POP , NEO-POP POST-POP OR WHAT ?sx Stuart Morgan wonders how far an art-historical term can be stretched .sx R e my de Gourmont once pointed out how much more difficult it is to abolish a term than to invent one .sx The business of art history may depend on this very principle .sx Invent an '-ism' , for example , and someone will cap it with an anti-ism , apparently challenging but actually confirming , your premise in the meantime .sx Make a pretended quarrel about some flimsy matter of periodisation , merely shoring it up as you do so , and your professional reputation will be made .sx ( Conservatism masquerading as revolt is always an excellent career move .sx ) British Pop Art expert Marco Livingstone has written book after book , catalogue after catalogue , about his chosen subject , including excellent monographs on Hockney and Kitaj , but also on the appalling Allen Jones , the vacuous Peter Phillips and more .sx Perhaps being a professional historian blinds you to matters of quality .sx Or perhaps business is business .sx As time goes on , however , business is bound to decline what else is there to be written ?sx An extended monograph on the Ruralists ?sx Another essay on Hockney's Picasso rip-offs or cut-up photographs ?sx Last year , Livingstone's Pop Art :sx A Continuing History appeared , a book as strange as its title suggests , not changing our definition of Pop , but indicating the complexity in its lineage , and working to expand it .sx Is Lisa Milroy a Pop Artist ?sx Or Ashley Bickerton ?sx The real answer may be that the question was not worth asking , that a movement like Pop corresponded to a moment in history and that their economic backgrounds , places of birth , influences , marketing , treatment of their media , in fact their entire parameters of meaning , make Peter Blake and Jeff Koons not simply strange bedfellows but completely incompatible ones , as the recent Pop symposium at the Royal Academy suggested .sx How far can an art historical term be stretched , after all , and why try ?sx From the dodgy end of Livingstone's book , the end which reveals that when he said " continuing history " he did not mean the newer works of existing Pop artists but the new work by new artists , comes the Serpentine Gallery's beautifully installed pendant exhibition Objects from an Ideal Home , with its muffled reference to Richard Hamilton's great collage What is it .sx ..? .sx Perhaps it is at this point that the weak-willed and easily led should take the advice of Nancy Reagan and just say 'No' .sx Or , 'Yes , but .sx ..'. Yes , John Armleder was a Fluxus member .sx Yes , Richard Wentworth does know everything there is to know about early Oldenburg .sx Yes , Edward Allington began his career by making impeccable drawings of rubber dolls .sx Yes , Haim Steinbach forms a link with the 60s by virtue of his age alone .sx Yes , the redoubtable Sturtevant has drawn on Pop , but only because she re - painted pictures by Pop artists .sx 'If it looks like X it must be X' is not an argument any respectable art historian would advance to cover art of the deep past .sx The fact that we lived through it is just not persuasive enough .sx Pop is indeed part of what today's artists know .sx So is Japanese cookery , the Mercator projection and the conjugation of Latin verbs .sx There is nothing to be gained by the related argument 'If it looks like a domestic object , it must be a work of Pop art because Pop artists referred to domestic objects' .sx Is Tapi e-grave s a Pop artist ?sx Was Beuys ?sx If there was anything to be gained by calling Koons or Gober or Levine or Holzer or Halley , Pop artists , we'd have done it already .sx And what is there to be gained , apart from another group show ?sx Entertain the thought for a moment .sx When Koons had German craftsmen remake animal ornaments , was he making a Pop statement ?sx When Armleder painted on furniture and showed the result alongside geometric ( but partly domesticated ) painting , was that Pop ?sx If 'Pop' means a leavening , the reduction of transcendence to mundanity , gallery to parlour , then an unbroken line connects 60s Pop and 80s neo-Conceptualism , the common element being one of debunking .sx ( " I often say I've taken Newman's zip and turned it into plumbing " , Peter Halley wrote in 1986 .sx ) Certainly a down-to-earthness permeates this exhibition , characterised by Clive Barker's Venus de Milo with her Tongue in her Cheek .sx So does a certain small-scale wit - Tony Cragg's broken china tigers in cage-like metal containers , for example , or Julian Opie's identical Minimalist wall-pieces-cum-ventilators .sx And Pop also meant idealising , as in Grenville Davey's large-scale button , regarded ( for the purposes of this exhibition ) as an Oldenburg homage .sx But 60s Pop also began an investigation into art and commerce :sx the relation between conveyor-belt and craftsmanship , individuality and multiplicity .sx Only Edward Allington in his do-it-yourself Greek architecture , Louise Lawler in her photograph of Marilyn Monroe sold into slavery by Warhol , commodified , labelled and ready to change hands , or Meye Vaisman in his artwork/ self-portrait/ coinage/ caricature equation succeeded in hinting at some of the mind-boggling ramifications of the arguments that Warhol , Lichtenstein and Oldenburg proposed .sx Perhaps the arguments of art historians and critics alike pale into insignificance in the face of what these pioneers made possible :sx a politics of the everyday , a felt connection between daily routine and greater , uncontrollable power structures .sx Sometimes , as in Richard Wentworth's The Weather , one of the quietest and certainly one of the most effective works in the exhibition , we feel that connection .sx Does that make it a work of Pop , neo-Pop , post-Pop or what ?sx Only Marco Livingstone or Alan Freeman could tell us .sx REALISM AND THE TWO GERMANYS .sx John Roberts looks at the conflict over realism in the former FDR and GDR .sx Germany is the crucible of the modern debate on realism .sx The debates of the 1930s ( Benjamin , Brecht and Adorno in particular ) are still the founding moment of any adequate philosophical engagement with the issue .sx The continuation of the arguments though after 1949 in the two Germanys , with the formation of the GDR , has been a history of subjugation , mystification and denial .sx The powerful anti-Stalinist credentials of the early debate were not something the GDR bureaucracy could stomach , just as the debate in the FDR ( after a brief flirtation with the idea of Capitalist Realism in the early 60s and a revivalist kind of Berlin 'ugly realism' in the late 70s ) was either forgotten about or dismissed in terms borrowed from the caricatures of the East .sx With the collapse of Stalinist state capitalism in the GDR and the reunification of the two Germanys , these two partial traditions now meet in a potentially new cultural space .sx This is very much the theme of 'Models of Reality :sx Approaches to Realism in Modern German Art' , even though the organisers and contributors to the catalogue would no doubt disagree with my provisional history .sx In his essay , the former GDR critic Christoph Tannert clearly assumes he was working under a socialist system .sx Artists from the East included Tina Bara , Volker Via Lewandowsky , Werner T u bke and Arno Fischer ; from the West , Gerhard Richter , Martin Kippenberger , G u nther F o rg and Bernhard and Anna Blume .sx This is a suggestive selection inasmuch as it pits Werner T u bke , the leading GDR socialist realist , against West Germany's Gerhard Richter , the modernist scourge of conventional realism .sx In fact this is the key theme of the show :sx realism as ( unproblematic ) reportage and historical witness , and 'realism' as the critique of representation .sx Socialist realism in its classic form , particularly in the GDR , privileged a given set of signifiers ( the victorious Red Army , Allende's defeat , manual labour , etc. ) as a kind of fetishisation of the popular .sx T u bke certainly acknowledged this framework and its aims - he couldn't do otherwise - but like Brecht's anti-Stalinist Stalinist , he was a bit more canny than most .sx Closer to the Party and the GDR state than perhaps any of the country's other leading artists , his epic history paintings nevertheless produce a troubling sense of displacement .sx T u bke's allegories of German peasant history and class struggle have the look of an artist trying to outdot the 'i's of the most ardent advocate of Luk a csian typicality , in a display of traditional skills that borders on the neurotic .sx It is as if the only adequate form for painting under an authoritarian regime was itself an authoritarian one .sx Represented here by two small 'altar piece' history paintings and the larger Verspottung eines Ablass-H a ndlers , 1976 , a medieval scene of the torture of a monk accused of satanism , T u bke is undoubtedly the most important artist the GDR produced , if only because the allegories are susceptible to a second-order allegorical reading themselves .sx Similarly Richter is perhaps the most interesting artist the Federal Republic has produced since the late 60s .sx Having left the GDR just before the Berlin Wall was built his whole development as an artist sensitive to the modernist critique of history painting has been to map out a space of negotiation between the continuing legitimacy of the act of painting and the distributive power of modern mechanised imagery .sx Richter , essentially , is a history painter engaging with photography's critique and displacement of the public function of history painting .sx This at least makes his art a more legitimate candidate for the mantle of realism , insofar as he acknowledges the contradictions of his practice as a painter in the form of the work itself .sx What made his series 18 .sx Oktober 1977 shown at the CAI in 1989 so vivid , and one of the best visiting exhibitions of the late 80s , was its transformation of the historical referent ( police archive photographs of the 'suicides' of the Red Army Faction in the Stannheim sic !sx gaol ) into a focus for the reading of history itself .sx The blurred quality of the grey paintings actually gave form to the subsequent historical perception of those events :sx the suppression and disavowal of that period by the West German state .sx As a result the work places the spectator in a position of critical tension between identification with the group ( utopianism ) and with that act of disapproval .sx In fact this historical moment is an important one for understanding the development of the realist debate , and the relationship between culture and politics , in the Federal Republic .sx The RAF was to a large extent the most extreme manifestation of a dominant Maoist current on the German left in the 70s , a tendency that was characterised by an exaggerated ( and desperate ) political voluntarism .sx With the intellectual bankruptcy of this tradition in the wake of the demise of the RAF , the extra-parliamentary left opposition went into deep crisis .sx Those elements that weren't pulled to the right or the SPD moved in the direction of the emerging green movement with its 'broad church' ecologism ( i.e. deep ecologists , ex-Nazis , as well as ex-revolutionaries) .sx An intellectual vacuum emerged amongst those still prepared to argue for the historical possibility of a socialism left of the SPD .sx As with the crises of Maoism in Italy and France in the 70s one of the immediate beneficiaries culturally of this was post-structuralism and its more apocalyptic variants .sx Coupled with the remnants of a strong Western Marxist tradition in intellectual circles , with its emphasis upon the importance of commodity fetishism and a 'total system' view of capitalist relations , the possibility of any projective re-theorisation of culture and politics was effectively forestalled .sx There are of course exceptions to this rule .sx For example G u nter Grass's public interventions ( a leading figure in the SPD but intellectually outside it ) , and J u rgen Habermas's heavily rationalistic hybrid Marxism .sx However , Grass is not theorist and Habermas's interests have never been specifically cultural , just as this intellectual counter to the rise of the new 'left' irrationalism in the Federal Republic has had little effect on the ground .sx Since the late 70s there has not been a steady socialist tradition , if you like , that could nurture a broad debate on culture and politics by drawing on and bringing together the work of a younger generation and important work from abroad .sx This to a certain extent did happen in Britain , though , which is why the debate on realism in Britain during the 70s and 80s ( through film and photography mainly ) was far in advance of anything that occurred elsewhere in Europe .sx