THE RIVER MAGAZINE | Spring 2017 21 | C U L T U R E | classic paintings and other images nearby. This is popular, abstract Pop Art. It doesn’t easily fit into a shallow box of pop culture. It’s references, style and colour are layered and seasoned. It’s easy on the eye, accessible to the mind and yet there is a drama and tension in it, heightened by the assassination of President Kennedy that followed later that year. Rauschenberg’s art can be enjoyed at the Tate Modern until early April (for more details see pages 26-27). The reckless pursuit of the‘popular’at the expense of the ‘meaningful’can have disastrous consequences because pop has powerful and widespread influence but no ethics. In January this year the film“Christine”opened to five star reviews starring British actress Rebecca Hall. The movie spotlights the life and tragic death of Christine Chubbuck in 1974, a TV News reporter who committed suicide live on air. Plagued all her life with depression and a macabre sense of humour she was working as a broadcaster at the small WXLT Channel 40 TV station in Florida. The mantra at the station had become“if it bleeds, it leads”; in order to attract the highest possible ratings - sensational headlines trumped quality journalism. The pressure was too much for Chubbuck and on 15 July 1974 she became the lead story. Two years later, in the 1976 Sidney Lumet film‘Network’, Peter Finch played fictitious TV Anchorman Howard Beale who vows to kill himself live on TV. The original script for Network by Paddy Chayefsky had already been started before Chubbuck’s suicide, including the intentions of Howard Beale. Beale, frustrated by the pursuits of the soulless, attention-seeking society in which ratings and popularity rule, famously incites viewers to lean out of their windows and shout“I’m mad as hell, and I am not going to take this anymore!”... and in unison, they do. Network is coming to London, to the National Theatre. Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston will be playing Beale and the play is to be directed by Ivo van Hove following his successful run with Hedda Gabler on the Southbank. As a Donald Trump presidency became increasingly possible Cranston publicly stated that this would be something he couldn’t take at all and expressed his intention to leave the United States should it come to pass. Trump was elected and Cranston is heading to London – perhaps our instinctive suspicion of the popular will encourage him to stay. nuclear weapons in the world at his fingertips likes to keep all the attention on himself. He’s still popular though, for now. Let’s hope his demise on that ferris wheel of popularity is a safe one. The pop art of Robert Rauschenberg made in the 1960s, has frozen in time the hopes and dreams of that age. His collages, placing clashing images together, tell a story almost like a piece of cinema. Retroactive II (1963), a silkscreen work, puts images of President Kennedy and the Apollo space program side by side with traces of Ivo van Hove (centre top) will be directing Bryan Cranston in Network later this year Retroactive II (1963) by Robert Rauschenberg captures the popular zeitgeist of the early 60s America THE RIVER MAGAZINE | Spring 2017 21