ART REVIEW : A REVISIONIST ASSESSMENT OF ENIGMATIC HAMILTON

Richard Hamilton emerged in the early 1960s as an important part of the first British Pop generation, which, along with the Beatles and Rolling Stones, played such a key role in propagating the “Swinging London” phenomenon. Primarily known for his collages and prints of media-generated imagery and art historical homages, Hamilton has always been something of an aesthetic enigma.

Critics point to his lack of a particular style and overt distance from his subject matter as evidence of an emotional and conceptual detachment. This view is reinforced by Hamilton’s acknowledged debt to Marcel Duchamp, with his raising of chance and process over the sanctity of the art object, and to the pluralistic irony of James Joyce. As Hamilton himself once put it, “Joyce’s readiness to ape the manner of other writers and genres had long since freed me from inhibitions about the uniquely personal mark that every painter is supposed to strive for.”

Given such a dogmatic appraisal, a revisionist reassessment was perhaps inevitable, and it arrives in the form of “Image and Process,” an exhibition of 71 graphic works produced from 1953 to 1981, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through Sunday. The show, which opened at London’s Tate Gallery in 1983, presents preliminary studies, state and final proofs in a wide variety of graphic media as a means of breaking down Hamilton’s creative process to reveal the buried lyricism (and thus aesthetic continuity) within.

The results are unconvincing, largely because Hamilton’s refusal to dislocate technology from style, and to differentiate one system of visual codes from another, constantly places the onus of interpretation and intent on the viewer. The open text can be highly effective in forcing the audience to draw its own conclusions from an ambiguous set of cultural-visual parameters, but Hamilton tends to present each image or juxtaposition as a fait accompli of arbitrariness, mitigated only by the manipulations of process. There is little room for either artist or viewer to digest and interpret the sociological or ideological implications of either Hamilton’s mechanicalreproduction or his historical precedents.

Even experiments with perspective, space and the blurring of distinctions between photographic and hand-manipulated imagery tend to be incomplete or reluctant statements, as if Hamilton preferred to play the role of art director rather than true auteur. The curators are clearly aware of this impasse, quoting the dictum that “art is only a series of temporary solutions,” but Hamilton’s anonymous ironies seem more intent on turning it into an extremely limiting credo. Perhaps he should have read Joyce a little more carefully and discovered that appropriation doesn’t necessarily have to gainsay a strong personal voice.