THAT OLD THING, ART . . .

Roland Barthes

As all the encyclopedias remind us, during the fifties certain artists at the London Insti-
tute of Contemporary Arts became advocates of the popular culture of the period: comic
strips, films, advertising, science fiction, pop music. These various manifestations did
not derive from what is generally called an Aesthetic but were entirely produced by Mass
Culture and did not participate in art at all; simply, certain artists, architects, and writers
were interested in them. Crossing the Atlantic, these products forced the barrier of art;
accommodated by certain American artists, they became works of art, of which culture
no longer constituted the being, merely the reference: origin was displaced by citation.
Pop art as we know it is the permanent theater of this tension: on one hand, the mass cul-
ture of the period is present in it as a revolutionary force which contests art; and on the
other, art is present in it as a very old force which irresistibly returns in the economy of
societies. There are two voices, as in a fugue — one says: “This is not Art”; the other says,
at the same time: “I am Art.”
Art is something which must be destroyed — a proposition common to many experi-
ments of Modernity.
Pop art reverses values. “What characterizes pop is mainly its use of what is despised”
(Lichtenstein). Images from mass culture, regarded as vulgar, unworthy of an aesthetic
consecration, return virtually unaltered as materials of the artist’s activity. I should like
to call this reversal the “Clovis Complex”: like Saint Remi addressing the Frankish king,
the god of pop art says to the artist: “Burn what you have worshipped, worship what you
have burned.” For instance: photography has long been fascinated by painting, of which
it still passes as a poor relation; pop art overturns this prejudice: the photograph often
becomes the origin of the images pop art presents: neither “art painting” nor “art pho-
tograph,” but a nameless mixture. Another example of reversal: nothing more contrary
to art than the notion of being the mere reflection of the things represented; even pho-
tography does not support this destiny; pop art, on the contrary, accepts being an im-
agery, a collection of reflections, constituted by the banal reverberation of the American
environment: reviled by high art, the copy returns. This reversal is not capricious, it does
not proceed from a simple denial of value, from a simple rejection of the past; it obeys a
regular historical impulse; as Paul Valéry noted (in Pièces sur l’Art), the appearance of
new technical means (here, photography, serigraphy) modifies not only art’s forms but
its very concept.
Repetition is a feature of culture. I mean that we can make use of repetition in order to
propose a certain typology of cultures. Popular or extra-European cultures (deriving
from an ethnography) acknowledge as much, and derive meaning and pleasure from the
fact (we need merely instance today’s minimal music and disco); Occidental high culture
does not (even if it has resorted to repetition more than we suppose, in the baroque pe-
riod). Pop art, on the other hand, repeats — spectacularly. Warhol proposes a series of
identical images (White Burning Car Twice) or of images which differ only by some slight

From the catalogue of the exhibition Pop Art at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, first published by Electa,
1980; in France in the collection L’obvie et l’obtus, Edition du Seuil, Paris, 1982; and in the English
translation by Richard Howard in The Responsibility of Forms. Translation © 1985 by Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, Inc.

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variation of color (Flowers, Marilyn). The stake of these repetitions (or of Repetition as a
method) is not only the destruction of art but also (moreover, they go together) another
conception of the human subject: repetition affords access, in effect, to a different tem-
porality: where the Occidental subject experiences the ingratitude of a world from which
the New — i.e., ultimately, Adventure — is excluded, the Warholian subject (since
Warhol is a practitioner of these repetitions) abolishes the pathos of time in himself, be-
cause this pathos is always linked to the feeling that something has appeared, will die,
and that one’s death is opposed only by being transformed into a second something
which does not resemble the first. For pop art, it is important that things be “finite”
(outlined: no evanescence), but it is not important that they be finished, that work (is
there a work?) be given the internal organization of a destiny (birth, life, death). Hence
we must unlearn the boredom of the “endless” (one of Warhol’s first films, Four Stars,
lasted twenty-five hours; Chelsea Girls lasts three and a half ). Repetition disturbs the per-
son (that classical entity) in another fashion: by multiplying the same image, pop art re-
discovers the theme of the Double, of the Doppelgänger; this is a mythic theme (the
Shadow, the Man or the Woman without a Shadow); but in the productions of pop art, the
Double is harmless — has lost all maleficent or moral power, neither threatens nor
haunts: the Double is a Copy, not a Shadow: beside, not behind: a flat, insignificant,
hence irreligious Double.
Repetition of the portrait induces an adulteration of the person (a notion simultane-
ously civic, moral, psychological, and of course historical). Pop art, it has also been said,
takes the place of a machine; it prefers to utilize mechanical processes of reproduction;
for example, it freezes the star (Marilyn, Liz) in her image as star: no more soul, nothing
but a strictly imaginary status, since the star’s being is the icon. The object itself, which
in everyday life we incessantly personalize by incorporating into our individual world —
the object is, according to pop art, no longer anything but the residue of a subtraction:
everything left over from a tin can once we have mentally amputated all its possible
themes, all its possible uses. Pop art is well aware that the fundamental expression of the
person is style. As Buffon said (a celebrated remark, once known to every French school-
boy): “Style is the man.” Take away style and there is no longer any (individual) man. The
notion of style, in all the arts, has therefore been linked, historically, to a humanism of
the person. Consider an unlikely example, that of “graphism”: manual writing, long im-
personal (during Antiquity and the Middle Ages), began to be individualized in the Re-
naissance, dawn of the modern period; but today, when the person is a moribund idea, or
at least a menaced one, under the pressure of the gregarious forces which animate mass
culture, the personality of writing is fading out. There is, as I see it, a certain relation be-
tween pop art and what is called “script,” that anonymous writing sometimes taught to
dysgraphic children because it is inspired by the neutral and, so to speak, elementary fea-
tures of typography. Further, we must realize that if pop art depersonalizes, it does not
make anonymous: nothing is more identifiable than Marilyn, the electric chair, a
telegram, or a dress, as seen by pop art; they are in fact nothing but that: immediately and
exhaustively identifiable, thereby teaching us that identity is not the person: the future
world risks being a world of identities (by the computerized proliferation of police files),
but not of persons.
A final feature which attaches pop art to the experiments of Modernity: the banal con-
formity of representation to the thing represented. “I don’t want a canvas,” Rauschen-
berg says, “to look like what it isn’t. I want it to look like what it is.” The proposition is
aggressive in that art has always regarded itself as an inevitable detour that must be taken

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in order to “render” the truth of the thing. What pop art wants is to desymbolize the ob-
ject, to give it the obtuse and matte stubbornness of a fact (John Cage: “The object is a
fact, not a symbol”). To say the object is asymbolic is to deny it possesses a profound or
proximate space through which its appearance can propagate vibrations of meaning: pop
art’s object (this is a true revolution of language) is neither metaphoric nor metonymic;
it presents itself cut off from its source and its surroundings; in particular, the Pop artist
does not stand behind his work, and he himself has no depth: he is merely the surface of
his pictures: no signified, no intention, anywhere. Now the fact, in mass culture, is no
longer an element of the natural world; what appears as fact is the stereotype: what every-
one sees and consumes. Pop art finds the unity of its representations in the radical con-
junction of these two forms, each carried to extremes: the stereotype and the image.
Tahiti is a fact, insofar as a unanimous and persistent public opinion designates this site
as a collection of palm trees, of flowers worn over one ear, of long hair, sarongs, and lan-
guorous, enticing glances (Lichtenstein’s Little Aloha). In this way, pop art produces cer-
tain radical images: by dint of being an image, the thing is stripped of any symbol. This is
an audacious movement of mind (or of society): it is no longer the fact which is trans-
formed into an image (which is, strictly speaking, the movement of metaphor, out of
which humanity has made poetry for centuries), it is the image which becomes a fact. Pop
art thus features a philosophical quality of things, which we may call facticity: the facti-
tious is the character of what exists as fact and appears stripped of any justification: not
only are the objects represented by pop art factitious, but they incarnate the very concept
of facticity — that by which, in spite of themselves, they begin to signify again: they sig-
nify that they signify nothing.
For meaning is cunning: drive it away and it gallops back. Pop art seeks to destroy art
(or at least to do without it), but art rejoins it: art is the counter-subject of our fugue.
The attempt has been made to abolish the signified, and thereby the sign; but the sig-
nifier subsists, persists, even if it does not refer, apparently, to anything. What is the sig-
nifier? Let us say, to be quick about it: the thing perceived, augmented by a certain
thought. Now, in pop art, this supplement exists — as it exists in all the world’s arts.
First of all, quite frequently, pop art changes the level of our perception; it dimin-
ishes, enlarges, withdraws, advances, extends the multiplied object to the dimensions of
a signboard, or magnifies it as if it were seen under a jeweler’s loupe. Now, once propor-
tions are changed, art appears (it suffices to think of architecture, which is an art of the
size of things): it is not by accident that Lichtenstein reproduces a loupe and what it en-
larges: Magnifying Glass is in a sense the emblem of pop art.
And then, in many works of pop art, the background against which the object is sil-
houetted, or even out of which it is made, has a powerful existence (rather of the kind
clouds had in classical painting): there is an importance of the grid. This comes, per-
haps, from Warhol’s first experiments: serigraphs depend on textile (textile and grid are
the same thing); it is as if our latest modernity enjoys this manifestation of the grid, at
once consecrating the raw material (grain of the paper in Twombly’s work) and the mech-
anization of reproduction (micro-pattern of the computer portraits). Grid is a kind of ob-
session (a thematics, criticism would have said not long ago); it participates in various
exchanges: its perceptual role is inverted (in Lichtenstein’s aquarium, water consists of
polka dots); it is enlarged in a deliberately infantile fashion (Lichtenstein’s sponge con-
sists of holes, like a piece of Gruyère); the mechanical texture is exemplarily imitated
(again, Lichtenstein’s Large Spool ). Here art appears in the emphasis on what should be
insignificant.

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 Another emphasis (and consequently another return of art): color. Of course, every-
thing found in nature and a fortiori in the social world is colored; but if it is to remain a
factitious object, as a true destruction of art would have it, its color itself must remain in-
determinate. Now, this is not the case: pop art’s colors are intentional and, we might even
say (a real denial), subject to a style: they are intentional first of all because they are al-
ways the same ones and hence have a thematic value; then because this theme has a value
as meaning: pop color is openly chemical; it aggressively refers to the artifice of chem-
istry, in its opposition to Nature. And if we admit that, in the plastic domain, color is ordi-
narily the site of pulsion, these acrylics, these flat primaries, these lacquers, in short these
colors which are never shades, since nuance is banished from them, seek to cut short de-
sire, emotion: we might say, at the limit, that they have a moral meaning, or at least that
they systematically rely on a certain frustration. Color and even substance (lacquer, plas-
ter) give pop art a meaning and consequently make it an art; we will be convinced of this
by noticing that pop artists readily define their canvases by the color of the objects repre-
sented: Black Girl, Blue Wall, Red Door (Segal), Two Blackish Robes (Dine).
Pop is an art because, just when it seems to renounce all meaning, consenting only to
reproduce things in their platitude, it stages, according to certain methods proper to it
and forming a style, an object which is neither the thing nor its meaning, but which is: its
signifier, or rather: the Signifier. Art — any art, from poetry to comic strips — exists the
moment our glance has the Signifier as its object. Of course, in the productions of art,
there is usually a signified (here, mass culture), but this signified, finally, appears in an
indirect position: obliquely, one might say; so true is it that meaning, the play of mean-
ing, its abolition, its return, is never anything but a question of place. Moreover, it is not
only because the pop artist stages the Signifier that his work derives from and relates to
art; it is also because this work is looked at (and not only seen); however much pop art has
depersonalized the world, platitudinized objects, dehumanized images, replaced tradi-
tional craftsmanship of the canvas by machinery, some “subject” remains. What subject?
The one who looks, in the absence of the one who makes. We can fabricate a machine,
but someone who looks at it is not a machine — he desires, he fears, he delights, he is
bored, etc. This is what happens with pop art.
I add: pop is an art of the essence of things, it is an “ontological” art. Look how
Warhol proceeds with his repetitions — initially conceived as a method meant to destroy
art: he repeats the image so as to suggest that the object trembles before the lens or the
gaze; and if it trembles, one might say, it is because it seeks itself: it seeks its essence, it
seeks to put this essence before you; in other words, the trembling of the thing acts (this
is its effect-as-meaning) as a pose: in the past, was not the pose — before the easel or the
lens — the affirmation of an individual’s essence? Marilyn, Liz, Elvis, Troy Donahue are
not presented, strictly speaking, according to their contingency, but according to their
eternal identity: they have an “eidos,” which it is the task of pop art to represent. Now
look at Lichtenstein: he does not repeat, but his task is the same: he reduces, he purifies
the image in order to intercept (and offer) what? its rhetorical essence: here art’s entire
labor consists not, as in the past, in streamlining the stylistic artifices of discourse, but,
on the contrary, in cleansing the image of everything in it which is not rhetoric: what
must be expelled, like a vital nucleus, is the code essence. The philosophical meaning of
this labor is that modern things have no essence other than the social code which mani-
fests them — so that ultimately they are no longer even “produced” (by Nature), but im-
mediately “reproduced”: reproduction is the very being of Modernity.
We come full circle: not only is pop art an art, not only is this art ontological, but even

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its reference is finally — as in the highest periods of classical art — Nature; not of course
the vegetal, scenic, or human (psychological) Nature: Nature today is the social absolute,
or better still (for we are not directly concerned with politics) the Gregarious. This new
Nature is accommodated by pop art, and moreover, whether it likes it or not, or rather
whether it admits it or not, pop art criticizes this Nature. How? By imposing a distance
upon its gaze (and hence upon our own). Even if all pop artists have not had a privileged
relation with Brecht (as was Warhol’s case during the sixties), all of them practice, with
regard to the object, that repository of the social relation, a kind of “distancing” which
has a critical value. However, less naïve or less optimistic than Brecht, pop art neither
formulates nor resolves its criticism: to pose the object “flat out” is to pose the object at
a distance, but it is also to refuse to say how this distance might be corrected. A cold con-
fusion is imparted to the consistency of the gregarious world (a “mass” world); the dis-
turbance of our gaze is as “matte” as the thing represented — and perhaps all the more
terrible for that. In all the (re-)productions of pop art, one question threatens, chal-
lenges: “What do you mean?” (title of a poster by Allen Jones). This is the millennial
question of that very old thing: Art.

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