Warhol

Year 3, semester 1

Why ARE We Still Talking About Andy Warhol?

This essay focuses on the theme of repetition. According to Arthur C Danto, the pop artist reproduced as high art what everybody knew – the familiar things of the ordinary person's life world: comic strips, soup cans, shipping cartons, cheeseburgers.1

What are the connections with repetition and the familiar? For Andy Warhol, the embodied meanings of his works belonged to the common culture of the time and were recognised as a part of every day life. What effect does the repetition of the familiar have on a human being?

The concepts addressed in this essayl involve research into:

• Introduction to pop art.

• Repetition in art

• Analysis of a work by Warhol.

• Analysis of work involving repetition by a contemporary artist.

• Comparing and contrasting these works.

• Psychology and repetition.

• Repetition and the role it plays in the human life world.

Excerpt

Repetition is with us from birth. As a baby, we live in a cyclical environment, a rhythm of life. We should be provided with warmth, nourishment and order. As we grow, we are taught by repetition to use the toilet and to talk. Repetition of words such as mama or daddy mean we have a language that we can associate with certain objects. We remember nursery rhymes and counting games through constant repetition. Our early upbringing in the world is a series of repetitions, and for most is a memory of happy times. For some less fortunate, childhood can bring back memories of abuse, a topic exposed through media frequently today.

Warhol's soup cans are represented as comfort food, a product of his everyday life and a packaged commodity. In contrast to the soup cans, Warhol also produced works relating to appropriated images in mass media production. An important body of work is the Death in America series based on newspaper photographs of car crashes, suicides, the electric chair and civil rights confrontations. These works use repetition of images based on Warhol's comment:

“When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect. The more you look at the exact same thing, the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.”2

This emptiness reflects consumer culture of the pop era through the saturation of mass media in television, newspapers and magazines. We become immune or de-sensitised to visual imagery through constant repetition in the mass media.

Through repetition of familiar, everyday objects, Warhol has responded to social and political conditions of popular culture in the 1960's. The works of Renee Green and Willie Cole also respond to social and political conditions facing us here and now. Their use of repetition and familiar objects, reiterates the many layers of meaning, understood through a common language, that a work of art can reveal to the viewer, rather than being viewed passively. The audience is a critical issue to consider for a socially and politically engaged artist. These works encourage the audience to consider their position in the world, and their engagement with other human beings.

1 Arthur Danto. Beyond the Brillo Box. New York; Noonday, 1992. 3

2 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: the Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, Mass.; MIT Press, 1996 131