Tuesday, May 26, 2009

W: Andy Warhol



Those damned soup cans. I think that you have to have lived under a rock to have not seen or had some contact with Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup can paintings. Then you either love them or hate them. At various times in my life, I have had both reactions. When I finally got to see them at MoMA, for the first time I had a true reaction. Again, this was one of those times when seeing the work in person was so much more significant than in books or online. There is a hand work in them that shows through when you get an opportunity to see them in person and stop to study them that I lost in smaller translations.

“Earlier artists, like Monet, had painted the same motif in series in order to display minute discriminations of perception, the shift of light and color form hour to hour on a haystack, and how these could be recorded by the subtlety of eye and hand. Warhol's thirty-two soup cans are about nothing of the kind. They are about sameness (though with different labels): same brand, same size, same paint surface, same fame as product. They mimic the condition of mass advertising, out of which his sensibility had grown. They are much more deadpan than the object which may have partly inspired them, Jasper Johns's pair of bronze Ballantine ale cans.”
- From "American Visions", by Robert Hughes

Most of Warhol’s work was accomplished in the six years following the show of his 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans in 1962. The American iconic Pop Artist attacked the products and celebrities of the time in his repetitious silk screened paintings. He takes a role as spectator in his work and creates work that is both copied and original.

Recently, I’ve seen clips and documentaries on the Ovation channel about his “Factory” days. I’m not sure that I like the work he created—does that really matter—but I think it is important to understand how original it was in the time and place of the 1960s. Today it’s easy to replicate his basic approach in a computer. But the original work is definitely a hand-done process and that’s where I think it derives its originality and impact.

The poster-color silkscreen over sketches of the celebrities defines the era. I don’t think that you would get very far discussing Marilyn Monroe and not consider the Warhol painting. I put the Ingrid as a Nun painting here because my daughter Alexis loves Ingrid Bergman.

I like Jasper John’s Ballantine ale cans better than the soup cans. But I like beer better than soup. Go figure. With Warhol, I keep trying to pull away, but his images keep popping up over and over again. Not all influences are pretty or good.

1 comment:

  1. I have the same reaction to Warhol's art (and life) as you. I'm fascinated, even sometimes inspired by him...other times, I bump up against its limitations and, at times, ugliness.

    Lou Reed was the lead singer/songwriter of The Velvet Underground, a rock-n-roll/art band Warhol sponsored. Reed had a falling out with Warhol, but he never lost his respect (even love) for the artist. After Warhol's death, Reed put together a relatively sympathetic tribute album called Songs for Drella. Before that, however, he wrote the following haunting and philosophical song about Warhol's life that he likens to a dime-story mystery novel:

    He was lying banged and battered, skewered and bleeding
    Talking crippled on the cross
    Was his mind reeling and heaving hallucinating
    Fleeing what a loss

    The things he hadn't touched or kissed his senses
    Slowly stripped away
    Not like buddha not like vishnu
    Life wouldn't rise through him again

    I find it easy to believe
    That he might question his beliefs
    The beginning of the last temptation
    Dime store mystery

    The duality of nature, godly nature,
    Human nature splits the soul
    Fully human, fully divine and divided
    The great immortal soul

    Split into pieces, whirling pieces, opposites
    Attract
    From the front, the side, the back
    The mind itself attacks

    I know the feeling, I know it from before
    Descartes through hegel belief is never sure
    Dime store mystery, last temptation

    I was sitting drumming thinking thumping pondering
    The mysteries of life
    Outside the city shrieking screaming whispering
    The mysteries of life

    There's a funeral tomorrow
    At st. patrick's the bells will ring for you
    Ah, what must you have been thinking
    When you realized the time had come for you

    I wish I hadn't thrown away my time
    On so much human and so much less divine
    The end of the last temptation
    The end of a dime store mystery

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