Re-Generation:
Robert Rooney as Pop
catalogue essay for the exhibition
"From The Homefront - Robert Rooney works 1953-1988", Monash
University Gallery, Melbourne
In the Popism show at the National Gallery Of Victoria in
1982, some screenprints by Robert Rooney were exhibited
among works by artists such as Howard Arkley, Juan Davila,
Richard Dunn, Maria Kozic, Imants Tiller, Peter Tyndall
and Jenny Watson. One of the critical strategies in this
exhibition curated by Paul Taylor was to link a fairly disparate
group of artists who - despite the multiple generation gaps
within the corpus - had specialized in presenting in their
work certain views on how they as artists related to popular
culture.
Rooney's
main work for the Popism exhibition was titled Pilkington
Predicts. It is a set of screenprints which are in fact
direct and unaltered enlargements of a series of advertisments
he designed as a young commercial artist for the Pilkington
glass company. Of all the works in the Popism exhibition,
this was perhaps the most `popist' - that is, the most self-consciously
aware of the multiple and entwining histories of popular
culture, Pop art and art culture. The oldest artist in this
exhibition, Rooney had not only exploited his age but also
his background as an original Pop artist and one who could
be included in such an exhibition.
Pilkington
Predicts might well have been titled Rooney Predicts, for
this work functioned as both his return to painting and
a sign of what that return implied and instigated. In 1982,
Rooney had not produced any paintings since 1970. After
the Popism exhibition and a new critical respect afforded
him, Rooney returned to painting to conceptually regenerate
and formally rework a number of key motifs, manouvres and
methods he had established in his paintings up to 1970.
It is this `return' that encapsulates and envigourates Rooney's
ouvre, locating him within a Pop tradition that spans the
last 30 years and is still generating vital work in our
current Post-Pop environment. To elaborate upon this notion
of a `Post-Pop environment' and to articulate the Pop tradition
as something more complex than its intial populist critical
reception throughout the 60s, this essay will move through
Robert Rooney's paintings, detailing and qualifying how
his `neo-conceptual' approach and `hyper-formalist' methods
are integral to how Pop Art has been generated.
Robert
Rooney's return to his past in the guise of a return to
painting replicates a gesture common to Pop after the sixties.
While many Pop artists started their careers in commercial
illustration and graphic design and/or made open allusions
to those fields and their techniques (eg. Andy Warhol's
blotted line, James Rosenquist's billboard photo-realism,
Robert Indiana's packing crate stencils, Peter Phillips'
custom painting style, Ed Ruscha's straight typefaces, etc.),
much Pop in the seventies made those kind of allusions central
to its practice. Roy Lichtenstein's Artist's Studio - Look
Mickey (1973) contains an image of Lichtenstein's own Look
Mickey (1961), one of many painting Lichtenstein did in
the seventies which contained self-references. Larry Rivers'
Golden Oldies series of prints (produced between 1972 and
1978) collages images Rivers had made famous in the gallery
(body charts, cigar boxes, dollar bills, etc.), thereby
parodying his own historical status as a Pop artist. Andy
Warhol's Reversal Series (1979) deployed similar artifice
by reprinting a collection of his most representative works
in negative. In Pilkington Predicts, Rooney made a statement
about his own past as a graphic artist and how his history
as an exhibiting artist converged with those of many international
Pop artists.
A
survey of Pop activity throughout the seventies reveals
a type of regurgitation which suggests that once Pop Art
had become part of popular culture, it was bound to cannibalize
itself for new work. However this regurgitation, while seemingly
unprogressive and uncreative, typifies much of what Pop
was attempting throughout the sixties - namely, a kind of
`dynamic stasis' wherein Pop artists were surveying the
pivotal demise of modernism within the museum and noting
that the compulsive progressivism of 20th Century Art had
become a final series of avant-garde spasms. Pop's recourse
- a fairly desparate catharsis at that - was to stand still
and let things pass; to let time, history and art all pass
into the transitory ephemera of the present. As an art movement,
Pop initiated formalist explorations in what could be done
with a certain vaccuumed or vacated subject matter and how
one would formally do it. Rather than highlighting `popular
culture' of its time, Pop focussed on what could be called
the `abject contemporaneity' of its culture - a field emptied
of romantic artistic discourse and governed by mass media
communication. Robert Rooney's paintings are quintessentially
Pop as they formally explore the means of absenting content
by dwelling on issues and themes of domesticity, boredom,
suburbanism and repetition - all of which connote the effects
of living in the present.
Rooney's
endless present is measured by the many collections he has
amassed as a collector of culture, simultaneously keeping
up with the present and methodically researching its multiple,
ad hoc beginnings. Obsessively informed of global contemporary
art activity and cultural phenomena since the early fifties,
he has a formidable number of magazines, slide carousels,
scrapbooks and clipping files. Some of them contain images
of interesting things for personal pleasure - fragments
on the run, caught by his eye; others contain images used
to make collages, publications, paintings 1.
Part diary, part library, part workbench. Input and output
operate as a closed circuit, so typical of Pop.
Some
of Rooney's earliest work parallels the early work of Warhol
in this way. Among Warhol's set of black and white pseudo-abstract
expressionist renderings of newspaper advertisments, dated
1960, there are a few works titled Untitled which are simply
selections of small newspaper advertisments cut out and
pasted on paper in the form of a mini ad page. Essentially,
these `works' are source material sheets, grabbed on the
run and filed away for future reference and/or application.
Much Pop source material was catalogued this way, starting
in the mid fifties with `diary library workbenches' like
Rauschenberg's photos of commercial shop signs and Paolozzi's
suitcases of American leisure and entertainment magazines.
An early interest of Rooney's was juvenile delinquents -
a new phenomenon which was pictorially splattered across
many family journals of the late fifties. Some coverage
in Life and Fortune magazines ended up in one of Rooney's
many image files, and some of those images became the source
material for a set of paintings between 1958 to 1959.
Trouble
and Adolescents (both 1958) and Hero (1959) demonstrate
a naive social realist tendancy. Groupings of crew-cut kids
stand around and hang out within the pictorial frame. The
banality of their execution (an almost text-book illustrative
approach to juxtaposing and dissolving reds with blues)
echoes the non-eventfullness of the figures' existence,
ritually sipping coke and regularly taunting each other.
A mock-mythical quality pervades another set of paintings
- I Rise In Flame, Implication and Mortality Play (all 1958).
Similar renderings apply, but these scenarios posit the
adolescents as melo-tragic photo-journalistic representations
of sweet birds of youth. Youthful energy - incapable of
distinguishing between passion, aggression and frustration
- is evoked in these symbolic tableaux, yet a strange ambivalence
haunts these weird mutations of James Dean wannabes, an
ambivalence possibly derived from their being sourced from
Life magazine rather than `everyday life'.
CHECK
TEXT HERE
sourcing
of newspaper and magazine articles in this bland way becomes
more localised and focussed in a series of carcrash paintings
Rooney did between 1958 and 1960. Sunday (1958) links cruising
adolescents to derelict car wrecks. The title Sunday verges
on the sarcastic with its reference to the great Australian
`sunday drive' which was the ultimate torture to any aspiring
delinquent (how embarrassing to be seen parading as part
of the family display). The scene of Sunday presents the
outsider delinquents - who routinely escape the sunday drive
- impassively witnessing their sunday playground : the gutted
and rusting car wrecks dumped behind the childrens' playground.
This solitary contemplation is transformed into morbid voyeurism
in the following carcrash paintings : Crash Victim (1959)
and Accident and Red Death (both 1960, the latter uncannily
prefiguring Warhol's titling of carcrashes like Five Red
Deaths On Red in 1962). In a similar mock-painterly fashion,
these paintings replicate the delinquents' impassive perspective
on the spectacle of death, and thus run tandem to the then-increasing
impassivity in photo-journalism, which in turn was very
influential on both Rauschenberg's and Warhol's relation
to and treatment of such imagery. Rooney's carcrashes also
relate to a strong textual undercurrent in much work of
the early sixties which fixed on the compacted automobile
as the violent breakdown of America's main postwar boom
industry (many Pop paintings and sculptures feature car
parts, chassis, textures, attachments, etc.). Australia
was caught up in the same propogation of the `ultimate leisure
vehicle' with the patriotic GMH push 2, and Rooney's
carcrashes - as conservative as they may superficially appear
- are his terse contribution to late fifties `landscape
painting' and their ghost gums. Rooney's ghosts are car
wrecks.
An
interesting feature of the carcrash paintings is that as
they progressively featured more of the twisted metal, they
appeared more like abstract expressionist paintings - an
irony not lost on Rooney. As such they start to form a bridge
between his early work and his peculiar `abstract' paintings
throughout the sixties which explore how the representational
perceptually dissolves so easily into the abstract. Available
Form and Two (both 1966) are the first example of this.
The main figure in both these paintings is just that : a
figure of representation and abstraction; a `figure of vision'
in the same sense as we refer to a `figure of speech' where
we note language's ability to displace itself. Available
Form and Two each feature the same rabbit/duck confusion
between an alien hieroglyph and a human form, engineered
by foreground being displaced by background. Hence one can
see an infinte plateau of mimesis in their silhouettes :
the Playboy bunny logo, barbed-wire, lips, an optical film
soundtrack, breasts, buttocks, cheap curtain patterns, Arp,
Moore, Giacometti and Tony Curtis in The Great Houdini.
Two in particular pokes fun at this futile visual association
: two what?
Having
used a cut-out stencil to generate the figures of those
two paintings, Rooney then hit upon the cunning idea of
using the pre-designed shapes kids cut out from the backs
of Kellogs Corn Flakes packets to make up funny masks and
animal assemblages. Here was a more succinct way of colliding
abstraction and representation; of flirting mimesis while
disavowing reference; and of incorporating the utterly domestic
into the dreadfully artistic. These templates - perfect
tools for serialization - became the main means of production
in a series of works which through their childish origins
outwardly mocked the preciousness with with Australia tackled
the hard-edge revolution of the late sixties 3.
While a Duchampian pun can be detected in the play between
`cereal' and `serial', the supreme irony is to be found
in the innate abstractiveness of the cereal box shapes,
marking Rooney's works as even more hard-edged than the
`real thing'. The first two series - Kind-Hearted Kitchen
Garden, Nos.1-4 and Slippery Seal, Nos.1-5 (both 1967) -
are centred on a play with illusionistic depth. Kind-Hearted
Kitchen Garden employs meta-grids through which one perceives
an interlocking of shapes, structurally reinforcing the
dimensional relationship between the cut-out commodity and
the fine-art object. Slippery Seal extends this play further
by creating an Op effect which dissolves the perceivable
meta-grid of Kind-Hearted Kitchen Garden. Both clearly replay
the paintings Available Form and Two - especially if the
viewer tries to distinguish the shapes mentioned in the
titles. Collectively, these paintings between 1966 and 1967
testify to the strong immergence of a neo-conceptual strain
in Rooney's hyper-formalism, in that they are as much about
the conceptualization of perception involved in defining
hard-edge abstraction (and all its desperate measures to
escape signification) as they are about the practical means
and methods employed in the production of such painting.
Canine
Capers, Nos.1-7 (1968) fortifies that neo-conceptual strain.
The paintings in this series more directly illicit a hard-edge
aesthetic minus the parodic method employed, as if the end
starts to nullify the means. Viewed as a sequential series,
each painting works through a complex set of rhythms by
establishing a meta-grid made up of a repeated motif aligned
vertically and horizontally. Each successive painting simply
alters the angle of either all the motifs or some of them
in alternate sequence, suggesting a virtual cinematic animation
in each painting's slight deviation engineered by quite
complex internal structuring. Visible through the lattice
holes created by the meta-grid, a contrapuntal series of
secondary shapes spreads in and out of spatial synchronization
with the main motif, thereby creating a polyphonic play
with shapes, motifs and their interlocking grids. Cereal
Bird Beaks, Nos.1-3 (1969) continues this approach to complex
spatial relationships. Comparing Cereal Bird Beaks with
Canine Capers, one can observe that the internal placement
of secondary shapes against the main motif grids in both
these series of paintings seems highly illogical and anti-geometric
while nonetheless generating a feeling of extreme spatial
logic. This series suggests the modification of tightly
structured frameworks by the aleatory placement of micro-structures.
The implicit irony in this arises from juxtaposing the high
plane of structural/spatial logic with the base reality
that anything sequenced in such a way takes on the appearance
of such logic (one could call it the `wallpaper effect').
Both Canine Capers and Cereal Bird Beaks thus deflate the
importance of such rigourous methods while exploring the
complexities unleashed once such processes are set into
motion.
To
demonstrate and demystify this illusion of systemization
in hard-edge abstraction, Rooney's final series of hard-edged
abstract paintings - though not as sumptuous as the aforementioned
cereal box cut-outs - seems intent on paradoxically rejecting
all attempts at executing painting. Superknit, Nos.1-6 (1970)
posits the plain, dull and decidedly un-chauvinist activity
of knitting as the sublime production of structuralist abstraction.
The most conceptual of Rooney's paintings up to that point,
the Superknit series proposes that painting can be reduced
to working out a time scale purely in order to pass it,
to exist in its passage of time in the manner of dynamic
stasis. Pop's `abject contemporaneity' here becomes exquisite
boredom, almost as if one could give up painting in order
to knit. A terse solipsistic subtext is thus woven through
the Superknit series, making it no suprise that they will
be the last major paintings Rooney does for thirteen years
4.
Yet
through its negation of painting, Superknit is an important
series of works which links Rooney to the dada legacy carried
by Pop Art. It was Marcel Duchamp who first seriously averred
the acquittance of painting as a means of dealing with the
abject contemporaneity he found so inspiring. Chocolate
grinders, snow shovels, hat racks, coat racks, bottleracks,
bicycle wheels, twine balls, urinals. Duchamp took the ultimate
`everyday' decision : to collapse into the present. No past,
no future; but simply chess, spaghetti, and a job in a library.
A dynamic stasis engineered and maintained by the decision
to remain in the present. His most `negative' work Dust
Breeding (1920, documented in Man Ray's photograph) shows
The Large Glass neglected, gathering dust in Duchamp's New
York studio; an object within which nothing happens but
the accruement of the present and the material mark of time.
Pop formalized this legacy of the everyday void (and the
museographic processes of mummification) by making manifest
what Duchamp conceptually projected.
Pop
was thus inevitably engaged in high modes of formalism as
well as intricate conceptual flows due to its realization
and actualization of much of what Duchamp and the dadaists
forecast as the end of art. In this sense, Pop can be viewed
as the implosive sound ("POP!") of modernism becoming postmodernism;
of 20th Century formalism being serially reworked as hyper-formalism;
of the theory of art becoming the practice of culture. Just
as much Pop Art regenerates dada's views of the art/culture
collapse, Pop Art prefigures much of what has been occurring
in postmodern art throughout the eighties. Broadly speaking,
this is what we could term the `Post-Pop environment'. Just
as it is responsible for prompting critical re-investigation
of Pop Art and its continuing practitioners, so has it nurtured
a new generation of artists with new perspectives on the
relationships between art and culture, modernism and postmodernism.
The Popism exhibition was one of many exhibitions around
the world throughout the eighties which explored these relationships,
and Robert Rooney is one of extremely few artists in Australia
who not only could be classed a `continuing practitioner
of Pop' but who also produced a large body of work throughout
the eighties which allows us to open up these issues for
critical discussion.
CHECK
TEXT HERE
:
The Death Of James Dean, Nos.1-2 and Clue To Abel's Character
(all 1983). Together, they rework and `re-appropriate' his
early adolescent paintings. The Death Of James Dean is a
perverse lyrical ode to the deathly attraction of hip iconography,
expressed through the incongrous mix of El Lissitsky, James
Dean, Kurt Schwitters and Lana Turner. This mix of references
was typical of the early eighties when not only was popular
culture again invading the gallery, but also art was invading
the advertising agency. Rooney thus plays on his own past
- as teenager and artist - and the way in which it had passed
into these rengenerated pseudo-nostalgic Post-Pop zones.
Despite this, these paintings manage to recoup their base
reference, for each is a cut-up of magazine headlines and
intro-lines which at the time were clustered around the
tragic death of James Dean. Just as the James Dean Foundation
economically deploys the Jimmy Dean mythology 5,
Rooney employs the same mythology within a pseudo-high art
framework. Clue To Abel's Character (1983) - a strange one-off
painting - similarly returns to fifties' delinquent/rebel
mythology, this time by enlarging a fragment visibly torn
from a magazine of the time. An illustration of a forlorn
figure (rendered in a style reminiscent of Warhol's early
blotted-line technique), sitting with head in arms and angry
at the world, is captioned with a text that clearly recalls
Rooney's own mock-mythical set of adolescent paintings :
"Clue to Abel's character are [sic] his sketchbooks which
are full of drawings of lonely men like this one, burdened
by life yet and resigned to it." As such, Clue To Abel's
Character makes clear the ambivalence of Rooney's early
adolescent paintings and the distanced melancholy they evoke.
Rooney's
first solo exhibition of paintings since Popism was held
in 1983 and titled As You Were. Tinged with Rooney's new
Post-Pop self-referentiality, the title is lifted from and
refers to Australia's patriotic feelings during WWII as
depicted in popular magazines of the time. A few stark black
and white paintings apply the method of direct enlargement
first used in Pilkington Predicts to grossly enlarge some
iconic wartime illustrations (marching men, flying planes,
etc.). In What Price Victory? and Speed Victory (both 1983)
the rough outlines exaggerated by the magnification of the
cheap printing of the source images replicate the nostalgic
impulse which throws the viewer back into an era that cannot
be recaptured - whether you were there or not. This nostalgic
impasse (hinted at previously in the adolescent series)
generates a full and total blockage through the compaction
of similarly sourced images in the collaged tableaux of
a set of paintings which carry through to 1984 (most of
which were shown in the As You Were solo exhibition) and
whose titles are drawn from the editorial copy which framed
the images used : As You Were, The Way To The Stars, Functional
Dress For Men, The Home Front, The Art Of Illustration and
Child's Journey (all 1983) and The Second Front and The
Setting Sun (both 1984).
These
paintings restage the collapse of the respresentational
into the abstract cited previously in Available Form and
Two (both 1966) by foregrounding an array of imagery which
obviously represents certain objects while at the same time
abstracting those very objects. Rooney's eye for detail
makes these paintings fascinating because he has selected
from hundreds of possible images only those that resonate
with this formalist confusion; those repleat with an overwhelming
amatuerism and awkwardness in their depiction. All together,
these paintings strongly evoke an era of rationing, not
only in the wartime images of leisure activity and consumption
depicted, but also in the off-white backgrounds simulating
pulp paper printed with black and one colour. While the
finished paintings achieve a dense effect through careful
and streamlined juxtaposition, a nostalgic impulse enlivens
what would have otherwise been a clinical postmodern exercise
in `image pirating', imbuing them with a genuine ambiguity
which acknowledges the farce of remembering the era (lest
we forget) while accepting the fact that the era was lived
(as we were) 6; painting a portrait of wartime
life that recalls Abel's character : "burdened by life yet
and resigned to it."
The
compacted approach to the collage of found imagery which
typifies the As You Were collection announces Rooney's eighties
work and positions it in line with other Post-Pop work.
This `compaction' is a regeneration and re-evaluation of
the original precepts of collage as propounded by the dadists.
The major difference is in the erasure of dimensional demarcation
in the finished pictorial plane. While Rauscheberg introduced
his `combines' as an extension of Schwitters' `merzbaus',
overlaying torn image fragments so that they violently ruptured
each other's homogenous textures and surfaces, much Pop
and Post-Pop art applied what is now recognized as a postmodern
technique : the cancellation of material difference. The
pictorial plane in some of the Post-Pop work of, for example,
Komar & Melamid and Thomas Lawson (American-based artists
whose multi-planed collages of visual references bear certain
relations to Rooney's work) and Imants Tillers, Peter Tyndall
and Maria Kozic (Australian artists who exhibited with Rooney
in Popism) is one of semi-detached, ironically faithful
reproduction. Their found imagery is treated impassively
and `sealed' through the act of appropriation, confronting
the viewer with a marked lack of artistic personage or identity.
The point, though, is that this type of compaction (where
the found is fixed, as opposed to collage where the found
is fractured) is neither a frivolous trend nor an oppressive
movement which binds the artists mentioned, but rather a
broad base from which one might historically relate to modernist
deconstruction and issues of popular culture.
Rooney's
1985 solo exhibition carried a flagrantly ironic title :
One Complete Abstract Painting Included In Every Picture.
This collection of works more openly interrogates Rooney's
key perceptual thematics of collage and compaction; appropriation
and ambiguity; sourcing and sealing; and nostalgia and negation.
A second series of wartime paintings, this collection strikes
one with a harder propoganda edge and specifies the Asian
Invasion (WWII and the Korean War) as the prime energizer
in this mythology of patriotic hysteria as expressed through
media of the time. Understand The Weapon and The Missing
Man (both 1985) employ the basic processes of the 1983-84
paintings, but through an expanded colour range their scenarios
more immediately construct a proto-cinematic narrative within
the frame. Understand The Weapon, for example, suggests
cathartic victory through collaging the child's war-toy
pop gun; the blitzkreig spotlights (or are they Hollywood
arc lamps?); the singing military; and the strewn confetti
(or is it demoralizing propoganda dropped by the enemy?).
These paintings do not confront one with alien imagery,
but rather `naturalize' that imagery to tell a story of
national conflict, marking them as a manifestation of the
iconic, symbolic and narratological material latent in the
first series.
A
dominant visual motif groups together the paintings in the
One Complete Abstract Painting Included With Every Picture
collection : camouflage. Three paintings feature airborn
dog-fight explosions - Born To Die, Tumult In The Clouds
and Against The Sun (all 1985). The latter two especially
blend flames and smoke, camouflage material and paint, military
maps and charts, all at once in a dizzy swirl of shapes.
The pictorial frame becomes awash in a patterning of wartime
iconography, as Rooney does another take on the seriousness
of his subject matter by reducing it to the flattened plane
of bland visual association. The remaining paintings - With
Intent To Deceive, Beans & Bushido and Juke Box Jungle
(all 1985) - take the camouflage motif further. With Intent
To Deceive is a self-reflexive tale of a seductive Mata
Hari figure in `Jade Woman' repose, rendered in naked outline
on top of a camouflaged plane whose door half-conceals a
`live ammunition' symbol. Beans & Bushido carries a
similar veiled threat as a handful of contaminated beans
are thrown against what appears to be either a miltary map
or an op-abstract background, but which in fact is a grossly
enlarged and distorted image of two undetected Japanese
factory workers. Juke Box Jungle is a crazy clash of 50s
juke-box stencilled figures dancing against a vibrating
enlargement of an illustration of jungle growth, recalling
the tension between those that went to war and the spivs
who stayed at home; of the jungle beat (from be-bop to swing)
that played while loose lips sank ships in a juke joint
and big bands tried to make everyone march to the same drum.
One complete abstract painting hidden in every picture.
The
title of Rooney's next solo exhibition (in 1988) made it
impossible to not recognize how he had been replaying his
duplicitous involvement in hard-edged abstraction as a signal
of his Pop status, now clearly decipherable in the Post-Pop
environment. Titled Silly Symphonies, or At Last, The 1968
Show, Part One : New Paintings, the show sardonically referred
to the The Field exhibition of hard-edged abstract painting
held in 1968 at the National Gallery Of Victoria. Far from
being nostalgic, Rooney is questioning his involvement with
the show, for he probably was as relevant to that exhibition
as it is to the current Post-Pop environment.
The
seven paintings in the Silly Symphony series (all 1988)
provide us with the most recent regeneration of Rooney's
Post-Pop work to date. The motif of camouflage once again
dominates as the prime means of compaction, plus it also
works to perversely camouflage some of Rooney's early abstract
works in a self-reflexive Duchampian manner. Whereas Rooney
used the cut-out cereal box shapes as templates to construct
his early hard-edged abstractions, in the Silly Symphony
series he uses the whole of the cereal box animal as a monotype
template. Psychedelphant, Zebra Special and Morocco Bound
each feature the animal of their titles in full form (as
opposed to the fragment from them used in the late sixties
paintings) but not only are they painted in wonderfully
revolting colours which render their formal contours almost
invisible, they are also positioned either on their side
or upside down so that one has to at first look hard to
decipher the figure. While their crazy Op kitsch backgrounds
clearly clash with the central figures, supposedly un-camouflaging
them, one still has difficulty in making sense of the shape
and its surroundings. Other paintings in the Silly Symphony
series - Jumbo Jungle, Camel Cuts and Zebra Slices - feature
those same animal figures cut up into jigsaw segments and
thrown them against a wash of flat, bright colour, leaving
the viewer with even more difficulty in putting the puzzle
together.
These
latter works from 1985 on foreground the construction of
a critical `play space' wherein Rooney is looking back at
his source material and the ways in which he used that material
in order to then regenerate a self-referential exercise
in formalist deconstruction. As figured in Pop Art throughout
the seventies and heralded in his own Pilkington Predicts
screenprints, Rooney approaches his own work in the same
displaced way he originally approached his subject matter,
indicating how tightly fused the `diary library workbench'
has become - in fact, as compacted as his visual surfaces
and as camouflaged as his perceptual processes. This type
of fusion, of closed circuitry and replayed figures, marks
Rooney as a Pop artist who has successfully passed into
the Post-Pop environment - a transition which aids toward
the clearer critical evaluation of Pop as theory, practice,
legacy and vital creative force. A study in motion of Pop's
integral dynamic stasis, Robert Rooney is as he was and
was as he is.
NOTES
1
See Spons, Documentations, Prott Inc. etc. ...
2
See Holden Park photo series ...
3
Hard-edged abstraction - including some of Rooney's parodies
of the genre - was showcased in The Field exhibition at
the National Gallery Of Victoria in 1968.
4
See the chronology for a listing of the photographic projects
and works which Rooney mostly worked on during this period
...
5
The James Dean Foundation has been raking in an estimated
US$50-75 million anually worldwide since 1984 from licensing
images of Dean for promotion of anything.
6
Some of the original source material for this exhibition
was displayed uncredited as such in the exhibition Innocence
& Danger - An Artist's View Of Childhood at Heide gallery
in 1987, curated by Robert Rooney.
