One work that has been submitted to mass production in a curious way is Jackson Pollock’s Convergence, 1952. The original painting is in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; it has been reproduced in the form of a jigsaw puzzle. It is therefore an extreme example by which we can test what remains when art is treated not as a self-evolving process but as something added to the continuum of moving daily signs. The original is not destroyed when the colored reproduction is cut up into little Arp-like free form units. The painting is a Herculean late work, one of the two major efforts Pollock made to recapture and extend the big drip paintings of two years earlier (the other is Blue Poles). Is it degraded by its ludic form? I think not, inasmuch as any transmissible image is subject to re-contextualization, whether it is the lion’s feet, derived from Egypt, on Napoleonic furniture, or a Coca-Cola sign in a South American jungle. The continuum of translated messages requires acts of continuous estimation before a succession of alternatives. Is the person who successfully completes the puzzle stimulating the work of the artist and hence being brought close to a creative process? Obviously not, for the arrangement of standardized parts does not resemble Pollock’s way of painting, but it might be like making a Sol LeWitt (“the process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course” (27)). The variables of context and interpretation released by the 20th-century communications have become the subject of this mass-produced object. A connection can be made between the puzzle: the image of the labyrinth, a structure with blocked routs, continually evoked by writers on Pollock, is appropriate to the initial unordered scatter of the bits; and when it is terminated it becomes a sign for the painting, Convergence.

The ’60s was a brilliant decade in which an exceptional number of young artists emerged, without the tentative or inhibitory starts of their predecessors. Their work, along with the continued work of slower developing older artists, helped to make the decade one of numerical and stylistic abundance. There was undoubtbly a sense of relief and ebullience at having got out from under the gestural form of Abstract Expressionism which dominated the ’50s. The escape from de Kooning opened out a series of options which had been excluded by the esthetics and operational lore derived from him. For museums it marked an efflorescence of retrospectives, or their equivalent. Not only were exhibitions on a large scale, there was lavish duplication, such as two different Liechtenstein exhibitions in two years, and big short-term expenditures, such as Morris’ colossal piece at the Whitney museum or Serra’s at Pasadena. Museums cooperated in the realization of artists’ projects on a vast scale. In the catalogues there is a convergence of art history as a methodology and art criticism as a response to present art. Thus there is has been a complexity of data available about living artists. For publishers the ’60s included a number of monographs on, to name a few, Johns (Kozloff), Oldenburg (Rose), Stella (Rubin), Warhol (Coplans, Crone), Lichtenstein, Kelly (both Waldman), Frankenthaler (Rose). The support system of the knowledge industry was firmly lined up behind the artists.

It was in the ’60s, starting with Pop art, that regular mass media coverage of art began. Previously magazines and newspapers had treated individual stories, often in detail, but now art was recognized as a theme of leisure which was itself named as a subject in this decade. Instead of occasional pieces on defaced statues or extravagant collectors, art was steadily covered as a constituent of culture. Life and Time, for instance, had reproductions of and statements by Pop artists long before the specialized art journals got around to them. Later in the ’60s, however, it is true that the art magazines and general press share the same subjects much of the time. (It is the promptness of the coverage that is one of the reasons for the corrosion of the concept of an avant-garde. A group’s lead-time in new idea is of almost negligible duration now.) When I wrote a piece on Rosenquist for Artforum recently, selection of the color illustrations was delayed until we could find out which of the transparencies available from the Whitney Museum were being used by Time and Newsweek. Although my article was longer and later, it was essentially no less occasional than Robert Hughs’ and Douglus Davis’ pieces. I did not time the article myself; the Whitney Museum did. It is a weakness of the art magazines that many of the articles are as much reviews as the shorter pieces acknowledged as such. Color reproductions in the catalogue are reused in the magazines, a convenience that ties that ties later uses closer than ever to the initial occasion. The effect of criticism as reviewing is to produce a series of suddenly uniform topics in the journals, which gives the appearance, to suspicious provincials, of a rigged scene.