Artist: Andy Warhol Essay

Perhaps no artist in American history has embraced ambiguity more willingly than Andy Warhol. To this day, scholarly interpretations of his multi-faceted creative output struggle to define Warhol’s essential aesthetic, and also to resolve the central debate relative to his artistic career, which centers around crucial definitions of â€Å"pop art† and â€Å"avant garde† expression. Warhol, regarded by many as an apologist for twentieth century American culture, receives an equal portion of accolade for being twentieth century American culture’s most accomplished satirist and critic. As an artist with â€Å"roots in commercial design, who, by 1965, was already a celebrity commanding large commissions and shows in major galleries† Warhol occupied a unique aesthetic position which allowed him to forward a number of ground-breaking artistic works which disturb â€Å"the image of Pop as a crass, commercial cousin to the more genuinely radical movements of the period† while remaining a successful capitalist and popular celebrity-artist. (Rifkin 647) Warhol remains a â€Å"leading exponent of the pop art movement,† which is viewed by art historians and critics as an important movement in the mid-twentieth century. Warhol’s use of â€Å"commonplace objects such as dollar bills, soup cans, soft-drink bottles, and soap-pad boxes† is his paintings, collages, and other works emphasized what was then considered a bold new voice in experimental art. paradoxically, the â€Å"experimental† attributes of this new art drew their origin from common, everyday cultural objects, with which Warhol seemed to be attempting to â€Å"ridicule and to celebrate American middle-class values by erasing the distinction between popular and high culture† while simultaneously attempting to blur or erase the line between popular expression and experimental techniques. (â€Å"Warhol, Andy†) In addition to blurring the lines between pop-art and avant garde experimentalism, Warhol also blurred the lines between the personal and impersonal in his art. His idiom incorporated elements of modern society, particularly repetitiveness and â€Å"emptiness† which played equally visceral roles in the impact of his works. In doing so, Warhol admitted into his art, a personal element which often made us of erotic and sexual themes, but which were expressed by way of an intermediary medium or set of contemporary images which seemed to be rife with symbolic association but which might just as easily comprise merely a clever pastiche or surface-level recapitulation of social mores and icons. Warhol produced â€Å"multi-image, mass-produced silk-screen paintings: for many of these, such as the portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy, he employed newspaper photographs† which allowed for an impersonal medium and yet which produced indelible, iconic visual statements. (â€Å"Warhol, Andy†) Warhol’s idiom developed from his lived-experience. Rather than utilize his personal life for theme and subject matter, he incorporated his biographical experiences: those of a Bohemian, East-coast avant-gard artist into his techniques and in to his supporting cast of assistants. In the 1960’s Warhol â€Å"and his assistants worked out of a large New York studio dubbed the â€Å"Factory. † In the mid-1960s Warhol began making films, suppressing the personal element in marathon essays on boredom. In The Chelsea Girls (1966), a seven-hour voyeuristic look into hotel rooms, he used projection techniques that constituted a startling divergence from established methods. Among his later films are Trash (1971) and L’Amour (1973). With Paul Morrissey, in 1974 Warhol also made the films Frankenstein and Dracula. In 1973, Warhol launched the magazine Interview, a publication centered upon his fascination with the cult of the celebrity. † (â€Å"Warhol, Andy†) The influence of his life upon Warhol’s notions of compositional methods gained reinforcement from similar avant-gard artists, poets, and publishers in the 1960’s. Many of Warhol’s associates â€Å"Floating Bear, and Ed Sanders’s Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts transmitted gossip and/as new literary works; for the extended community who read them, the little magazines functioned as a kind of group epistolary romance† which indicated the juxtapositioning of biography and artistic expression. As such, the â€Å"fast-paced intimacy of these productions appealed to Warhol, who worked to integrate these attributes of the mimeograph medium, as well as the personalities who populated the journals, into the production and distribution of his early films† and also, into his photographically inspired portraits and other paintings which had revitalized a thought-to-be-dying sub-genre. (Rifkin 647) So, in some ways, Warhol seemed to be acting directly against the contemporary social mores of his time: he was openly homosexual, lived as a Bohemian reveler, with a reputation for excess and he made dramatically ambiguous public statements which seemed to stoke the fires of controversy, he was also a self-professed lover of contemporary culture and pop-culture. A good case in point is Warhol’s famous response to â€Å"Gerard Malanga’s â€Å"Andy Warhol on Automation: An Interview,† originally printed in Chelsea magazine in 1968: â€Å"Q. How will you meet the challenge of automation? A. By becoming part of it† (Pratt, 37). In the end, Warhol’s statement about automation is both self-effacing and self-elevating; he is suggesting, in fact, that he not only understands the ways and means of contemporary culture but understands how to submit to it in order to glean artistic and creative insight and power, but he is also admitting to a denial (or subsuming) of the individual into the non-personal culture as a whole. For example, Warhol said he â€Å"thought that â€Å"making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art† and recommended that in love affairs we follow at least one rule: â€Å"I’ll pay you if you pay me. † (null18) Warhol’s comments frequently invited cultural projection; that is, his statements allowed an individual or group of individuals to foist their own beliefs onto his words. This is a similar operative method which propels most of his important creative work as well. Warhol seemingly understood the public persona to be a function of artistic expression– and vice-versa. At play in all of Warhol’s works is â€Å"an interaction between Warhol’s supposed subjectlessness and the suspicion that this is, in fact, an impossibility. The desire to penetrate this impassivity has inflected much of the critical and art historical commentary on Warhol as well, where a dialectic frequently unfolds between the attempt to define the artist’s meaning and the tacit assumption that neither he nor his art will provide the means to do so. † (Joseph) In order to understand Warhol’s work or his life, it is necessary to conceded that they are absolutely inseparable. â€Å"In a large portion of the writing on Warhol, the result is an analysis that cedes to projection, with the overall impression being one of an ineffectual and unenlightening hermeneutic spinning out of control. â€Å"[I]t’s often impossible to distinguish the authentic Warhol from the act,† which, of course, concedes another fact: that Warhol’s expressive and creative techniques alone may fail to rise to the level of enduring and meaningful art sans the impact of his public persona and biographical details. (Joseph) From this perspective, many of Warhol’s attempted works, from his dozens of films, to his thousands of silk-screens and sketches, may be of less intrinsic value than is widely supposed: â€Å"the role of avant-gardes has always been, as John Ashbery maintained in his founding article on Pop, to â€Å"call attention †¦ to the ambiguity of the artistic experience, to the crucial confusion about the nature of art† rather than to express, with finality, assumptions about the form and function of art, per se. (Rifkin 647) Warhol seems forever poised between these two worlds: the world of the pop-artist with its attending celebrity and riches and the world of the avant gard experimentalist with its womb-like world of underground poetry, music, theater and â€Å"fringe† characters of all kinds. Against this central dichotomy, Warhol’s aesthetic emerges like a spiderweb over a canyon and anyone attempting to cross over upon it, including, perhaps, Warhol himself is probably doomed to experience a very long fall. Part of the fall is in the â€Å"challenge still posed by the core of Warhol’s art is that of articulating the means by which meaning is produced in the midst of such impassability. If Warhol’s archive stands as a sort of metonym of its subject, then the profusion and disparity of materials within justly calls to mind one of the most famous maxims from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again): â€Å"I never fall apart because I never fall together. † (Joseph) A paradigm for Warhol’s unique melding of popular and avant garde techniques is his famous works in portraiture. This genre where he so famously distinguished himself also shows his propensity for making profitable art, and for celebrating the celebrity social worlds he so loved. His reinvention of portraiture, though viewed as astonishingly radical, simply incorporated the most modern of new visual technologies at the time: the photograph, to revitalize what had been a dead genre of patining and visual art. Warhol’s conclusion was that â€Å"the best method of electrifying the old-master portrait tradition with sufficient energy to absorb the real, living world was, now that we see it in retrospect, painfully obvious. The most commonplace source of visual information about our famous contemporaries is, after all, the photographic image, whether it comes from the pages of the Daily News or Vogue. † (Rosenblum 208) However, viewed closely, Warhol’s most famous work: his Marilyn Monroe portrait, reveals itself as much more classically inspired than its radical reputation would suggest : â€Å"No less than the medieval spectator who accepted as fact the handmade images of Christian characters who enacted their dramas within the holy precincts of church walls, we today have all learned to accept as absolute truth these machine-made photographic images of our modern heroes and heroines. When Warhol took a photographic silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe’s head ( fig. 126 ), set it on gold paint, and let it float on high in a timeless, spaceless heaven (as Busby Berkeley had done in 1943 for a similarly decapitated assembly of movie stars in the finale of The Gang’s All Here), he was creating, in effect, a secular saint for the 1960s that might well command as much earthly awe and veneration. (Rosenblum 208) Such interpretations provide a rich glimpse into the ambiguity of expression, the fusion of opposites, which Warhol achieved with brilliancy during his extraordinarily diverse and celebrated career. Warhol presented an enigma, perhaps, but one which stripped of its mystery, still revealed merely a poker-faced perceiver of contemporary America — or not. Just as easily, Warhol could be viewed as a visionary Bohemian, a gay-rights activists and a visionary of underground culture. That he could paint â€Å"simultaneously Warren Beatty and electric chairs, Troy Donahue and race riots, Marilyn Monroe and fatal car crashes, may seem the peculiar product of a perversely cool and passive personality until we realize that this numb, voyeuristic view of contemporary life, in which the grave and the trivial, the fashionable and the horrifying, blandly coexist as passing spectacles, is a deadly accurate mirror of a commonplace experience in modern art and life. † (Rosenblum 210) Works Cited â€Å"Warhol, Andy. † The Columbia Encyclopedia. 6th ed. 2004. Joseph, Branden W. â€Å"The Critical Response to Andy Warhol. † Art Journal 57.4 (1998): 105+. Leung, Simon. â€Å"And There I Am: Andy Warhol and the Ethics of Identification. † Art Journal 62. 1 (2003): 4+. Mattick, Paul. Art & Its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics. New York: Routledge, 2003. Pop out: Queer Warhol. Ed. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and JosE Esteban MuNoz. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Pratt, Alan R. The Critical Response to Andy Warhol. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Rifkin, Libbie. â€Å"Andy Warhol, Poetry and Gossip in the 1960s. † Criticism 40. 4 (1998): 647. Rosenblum, Robert. Selected Essays Selected Essays. New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 1999.