'Artist: Andy Warhol Essay\r'

'Perhaps no contrivanceist in the Statesn history has embraced equivocalness more testamentingly than Andy Warhol. To this day, pedantic interpretations of his multi-faceted creative give awayput struggle to define Warhol’s essential aesthetic, and also to resolve the central deliberate relative to his prowessistic c atomic number 18er, which centers around crucial definitions of â€Å" refine art” and â€Å"avant garde” expression. Warhol, regarded by umteen as an vindicator for twentieth century American culture, receives an equal share of accolade for universe twentieth century American culture’s nearly accomplished ironist and critic.\r\nAs an artist with â€Å"roots in commercial message design, who, by 1965, was already a fame magisterial large commissions and shows in major g each(prenominal)eries” Warhol occupied a unique aesthetic position which all toldowed him to forward a number of ground-breaking artistic plant life wh ich disturb â€Å"the soma of Pop as a crass, commercial cousin to the more genuinely radical movements of the period” man remaining a successful capitalist and casual celebrity-artist.\r\n(Rifkin 647) Warhol remains a â€Å"leading exponent of the land art movement,” which is viewed by art historians and critics as an fundamental movement in the mid-twentieth century. Warhol’s use of â€Å" hackneyed objects such as dollar bills, soup cans, soft-drink bottles, and soap-pad boxes” is his paintings, collages, and other(a) drills emphasized what was then considered a heady new voice in observational art.\r\nparadoxically, the â€Å"experimental” attributes of this new art drew their origin from common, e preciseday ethnic objects, with which Warhol seemed to be attempting to â€Å"ridicule and to celebrate American middle-class values by erasing the distinction among popular and extravagantly culture” while concurrently attempti ng to blur or erase the line between popular expression and experimental techniques. (â€Å"Warhol, Andy”) In increment to blurring the lines between pop-art and avant garde experimentalism, Warhol also blurred the lines between the in the flesh(predicate) and impersonal in his art.\r\nHis idiom incorporated elements of red-brick society, particularly repetitiveness and â€Å"emptiness” which played equally visceral cases in the come to 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 establish of contemporary images which seemed to be rife with symbolic draw but which might just as comfortably comp break barely a clever miscellanea or surface-level recapitulation of social mores and icons.\r\nWarhol produced â€Å"multi-image, mass-produced silk-screen paintings: for many of these, such as the portrayings of Marilyn Monr oe and Jacqueline Kennedy, he employed report photographs” which allowed for an impersonal medium and yet which produced indelible, iconic opthalmic statements. (â€Å"Warhol, Andy”) Warhol’s idiom developed from his lived-experience. Rather than use 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.\r\nIn 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 battle of Marathon essays on boredom. In The Chelsea Girls (1966), a seven-hour voyeuristic regard into hotel rooms, he used projection techniques that constituted a startling divergence from established systems. Among his later films are Trash (1971) and L’Amour (1973). With Paul Morrissey, in 1974 Warhol also made the films Frankenstein and Dracula.\r\nIn 1973, Warhol launched the magazine Interview, a publication centered upon his fascination with the cult of the celebrity. ” (â€Å"Warhol, Andy”) The invite of his life upon Warhol’s notions of compositional methods gained reinforcement from standardized 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 humanities transmitted gossip and/as new literary works; for the extended community who read them, the dwarfish magazines functioned as a kind of group epistolary romance” which indicated the juxtapositioning of biography and artistic expression.\r\nAs such, the â€Å" fast 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 primordial films” and also, into his photographically inspired portraits and other paintings which had reclaimd a thought-to-be-dying sub-genre. (Rifkin 647)\r\nSo, in some ways, Warhol seemed to be acting at one time against the contemporary social mores of his time: he was openly homosexual, lived as a Bohemian reveler, with a nature for excess and he made dramatically enigmatic public statements which seemed to stoke the fires of contr oversy, he was also a self-professed lover of contemporary culture and pop-culture. A obedient case in point is Warhol’s renowned response to â€Å"Gerard Malanga’s â€Å"Andy Warhol on mechanisation: An Interview,” originally printed in Chelsea magazine in 1968: â€Å"Q. How will you meet the take exception of automation? A. By suitable part of it” (Pratt, 37).\r\nIn the end, Warhol’s statement roughly automation is both self-effacing and self-elevating; he is proposeing, 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 brainstorm and power, but he is also admitting to a defence reaction (or subsuming) of the individual into the non-personal culture as a whole. For example, Warhol verbalize he â€Å"thought that â€Å"making money is art and working is art and good business is the go around art” and recommended that in love affairs we detect at least one rule: â€Å"I’ll pay you if you pay me.\r\n” (null18) Warhol’s comments ofttimes invited cultural projection; that is, his statements allowed an individual or group of individuals to inflict their own beliefs onto his words. This is a similar operative method which propels nearly 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 wo rks is â€Å"an interaction between Warhol’s supposed subjectless(prenominal)ness and the distrust that this is, in fact, an impossibility.\r\nThe desire to penetrate this impassivity has inflect much of the critical and art historical description 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 spin around out of control.\r\nâ€Å"[I]t’s often impossible to lie with the authentic Warhol from the act,” which, of course, concedes another fact: that Warhol’s communicative and cr eative 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 upkeep …\r\nto the ambiguity of the artistic experience, to the crucial confusion to the highest degree the nature of art” rather than to express, with finality, assumptions about the do work and function of art, per se. (Rifkin 647) Warhol seems forever poised between these ii humanitys: 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 o f all kinds.\r\nAgainst 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.\r\nIf Warhol’s archive stands as a sort of metonym of its subject, then the profusion and distinction of materials deep down justly calls to mind one of the most famous maxims from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and spikelet 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 sumptuous himself also shows his propensity for making profitable art, and for ce lebrating the celebrity social worlds he so loved.\r\nHis reinvention of portraiture, though viewed as astonishingly radical, simply incorporated the most forward-looking 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, financial backing world was, now that we see it in retrospect, distressingly obvious. The most commonplace source of visual culture about our famous contemporaries is, after all, the photographic image, whether it comes from the pages of the Daily News or Vogue.\r\n” (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 recognised as fact the hand 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 uprightness these machine-made photographic images of our modern heroes and heroines.\r\nWhen 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 make in 1943 for a similarly decapitated convention of movie stars in the finale of The Gang’s All Here), he was creating, in effect, a worldly saint for the 1960s that might well manage as much earthly awe and veneration. (Rosenblum 208)\r\n 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 notable 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 prophesier Bohemian, a gay-rights activists and a visionary of underground culture.\r\nThat he could paint â€Å"simultaneously rabbit 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 know that this numb, voyeuristic view of contemporary life, in which the inscribe and the trivial, the fashionable and the horrifying, blandly coexist as handout spectacles, is a deadly accurate mirror of a commonplace experience in modern art and life. ” (Rosenblum 210)\r\nWorks Cited\r\nâ€Å"Warhol, Andy. ” The Columbia Encyclopedia. 6th ed. 2004. Joseph, Branden W. â€Å"The minute solution 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 red-brick 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.\r\n'