Future Pop Nostalgia: William Nelson at Cavalier Gallery
By Kurt Cole Eidsvig
William Nelson, Killer A.I. Robot: QUEENS 1964, 2023. Oil on canvas. 30 x 24 in
In all of the internet’s attempts at mind-bending memes, one of my favorites is the recent prompt: What year would Marty McFly visit if Back to the Future were made today? Turns out the infamous thirty-year delta would place Michael J. Fox’s voice wavering, “Doc?” in 1993. He’d contend with the realities of beepers and fax machines as opposed to soda fountains and sock hops. But before we greenlight the reboot and get Billie Eilish to cover The Power of Love, stop for a moment and notice the time warp in New York this fall. We can collectively scratch our heads at the passage of time as Pop Art reconsiders its moment, its import, its place in time. In the right here and now, Pop Art is performing its own version of McFlyian bug-eyed double-takes.
The current Pop Art time warp is as mortal as McFly’s. Can it survive an ever-fading photograph of the past, relying on nostalgia and reframing? What happened to the new and modern Pop? Well, the grandaddies of the movement are just that now: grandaddies. As Gagosian hosts a pair of Lichtenstein shows showcasing the intimacy (through sketches), dimension (through sculptures), and magnitude (in a mega-size mural) of the master, Christie’s is making the case that Andy Warhol is a digital art pathfinder alongside the newly minted Haring NFTs in Pixel Pioneer, and MoMA features a sweeping powerhouse Ed Ruscha retrospective. Beyond the demands of commerce, if Pop Art is a gold mine, we’re in the midst of some old veins. Our returns are, at moments, revelations, as with Ruscha. They also seem to be the desperate scrapes of mine owners to get every last nugget sold. But beyond the digging and the presentation, is there anything left to find in a Pop Art exploration? Or, just like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, does Pop Art need a time machine to save its life?
Enter William Nelson at Cavalier Gallery. Given the stage, there’s a heroic optimism in taking on the responsibilities of Pop Art. Not only because of the sharp contrast to the masters on display this fall. But anyone who’s stepped into the major world art fairs of late has seen the never-ending skipping of Pop Art references bouncing from canvas to canvas. Pop Art has become its own set of funhouse mirrors, or to stay in the ‘93 motif, a CD skipping while playing on repeat. Nelson rightly approaches his quest with his very own time machine. Except, rather than Michael J. Fox, Nelson’s time traveler–featured in a number of canvases from the nelw series A.I. Apocalypse: Seductive Takeover– is called the Killer AI Robot.
Befitting the push-pull of future and past in Pop Art’s present moment, the Killer AI Robot travels. On roller skates, scooters, and Vespas, her bright pink form zooms past moments from New York’s past. But as Doc Brown might say, “It’s not just where we are going but when.” The history lessons are high points from the city’s formative moments, greatest hits like the 1963 World’s Fair, the Brooklyn Bridge in its debut year (1883), and the Trans-Lux Theater on Madison Avenue in 1931. In each case, the curvy Killer AI Robot is rendered in Barbie pink while her historical backdrops are presented in a grayscale akin to spools of old black and white film.
The tension in these pictures is grappling with the original aims of Pop Art. Before there was Marilyn, there were soup cans. The 1962 group show at the Pasadena Art Museum, featuring Lichtenstein, Ruscha, Warhol, and others, was titled New Painting of Common Objects. If Nelson is to be considered a baton carrier for the movement, we have to assume that the pictures in Love & Science represent the common ideas of the collective. Is the all-consuming certainty the apocalypse is upon us in the form of AI as neutral as a can of SPAM or a panel from a throwaway comic book? Even Warhol’s later portraits of celebrities–and his infamous quote about 15 minutes of fame–suggest celebrity as something as commoditized and typical as a can of soup.
William Nelson, Clifton Heights, 2022. Oil on canvas, 48 x 48 in
Nelson’s time machine is at its best in mashups: Nicole Kidman featured in an advertisement for a SLINKY, Lady Gaga’s signature glance, staring out with an almost Matisse-ian rendering of a Pink Panther cartoon in the background. There are emojis bouncing as thought balloons and time contraptions (beyond the killer robot) that seem to represent a 1950s version of a time machine versus a post-Jetsons-informed framework. These are landscapes without Zuckerberg, Bezos, or Musk interference. Killer AI Robot inhabits a different starting point than ours. Hers is one that is much closer to Marty McFly’s original destination of 1955 than today’s.
Also at odds is the fatalistic view of AI. Wouldn’t Andy Warhol give a creepy wig-twisting grin at the spawn of AI? Draining images of their inherent meaning, challenging the aims of art, and elevating the mundane to the heights of grand high historical pictures seem central to any Pop Art approach. Not picking up the fight against the new. This incongruity against the earliest goals of Pop is near fatal at times. While Nelson places an iconic Ingres figure against a Pink Floyd background in And Forsake All Others, 2021, there is less Pop power than if one were to say, place three letters, OOF, on a canvas.
William Nelson, Odalisque on the Dark Side of the Moon, 2023. Oil on canvas 30 x 60 in
At the center of the Actor’s Strike is the question of appropriation of likenesses. But Pop Artists never needed a computer for that, just as Nelson swapped Kidman and Gaga into different time periods. While the Warhol Foundation suffered a loss at the hands of the Supreme Court earlier this year in the Lynn Goldsmith copyright suit, these are 1981 Prince questions, not the apocalyptic visions of 2023.
While Nelson’s paintings outside of AI commentary bring charm and fun, they aren’t as strong as his other work. It's clear from his imagery and the unrelenting WGA strike that we cannot and should not depend on AI to write the narratives of the future. Still, we can hope for a different starting point from the past. The next time we send Killer AI Robot out, let’s send her to the start of Pop Art. Only from there can she and the rest of us decide if there’s more room in the future for Pop Art explorations. If not, Pop Art must be recognized as the stuff of nostalgia, a fading memory of 1962 that only existed in the before.
William Nelson, Coffee Cantata Johann Sebastian Bach, 2023. Oil on canvas 72 x 48 in.
The highest point in Love & Science comes in Coffee Cantata, from the artist’s Ghost in the Machine series. Visually striking, the large canvas makes use of Nelson’s great use of color, shape, and composition to create an image that plays spherical notes across the picture plane and allows the eye to wind like the gears featured throughout the painting’s self-contained contraption. Recalling the use of music and sound in works like John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo from 1882, the Nelson painting captures the whimsy comedy and dancing notes from the Johann Sebastian Bach mini-comic opera it draws on for inspiration. Further, this version of Nelson’s visual time travels captures the dichotomy of rendering aspects of contemporary life (in this case, coffee drinking) against the satirical underpinning and Dadaistic tongue-in-cheek nature of high Pop. With this type of machine traversing the multiverse, one looks forward to finding where and when William Nelson may bring us next.
Love and Science, an exhibition of new works by William Nelson, is on display at Cavalier Gallery through Saturday, September 30, 2023.
-Kurt Cole Eidsvig