The Adventurous Decade: Comic Strips in the Thirties by Ron Goulart, The World Encyclopaedia of Comics ed. by Maurice Horn (review)

166 Books Pop. Simon Wilson. Thames & Hudson, London, 1974. 128 pp.. illus. Paper. 95p. Art since Pop. John A. Walker. Thames & Hudson, London, 1975. 128 pp.. illus. Paper. 95p. Reviewed by Francis V. O’Connor* These two appallingly superficial paperbacks. designed. one suspects, to add a touch of class to the pornography racks in Anglo-American drugstores, are worthy examples of the visual culture they so turgidly describe. Mechanically divided between ‘64 pages in colour’. as their covers scholastically proclaim. and introduced by 64 pages of words. they are serious ‘books‘ in about the same contrived sense as Pop and its aftermath is serious ‘art’. Wilson discusses three major distinguishing characteristics of Pop art: it is ‘figurative and realist’ (here Courbet is evoked; Daumier ignored), it is ‘rooted in the urban environment’ (as if rural satirists ever make it) and its subject matter (blessedly)‘has never before been used as a basis for art’. He proceeds to give capsule critical biographies of New York. U.S. West Coast. British and continentalEuropean Pop artists-and stops. Walker. of the two, the more sensitive to the reader’s possible curiosities. describes casualties for the art types he discusses. Thus Clement Greenberg is not unreasonably cojoined with the rise of Post-Painterly Abstraction. Time magazine is accused of Op art. A whiff of Structuralism pervades Minimal art. Process art, Earth art, Psychedelic art. The New Informalists and the Photo-Realists are all given some sociological, pharmacological and/or psychological rai.soti d’trre. and even the Body artists. from the archness of England’s Gilbert and George to those unspeakable German butchers who artlessly revive the rituals of the Mithraic Tauraboreum. are given suitable. if not always convincing, contexts. And the Conceptualists are given to the philosophers, among whom. I suppose. they belong. lest Mystics be corrupted. Both books contain brief chronologies and bibliographies, with Walker’s being the more complete and meaningful. One wonders for whom such things are written. Surely the artprofessional class gets its own more comprehensive and sophisticated promotional literature and the general public has little reason to read works that give it so little reason to be interested. The public wants explanations, not descriptions. The suckers. I fear. are artists of little distinction and some art studentswho are lured by those measly but informational colour plates. a lust to know what is happening ‘now‘and obsessed with finding the stratagem for attaining the bliss of being in such books themselves. The hard truth, of course. is that. from the perspective of the year 2000, it seems probably that only the absolutist Andy Warhol will be seen as archetypal of his time’s antipathy toward art and that visionaries such as Robert Smithson and Eva Hesse, destroyed before their time, will stand as harbingers of an aesthetic rooted in the awesome indifference of natural phenomena. But these ‘books’ provide no judgement nor prophecy and. as with pornography, the promise disappoints, which perhaps explains why David Storey’s ‘Life Class’. given such unstimulating texts and only spasmodic instruction. raped the model. L’Art de la science fiction 1926-1954. In French. Lester del Rey, ed. Trans. from American by Thierry Ogee. Editions du Chine. Paris, 1975. 92 pp.. illus. Paper. Reviewed by David A. Hardy** This is basically a collection of 40 covers from science fiction (SF) magazines published between 1926 and 1954. in format very much after the pattern of the Pan/Ballantine books. which include artists such as Dali and Magritte. However. one difference that pleased me is that each caption (in English) faces the illustration to which it relates instead of being on its reverse. Unlike other recent books on SF art, one page is devoted to each cover, with a fairly wide white border and no cluttering text. The reproduction isextremely good (very littlecross-screen effect due to reproducing from a printed original). especially since, as the text points out, some covers were originally printed in three colours with no black plate. *250 East 73rd St., No. IIC, New York, NY 10021, U.S.A. **99 Southam Rd.. Hall Green, Birmingham B28 OAB. England. The eight pages of introductory text. in F:ench, are necessarily brief...