documentary impulse is thus undermined, its visual contents lIterally obscured by the decorative gesture. The decals, emblems of the cheap and mass produced, lowbrow forms of embellishment, become the very medium through or around which one must view news of the president's death. They mount a seemingly benign assault on legitimized forms ofdiscourse by forcing the headlines to struggle for legibility. As such they underscore the newspaper itselfas mass produced and cheap, concerned with pattern and layout. The front page as enduring record ofthe event and the day, its potential as a collector's piece, is presented here as a decoranve cover, hinting at the disposability ofhistorical accounts. In the cover for Flash, Warhol's Daily News painting (1962) meets his silkscreen Flowm (1966-1967), and the funereal function of the Jackie portraits appears to be replaced by a more explicit acknowledgment ofthe Image as ornamentation. Warhol's assassination art was but one instance of pop's encounter with American political and nationalist iconography.l Rearticulations of the flag in Claes Oldenburg's constructions, Jasper Johns's paintings or George Herms's assemblages were perhaps the most common experiments. As both a player m and a product of the image culttlre, JFK was ideal for pop's appropriation of national symbols and can be found in the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg and Larry Rivers. In James Rosenquist's PresuJent Elect (1960-1961), two female hands appear to emerge from Kennedy's face, eachofferinga pieceofcake with frosting, while behindthem sits anew car. Kennedy as the first media-made president is thus compared with other great American commodities, his image no less a product of the ad man's sales pitch. Pop's fascination with the art ofadvertiSing and corporate journalism , from television to COInlC strip heroes, forced itinto direct confrontations with the imagery ofconsumer culture. The supermarket bag held the contents for a perfect still life. Thus, pop was well prepared to comment on the selling of the Warren Report and the government's posthumous manufacture ofKennedy's identity. 119 JFK u Found Art Indeed, in its incorporation of the assassination, pop's interest in the everyday and the obsolescent could be read as an increasingly critical stance. For wlthin weeks of the shooting the public sphere turned qUlckly to memorializing the slain president by naming and renaming various structures in his honor. Schools, airports, and bridges were given Kennedy's name in a process that both involved and concerned Washington lawmakers. Three weeks after the assassination, ajoint congressional session ofthe House and Senate Committees on Public Works convened to consider naming the nascent national center for the performing arts in honor ofthe late president. Each witness before the commirtee articulated essentially the same point: the need to erect an homage to JFK which would symbolize permanence by showcasing works of enduring cultural value. The idea ofa memorial worthy of its name was underscored by expressions of concern about the expanding list ofstructures or institutions being named in Kennedy's honor. All Americans hope that his personal example of devoted duty and the bold· ness ofhis goals for the countrywill neverbe forgotten. Yet in this moment of sorrow and mourning we must be careful not to debase our griefby attaching the Keunedynameto everything in sight. Surely, no one hadagreater sense of the fitting and appropriate gesture than President Keunedy.a Testimony before the committee was punctuated by artempts to identify the performing arts center with the late president's character. A living memorial , it was claimed, would capture Kennedy's youthful enthusiasm while standing simultaneously as a monument to the timeless values for which he had an astute appreciation. Kennedy's identity was not only transferred to the structure but was itself rewritten to conform wlth the center's function as home to the arts. Ithink it is particularly an appropriate memorial to aPresident who had an immutable capacity for many ofthe arts. Iconsider he was avery great artist. Bill capacity to use the English language was unmatched, I think, by anyone, save perhaps President Lincoln, who only just about a hundred years ago sufferedthe same fate as President Keunedy. He hadgreat sensitiveness to all the arts. He himself was an artist in the true sense of the word. He won a Pnlltzer...

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