ABJECT SEXUALITY IN POP ART
Joe A. Thomas
Erotic art has long comprised the secret museum
of art history because societal taboos and restrictive
cultural morés have created an awkward and
embarrassing atmosphere around human sexuality, at
least in the west. Similarly, some writers and viewers
have considered Pop Art as something of an embar‐
rassment in the history of art. Seen as “selling out”
modernism, its popular and economic success helped
to spur its general critical rejection in the art world of
the early sixties. Pop was seen as thumbing its nose at
“serious” modernist art for many reasons, but among
the least discussed of its artistic transgressions has
been the consistent use of sexual and erotic imagery.
In a sort of artistic patricide, the Pop artists used
erotic images as part of an overall strategy to establish
themselves as the new avant‐garde while distancing
themselves from the oppressive weight of the Abstract
Expressionist art establishment.
In 1939 Clement Greenberg’s “Avant‐Garde and
Kitsch” codified the almost sacred separation of
modernist, highbrow culture and art from popular,
lowbrow products. In Greenberg’s view whatever held
popular appeal for the masses was by definition
lowbrow kitsch and artistically insignificant. Kitsch
was thus defined by its designated site in popular
culture. Greenberg was not alone in his opposition to
mass culture; commercial art and popular media were
widely considered artistically insignificant. Bernard
Rosenberg and David Manning White, discussing mass
culture in 1957, expressed the accepted opinion that
art was “the counterconcept to popular culture” and
that “a genuine esthetic (or religious or love) expe‐
rience becomes difficult, if not impossible, whenever
kitsch pervades the atmosphere.”1 When Pop artists
began to appropriate popular culture by using
commercial images and styles, they defied Greenberg’s
artistic hierarchies and consciously sought out the
abject—relative to their own art‐historical context.
While some recent psychoanalytic theory projects
many complex layers of meaning onto the term
abjection, I prefer a less labored definition. Webster’s
dictionary defines abject as “miserable; wretched” or
1 Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., Mass
Culture: The Popular Arts in America (London: The Free Press,
1957), 10.
“lacking self‐respect; degraded.” It derives from the
Latin verb abjicere, which means “to throw away.” The
modernist imperative included an unspoken rule that
the radicality of the art would produce an underlying
sense of the abject, hence provoking negative reac‐
tions of shock from an uninformed public. Pop Art,
however, redoubled and redefined the modernist
affection for the abject. Even the self‐styled avant‐
garde saw it as miserable and wretched. Max Kozloff’s
famous 1962 article derided the emerging style for its
“metaphysical disgust” practiced by “new vulgarians.”2
Paradoxically, Pop artists had turned to popular
culture largely because they felt such intense pressure
to conform to modernist standards of the avant‐garde.
Andy Warhol well illustrated this impulse. As he
began to seek a high profile in the New York art world,
he visited the art‐lending gallery then offered by the
Museum of Modern Art. Upon seeing a collage by
Rauschenberg, Warhol remarked with disgust, “That’s
a piece of shit. Anyone can do that. I can do that.” His
friend Ted Carrey responded, “Well, why don’t you do
it?” “Well, I’ve got to think of something different,”
was Warhol’s response.3 The Pop artists’ effectiveness
in conveying their radical status was instantaneous
and profound. Thomas Hess reported that a leading
modernist painter, upon seeing the watershed
exhibition of Pop and other art at Sidney Janis Gal‐
lery’s “New Realists” show in November 1962,
exclaimed, “I feel a bit like a follower of Ingres looking
at the first Monets.”4 In fact, the disgust of the
modernist establishment was such that Janis’s entire
stable of Abstract Expressionists (except Willem de
Kooning) left his gallery.5
Erotic and sexual content—which could increase
the art’s “wretched” and “degrading” connotations—
were among the Pop artists’ most effective tools in
establishing their avant‐garde credentials. All of the
2 Max Kozloff, “’Pop’ Culture, Metaphysical Disgust, and the
New Vulgarians,” Art International 6 (March 1962): 34‐36.
3 Patrick Smith, “Art in Extremis: Andy Warhol and his Art”
(Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1932), 468‐69.
4 Thomas Hess, “New Realists,” Art News 61 (December 1962):
12.
5 Barbara Haskell, Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and
Performance, 1958‐1964 (New York: Whitney Museum of American
Art in association with W. W. Norton & Co., 1984), 86; Calvin
Tomkins, “Profiles: A Good Eye and a Good Ear, Leo Castelli,” The
New Yorker, 26 May 1980, 62.
2
major Pop artists involved themselves with such
imagery to some degree, particularly those whose
work commented on the mass media exploitation of
female sexuality: Tom Wesselmann and Mel Ramos.
Typical of Wesselmann’s work is Great American Nude
#55 of 1964. All of the elements of the painting are
simplified into flat areas of commercial‐looking, bright
color, except for the tasteless, leopard‐print spread on
which the nude lies.
The artist’s characteristic
emphasis on erogenous zones by the use of
contrasting colors is heightened in this work by the
use of collaged hair. Interestingly, in explaining his
artistic strategy the artist revealed an odd conflation
of formalism with a realization of the abject quality of
the subject. He stated (not referring specifically to
#55) that he found the emphasized pubic areas
“blatantly erotic and consequently visually aggres‐
sive. . . . A shaved vagina had the same vividness and
immediacy as a strong red.”6
Mel Ramos’s most famous works are probably the
paintings of 1965‐66 in which nude centerfold girls
were paired with common commercial products
(usually food, but always something consumable). In
Val Veeta a nubile sixties sex kitten sprawls on a giant
box of Velveeta cheese spread. Ramos customarily
played with the title in order to alliteratively connect
the woman’s name with the corresponding product.
The painting equates the highly processed and arti‐
ficial erotic image of the nude woman with the
similarly processed and artificial food product. The
sensual aspects of the food parallel the sensual aspects
of the nude. The extensive finishing and processing
that such a nude model would undergo—including
later airbrushing—made her a product as far removed
from a real woman as the rubbery, glutinous Velveeta
is from real cheese. Both were meant to be con‐
sumed—one by the eyes, the other by the mouth.
Ramos’s smooth brushwork in Val Veeta imitates the
airbrushed perfection of Playboy centerfold models
and recalls the slick technique of advertising
illustration. Both in style and subject, the painting
embodies some of the most reviled and abject features
of popular culture: blatant consumerism, the sexual
sell, crassness. Oddly, Ramos has never acknowledged
any such purposeful strategy, however, maintaining
that he is just “a figure painter.”7
6 Slim Stealingworth [Tom Wesselman], Wesselmann (New
York: Abbeville, 1980), 23.
7 Mel Ramos, interview by the author, 30 May 1991, Oakland,
California, Tape recording.
In contrast, Claes Oldenburg explicitly related
eroticism to the transformative nature of his art. As he
said, “My work is always on its way between one point
and another.”8 The points in his particular artistic
geometry usually encompassed mundane objects at
one end and sexual organs or erotic symbols at the
other. Falling Shoestring Potatoes (1966) illustrates
the fluid mutations Oldenburg saw in objects.
Ostensibly it is a giant bag of French fries spilling onto
the gallery floor. But as Lawrence Alloway has
explained, in a sketch for the piece Oldenburg wrote
that an electrical plug equals legs, which then equal
shoestring potatoes. The potatoes resembled both
legs and the prongs of the plug, while the sack/skirt
from which the potatoes/legs protrude was the plug
itself; the French fries were thus a metaphor for legs
under a miniskirt and an electrical plug.9 Oldenburg’s
vision of a pansexual world correlated with contem‐
poraneous psychoanalytic theories that posited
sexuality as being at the root of our perception. Olden‐
burg was a fan of Norman O. Brown, an early sixties
writer and thinker who believed in the renunciation
and repression of logic in a favor of a return to the
polymorphous perversity of infancy as described by
Freud.10 There is often a grotesque quality to Olden‐
burg’s transmutations: for example, in a musing from
his notebooks, “ice cream=God=sperm.”11 Such “poly‐
morphous perversity” would have created a sense of
abjection in a typical squeamish 1960s viewer.
Almost as soon as James Rosenquist turned to
painting Pop works, erotic elements began to appear.
I Love You With My Ford has probably received more
critical attention than any other Rosenquist painting
except F‐111. Gene Swenson wrote in 1962:
The upper section, an obsolescent ’49 Ford,
comments on things which change (car
models), or persist (making love in cars).
The progressive enlargement of scale in the
three sections parallels the increasing loss
of identity in the sexual act.12
Or as Simon Wilson saw it,
. . . the Ford phallic symbol looms over the
face of the girl, her eyes closed and lips
parted in ecstasy, while below the consum‐
8 Lawrence Alloway, American Pop Art (New York: Macmillan,
1974), 101.
9 Ibid., 104.
10 Barbara Rose, “The Origins, Life and Times of Ray Gun,”
Artforum 8 (November 1969): 57; Barbara Rose, Claes Oldenburg
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 64.
11 Ellen
Johnson, Claes Oldenburg (Harmondsworth and
Baltimore: Penguin, 1971), 24.
12 Gene Swenson, “The New American ‘Sign Painters,’” Art News
61 (September 1962): 60‐61.
3
mation is somehow symbolized by the
writhing, glutinous masses of spaghetti.13
Rosenquist’s title perhaps suggests that commodity
exchange involving objects such as this will replace
physical affection (and its accompanying messiness
and complications). The artist depicted the sexual act
on three levels corresponding to the three horizontal
bands of imagery. On top is the car itself, a repre‐
sentation of consumerist society’s love affair with the
automobile. The middle register conveys the romance
of the sexual act as immortalized in films and
advertisements: the idealized embrace of a white,
heterosexual couple, reduced to the acceptable synec‐
doche of faces pressed together. In the lowest register,
the spaghetti refers to the actual, sensual, physical
experience of sexual intercourse. The symbolic “con‐
summation” of the spaghetti refers to the most abject
attributes of the sexual act: the friction of mucous
membranes and the secretion of bodily fluids. The
softly modulated contours of Rosenquist’s billboard‐
inspired brushwork increase the sensuality of the
spaghetti and the embracing couple above it. As with
Oldenburg’s work, there is a grotesque aspect to
Rosenquist’s metaphorical conjunction of the most
base and physical aspects of love with American
commercialism.
Andy Warhol went far beyond the teasing, often
subliminal sexuality of advertising and mass media by
dealing with sex more candidly than any other Pop
artist. Among Warhol’s earliest, widely‐noticed works
were silkscreened images of Holly‐wood sex symbols
such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor.
However, the very first of these images, made in
limited numbers during the summer of 1962, depicted
the male actors Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty.
Thomas Crow has demeaned these works as “dead‐
end experiments,”14 but their erotic content is
significant. While the open recognition of male sex
symbols was largely taboo in normative straight
culture, Donahue and Beatty would have been widely
and openly renowned as desirable sexual objects by
Warhol and others in New York’s gay subculture. As
Warhol told an interviewer regarding Donahue, “He
was so great. God!”15
In 1963 Warhol first announced his intention to
make “pornographic pictures” using black lights so
that the canvas looked blank under normal gallery
Simon Wilson, Pop (Woodbury, NY: Barrron’s, 1978), 24.
Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in
Early Warhol, “ Art in America 75 (May 1987): 134.
15 Smith, 944.
13
14
lights. If the show were to be raided by the police, the
lights would go on and the evidence would dis‐
appear.16 Such a painting finally appeared in October
1966 at Sidney Janis Gallery’s “Erotic Art ‘66” show.17
Seemingly derived from a soft‐core pornographic
nude, in his usual serial fashion Warhol repeated the
image of a woman’s stomach and breasts. Art critic
David Bourdon recalled that the image was repeated
on many panels that covered a wall, and that a special
switch was available for the viewer to turn on the
ultraviolet light,18 just as Warhol had earlier planned.
Interestingly, the eerie glow of the ultraviolet light in
the darkness and the flicking off of the lights before
the show starts is also reminiscent of the peep shows
and porno arcades of 42nd Street, with which Warhol
was certainly familiar.
Warhol’s forays into filmmaking were startlingly
sexual almost from the beginning. In fact, we might
even say that Warhol’s entire film career was
predicated on sexuality. The first film for which he
became widely known, Sleep, depicted Warhol’s then‐
crush, the poet John Giorno, sleeping for hours,
variously repeated into a six‐hour film. The reels
focused on Giorno’s nude body and created a teasing
nudity and subtle eroticism. Only a few months later
in January 1964 Warhol filmed another, more
explicitly sexual work, Blow Job. The camera never left
the face of the still‐anonymous Factory visitor who
was the film’s focus; it simply documents the varied
and sometimes hilarious expressions that passed
across his face. If not for the title the nature of the
activity would be difficult to determine. Such films,
which engaged eroticism through allusion, were a far
cry from slightly later works such as Couch, explicitly
depicting random couplings on a couch in the silver
Factory. With connotations ranging from porno‐
graphy to homosexuality, the sexuality of Warhol’s
oeuvre was probably the most threatening of any Pop
artist to the sixties establishment.
Pop’s obvious connections to quickly shifting
trends in mass culture often resulted in the two being
directly confused with each other. Max Kozloff
reported in 1965 that media had started to connect art
with other aspects of popular culture because of “a
confusion between behavior at openings (or at inde‐
16 Gene Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Part I,” Art News 62
(November 1963): 60‐61.
17 New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Erotic Art ‘66, Exhibition 3‐
29 October 1966.
18 David Bourdon, interview by author, Tape recording, New
York, 15 May 1991.
4
pendent film showings or discotheques) and works of
art.”19 Gallery receptions could be news for the society
page. Art became fashionable and hip in a way it had
not been before. Pop Art rapidly became connected in
the public mind to a variety of simultaneous cultural
trends. For instance, the art world and the public
often associated Pop with the burgeoning interest in
the camp sensibility, exemplified by the publication of
Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” in late 1964.20 The
conflation of the two even resulted in a wave of
accusations that Pop Art was a homosexual conspiracy
to ruin the art world.21
Warhol’s importance in this phenomenon cannot
be underestimated. Although he was the last of the
major New York Pop artists to have a solo exhibition,
he quickly became the most famous of the group
because of his purposely outrageous life‐style and his
clever manipulation of media. Starting as a commer‐
cial artist, then moving to paintings, films, nightclubs,
bands, and becoming a semi‐professional party‐goer,
Warhol both epitomized and spearheaded the
blending of genres at the time. His undisguised
homosexuality added a good deal of verve to his public
image as a shocking sexual rebel. His retinue of pill‐
popping drag queens, gays, lesbians, and others of
varied sexual orientations completed the outrageous
picture he sought to portray. By promoting a band—
the Velvet Under‐ground—opening a nightclub—The
Exploding Plastic Inevitable—and attending (often
crashing) society gatherings, he associated Pop Art
with everything trendy and fashionable.
Sexuality involves an element of pleasure just as
popular culture does, and the pleasurable aspects of
Pop also played an important role in both its initial
critical rejection and its association with the abject.
Dick Hebdige pointed out that critics summarily dis‐
missed Pop Art as empty and shallow, but that Pop
actually set out to blur the distinctions and overturn
the suppositions that provided the very foundations of
this critical attitude. By way of explanation Hebdige
quoted Pierre Bourdieu, who described the traditional
“antithesis between culture and corporeal pleasure (or
nature if you will)” that was expressed by a social
relationship: “the opposition between a cultivated
19 Max Kozloff, “Art: Review of the Season,” The Nation, 7 June
1965, 623.
20 Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Partisan Review 31 (Fall
1964): 515‐16, 530.
21 Most notably seen in Vivian Gornick, “Pop Goes Homosexual:
It’s a Queer Hand Stoking the Campfire,” The Village Voice, 7 April
1966, 1, 20‐21.
bourgeoisie and the people.” In other words, critics
rejected Pop because of its association with the
pleasurable, which was by definition common and
kitsch.22 The Pop artists’ easygoing personalities and
commercial success, their art’s obvious humor, and
their use of eroticism all emphasized the pleasurable
aspects of their art and a consequential association
with the non‐elite masses that were the intended
market of the creators of Pop’s original sources of
imagery.
Little had been more reviled, repressed and kitsch
in America than the open, pleasurable enjoyment of
sexuality—the reaction to the publication of Kinsey’s
famous works was proof enough of that. Sex was an
integral part of popular culture, however. Pinups,
pornography, and comic books: all of these utilized
eroticism, and all were at the bottom of the kitsch
barrel. Pop artists initially sought a variety of kitsch
imagery from popular culture as a revolutionary
alternative to modernist abstraction. But if an artist
really wanted to turn his back on modernist
formalism, he could do more than just copy a comic
book—he could copy an erotic comic book. By inject‐
ting elements of sexuality, the Pop artists were able to
increase the “trashy” connotations of their work and
begin the overturning of modernist dogma that was
eventually to create a basis for postmodernism.
22 In Paul Taylor, ed., Post‐Pop Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
and Flash Art Books, 1989), 94, 104‐05.