Artist: Andy Warhol Essay

Perhaps no esthetic creationificeist in the Statesn history has embraced ambiguity more willingly than Andy Warhol. To this day, scholarly interpretations of his multi-faceted creative siding struggle to define Warhols essential aesthetic, and also to resolve the aboriginal debate relative to his creative personic career, which centers around crucial definitions of pop finesse and avant garde expression. Warhol, regarded by umpteen as an apologist for twentieth century American nuance, receives an equal portion of accolade for being twentieth century American cultures roughly accomplished satirist and critic.As an artist with roots in commercial design, who, by 1965, was already a eminence commanding large commissions and shows in major g solelyeries Warhol occupied a curious aesthetic position which allowed him to forward a number of ground-breaking artistic deeds which disturb the image of Pop as a crass, commercial cousin-german to the more genuinely radical exertions of the period while remaining a successful capitalist and habitual celebrity-artist.(Rifkin 647) Warhol remains a leading forefinger of the pop art movement, which is viewed by art historians and critics as an important movement in the mid-twentieth century. Warhols use of commonplace objects such as ane dollar bill bills, soup cans, soft-drink bottles, and soap-pad boxes is his paintings, collages, and other kit and caboodle emphasized what was and then considered a sheer(a) new voice in experimental art.paradoxically, the experimental attri hardlyes of this new art drew their origin from common, everyday cultural objects, with which Warhol strikemed to be attempting to ridicule and to sustain American middle-class values by erasing the distinction betwixt popular and high culture while concurrently attempting to blur or exhaust the line surrounded by popular expression and experimental techniques. (Warhol, Andy) In summation to blurring the lines between pop-art an d avant garde experimentalism, Warhol also blurred the lines between the personalized and impersonal in his art.His idiom incorporated elements of newfangled society, particularly repetitiveness and emptiness which contend equally visceral roles in the impact of his works. In doing so, Warhol admitted into his art, a personal element which oftentimes made us of erotic and sexual themes, but which were expressed by way of an intermediary medium or flummox of contemporary images which seemed to be rife with symbolic association but which business leader just as easily comprise merely a guileful pastiche or surface-level recapitulation of social mores and icons.Warhol produced 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 that which produced indelible, iconic opthalmic statements. (Warhol, Andy) Warhols idiom develo ped from his lived-experience. Rather than engage his personal bread and butter 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 1960s Warhol and his assistants worked out of a large parvenu York studio dubbed the Factory. In the mid- sixties Warhol began devising 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 LAmour (1973). With Paul Morrissey, in 1974 Warhol also made the films Frankenstein and Dracula.In 1973, Warhol launched the clip Interview, a populaceation centered upon his fascination with the cult of the celebrity. (Warhol, Andy) The influence of his life upon Warhols notions of compos itional methods gained reinforcement from similar avant-gard artists, poets, and publishers in the 1960s. Many of Warhols associates Floating Bear, and Ed Sanderss Fuck You A Magazine of the arts transmitted gossip and/as new literary works for the elongate community who read them, the little magazines functioned as a kind of root epistolary romance which indicated the juxtapositioning of biography and artistic expression.As such, the fast-paced niggardliness of these businesss 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- writing style. (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 contr everywheresy, he was also a self-professed have intercourser of contemporary culture and pop-culture. A good case in point is Warhols celebrated response to Gerard Malangas Andy Warhol on Automation An Interview, originally printed in Chelsea magazine in 1968 Q. How will you meet the challenge of automation? A. By becoming part of it (Pratt, 37).In the end, Warhols statement about automation is both self-effacing and self-elevating he is suggesting, in fact, that he not further 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 soulfulness into the non-personal culture as a whole. For example, Warhol said he thought that making money is art and workings is art and good business is the best art and re commended that in love affairs we follow at least one rule Ill pay you if you pay me. (null18) Warhols 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 good method which propels most of his important creative work as well. Warhol obviously understood the public persona to be a function of artistic expression and vice-versa. At play in all of Warhols works is an interaction between Warhols supposed subjectlessness and the suspicion that this is, in fact, an impossibility.The longing to penetrate this impassivity has inflected more of the critical and art historic commentary on Warhol as well, where a dialectic frequently unfolds between the attempt to define the artists meaning and the tacit surmisal that neither he nor his art will provide the means to do so. (Joseph) In order to understand Warhols work or his life, it is necessity to conceded that they are absolutely inseparable. 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.Its often impossible to distinguish the authentic Warhol from the act, which, of course, concedes another fact that Warhols expressive and creative techniques alone whitethorn fail to rise to the level of bear and meaningful art sans the impact of his public persona and biographical details. (Joseph) From this perspective, many of Warhols attempted works, from his dozens of films, to his thousands of silk-screens and sketches, may be of less inbuilt value than is widely supposed the role of avant-gardes has always been, as buttocks Ashbery maintained in his founding article on Pop, to call vigilance to the ambiguity of the artistic experience, to the crucial con league about the nature of art rather than to express, with finality, assumptio ns about the form and function of art, per se. (Rifkin 647) Warhol seems forever poised between these two pieces 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 fringe characters of all kinds.Against this central dichotomy, Warhols 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. resolve of the fall is in the challenge still posed by the load of Warhols art is that of articulating the means by which meaning is produced in the center of such impassability.If Warhols 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) I never fall apart because I never fa ll together. (Joseph) A double for Warhols 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. Warhols conclusion was that the best method of electrifying the old-master portrait custom 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 tuition 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, Warhols most famous work his Marilyn M onroe portrait, reveals itself as much more classically inspired than its radical reputation would suggest No less than the medieval spectator who accepted as fact the camp-made 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 Monroes head ( fig. 126 ), commit it on gold paint, and let it float on high in a timeless, spaceless heaven (as Busby Berkeley had done in 1943 for a likewise decapitated assembly of movie stars in the finale of The Gangs All Here), he was creating, in effect, a secular saint for the 1960s that might well command as much earthly idolatry 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 extraordin arily diverse and celebrated career. Warhol presented an enigma, perhaps, but one which bare of its mystery, still revealed merely a poker-faced perceiver of contemporary America or not. Just as easily, Warhol could be viewed as a ethereal Bohemian, a gay-rights activists and a visionary of underground culture.That he could paint 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 static personality until we realize that this numb, voyeuristic view of contemporary life, in which the dangerous and the trivial, the fashionable and the horrifying, blandly coexist as passing spectacles, is a devilishly accurate mirror of a commonplace experience in modern art and life. (Rosenblum 210)Works CitedWarhol, Andy. The Columbia Encyclopedia. 6th ed. 2004. Joseph, Branden W. The Critical Response to Andy Warhol. ruse Journal 57.4 (1998) 105+. Leung, Simon. And There I Am Andy Warhol and the Ethics of Identification. machination 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. Andy Warhol, meter and Gossip in the 1960s. Criticism 40. 4 (1998) 647. Rosenblum, Robert. Selected Essays Selected Essays. New York Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 1999.