Andy Warhol's Pop Art - Research Paper Example

?Topic: Interpreting through Primary Sources Andy Warhol's Pop Art “The Andy Warhol Diaries” by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett (1991) is an excellent example of how a primary sourcebook can assist in interpreting the works of an artist. This book was written as collaboration between the two authors, with Pat Hackett acting as Warhol’s secretary and actually doing the stenography for the book. With regard to writing methodology, Hackett reports that she received calls from or called Warhol every day of his life from the late 1970’s until his death in 1987. Hackett transcribed these phone calls word for word into the diary, and then edited the diary for publication. This method is itself reflective of the commercial approach that Warhol took to art, where he ran a “Factory” and employed a number of assistants and staff to do much of the work of creating his paintings. Strangely, Hackett describes Warhol’s method of painting as being very akin to the application of make-up and fashion. She writes in the introduction to the diary: “Andy had his assistants prepaint rolls of canvas in one of two background shades: flesh tone for men’s portraits and a different, pinker flesh tone for women’s. Using a carbon transfer under tracing paper, he’d trace the image from the 40” X 40” acetate onto the flesh-tone-painted canvas and then paint in the colored areas like hair, eyes, lips on women, and ties and jackets on men. When the silkscreen was ready, the detailed image would be lined up with the prepainted colored areas and the details of the photograph would be screened onto the canvas. It was the slight variations in the alignment of the image with the painted colors underneath that gave Warhol portraits their characteristic ‘shifting’ look.” (Warhol and Hackett, 1991) The world of fashion in New York and internationally were interwoven with the fine art crowd of museums. Artists, models, young actors and actresses, musicians, and all manner of up and coming celebrities were pictured in Andy Warhol’s diary. Warhol’s language is like gossip when he describes the scenes, scandals, cliques, and conversations that occur in his presence involving some of the most famous names in pop culture. Mick Jagger, Bianca Jagger, Halston, Basquiat, Lou Reed, Nico, and others are favorites as he attends parties on the Upper East Side of Manhattan featuring all of the wealth and luxury of the entertainment world. Warhol clearly understood the path to celebrity and struggled to achieve that in his life. Hacket writes: “Every night, celebrities of the art, fashion, music, and ‘underground’ filmmaking crowds jammed themselves into favorite corners of the back room at Max’s and monitored each other’s clothes, makeup, wit, and love interests while they received ‘exchange’ celebrities from out of town—directors and producers from Europe or Hollywood—and waited to be taken away from ‘all this’ (New York notoriety) and put into ‘all that’ (global fame). Andy’s art hung on the wall.” (Warhol and Hackett, 1991) Thus, if every artist must be supported and reflective of a larger culture, than Warhol’s closest identity is to this Upper East Side Manhattan and Greenwich Village crowd of young bohemians, artists, models, and actresses, all of whom shared the career goals of Warhol of attaining celebrity status through their self-expression. Warhol’s art becomes more “universal” and American when it symbolizes a superficial culture, pop culture, where everybody has 15 minutes of fame. Fame is an integral part of art and art history as it is known in modern times, because if an artist is not famous, his or her work will not be printed, distributed, and known. If the artist is not famous, it will have no influence on other artists and vanish, no matter its beauty or technical excellence. Warhol’s art is conceptual and uses silk-screens of sampled images taken from photographs, or copied from print and television advertisements. Warhol himself may only paint a few details of makeup, or a few highlights on the painting. What is important is his work is its symbolic nature and embrace of the superficial, surface aspects of modernism, and finding depth by transforming the superficial into a deeper iconic presence. In this regard, much of his work is also about creating a type of “brand,” the Warhol brand that could be marketed and sold through paintings, magazines, film, and other media. The celebrity and fame aspects of his work accord directly with this branding, in the manner that TV commercials and magazine ads create a spokesperson or model for their brand. The corporation creates the brand through graphic imagery, logo, and also a marketing campaign involving a spokesperson or salesman-type in the advertisement. Warhol’s work plays ironically on the fact that these same commercial patterns are found in the high-art world as in commercial grocery products, and then seeks to symbolically bridge the two by switching the symbols of the high and low. Thus, the Campbell’s soup cans, the Brillo pad boxes, and other commercial products mass-produced for the retail grocery store and supermarket are taken as subject matter for the art. Without Warhol’s celebrity and brand, without his spokesmanship, these images and products would be viewed and ignored thousands of times per day by people. After he transforms these mundane subjects with his conceptual art, they become “valuable” commodities. Warhol’s diary begins by illustrating this theme in a discussion that places pop art in contrast or as an expression of the soul of modernity. He states: ““Catherine Guinness didn’t get edgy till the last day when she started this annoying thing the English do—asking me over and over, ‘What exactly is Pop Art?’ It was like the time we interviewed that blues guy Albert King for Interview, when she kept asking, ‘What exactly is soul food?’” (Warhol and Hackett, 1991) That Warhol in this first passage relates pop art to soul food should be taken of critical importance, even more so in that it is highlighted in the first entry. That the soul can be expressed in what is taken to be superficial and empty is key to understanding Warhol, otherwise there may be a failure to recognize these common aspects of pop culture as part of a deeper cultural expression of our selves. Food is directly related to the insatiable appetite, to hunger, and the soul is what is yearning to be satisfied. What is characteristic about food is that it must be continued to be produced on mass scales, on a daily basis, by all aspects of society. It is basic energy. Thus, Warhol is seeing pop art as related to the creativity of this daily effort to produce, agriculturally, in the kitchen, the restaurant, the supermarket, etc. Stylistically, advertising is at the top of this food chain. Art relates to this in that Warhol feels it must be produced by a factory, in mass-quantities, that creativity must become as regular part of life as the production of food, or cooking and eating. In the last passage of Warhol’s diary before his death, Andy relates a meeting with Miles Davis, the legendary Jazz musician, and describes his hands and fingers. He states: "I had all my makeup with me. Miles Davis was there and he has such delicate fingers. They’re the same length as mine but half the width. I’d gone with Jean Michel last year to see his show at the Beacon, and I’d met him in the sixties at that store on Christopher Street, Hernando’s, where we used to go get leather pants. I reminded him that I’d met him there and he said he remembered. Miles is a clotheshorse." (Warhol and Hackett, 1991) That Warhol typically describes everything in homosexual terms is also an aspect of his work that is evident throughout the diary and is very important for the development of gay identity after his death. Yet, Hackett also reports in the introduction how Warhol would commonly exaggerate facts and figures in description, ironically and sarcastically, as a means or method to further the effect. She writes: “He exaggerated quantities—he’d describe a 5’2” person as 2’, or a man who weighed 250 pounds as 400. ‘Eighteen’ was a favorite number—if there were multiple events on his evening schedule, he’d say he had ‘eighteen parties to go to.’” (Warhol and Hackett, 1991) That Warhol thought and described reality through exaggerations should thus be a key element in understanding his work, and this in many ways is related to the celebrity aspects of fame that he himself is famous for historically. For example, fame and celebrity are based upon an exaggerated sense of ego identity, in the same manner that mass-production of soup or soap pads can be seen as an exaggeration of traditional relationships of craftsmanship. The Factory as artist studio is also a type of exaggeration, but one that was necessary to compete for media space in the public discourse of a super-power. The nuclear age of which Warhol is a product in the 1950s & 1960s is an exaggeration of war. What seems to create this exaggeration is the “Wizard of Oz” type of effects of modern media production. Warhol tells Hackett on Tuesday, August 12, 1980: “The opera was boring. Good costumes, lots of tumbling. Drag queens. I saw Margaret Hamilton, the witch in The Wizard of Oz, and got so excited and went over to her and told her how wonderful she was. She does the Maxwell House commercials now. She’s really small.” (Warhol and Hackett, 1991) The humor of Warhol is evident throughout his diary and it opens the reader up to understanding him as a person, an artist, and also to how his mind and perception were describing reality. This is evident in passages like the following, where Warhol states: “Watched 20/20 and instead of saying, ‘In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,’ it was so funny to hear Hugh Downs say, ‘As Andy Warhol once said, in fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.’ People on TV always get some part wrong, like—‘In the future fifteen people will be famous.’ Oh, and I forgot to say that Truman really is looking more and more like his bulldog.” (Warhol and Hackett, 1991) Just as it is significant to the meaning how the TV announcer arranges his language in order to construct meaning, so too it is important to understand the grammar and vocabulary of Andy Warhol’s artwork. When looking at his artwork critically, what immediately is evident is the Warhol brand which is created stylistically through the use of patterns of communication from advertising and marketing, and Warhol creates himself a celebrity and spokesperson for his art. Yet, Warhol is regarded as a genius because he understood subtle aspects about modern communication that related to the way meaning was constructed socially through symbols and signs. In this manner the gossip of his diary functions in a way that is photographic, but much as in his silk-screens, these photographs are further worked into planes of representation through simplification. Thus, Warhol is able to build from superficiality a system and a style of art that functions on the same aspects as the essentialists, focused on appearance in the way of classicism. In this way, Warhol also assisted with the evolution of conceptual art popularly in modernism. Sources Cited: Warhol, Andy and Hackett, Pat. The Andy Warhol Diaries. New York: Warner Books., 1989. Read More