University of Southern California
DAILY m TROJAN
VOL. LXIV NO. 74
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1972
Wolfe traces pop art
TOM WOLFE DT photo by Tony Korody
By ROBIN NEWCOMER Managing Editor
Tom Wolfe, one of the today’s New Journalists, came to campus Tuesday in a purple Dodge Charger, sporting what he called his “winter whites” and spoke to an overflow crowd in Bovard Auditorium about art—as a religion of modern culture, as an expression of the masses, as neon signs, Campbell soup cans, comic strips, Buick billboards and supermarkets.
His talk opened the Festival of the Arts, and though Wolfe is heralded as a New Journalist, his topic was art and the emergence of the pop art form.
Wolfe traces his links with pop art back to 1965, when he found himself described by Time magazine as one of the world’s foremost pop journalists. “The word pop, for a while, became the curse of my life,” he said.
“At that time, the word pop was in the air like an obsession. There were pop artists, pop singers, dancers...They were sort of looking for a pop writer.” Representing a trend
Wolfe accepted the challenge of representing such a nebulous form and said he experienced “an incarnation problem.” It’s when you don’t think of yourself as simply an individual but as an incarnation of an entire trend or movement,” he explained.
Eventually Wolfe’s thinking progressed even further until he began to think, “Maybe I’m the pop movement incarnate—maybe I’m a whole trend.”
The journalist’s experience on the Les Crane TV show really brought him down, he said. When asked what were going to be the new things in the pop world the next year, the suddenly disillusioned Wolfe replied, “Oh, hell, I don’t know.” The remark. Wolfe said, quickly ended his budding career on the talk show.
The problem, Wolfe explained was that even though the word “pop” was in the air, it had no definition. Of the three definitions that could apply to pop, the only one that was serious was the idea of popular culture, Wolfe said. However, the other two ideas—that the pop writer worote about the trivial, or that
he wrote for perverse reasons, putting high values on things that were junk—were also valid, Wolfe said, because they were very much a part of pop art.
Middle-class change
Changes in the lives ofthe middle class during the ‘50s and ‘60s intrigued Wolfe—he felt this change was going to turn out to be the most important thing that occurred during these two decades—even more important than the Vietnam war.
“During World War II, money was pumped into the economy at every class level—something which has never happened before in history,” he said.
“Because of this, it gave people the opportunity to start expressing themselves. No one had ever had that kind of money before at a mass level.”
At this same time, pop art was also evolving.
“A great deal of pop art, what I like to think I was involved in, was meant to be a sense of discovery about what seemingly ordinary people were doing, making them no longer ordinary.”
The emergence of pop art began to strip bare the class natures of what goes on in the art world, Wolfe said. “Culture and art are literally becoming the religion of the educated classes. Art is becoming the legitimation of wealth for these people and a way to put a foothold on eternity or the way to buy a piece of immortality.”
Artists deceived
Many artists who wanted to launch protests against museums, galleries and other such complexes began to fool themselves, Wolfe said, when they took their work downtown
to lofts and less elite-type places. “In many cases, these were pop artists who started to discover the vitality of the people and the new forms of expression of the masses.”
The unfortunate thing, Wolfe added, was that these artists looked upon the new expressions as a form of primitive art.
“They started going out and seeing the Campbell soup cans, comic strips and neon signs and saying, ‘We have discovered this likeness of primitive art, but it does hold a certain vitality, so we’ll preempt it and we’ll bring it into the age-old game of art.’
Free expression
This expression of art became pop art, and instead of becoming an ordinary expression of American life, it was played as a game, Wolfe said.
The problem with the emergence of the art form was that the people who were making the Brillo boxes, Campbell soup cans or neon signs were “not primitive, Wolfe said. They were people who were outside the aristocratic ethos, but they were not unsophisticated; in fact they dealt with highly sophisticated technological devices.”
The old rules are finally beginning to wear out, Wolfe said. “People are beginning to realize that they really ought to run down to San Diego and see an amazing sign that is advertising Buick.
“People are also finding that the great mausoleums are nothing. An artist who thinks he has an idea that will light up the sky ought to try it. The time has now come for the new geniuses to arise.”
Kunstler, famed attorney, to talk
By RICHARD SIMON Staff Writer
William Kunstler, civil rights attorney and defender of the Chicago 8, will speak at 1 p.m. today in Bovard Auditorium.
The lecture, sponsored by the Great Issues Forum, had been postponed until March, but Kunstler won an unexpected early acquittal of his client in a lengthy murder trial, permitting the lawyer to speak as scheduled.
The 52-year-old lawyer received nationwide publicity from his participation in the Chicago 8 conspiracy trial, hearings on the Kent State killings, the Rap Brown case, the Isla Vista burning proceedings, and more recently, Attica State Prison. Kunstler served as a member of the Attica citizen observer committee, which was established to analyze the prison rebellion.
Kunstler believes that rebellion may be the last step if every other method of change fails. “On campus, if everything else failed to get a grievance recognized, I think broken windows would be perfectly proper; and if the broken windows didn’t work, then burning a building would be perfectly proper; and if that didn’t work maybe getting rifles would be proper,” the lawyer said in an interview last year.
Kunstler, however, feels that the democratic system still has a chance. He said the system is fine theoretically, but the problem is that it has never been translated into reality.
“We have a President, but he is chosen between Tweedledee and Tweedledum,” Kunstler said.
“We have a Congress, but again we have to take the choices of the two major parties and they’re frequently very much alike. We have a judiciary, but we have to trust the principle that the judges are impartial when, too often, they are partial in situations where the system itself is threatened.”
He also said juries often are not the peers of a defendant but those who have the most to lose by the defendant’s philosophy of life.
“Capitalism as a system is destructive of human beings and must be replaced, but by what, I don’t know,” Kunstler said about capitalism.
The civil rights attorney said that newspapers and television have robbed him of his anonymity. “It has made it difficult for me to go anywhere without causing a minor maelstrom,” Kunstler said.
“I also recognize it turns off a lot of people, a lot of young lawyers with whom I’d like to work. They say ‘Why should I want to work with him? All the press will do is look at him and I’ll just be carrying a briefcase.’ ”
Bible views seen as better for ecology
By MIKE REVZIN Staff Writer
“If you had a nice garden, and you left it with someone to guard, and you came back and found they made a parking lot out of it, you wouldn’t pat them on the back,” an authority on the Bible said Tuesday.
Carl Armerding, assistant professor of Old Testament at Regent Seminary in Canada, spoke in Hancock Auditorium on “The Christian View of Ecology.” He was sponsored by the Trojan Christian Fellowship.
The earth, Armerding said, is God’s garden, and it was given to man to guard. If the Bible’s view of the world had been followed, today’s environmental problems could have been avoided.
He criticized those who say the Judeo-Christian beliefs have caused the present situation.
The technological societies, which are the major polluters, are largely Judeo-Christian, Armerding said, but it is such departures as greed from the
Mr. Video to be featured today
Today’s Cultureprobe schedule is highlighted by Larry Menkin—“Mr. Video”— as guest speaker.
Menkin, a three-time variety show management program award winner, author of over 375 scripts for television and director of the San Francisco
Bay Area United Crusade, is part of the theme of mass communication presented by the Festival of the Arts. He will speak at noon in the Student Activities Center.
At 10 a.m. a ferris wheel will be in operation near Alumni Park and will run until 4 p.m.
at no cost.
Also on the festival’s agenda is an All-Night, Once-In-A-Lifetime Atomic Movie Orgy. The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy and Mighty Mouse are among those being shown in Bovard Auditorium at 7 p.m. There is no charge.
teachings of these religions that caused man to neglect his duty to guard the earth.
Armerding said that an appeal to people’s theological beliefs may be the necessary approach to solving environmental problems.
“I don’t think we’ve hit the point where self-preservation is a sufficient factor to get people to do something,” he said.
Armerding explained that people will not give up ingrained ways of life, such as driving cars, because they don’t fear an environmental catastrophe will happen in their lifetime.
It is not necessary to convert everyone in order to achieve the goal of improving the environment, he said, but more progress is made in societies that follow the Judeo-Christian concept and regard man as God’s highest creation.
In societies where other aspects of nature are worshipped and held in awe, technological progress is not as great. Armerding cited India, where cows are regarded as holy, as an example.
Armerding said that he doesn’t want to be a prophet of doom, but he doesn’t think that the environmental problem will ever be completely solved.
He believes, however, that man shouldn’t cease his attempts to improve the situation.