Strangely, this guy reminds me of micheal jackson. ek. OT

Information from internet and SOVA 123, and brenda’s notes. (Mainly from sova 123, posted here for easy reading)

Background
Son of poor Czech immigrants
Commercial artist in the 1950s, very successful. (once the most famous footwear illustrator in new york)

* 1960s:
- Worked towards goal of machine-like art, devoid of emotional and social comment in a New York Studio, known as “The Factory”.
- Work ranged from portraits of friends, celebrities to news events,car crashes, electric chairs to consumer products.

Abandoned comic-strip painting.

- Based work on commercial & popular images.
~ Took subject matter from the category of mass communication — newspaper, comic strips, ads, images of mass-produced products, etc.
~ One crucial quality of Warhol’s images = extreme obviousness.
~ Famous brands: Campbell’s Soup, Coca Cola; Famous people: Elvis, Marilyn; Most familiar objects: dollar bills, newspapers.

- Settled on a ‘cold’, ‘no-comment’ style of painting.
- Presented images as if they have undergone little or no processing by the artist.  Instead he favored the print method & use of assistants.
~ Implied that art could be made by anybody or as a collaborative venture along lines of commercial mass production.
~ Also encouraged the idea that anybody should be able to produce art.
-  Focused not on the end result/the ‘original work of art’, but on the creative processes that produced the work of art.

* 1962:
- Painted a series of DIY paintings.
- Such works mimicked the popular pastime of painting by numbers.
- Each canvas was based on a diagram from a ‘paint-by-numbers’ kit, photographed and projected onto the canvas; the numbers identifying the different coloured areas were produced in a mechanical way — commercial transfers.

1962: Discovered replicating image through photo-mechanical process — silkscreen printing.

E.g. Dollar Bills
~ Hand drawn banknote as basic unit to be printed one by one on a strict grid system.
* Grid = A pure expression of serial repetition that do away with relational methods of composition — it functioned as a sign for modernism in the context of abstract & representational painting.
~ In Dollar Bills, Warhol was literally printing money, matching technique to subject.  He also drew attention to the status of art as a mere commodity — ‘money on walls’.  The buying & selling of contemporary art was becoming big business in NY.

Silkscreen printing technique also eliminated the distinguishing personality of brushwork & satisfy his desire to make himself into a machine

* Mechanical method combined with the banality of images was to make his paintings appear completely meaningless & this was reinforced by his practice of repeating his images.
* Repetition = A useful tactic to empty his mind, free him to respond intuitively & it is open to accidents & chance effects.

- The accidental effects are often deliberately sought by Warhol.  In his hands, the silk-screen becomes a highly flexible means of creating expressive paint surfaces & forms.;  He exercised more control over the production of his work than is generally supposed.  The arrangement of images & the determining of the relationship of the image or block of images to the round are conscious compositional procedures.

1962 -3, Warhol was producing some of the most influential art..
~ In them, traditional assumptions about the uniqueness & expressive potential of art was questioned in a disturbing way in his use of repetition & semi-mechanical method.

~ There was also an identification with consumerism & assembly-line methods of production.  This suggested an ironing out of personality & individual identity which was an American condition.  Warhol recognised that assembly-line production while dehumanizing was also imbued with grandeur & inspiring efficiency

* Use of the photo-screen
- An easy to use technique; capable of indefinite reproduction & is attractive because of its mechanical nature.
- This technique was used in the prints of film stars (e.g. Marilyn, Elvis, etc.)
~ Warhol used images selected from the collection of publicity shot he had collected.  The images were not arbitrary images of famous people but emblems of their beauty, glamour & star quality that they & the film studios had chosen to represent to the public.

Warhol was aware that over-exposure to images gradually divest them of any emotion & gave them iconic power by engraving them in our memory through force of repetition.

Warhol’s work:
-Meaning:
Revealed constant & significant preoccupations with fame, glamour, death, violence & disaster & with money.
- Formal/aesthetic significance:
Repetition reduced images to elements in the composition & attention is directed towards a consideration of what the artist has done to it.

* Implications of Warhol’s work:
- Addressed a culture that overflowed with information, a society where people experienced most things at 2nd or 3rd hand through print & TV, through images that become banal (ordinary) and disassociated by repetition, there is a place for affectless art.
- ‘Dead-pan’ style of Warhol of the 1960s recalled Dada & anticipated Conceptual Art.

- Link between the world of consumer products & high art.

- Warhol’s images call into question the uses to which we put all of our images.

- Rendered clearly the impact of the mundane so that his paintings stand apart from everyday life & illuminate it.

- Put fine-arts format at the service of his media-style flair.

My own reflection (By Victor Gan)

The reason why warhol is acclaimed to be one of the most influential artist of the 20th century is the fact that his art depicts accurately the american society at that time as closely as possible. The  propagation of mass consumerism, advent of televison and computers (haha), meant that the society is exactly what warhol is making it out to be. Banal (ordinary images), are being repeated again and again until they become iconic stay in the viewers mind. Iconic images are being repeated again and again until they become banal and not so special and iconic anymore. The fact that he is producing his art at a pace as fast as factory meant that he views art as a product, just like how everything in our world are products, affected greatly by money.

I suddenly know why he is famous and people like him. Because he is able to see society as it is and identify the trend. Yet, he did not give his views and comments on those trends. its like him saying :”oh chiakai is gay, but hey i didnt say its wrong!” (Neither did he say it is right). He brought attention to the issue, and leave it up to his viewers to interpret.

Any comments on warhol?