Andy Warhol and His Screen Tests - Essay Example

Visual Art Paper Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests Andy Warhol Screen Tests Andy Warhol was a prominent contributor in the 20th century American visual art industry under the pop art genre. Warhol’s works delve in the link between the general artistic look, celebrity culture and ads that were prominent during the 1960s and 1970s. The artist proved to be an indispensable commercial illustrator, even as some people viewed his screen-Ttests as controversial. The Andy Warhol Museum located in his home city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has a wide range of permanent repertoire of his important artistic items. It is the biggest archive in the United States holding important pieces of art attributed on one artist. Warhols screen tests capture a variety of items created through different media including painting, hand drawing, printmaking, silk screening, films, photographs and sculpture. Part of his screen tests was computer-generated especially towards his death, following the integration of computer into the American film and media production. Regardless, Warhol’s works have been the focus of several retrospective exhibitions, publications, documentaries and feature films. This paper examines the connection between Andy Warhol’s screenshots and the pop culture between 1960s and 1980s. Warhol’s screen Tests The important connections between Warhol’s screenshots and the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s pop life experiences have led to their resurfacing in the current century, perhaps more than they appeared in the second-half of the 20th century when they were created. In the 1970, for instance, the artist pulled out 472 shots that he had captured between 1964 and 1966 alongside his footages of various art works from public galleries. However, between 1995 and 2007, different galleries have had their hands on these important artistic items and released them to the public for viewing for the first time in many decades as a celebration of the massive contributions Warhol made in the American visual art industry. Part of the Warhol’s earliest screenshots from films such as Kiss, Eat, and Sleep and Empire captured in the early 1960s continue to shed light on the then pop culture of romanticism and penchant for food in an environment where dietary complications had not yet become serious1. The screen tests were taken at a pace of 24 frames per second from 16mm film running a 100-foot long, with almost three-minute duration of the recording time. Each screenshot is usually played back at a slower pace of 16fps, which extends the duration of play to well about four minutes. Each shot concludes with a bright camera flare and several white dots symbolizing the perforated image of the artist as the roll ends. Owing to the tests beckoning some kind of resurrection, critics, visual artist specialists and academics have suggested several elaborating opinion pieces regarding the connection between the works and the then prevailing pop culture. Warhols pop aspect of the screenshots is evidenced in each item’s stillness, serial nature, boredom aesthetics and the realism in the seminal pop films. Warhol’s general fascination with being a celeb also interrupted the abstract qualities of the screenshots2. Pop cultural attributes The screen tests depict the pop culture as diverse and thus indifferent to specific, formal theories. This is evidenced in Warhol’s determination to present different films in diverse portraiture as evidenced in his instinctive photo stands and silkscreen effigies. Part of the screenshots features arrays of the pop aspects of the culture. These include; Baby Jane Holzer doing some tooth-brushing, with white paste overflowing from her mouth; Dennis Hopper singing a song that is inaudible to the audience; Lou Reed and Allen Ginsberg looking at each other in the eye, and surprisingly, Donyale Luna, the pioneer Black model supposedly using her own image reflected on the mirror to actively make her hair and face by touching them with her long-nailed fingers. Luna’s inclusion in the screen tests is particularly telling a lot about the rise of blacks in the 1960s under the auspices of the Civil Rights Movement whose aim was to deliver equal rights for all communities to a share of the national resources3. While the formal connection of the screen tests to Warhols portraiture skills and agendas are pretty obvious, their differences are equally imperative, if not impressive. The screen tests neither have voyeurism qualities nor vérité touch inclinations: rather they are generally exhibitionist and are thus presented clearly from the natural camera-based aesthetics. In some cases, however, Warhol influences some performances by introducing audio aesthetics in the form of admiring expletives such as “Hes doing it!4.” Others argue that the artist would just bring out the natural qualities of realism by improving visibility in the studio, setting the camera, and sit aside, leaving the camera to capture any abstract imagery appearing in the frame. By ensuring that each screenshot captured a subject matter whose elasticity was unavailable in common still portraits, Warhol aimed to present something unique for the diverse and increasingly knowledgeable audiences of the second-half of the 20th century. Pop aesthetics In an interesting curatorial depiction, a screenshot of Ethel Scull who was Warhol’s patron and an equally important contributor in the seminal collections of pop and minimal artistic works is depicted on a typical 16mm film on the outside part of the exhibition. The screenshot is projected on a stand screen that was common in the 1970s pop culture showing Sculls face as blank, and apart from the sparkling lips, none of Warhol’s shades-sporting silkscreen effects is immediately clear. The imagery is a stark contrast from the grid-photo of the same celebrity captured a year earlier with more artificial aesthetics. The abstract qualities which were popular in the then culture are evenly captured in the gray, coarse, remote, and generally old-fashioned imagery. The projector, for instance, generates a loud, persistent noise and with the setting of adequate gadgetry and image, the product elaborates the filmic aspect of the entire enterprise5. As researchers have noted, Warhol captures religious quietness which also played a huge role in balancing the secularism culture. In the primary gallery of Warhol’s, for example, a dozen screenshots play in virtual silence, with the portraits reemerging and disappearing in fashionable eternal return6. The appearance of these technology-aided transfers is clear, except for a number of bizarre artifact aspects of the cheekbones of generally attractive imagery of composer Gino Piserchio. With the contrast coming out eminently clearer than with the celluloid imagery installed outside of the gallery, Warhol clearly captured the pop culture by presenting the secular culture and the Christian religious attributes of the important era all at once. Democratic equality Democratic equality is evidenced in the diverse nature of the arts. The presentation of the screen tests particularly reflects the artist’s radical aesthetics of using only the abstract black and white video footages and subtitles or simple audios to bring about omnipresent imagery of the typical modern mass media. Warhol’s screenshots capture the democratic impartiality of every subject-matter captured by the cameras. These underscore Warhol’s serious focus on current developments and his determination to blur the line between modern art and the commercialism culture. The arts feature multiple screen tests of similar subjects including multi-directional images of newspaper boxes, shop window displays, stereotypical pictures and related curiosities as well as the realities of the 1960s’ social differences along race and social class. Such imageries of common life experiences represent the typical American culture, which in the artist’s screen tests creates a clear iconographical portrayal of the increasingly modern America where social tolerance was at its nascence. Snapping arrangements of items in the focus of the camera such as furniture, grocery or tableware clearly inspired Warhol’s experimentation with diverse compositions of subjects for abstraction qualities, which is ideal for an increasingly diverse audience7. Artistic subjectivity Even as his art seeks to appeal to the widest audience, Warhol’s art is somehow getting lost in ambiguity. In addition, by capturing subjects that were closest to him, it is arguable that these imageries are subjective in one way or another. However, the fact that the subjects were pop artists and media personalities which great pop acclaim across the social divide lends credence to Warhol’s work as typically representative of the second-half of the 20th century pop trends. The screenshots of pop ‘actors’ such as of Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and Jane Holzer occupy an imperative part of his works in the sense that they paint Warhol as balancing credibility issues with social harmony to blur the social differences in the modern American society. As a consequence, these compromise screen tests of portraits have become important documents in the contemporary history, especially for the current generation of artists and historians who would like to get a glimpse of the then public life, the cultural discourses and the role of media by just observing visual art8. This way, the current audience can appreciate and trace the development of a more liberal, unified society from the mid-20th century social struggles which threatened to divide the nation further. Warhol’s Ambivalence The then prevailing social culture as evidenced in the diverse nature of the screen tests also characterizes the artist’s ambivalent interactions with the increasingly modern media. Warhol cuts the image of an artist who was sensitive to the allure of the glamorous qualities of the Hollywood films as embodied in the movie stars and because he was an actor in his own right, he comically presented the ironies in these celebrities by capturing their images. This he did through his individual castings, which primarily focused on carefully set, mediated qualities of subject-matters, tampered with abstract qualities of still cameras. Following Warhol’s positive encounter with and perfection of the screenshots, modern films turned out to be one of his favorites, most probably as an unintended consequence of him looking for the best screen tests to enrich his gallery9. The resulting cognitive conflict between the screen tests and digitized items evokes a challenging medium for curatorial specialists. But with clear documentation of cultural diversity in its abstract form, the appeal was captured in virtually all of Warhol’s works. As researchers have noted, Warhol’s screen tests preserve important artworks of the 20th century, which means his works do not only extend the durability of the 1960s pop art experiences and the accompanying drama, but preserve their cultural connections to the society10. Conclusion Andy Warhol was a popular photographer of the 1960s, through the mid-1980s when he passed on. In spite of his demise, his invaluable screen tests, especially those which he pulled off the public view in the 1970s have resurfaced over the past two decades and are highly appealing to curious artists who are keen on getting a glimpse of the 1960s’ popular influences on his various works. Warhol’s each and every screenshot is immensely representative of the prevailing public culture and life in the wake of social diversity campaigns. The diverse aspect of the pieces of art also portrays the artist’s personal fascinations with the American cultural flaws. The flaws are evident in Warhol’s abstract aesthetics of the unstructured screen snapshots that contrast with those of carefully set subjects to capture the interests of virtually all audiences. Bibliography Carrier, David. Proust/Warhol: Analytical Philosophy of Art (New York: Peter Lang, 2009): 34- 51. Flatley, Jonathan and Grudin, Anthony E. Introduction: Warhols Aesthetics. Criticism, 56 no.3 (2014): pp.419-423. Mattick, Paul. Art in Its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2003): pp.143-144. Powers, Edward D. Attention must be paid: Andy Warhol, John Cage and Gertrude Stein. European Journal of American Culture, 33 no.1 (2014): pp.5-31. Printz, Neil. Making money-printing painting: Warhols dollar bill paintings. Criticism, 56 no.3 (2014): pp.535-557. Robillard, Douglas. The Critical Response to Flannery OConnor (New York: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004): pp.27-85. Warhol Andy and Crone, Rainer. 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