Abstract art has its own integrity, not someone else's "integration" with something else. Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all.--Donald Judd, 1965 Donald Judd was one of the foremost practitioners of Minimal Art and best known for his sleek, boxlike constructions made of industrial materials such as plywood, sheet metal, and plexiglass. Through these works, he sought to create a depersonalized art in which the exploration of space, scale, and materials served as an end, rather than as a metaphor for human experience. Emphatically concerned with pure forms, Judd's works become lucid statements about proportion and rhythm as well as assertions about the displacement of space. His sculptures share rather than invade the observer's space, yet their monumentality often lends them a dynamic presence.

"The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel."--Andy Warhol, 1975 For Warhol and fellow Pop artists, reproducing images from popular culture was the visual means for expressing detachment from emotions, an attitude they regarded as characteristic of the 1960s. Like droning newscasts, repetition dissipates meaning and with it the capacity of images to move or disturb. Warhol created 16 Jackies in response to the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an event whose mass-media coverage reached an unparalleled number of people. The four images of Jacqueline Kennedy, each repeated four times, were enlargements of news photographs that appeared widely and continually in the media after the assassination. Taken from issues of Life magazine, the images depict, from top to bottom: Jackie stepping off the plane upon arrival at Love Field in Dallas; stunned at the swearing-in ceremony for Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force One after the president's death; grieving at the Capitol; and smiling in the limousine before the assassination. 16 Jackies combines a number of themes important in Warhol's work, such as his fascination with American icons and celebrities, his interest in the mass media and the dissemination of imagery, and his preoccupation with death.

Although Warhol was already impressed with the glamour of Jackie Kennedy by 1962,1 he was unmoved by the news of John Kennedy's assassination the following year. He later recalled: I heard the news over the radio when I was alone painting in my studio. I don't think I missed a stroke. I wanted to know what was going on out there, but that was the extent of my reaction.... Henry Geldzahler wanted to know why I wasn't more upset, so I told him about the time I was walking in India and saw a bunch of people in a clearing having a ball because somebody they really liked had just died and how I realized then that everything was just how you decided to think about it. I'd been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart--but it didn't bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad. It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't get away from the thing.... John Quinn, the playwright ... was moaning over and over, "But Jackie was the most glamorous First Lady we'll every get."2 For Warhol, the visual means for expressing detachment from emotions, an attitude he regarded as characteristic of the 1960s in general,3 was through the replication of images. Like the droning repetition of newscasts, the device dissipates meaning, and with it the capacity of images to move or disturb: "The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel."4 The sixteen faces of Jackie Kennedy in Warhol's painting were blown up from four news photos that appeared ubiquitously in the media after the assassination. From top to bottom, the images are of Jackie smiling at Love Field on arrival in Dallas; stunned at the swearing-in ceremony for L.B.J. on Air Force One after the president's death; grieving at the Capitol; and in the limousine before the shooting. The top three appeared in the 24 November and 6 December 1963 issues of Life magazine: the first by an unidentified photographer; the second and third by Cecil Stoughton and Fred Ward, respectively; the source for the bottom one has not been identified, although a U.P.I. photograph similar to it was reproduced in Newsweek. Eventually, in Warhol's view, these images became so familiar that neutral identification is all that the viewer experiences. Warhol make this point by repeating each of the four image of Jackie four times, in a simple well-designed non-sequential alternation of strips of "before and after" pictures. The high-contrast, low-information pictures, each as different from the others as one reproduction from another, are cropped to focus on Jackie's face, rhythmically directed one way along one row and then the other along the next. A deliberately careless look gives the painting a sense of chance and hurry, suggesting the quick duplication and dissemination of images.5 Additionally, expressivity is, in a sense, absent from the images themselves. Public expectation forces the face of the politician's wife into a perpetual, meaningless smile, while shock renders the widow as inexpressive and numb as one of Warhol's somnambulant superstars. The two faces, perceived by Warhol as equally unreal, have been further sapped of meaning by the mythologizing American culture and the techniques of reproduction, and are finally emptied of meaning by the artist's stylization. 1 See Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, PoPism: The Warhol '60s (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 36. 2 Ibid., p. 60. 3 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 27. 4 Warhol, PoPism, p. 50. It is interesting to note that 16 Jackies ignited the passion of a vandal who inscribed the words "HOGWASH/USA" on the panel third from the top on the leftmost column and "BLACK" on the panel second from the top on the rightmost column in ballpoint pen in November 1967; the inscriptions were successfully removed by Daniel Goldreyer in New York by late January 1968. 5 Warhol describes the silkscreening process he used, which allowed him to turn the work of reproducing the design over to Gerard Malanga and other assistants: "You pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple-quick and chancy;" Warhol, PoPism, p. 22.

The objects presented in this vitrine serve as artifacts of the most notorious scandal in the history of Japanese postwar avant-garde art. Akasegawa Genpei, who founded a trio of performance artists known as Hi Red Center, addressed the fundamental questions of art's authorship, value, and "place" in the realm of everyday society--issues that operated with special significance for these works. In an attempt to operate outside of the gallery system, he created fake banknotes in 1963, which he used as gallery invitations and as "packaging" for everyday objects, sparking a criminal investigation for currency fraud. A highly publicized trial ensued in 1966, which the artist and his defense team used to leverage courtroom dialogue about art's status and value. Ironically, while Akasegawa is commonly positioned within a conceptual anti-art discourse, the trial resulted in art's legitimation, though the artist himself was found guilty of fraud. As if in defiance of these results, Akasegawa went on to generate more currency, this time in the form of "Greater Japan Zero-Yen Notes"--his version of "no-value money."

"I'd been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart--but it didn't bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad."--Andy Warhol After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Andy Warhol began his series of "Jackie paintings" in response to the media blitz that followed the incident. 16 Jackies is a grid of four different images based on news photos of Jacqueline Kennedy from international press coverage of JFK's death. As in Brillo Boxes (1964/1969, also on view here), the artist elevates commercial iconography to the status of fine art. In so doing, Warhol allows his viewer to consider the overlap of things that American culture values: wealth and success, human emotion, and artistic expression.

I believe that Man's first real figurative experience is the recognition of his own image in the mirror: the fiction which comes closest to reality. But it is not long before the reflection begins to send back the same unknowns, the same questions, the same problems, as reality itself: unknowns and questions which Man is driven to re-propose in the form of pictures.--Michelangelo Pistoletto, 1964 Michelangelo Pistoletto is a leading figure of the Arte Povera (literally, "poor art") movement, a name applied by art critic Germano Celant to a group of postwar Italian artists who produced work using minimal formats and deliberately "humble" materials. Though they appear to be made from mirrors, Pistoletto's works are actually made from highly polished stainless-steel panels, to which he applies painted tissue-paper cutouts (paint side down) in such a way as to suggest photographic reproduction. He wrote: "I am afraid that it is incorrect to define my works as 'paintings on mirrors,' for the mirror is an object. Everything would change in my pictures were they to be taken off their mirror backgrounds. . . . The world that surrounds me is really the inner world. Everything is within me just as everything within the figures I paint is an interior reality." Pistoletto's use of imagery from popular culture likens his works to the paintings of American artists Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. He compared his work to Warhol's, suggesting that whereas Warhol's use of repetition demystified the original photograph, his own pieces reproduced the photographic material in depth. Pistoletto's works also embody an element of performance by placing the viewer within the picture. His first exhibition in the United States was presented by the Walker in 1966. Walker solo exhibition: Michelangelo Pistoletto: A Reflected World, 1966

"When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums."--Andy Warhol Andy Warhol is arguably the most important figure of American Pop Art, a 1960s movement characterized by its critique of postwar consumerism and popular culture. Warhol is widely known for cool, detached works that borrow images from television, advertising, and other mass media. His subject matter included ubiquitous consumer items such as Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell's soup cans and celebrity figures ranging from Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley to Jacqueline Kennedy. In Brillo Boxes Warhol took a popular consumer item and elevated it to the level of high art by producing large-scale trompel'oeil (trick of the eye) versions of the original. Warhol silkscreened the "Brillo Pad" logo onto previously manufactured, painted wooden boxes, and stacked the objects to mimic a supermarket product display.