This is an especially intuitive comment, one that needs to be taken seriously when judging the impact with which Warhol’s work had on the public sphere and throughout art criticism. His subject matter was entirely different to everything that had gone before, using pictures, newspaper cuttings, celebrities and ‘house-hold named’ objects in his art, he took his images out of the public body literature. This form of ‘found’ art that lends itself to the term popular is the basis for a theoretical understanding of Warhol’s designs. Furthermore, the mode of production used, the silk-screen method, became his sole catalyst of expression, which also contributes to the meaning of his pictures. The most famous, and most publicized painting by Warhol was the Cambells Tomato Soup Tin, itself an icon of Pop Art movement and also his portrait of Marilyn Monroe.
The process with which Warhol made his painting is of great important when trying to theorize these works. The silk-screen process enabled Warhol to effectively copy images onto canvass, a printing technique that allowed for the inclusion of color and stencil. The silk-screen production method has two significant theoretical purposes. For Warhol, this was a very personal method to his style, allowing him to completely distance himself from his own work,
I think it would great if more people took up silk-screen
so that no one would know whether my picture was mine
or someone else’s.
Communicated in this statement is the inherent lack of interest in the artists significance to the work, remembering that this was Warhol’s only means of pictorial expression, this style of painting has great significance on the actual subject. It displaces the relationship between fine and common art by using already commercially successful objects that have become imprinted images on the minds of the consumer. Warhol takes these images, places them in an art gallery, and asks the art critic to evaluate their necessity as pieces of art. Crone notes the meaning inherent within works of this kind,
…Warhol portrays the condition of society rather than his own aesthetics.
His pictures thus become valuable as source material, open to and
understandable to everyone, they no longer require unraveling by the expert.
The era of mass media was a condition of the sixties, and the celebrity portraits that Warhol made are monuments to the idea of a social art. The people he chose to represent where all iconic figures within American society, consumed on a mass level, they became objects of a popular culture, one that exposes and repeats itself. The portrait of Jackie Kennedy entitled The Week That Was consisted of a series of pictures taken of Jackie before, during and after the murder of John. F. Kennedy. Jackie is pictured displaying a number of emotions, laughing, smiling and in mourning, the effect alludes to an almost vulgar exhibition of emotion. However, this is the art of the hyperreal, or new realism as these were pictures that had been seen countless times throughout the media world. The silk-screens of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis where much the same, vibrant colors were used almost cartoon like in the case of Monroe. Van M. Cagle has noted the importance of the stars gaze within these portraits. He asserts that the photographs chosen by Warhol present these stars as ‘robotic and distant; the smiles seem mechanical and distant’. Furthermore, ‘in viewing these gazes, then, we are asked to confirm both the “uselessness” as well as the importance of fame’.What Warhol therefore intends is too expose the popular preoccupation with consumerised objects, be them inanimate or human.
Warhol ventured into a more politically conscious form of silk screen work with his series, The Electric Chair and Race Riots. Big Electric Chair, was a picture of a wooden electric chair with the harnesses slack at the sides and as with other pictures of this variety a single color was imposed up the picture, this time being a light turquoise. A repetitive painting of this was created in Lavender Disaster with the same image being repeated sixteen times. Other pieces within the death series included the partially disturbing Car Crash and the red silk screen of Atom Bomb. Crone has insightfully described the meaning of these pictures as symbolizing the ‘misuse of governmental sovereignty, an open confession of a deficiency in cultural development’. Crone also acknowledges Walter Benjamin’s description of the Electric Chair in which he states that this picture becomes “evidence in the historical process, the trial of history-this is the hide political meaning.” Furthermore, Benjamin’s insight enables a clearer understanding of the theoretical aspect of Warhol’s art in this series. The Atomic Bomb being the most profound of Warhol’s painting acts as a social document, a reality of Americans industrial and judicial life. Consumerism had been replaced by the modernism of violence within the silk-screen of this type and more specifically with Americans history of violence as epitomized by the Race Riots pictures. These depicted white policeman and their dogs in confrontational positions with black Americans, again repeating the image within the silk-screen.
The most striking attribute of these paintings entails the submission of any classical form of aesthetic. Color is used sporadically, and when it is used only a single shade is implemented and even this at times does not seem to complement the picture. Warhol’s aesthetic is realism, using unaltered, iconic pictures that not only represent an event but a significant moment within American history. Moments captivated by America social consciousness and public feeling. In examining Warhol’s shift between social commentating pictures, Cagle identifies certain questions that were being asked of Warhol’s work in this period. ‘Is Warhol humanizing objects while dehumanizing people? Is he criticizing or glorifying a society that has become indifferent to both violence and mass consumption’?
These questions seem to accurately suggest the meaning of Warhol’s work, especially the dehumanizing qualities of the pictures chosen. Monroe is transfigured from a person to a cultural commodity, consumed when people go to see her movies or viewed from a space in a gallery. In parallel to this, a Campbell’s soup tin or Coke Cola bottle becomes the representation of a nations infatuation with the product. The function of Warhol’s therefore instills upon the observer a new way of understanding the parameters of art and all that it can encompass. Warhol’s art is not bound by composition of color or fluidity of form. It is not an art created for aesthetic pleasure, this is obvious, put asks of the observer to question why they are looking at this piece in a gallery and not a historical textbook. It is only when these photographs are assimilated into the machinery of art do their political and historical significance become realized.
The methods and style of Warhol’s work was governed by his own unique awareness of himself as a machine. The Factory in which he produced his work mirrored the industrial process with which he created his silk-screen paintings. Disavowing any personality in his work, creativity was reduced to the minimum of only choosing the photo’s he was going to silk-screen. He disrupted the boundaries of art by placing common objects or images on artistic pedestals, forcing the observer to reevaluate images that had become intuitively ‘comfortable’ within society that their meaning had changed. His exploration of the mass consumed and mass neglected images within American opened new realizations within art. Art could now be interpreted without the need of aesthetics and personal expression; it could simply be the expression of feeling through a singular image. This is the legacy of Warhol’s work, transforming the ideal of the photo into the expression of a painting and embodying within the essence of art
Bibliography
- Reconstructing Pop / Subcultures, Art, Rock and Andy Warhol. Van M. Cagle, Sage Publications 1995
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Andy Warhol, Rainer Crone, Thames and Hudson London, 1970
- Pop Art Redefined, John Russel and Suzi Gablik, Thames and Hudson London, 1969
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Pop Art, A Critical History, Edited by Steven Henry Madoff, University of California Press, 1997
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Who is Andy Warhol, Edited by Colin MacCabe, Mark Francis and Peter Wollen, BFI Publishes 1997
Word Count: 1768
Pop Art Redefined, John Russel and Suzi Gablik, Thames and Hudson London, 1969, p18
Andy Warhol, Rainer Crone, Thames and Hudson London, 1970, p9
Andy Warhol, Rainer Crone, Thames and Hudson London, 1970, p10- Quote from Andy Warhol
Reconstructing Pop / Subcultures, Art, Rock and Andy Warhol. Van M. Cagle, Sage Publications 1995, p57
Andy Warhol, Rainer Crone, Thames and Hudson London, 1970, p29
Reconstructing Pop / Subcultures, Art, Rock and Andy Warhol. Van M. Cagle, Sage Publications 1995, p60-1