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Site for posting class reading responses as comments. Feel free to comment on other posts. History of Art, U.C. Berkeley. Instructor Sarah Hamill.
Fur-Lined Cup, Meret Oppenheim, 1936
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- Minimalism: For Class 3/31
- Warhol and Pop: For Class 3/19
- Johns, Rauschenberg, Frank: For Class 3/17
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- Response Week 1
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In his essay on Pop artist Andy Warhol, Thomas Crow focuses on themes of mass culture and celebrities in Warhol’s art. In his earlier artworks, Warhol took portrait photographs of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jackie Kennedy, reproduced these headshots, and placed them together in a grid formation in which the exact same photograph was repeated throughout. Critics have debated Warhol’s purpose in making his paintings this way, but Crow claims that Warhol does this in order to “dramatize the breakdown of the commodity exchange.” Warhol uses well-known, dramatic people as his subjects such as these three women, who the average person sees as unique and individualistic, and portrays them in a way in which they can be reproduced, copied, and are basically no longer the individuals society knows them to be. Crow argues for this point when he says in reference to the Marilyn series that Warhol’s “apparent acceptance of a woman’s reduction to a mass commodity fetish can make the entire series seem a monument to a benighted past or an unrepentant present.”
ReplyDeleteAnother theme evident in Warhol’s work is the relationship between celebrities, mass culture, and death. Warhol began the Marilyn series shortly after her suicide in 1962. In this series he puts a cropped image of her face against a gold background of an icon, which Crow claims is the “traditional sign of an eternal other world.” Additionally, Warhol begins his series on Elizabeth Taylor after she is diagnosed with a catastrophic illness and the Jackie series after the Kennedy assassination. In his later works, he relates death to consumer products such as Campbell’s soup and in his artwork, Tunafish Disaster, he questions whether canned tuna fish killed two women named Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown. According to Crow, these pictures “commemorate a moment when the supermarket promise of safe and abundant packaged food was disastrously broken.” Warhol also does a series on automobiles in which almost every car has been smashed or shows some sign of wreckage, thus causing the symbol of the car to lose its “aura of pleasure and freedom to become a concrete instrument of sudden and irreparable injury.”
Warhol defies the conventions of modernism through these themes and techniques in his artwork. In an interview with Gene Swenson, Warhol blatantly states, “I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody.” Warhol believed that everybody is becoming more and more alike and wanted that trend to be reflected in his artwork. He began to use the photo-silkscreen for this reason… in hopes that anybody will be able to reproduce his artwork and a copy would be indistinguishable from the original. He believes that everybody is trying to be creative and individualistic and that even making commercial drawings involves creativity because the artist must make corrections to his work in order to depict the feelings, style, and attitude of the person who hired him. Warhol wants his life to be mechanical and led by something other than his free will or creativity. To sum up Warhol’s view he says in his interview, “Someone said my life has dominated me; I liked that idea.” This clearly rejects all aspects of creativity and thought put into modernist paintings.
In the article “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol” by Thomas Crowe, he describes Warhol’s early works. Later to be coined Pop Art, Warhol’s early works repeated photos, newspaper clippings, and other publicly and readily available trinkets of mass consumer culture. Warhol used the symbiosis of repletion and common culture to make a statement on the commodification of people and objects. By using his art to make a statement on his contemporary society Warhol simultaneously rejects modern art; where modern art focuses on the experiences and technical talent of the artist, Warhol shifts the focus of his art away from adherence to technical talent and towards the interaction of art, the people, and society.
ReplyDeleteIn the article, Crowe discusses one of Warhol’s less famous pieces titled Tunafish Disaster, in which Warhol places a photograph of a can of packaged tunafish above the newspaper clipping of the article and photos of the story of the two women who were killed after consuming a portion of poisoned packaged tunafish. Warhol then repeats the combined images in a grid. While the image of the tunafish can is neither novel nor emotional, having been repeated incessantly both in Warhol’s painting and on the shelves of grocery stores across America, juxtaposed with the tragic story of the women’s’ deaths, the work takes on a highly emotional essence. The repetition of the newspaper and the emotion it conveys contrasts with the repetition of the tunafish can. Where the tunafish can represents the convenience and rationality that America values so highly, the newspaper article offers a painful contradiction to this ideal. Warhol thus employs two types of repetition to create his message; his repetition of the tunafish can versus the newspaper portrays his distraught attitude toward the contradiction between corporate convenience and the safety of the general public, and he uses the repetition of the emotional image of the tunafish can and the newspaper clippings together to reinforce the sensitivity of the said contradiction.
Warhol uses a photo of a can of tunafish as well as a photo of the newspaper clippings in Tunafish Disaster. Neither of these objects required specific talent from Warhol to acquire, he simply had to find a can of tunafish and the desired newspaper and take photographs. Additionally, any ordinary person could have acquired both of objects. What is important to the work however, is that Warhol’s marriage of these two pieces to create a message. The importance placed on the message of the work, rather than the technical expertise it requires, is where Warhol sways from the modern tradition where brush stroke, color choice, shadow etc play important roles in a work. Warhol also sways from the modern tradition by focusing the subject of his work outward. Where Warhol seeks to comment on the society around him, modern artists painted the way their surroundings reflected onto them.
Thomas Crow discusses the complexities in Andy Warhol’s works of art and how Warhol presents his works from an impersonal, passive perspective that actually reveal more significant meanings and claims on mass culture. Warhol is known for his use of reprints and photographs of well-known celebrities in pop culture, but he mobilizes the images in such a way to make a statement about society and mass culture. Unlike modernist paintings which delve in the unconscious and bring these thoughts forward, Warhol’s art focuses instead on the superficial surface of culture by using popular images that are constantly circulated in consumerism and consumption. Stated in an interview with Gene Swenson, Warhol said, “I want everybody to think alike… I think everybody should be a machine” (553). For example, the Marilyn Monroe series were all images of a popular celebrity that everyone knew; everyone knew her biography, her movies, her controversial affairs and death. In American society, Marilyn Monroe by mass culture became less a person, reduced to a “mass-commodity fetish” (544). Crow comments on this, saying “the mass-produced image as the bearer of desires was exposed in its inadequacy by the reality of suffering and death” (544). Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych is composed of many images of Marilyn Monroe in varying degrees and shades of clarity, but some aspects of it connect to ideas of death and memory. For example, Crow points out the image of her face against the gold – “the traditional sign of an eternal other world” (545) – and the multiple reproductions of a single picture repeated to allude to the flickering of a film. Warhol treats Marilyn Monroe as a pop icon, a symbol to represent American society, and his mobilization of her image in a memorial combined with her suicide pushed Crow to pose an interesting question: “Where does one put the curiously intimate knowledge one possesses of an unknown figure, come to terms with the sense of loss, the absence of a richly imagined presence that was never really there” (545).
ReplyDeleteAs Crow remarks on Marilyn Monroe, “Her memory is most vividly carried in the flickering passage of film exposures, no one of which is ever wholly present to perception… she is most present where her image is at least permanent” (545). Warhol is interested in the preservation of things and in their ultimate death. The titles of his many works of art illustrate this undercurrent theme – Little Electric Chair, Suicide, Gangster Funeral, etc. Besides the focus on the length of life of things, Warhol also comments on mass culture and consumption. The Tunafish Disasters, for example, push pop images frequent in mass culture into another context, a darker context with a more serious background since the can of tuna had killed two women. The repetitive images and the way the images are portrayed or in what context they are captured in photographs all contribute to Warhol’s underlying theme of the temporary quality everything has. Everyone sees the same things and feels the same feelings, and although some individuals stand out in society and become icons in mass culture, their fame or their persons eventually come to an end and they are once again like everyone else.
In Thomas Crow’s essay about Pop Artist Andy Warhol, the themes of mass culture and celebrities in art are prevalent. When Warhol first started doing works, at least that the general public has seen, he took portrait style photographs of famous people, mainly women/starlets like Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, and Debbie Harry. After taking these photos, Warhol would replicate the photo many times in an orderly fashion on a large canvas, varying the coloring of the faces. No one was really sure why Warhol decided to depict these icons in such a way, but in the essay, Crow says that he chose to work that way to “dramatize the breakdown of the commodity exchange.” Using these well known faces and well loved people because the average person sees these subjects as iconic individuals who they may look up to. Portraying these people in this mass market kind of way removes this individualist style and essence from them and places them in a new light for society to view them. Crow says this in the essay in reference to the series Warhol did of Marilyn Monroe when he writes that Warhol’s “apparent acceptance of a woman’s reduction to a mass commodity fetish can make the entire series seem a monument to a benighted past or an unrepentant present.” He says that Warhol’s acceptance and portrayal (and portrayal and portrayal and portrayal in the series) of Marilyn in this sexual way that she was usually seem makes that series seem like a dedication to the darker past, a past without intellectual, moral and social light, or to a remorseless present environment that she existed in.
ReplyDeleteThis same Marilyn series that Crow references above was not began by Warhol until after the starlet committed suicide in 1962. This begins his work with the theme of celebrities, their exposure to mass media and death. Warhol began his other series of Elizabeth Taylor shortly after she was medically diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness. Another example of this death theme was when Warhol began his series of Jackie Kennedy / Onasis soon after President Kennedy was assassinated. Further on in his later works he explores the idea of death outside of depicting people. His famous series of Campbell’s soup cans is an example of this and in his painting called Tunafish Disaster, Warhol plays with the idea that a single can of tuna could have killed two women. Crow writes that those photos “commemorate a moment when the supermarket promise of safe food was disastrously broken.” Death is also seen in his wrecked car series where almost every single car has large areas of damage causing the cars to loose their “aura o pleasure and freedom and become a concrete instrument of sudden and irreparable injury.” The injury that he speaks of is not only to the car, but inherently to the passengers of the cars, with potentially fatal results.
Warhol’s eccentric personality made him an interesting artist and caused him to be interviewed on multiple occasions. In one instance with an interview with Gene Swenson, Warhol says (and Crow documents) “I think everybody should like everybody.” As his art progressed, Warhol started to believe that everyone on the planet was becoming more and more the same and this is obviously present in his work of silk-screens when you look at the repetition of identical images over and over and over again. This method and subject he desired to be reproducible by the massive similar public, relating back to his work. Warhol also says in the same interview documented by Crow, “Someone said my life has dominated me; I liked that idea.” You can see that this idea would totally throw out the notion that he had a creative force in himself and that merely his life told him what to do and he did it; created an art that commented on mass production and the similarities he saw in the public and that could be itself mass produced identically.
Mark Kohn
ReplyDelete03/30/09
When examining how Andy Warhol’s work rejects modernist painting, it is useful to study Warhol’s habits as an artist. Typically, subject-matter plays an integral role in modernist painting, often through symbolic representation. However, Warhol’s artistic methodology deviates from this modernist tendency by his choice to use seemingly random subject-matter in a way that illuminates the hidden framework of our media defined society. Thomas Crow discusses these ideas in detail when he states, “The conventional reading of his [Warhol] work turns upon a few circumscribed themes: the impersonality of his image choices and their presentation, his passivity in the face of a media-saturated reality, the suspension in his work of any clear authorial voice. His subject-matter choices are regarded as essentially indiscriminate.” (543) Here, Crow elaborates on Warhol’s artistic practices by noting how he chooses subject-matter in an arbitrary fashion much like how popular commercial consumer culture attempts to infuse great meaning into material products it attempts to sell. Similarly, Warhol’s art deviates from modernist painting by his artwork’s ability to critique commercial consumer culture in a way that demonstrates the selling power of the visual image. As the technological availability of accessing visual imagery increases, the ability of images to sway public opinion becomes more pervasive. For Warhol, the indoctrinating power of visual imagery has led to the regression of society into a monoculture in which conformity takes precedence over originality. Warhol highlights this sentiment with his famous quotations, “I want everybody to think alike…I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody.” (553) This excerpt demonstrates the homogenizing power of consumer culture, heightened by the increased technological availability of visual imagery. In examining the impact of visual imagery on consumer culture, Warhol seeks to understand how mass culture responds to the death of commercialized royalty, or more colloquially, celebrities. In doing so, Warhol produced Marilyn Diptych, which was a silkscreen print on canvas of Marilyn Monroe’s face repeated fifty times, half of which is in black and white, while the other half is in color. The contrast created by the difference in color between the two regions of the canvas serves to symbolize the drastic difference between life and death. By seeing Monroe’s face on the bottom left corner change from a vividly colorful imprint to a faded black and white image on the top right corner demonstrates how contextual changes in visual imagery lead to a modified emotional response when perceiving varied pictorial representations. Crow describes this phenomenon when he writes, “Each of the two Marilyn Diptychs, also painted in 1962, lays out a stark and unresolved dialectic of presence and absence, of life and death.” (545) Another example of how contextual changes in visual imagery lead to an altered emotional response to those same images is demonstrated with Warhol’s series of depicting automobile accidents. Usually associated with the affluence of American culture, Warhol takes the automobile and places it out of its usual context by showing the dangers of driving cars. Crow comments on the transformed perception of cars that Warhol creates with his work when he says, “These [artworks] commemorate events in which the supreme symbol of consumer affluence, the American car of the 1950s, lost its aura of pleasure and freedom to become a concrete instrument of sudden and irreparable injury.” (550) Here, Crow reiterates the transformative power contextual imagery has on public perception as well as the wider consumer culture.
In his interview with Gene Swanson, Andy Warhol stated, “I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody” (553). Thomas Crow helps readers and viewers to understand Warhol’s viewpoint through his essay, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol” by pointing out how Warhol “produced his most powerful work by dramatizing the breakdown of commodity exchange” (546). By presenting viewers with the process of commodity exchange, Warhol directly appeals to the machine-like capability of humans, allowing viewers to abandon individuality and become one with others. Because Warhol directs viewers away from individuality and towards similarity, he rejects modernism, which, at that time, strove to stimulate the unique exchange and experience between the viewer and the artwork. Simply stated, Warhol’s work appealed to similarity, whereas modernism appealed to uniqueness.
ReplyDeleteOne of the most important characteristics of some of Warhol’s works is that he portrays celebrities in them. And they are not just any celebrities; they’re superstars such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Mickey Mouse, and Jackie Kennedy. Such superstar celebrities are held up by societies all throughout the world as icons, often representing for people the ideal and heavily desired lifestyle of the rich and famous. Since these celebrities tend to have the same significance for everyone, one can generally speculate that there is a consistent response and experience among viewers; such consistency expresses the machine-like attribution that Warhol strongly desires to bring out in society. The repetition of the celebrities that Warhol portrays in his artwork further appeals to the machine-like characteristic of society. What I find truly interesting is that even though the same image of the featured celebrity is repeated, there are still subtle differences among the numerous images. In my opinion, these subtle differences appeals to the notion of diversity throughout the world, whereas the repeated image expresses how even though a population may be diverse, they can still experience the same emotions and experiences as everyone else. By bringing viewers from all over the world to the same page of understanding and interpreting, Warhol abandons modernism, which sought to evoke the unique experience in humans with a work of art.
Although it is clear to me how Warhol appeals to machine-like characteristics and similarity in his art through his works of celebrities, I become confused on how he appeals such concepts in his works that deal with events. For example, I understand how Warhol’s Gangster Funeral (1963) ignites a sense of grief of suffering in all who view the work. However, does not such an image have the capability of arising specific and unique emotions in individuals? For example, if a family member of the deceased gangster were to look at Warhol’s work, I’m certain that they would have a more attached and highly emotional interaction than I would have. If Warhol were to produce an artwork of the Twin Towers on 9/11, sure people will be overwhelmed with sadness and empathy, but I feel as if they will begin to remember what happened to them that day, what they were doing when they found out about the terrorist attack, and how exactly they were impacted. Even though there would be a general and similar sense of grief when looking at the artwork, the artwork would also stimulate different experiences among the viewers.
In the essay Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol, Thomas Crow explores the purpose of Andy Warhol’s “pop art”. Unlike modern artists Warhol does not attempt to recreate a real life image nor does he purposely place meaning in his art. To Warhol, his art had no purpose other than to respond to the present day consumer society. According to Crow, Warhol “produced his most powerful work by dramatizing the breakdown of commodity exchange.” (544) In other words, Warhol was most successful at recognizing the state of consumer capitalism in the United States and by simplifying this idea into reproductions of iconic peoples Warhol he was able to expand this ignored notion to the people of America themselves.
ReplyDeleteWarhol felt that everyone should be a machine. By this he meant that everyone should be ok with being and doing everything the same, since society was already leading to this type of life-style. With mass media, pop culture, and entertainment people were able to follow trends with the help of consumerism. Warhol was simply trying to recognize this fact and reproduce it in his art. As addressed by Crow, “It was the artist himself who told the world that he had no real point to make, that he intended no larger meaning in the choice of this or that subject...” (544) This statement proves that Warhol was not creating art to be analyzed he was merely participating in the society that surrounded him and that he believed should develop to a more exaggerated state, where everyone would be alike.
In Warhol’s interview with Gene Swenson, Warhol states that “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.” (554) Here Warhol explains that his art is the way it is, simplified and repetitive, because he wants it to fit into consumer society. This way his is not an opinion, a belief, or a feeling, his art is part of consumerism itself. Because his art does not attempt to make a point it greatly drifts from modern art which centers on the meaning or a piece rather than representation. Although Warhol’s art is avant-garde, in a sense it returns to some basic purposes of art production. Representation in Warhol’s case is the exact figure of a pop culture icon, with his own colorful twists. Yet, he argues that he produces his work like a machine with the help of others proving that his art is unconventional. Despite his attempt to drift away from the modern techniques and ideals, the fact that his artwork is new age, unconventional, and controversial does in a sense make it modern.
Thomas Crow centrally focuses his essay on the influence of celebrity and mass culture within Andy Warhol’s artwork. In Warhol’s early works he concentrated on the representation of famous women of the time, including icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor. Within these painting the artists would reproduce an image of a given scarlet and duplicate it in a geometric and grid like fashion. Through this process Warhol turned individualistic women into a visual experience that could be easily copied and reproduced. The artist used photo-silkscreen productions to recreate his images in perfect likeness of their original, capitalizing on the idea of the manufactured and reproduced. Crow noted the subjects within these series as having been “reduc[ed] to a mass-commodity fetish” making them a commodity rather than human. Hereby Warhol has demonstrated effects of mass culture upon the individual, where the individual is a physical product to be bought and sold.
ReplyDeleteEach of the subjects featured within these series is connected in some sense to death and pain. The Marilyn series for example was created after the suicide of the young model actress. The painting points out the effects of the comodification of the individual and the construction of the artificial. Meaning that the person has lost there human qualities and instead been turned into a product of value that has less innate attributes. Through this process life has been lost, as the individual becomes a service of mass culture. This can be seen in the seemingly effortless reproduction of the image of the individual within Warhol’s artwork. Clearly the artist is making a stance on the effects of mass culture upon society. Warhol also chooses to focus on Jacqueline Kennedy just after the assignation of her husband. Where he centralizes on the loss meaning for the widowed wife. These catastrophes mark devastating events in social order, in where the lives of the iconic have been lost or deprived.
Warhol further elaborates on his theme of mass culture and death as he depicts images that allude to the death of individuals by the products of mass production. The artwork Tunafish Disaster reveals images set in reproduced newspaper articles. The image of tunafish can paired with two pictures of females titled Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown which exposes the tunafish’s role in the death of both women. The work of art takes a stance on mass culture being the death sentence for society. While it seen harmless if not beneficial hidden damages are maintained. The death of these two women marks a breaking of trust between the American people and their ideologies of the market as being a provider of “safe and abundant packaged food”.
Warhol adapts an unusual stance on modernism. He remarks that he “wants everybody to think alike” and even that “everybody should be a machine”. He distances himself with earlier modernist artists who valued individualism and creativity and instead promotes collective thought. Crow further notes how Warhol has “no real point to make that he intended no larger meaning in the choice of this or that subject that his assistants did most of the physical work of producing his art”. This behavior is drastically different from earlier artist who sought meaning, understanding and truth from their work. Warhol’s stance on modernism is similar to the ideology of mass culture where by all people become collectively motivated and driven by consumerist desires.
Commercial objects and celebrities inspired Andy Warhol’s artwork, unlike modern artists we have looked at in class. His use of mass culture encourages the idea that the image can be a commodity. Furthermore, Crow points out that his artwork “succumbs in an innocent but tell way to that numbing power.” In other words, Warhol was not afraid of using mass-produced or highly recognizable figures to get his message across. He insisted that everyone “think(s) alike,” which is following the idea behind the “leveling effects of the American consumer culture.” This artist recognized people followed trends that were influenced by the media. So, in order to appeal to the mass public, Warhol created works of art that would more easily connect to viewers. At the same time, Warhol used his artwork to reveal the more negative side of commodity. He wanted to show that consumerism was not as positive or spectacular as the media makes it appear. One of Warhol’s most famous subjects was Marilyn Monroe. However, the framing he puts around her upper body takes away some of her inviting illusion. She is broken down and not seen as sexually intriguing. Another interesting aspect of Warhol’s work using Monroe as a subject for his artwork was the fact that he started doing them a few weeks after her suicide. It seems evident that he wanted to stir up controversy in society. What and how do you react to a celebrity death? Is she still seen as ideally even after her death? Does she have the same impact? For the Monroe images, he used a photo-silkscreen technique, which has not been used in artwork that we have looked at before. Abstract artists often had unrecognizable figures or no subject at all, but Warhol took figures, such as Monroe, and made her a sign and symbol for people to look up to. Warhol also did this with Elizabeth Taylor, who also had a “myth” as a celebrity. Warhol chose Jackie Kennedy as a subject and she represented the new ideal. Warhol’s paintings had the power to set a new standard for women in society to follow. “Her slim, dark, aristocratic standard of beauty had made Monroe’s style, and thus power as a symbol, seem out of date even before her death.” When Kennedy’s assassination was used as inspiration, Warhol, unlike most of his other works of art, showed open emotion and sincerity. In stark contrast to modern artists, Warhol was really reluctant to show any raw feeling or depth in his artwork. His ideas were only based on commercial and media ideas.
ReplyDeleteWarhol also used consumer products as the subject in his artwork, which often showed a darker side of consumerism. His Tunafish Disaster is a prime example. The tuna can and women both represent everyday America, but the disaster shows a negative side of the idea of the supermarket. “The news of these deaths cannot be consumed in the same way as the safe (one hopes) contents of a can.” People happily get their goods from the grocery store, without ever thinking that something can go wrong. Warhol’s series that displays a car crash shows the automobile in a different way. The car, which is the ultimate consumer good, is seen in a negative light. Instead of safely transporting people, the car is causing destruction, injury, and pain. While the series doesn’t evoke real heart-felt sadness for the victims, it does remind viewers of the reality of car accidents. “It might just as well be taken to register the grim predictability, day after day, of more events with identical outcome, the leveling sameness with which real, not symbolic, death erupts into daily life.” Warhol was inspired by the pessimistic and often hidden stories of American life. He searched to find stories that he felt needed to be displayed in order to make the public aware.
Response 3/31
ReplyDeleteAs Warhol describes in his interview with Gene Swenson, his style of art is categorized under “pop” art, or a fad art style. This style is one that follows society’s mechanism, yet at the same time allows for the artist to express his/ her individuality. Warhol continues to say that “I think everybody should be a machine, I think everybody should like everybody” (Warhol interview with Swenson 553) meaning that artwork should be fluid with what society is creating. People should be able to change their style of artwork without being critizied for striving from the norm. This idea is very much the opposite of traditional modernist paintings and ideals. He strives to create something that everyone can make yet he reaches a point through his paintings which allows him to express himself. He does not conform to one style or subject of painting, he uses multiple paintings and pictures that have already been taken to create a series of photographs or paintings to convey a message.
Through celebrity works he finds himself connecting the idea of “pop” culture and death, emphasizing through the different shading the lack of emotion and feelings that are left within the subject of the painting. While they may be the coolest person on television, their are parts of their lives that are empty and not quite so glamorous. He wants to open the eyes of the audience to the reality of society and following fads, while modernist paintings might typically cover it up through and illusion or change to a scene.
Warhol continues to open the eyes of the audience through multiple series of paintings that he creates over his lifetime, one of those series where the subject matter is concentrated on the idea of death. He uses previous photographs to begin his paintings. Photographs that generally were not open to the public originally because they tended to be gruesome. By showing reality and starting his work based off of the work of others, he continues to reject a modernist style of painting, where modernists tend to be inspired and then create their own rendition of the scene or idea.
In the end, Warhol rejects the modernist style of painting. He begins by being on of the few people to use the silk screen for his artwork and striving away from the traditional. To produce his works of art, he depends on others who document the world around him, by taking their pictures to reproduce and morph, emphasizing certain characteristics of the photograph (which in his case tended to be death related). While he belives that “pop” art is a fad, their is a certain amount of mechanisms that follow society’s ideals, however, there is also a certain level of emotion and expression that one has to incorporate into their own artwork even if they are being told what to do, allowing people to create something through a machine like way and yet add their own message, idea, or emotion into the piece of art.
Crow argues that Warhol explored mass culture’s relation to celebrities and celebrity death through tracing photographs that refer to issues of American mass culture (anonymous suicides, electric chair, self-destruction of America with automobile accidents as a symbol of consumer affluence). Crow argues that the Marilyn Diptych explores the mass culture’s view and reaction to Marilyn Monroe’s suicide. The American public felt the loss of a figure that was not personally present in their own life and explored how society keeps Monroe in their memory. The repetition of Monroe’s picture, Crow argues, does not numb the effect of her image but instead magnify and intensify her presence. Also, Crow claims that the different prints of her face remark on life, death, memory, and beyond death as the different images change in definition and color so that Monroe demonstrates a simultaneous presence and absence. Presence in the public’s memory and films and absence since she was not part of the individual’s life and her suicide removing her from the public’s eye in the future. Crow argues that since Warhol created Marilyn Diptych a few weeks after her death, the art serves as a “memorial or funeral function” (545). Warhol also explore the image commodity of celebrity with Jackie Kennedy and JFK. He traces photographs that reference to these celebrities and uses repetition to intensify the image, drawing more attention to the subject, and assuming a machine-like copying quality that seeks to remove the Warhol touch from the art piece.
ReplyDeleteWarhol rejects modernist painting by attempting to remove his personal feelings and expression from his artwork. Whereas Abstract Expressionists such as Polluck and Rothko tried to heighten and dramatize their feelings so that audiences can step into the shoes of the painter, Warhol tried to be a “machine” and portray his subjects objectively, without his personal opinions or critiques. He accomplishes this by using photo-silkscreen technique which does not involve brushstrokes or a personal touch by the artist. This technique can be performed by anyone, relating to the mass-marketing or mass culture. Warhol adopts photos taken by other magazines or news organizations therefore he does not personally create an image. Therefore Warhol removes himself from his art, simply creating an image that seems devoid of Warhol’s personal feelings about the subject.
Victor Gonzalez
ReplyDeleteSection 7
Unlike his contemporaries, Andy Warhol seemed to reject the associations of creativity that are often interlaced with artists and art movements. Instead, Warhol appeared to embrace the very thing that his Art appeared to criticize, that is, Mass Culture. Such contradictory aspects of Warhol’s personality (what Thomas Crow calls his “three persons” 543) complicate our understanding of the purpose of his art and his persona. Although the subjects matter in Warhol’s paintings may appear to be superficial, it is precisely the fact that he captures superficiality to criticize superficiality that defines his role in Pop Art.
Marilyn Monroe was an iconic figure of the 1950’s and the epitome of an affluent American society. In reproducing the image of such a celebrity, Warhol was anthropomorphizing the concept of reproducibility. In many ways, especially on a superficial level, Warhol’s Marilyn’s appear to be mere copies of each other set on a canvas. Nevertheless, none of the individual portraits of Monroe is the same. In this sense, one might ask: To what extent is Warhol reproducing a singular image? To what extents is he using this pattern of reproducibility to criticize Mass culture?
Accompanied with his unique artwork, Warhol was a primary figure in voicing the rhetoric of Pop Art. In Warhol’s interview with Gene Swenson, Warhol stated: “I think everybody should be a machine” (553). The metaphor of the machine is part of the idea that Mass Culture has turned everyone into machines that “do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again” (553). In explaining his logic, Warhol states that by trying to be individual, creative, and unique, we inevitably fall into the category of machines that do as we are told. In other words, we are told to be unique, so we look for ways of accomplishing that command.
When I first saw the paining of the soup can. I was baffled. I didn’t see why a painting a can of soup was such a big deal. In the interview, Swenson asked Warhol why he painted soup cans. Warhol replied: “Because I used to drink it” (554). It almost seems as though Warhol is oblivious to the social commentary that he is presenting by painting everyday objects such as a soup can. Warhol is immersed in Mass culture himself, and his art reflects this superficiality
Elisabeth Sevy 3/30/09
ReplyDeleteIn his essay, “Saturday Disasters”, T. Crow talks about Andy Warhol and his pop art. Andy Warhol often used famous people as his subjects for his art. He did silk screen in which he duplicated one picture multiple times in a grid. By doing this, he was making multiple images of the same celebrity, making each one less special than the next. These headshots, such as headshots of Marilyn Monroe were so special when alone, yet when reproduced they become unoriginal. The public thinks of Marilyn Monroe as this amazing individual, yet Crowe believes he did this to make people see that anyone can be copied, and made unoriginal. In this way, Warhol rejected modern art. He moved away from the experience of art, and made something so detached from the skill of art. It was repetitive and seemed as though it could potentially be easily copied, which he himself admitted. He wanted it that way. He purposefully made his art impersonal because as he said, “I think it would be so great if more people took up silk screens so that no one would know whether my picture was mine of somebody else’s.” He wasn’t interested in making something so creative and technical.
He was interested in the connection to the world. One way Andy Warhol connected his art to the real world was through his obsession with death and thus his death series. The death in his pictures captured and mirrored the death that was occurring all over the world. It captured the death that was covering newspapers everywhere. His art made a statement. He started his Death Series when he saw a big plane crash picture in the paper. He started using Marilyn Monroe in his art only shortly after her suicide. He then used Elizabeth Taylor’s headshot when she was diagnosed with a fatal disease, and he also used Kennedy after his assassination. Warhol said in his interview that “Every time you turned on the radio they said something like, ‘4 million are going to die.’ That started it.” The whole world was full of death and Warhol showed this in his art. Even celebrities were mortal. Even these people, that seemed so perfect, could be dead.
Andy Warhol is perhaps best known today for his silkscreen works that depicted images of celebrities in various ways. In his essay, Crow explores how Warhol selected and reproduced images from popular and mass culture as a form of commentary on the celebrities and consumer products depicted and the culture that promoted them. Crow first looks at Warhol’s use of a portrait of Marilyn Monroe throughout a series of his works. According to Crow, Warhol exposed the inadequacy of “the mass-produced image as the bearer of desires” through “the reality of suffering and death”. By cropping her upright portrait in a rectangle of , selected from publicity stills for the 1953 film Niagara, he created an image “at odds with the illusions of enticing animation normally projected by her photographs”. He used this rectangular unit in various ways, repeating it in a grid in Marilyn Diptych and surrounding it with a field of gold color in Gold Marilyn Monroe, for example. Since all of these works involved precise silkscreen reproductions without much room for variation in technique, they show little emotion of personal touches that had been integral to the abstract expressionist art that had come just before. Just as he said how he wants everyone to be a machine, his works are very impersonal, by using a pre-fabricated image and reproducing it precisely. Nevertheless, through the slight ways in which he varies how he presents these silkscreen images, he comments on the cult of celebrity and the effects of death. By repeating the portrait many times in Marilyn Diptych, Warhol references film and “lays out a stark and unresolved dialectic of presence and absence, of life and death” by varying how strongly each rectangle had been inked. The gold surrounding Marilyn Monroe in Gold Marilyn Monroe serves a Warhol also used images of Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy in similar ways, both also famous celebrities in the 1960s, again referencing the threat or actuality of death by the illness that Taylor had suffered and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
ReplyDeleteOther works by Warhol that Crow describe in his essay also deal with themes of death. He juxtaposed images of tuna cans, a familiar consumer food product, with the portraits of two sincere and self-conscious looking women that had died from food poisoning from eating contaminated tuna from them, challenging the “promise of safe and abundant packaged food” symbolized by the can. He repeated images of automobile accidents, suicides, and electric chairs that obviously dealt with themes of death, all sourced from press photographs that he had meticulously found. As with his paintings involving Marilyn Monroe, Warhol investigates questions about how these images interact with the emotions linked with the scenes they depict, in an impersonal and objective way by using pre-made images.
One of the most telling parts of Crow’s evidence is the quotes from Warhol stating that he “wants everybody to think alike” and that he “thinks everybody should be a machine.” These ideas present an ideal that can be used to analyze Warhol’s work. The idea of everyone being alike, or like a machine, creates a significant juxtaposition when applied to art. Art relies on people having their own influences and background, and how those influence the experience of a piece of art. If everyone was the same art would lose its uniqueness, which is something that Warhol implied in many of his artworks. This idea applied to commodity exchange, using references to culture, is how Crow explains Warhol’s different style compared to modernists.
ReplyDeleteCrow focuses on certain pieces that reflect the idea of celebrity or common culture, and through those pieces shows how Warhol transfers his vision. One of Warhol’s interests that is emphasized is his focus on Marilyn Monroe. Crow explains how Warhol’s interest in Monroe was based on her image. These paintings showed Warhol’s focus on the idea of mass-commodity by focusing on an actress that had become a symbol. Focusing on a symbol allowed Warhol to reference something that anyone would understand so that it would be clear to anyone what the painting was about. Crow explains how this intention perpetuates allowed Warhol’s art to perpetuate myths, which was a common link in many of his paintings including ones of Liz Taylor. Focusing on common images was also part of Warhol’s other paintings of consumer products.
Warhol’s paintings of consumer products offered a reference to mass culture in a way that would be significant to every consumer. These paintings epitomized the Warhol philosophy of everybody thinking alike by emphasizing the products that are universal among consumers. Along with other themes that Warhol later used that were based on news items, Warhol always focused his work on things that were well known in society, removing most of the chance to interpretation of his art and replacing it with recognition. Far from the modernist’s emphasis on the viewers impression or interpretation, Warhol showed viewers what they already knew.
Crow emphasizes the significance of mass culture and celebrity representation in his essay on Andy Warhol. Warhol’s Pop Art displayed photographs of stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. Like with Jasper Johns’s Flag, Warhol departed from modernist painting by offering artworks that showed popular icons that were familiar to the masses. Warhol departed from the modernist practice of emphasizing the individual or personal experience by offering a representation that created a common experience to the viewers.
ReplyDeleteHis distinct look in stylizing many of the photographs or creating duplicate images reveals his deeper message of society and popular culture. Such is the case with Marylin Diptych. As Warhol is quoted in saying, “I want everybody to think alike… I think everybody should be a machine.” Marilyn’s image became less of a personal homage to the greatly admired actress and more of a symbol of the commodity fetishism.
Warhol seemed to chose his celebrity subjects based on his interest in death and its meaning in light of popular culture. He began his works on Marilyn Monroe just weeks after her suicide. He began representing Elizabeth Taylor when word got out that she had a possibly fatal medical condition. Jackie Onasis became the subject of his artworks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. One is forced to consider why Warhol was so fixated with the idea of celebrity mortality. The answer lies within his interest in representing mass culture. The idea of death surrounding these idolized figures in our popular culture forces us to consider the fleeting quality of their significance in our lives. We come to realize that these people are just as human as us. Moreover, the most intimate and perhaps more significant details of their lives will never be known to us. Their image becomes this sort of distant, alienating thing.