Warhol RENE GIMPEL looks at the influence of the 'pop art' cult figure who died recently. thoroughly than other pop artists and his painting method was an unorthodox, sardonic challenge to the art world. He invariably used a crude form of screenprinting, which allowed him to reproduce the same image many times over.
The cubists, and more especially the dadaists, had also borrowed existing imagery (such as Duchamp's 'ready-mades'), but they had always incorporated the image into unique works of art. Warhol's contribution to his subject was to crop and enlarge it. inject fairly arbitrary colour and lay on a few obvious brushstrokes; but other than this, his paintings remain a variation on printing:
There is both a paradox and a conundrum in Warhol's work. The paradox arises between Warhol the fine art painter and what Warhol represented on his casel. We face a conundrum in trying to evaluate and locate the specificity of Warhol's practice: a photo is crudely and poorly reproduced in a newspaper -first act of displacement; Warhol reproduces this photo in an even cruder form in a second, passive displacement. He 'reproduces' the picture in mimetic manner but
presents each picture as a fine art
object, complete with signature -
except that Warhol signed his
work with a rubber stamp
moulded with an imprint of his
signature.
I'm not more intelligent
than I appear... Advertising agencies can afford to, and do, buy the best talent available in the visual arts world; the agencies then spend a fortune creating and perfecting a potent image whose message is mendacious and duplicitous.
Normally there is little that the art world can counter with; but, in the sixties, that counter was located in Warhol's subversive streak.
Insofar as Warhol presented his
work as uniformally normative, the frequent appearances of
disturbing imagery among the
seemingly blander soup cans and
Marilyn Monroes was sufficient to
create an insidious untertow
which helps to explain why the
advertising world rarely reciprocated Warhol's interest in their products.
When it appeared in 1965, Warhol's Electric Chair shocked the art world, maybe because Warhol had transgressed the art market's adage 'no purple, no cows, no executions'. As usual, the artist simply recycled a newspaper photo. The chair is isolated, disarmed, slack and humdrum. The absence of victim blocks our attempt to transfer shock into the cathartic, if ersatz pity so beloved of colour supplements. This is an irreducible image, the more irritating because of its deadpan • presentation by the artist within the pantheon of his images.
A different approach to a similarly unsettling image is present in Green Disaster 1964. The distressing photo is repeated several times over, and the execution is Warhol at his callous best. The correlation of figures in the scene is well-nigh inexplicable, and raises more questions about us as consumers of this product than about the meaning of the original - whatever that is. Is the 'original' the original accident? Or its reproduction? Is not the core of the problem, and an explanation about the painting-as-event, located in the viewer as observer.
Warhol's films rework the film maker/filmgoer relationship in a manner similar to that of his best painted work. We are used to seeing films under a rigid set of codes which might be summarised as follows: film is a self-effacing medium carrying the author/ director's message or story; the film process, including the labour and equipment used in the shooting and projection, is hidden, dissolved in the finished product so as to preserve the seamless illusion of the film's narrative.
When we visit the cinema we must, in order to enjoy the film, suspend our reflexive, practical relationship to our surroundings. We must also suspend our disbelief in the story. We identify with the actors' characters and acquiesce in the unfolding story's internal logic. We accept the film's manipulation of space and time. Locations appear as
unobtrusive, neutrai backgrounds, and special effects legitimize and naturalise screen violence. A solution is found to the problems, contradictions and conflicts in the story in order to give a happy or satisfactory ending.
Even the surroundings in which we view films are calculated to enhance the mystification. Cinema architecture and furnishings include imposing facade, glitter and neon, chandaliers, frescoes, gilt, plush velvet and uniformed attendants.
In such films as Sleep, The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women and Empire State Building, Warhol completely subverted the genre. Film style is redundant; the finished product is no bearer of a coherent set of truths; there is none of the subjectivist, idealist notion of an artist/creator as a visionary gifted with insight. Neither are the films easy to sit through: we must confront and question the project.
We become self-consciously aware of our situation as engaged participants attempting to decode the flickering images before us. We also reflect on our specific presence as viewers, being no longer disembodied minds whose response is passively triggered by the 'action' on the screen. I don't worry about art or life. I mean, the war and the bomb worry me but usually there's not much you can do about them. I've represented it in some of my films and I'm going to try and do more. Money doesn't worry me, either, though I sometimes wonder, where is it? Somebody's got it all! Warhol's radical work was over by the end of the sixties. Increasingly he turned to society portraiture, and found himself surrounded by administrators selling Warhol exhibition deals.
As though in compensation he became more impenetrable, a victim of his own brand of fame,
barely surviving the grimmer fate
which befell so many Warhol
groupies ('superstars')
If Warhol was in many ways
the earliest exponent of
post-modern fragmentation, he
was also an early casualty; and once again a breakthrough in progressive cultural activity, such
as Warhol and Pop Art were, fails to realise its materialist potential
because of the endlessly recuperative power of late
capitalism.
I never wanted to be a painter.
I wanted to be a tap dancer.
International No 9 March/April 1987
Green Disaster, 1964
Salvador DAVID ROBINSON Salvador (18) Dir. Oliver Stone; with James Woods, Jim Belushi, John Savage, Cindy Gibb. SALVADOR IS a tense, gripping and horrifying account of the experiences of photo-journalist Richard Boyle (James Woods) who ventures into El Salvador in search of photographs for publication.
The film begins in New York when Boyle, down on his luck and having lost his wife, child and home, decides to change scenery. Arriving at the