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Envisaging the Possibilities for Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Consumer Culture and the Pervasivesness of the Media:
Andy Warhol


by Anna Pritchard 

All Rights Reserved © Anna Pritchard and Deep South
Deepsouth v.6.n.3 (Spring 2000)

 
I wish I could invent something like blue jeans. Something to be remembered for. Something mass.1

-Andy Warhol


 

Complex, contradictory, enigmatic. There are few artists who have left as massive a record as did Andy Warhol. And while the invention of a successor for the ubiquitous jeans eluded him, Andy Warhol worked and lived in a realm that fairly resonated with 'the mass'. 

 

From his emergence as a pop Artist in 1962, to his death in 1987, Andy Warhol's art has been taken as a symbol of the penetration of the imagery of consumer culture into the avant-garde. Warhol's art and practice complicated the codes that distinguished autonomous critical art from mass culture. Further, he was a catalyst; encouraging a certain fluidity between, and dismantling of, previously impenetrable distinctions between art and commodity, the mass media and the ideas of authenticity and reproduction. 
 
 

In this essay, I take Andy Warhol as a point of intersection between high art and mass culture. Warhol made images and films in an age of a virtually unlimited capacity for mechanical reproducibility and in a world defined by the ubiquity of the media, mass culture and commodity production, and his work is a direct result of that environment. Warhol worked in a variety of media and held multivalent media interests. He was a painter and sculptor, a rock promoter and film producer, an advertiser, a magazine owner, a star maker and a stargazer.2 In effect, he embodied and affirmed the condition of an artist in the twentieth century. I wish first to contextualise Warhol within an artistic trajectory, and then go on to explore his practice of art in the age of mechanical reproducibility, mass culture, and media.
 
 


From the 'Readymades' to Campbell's Soup

 
The Pop Art movement and the work of Andy Warhol was arguably prefigured and enabled by the Conceptual Art of Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp observed: 'What is interesting about Warhol is not the retinal image of the man who paints 50 soup cans, but of the man who has the idea to paint 50 soup cans.'3 With the 'Readymades', Duchamp radically destabilised notions of what art is and, in raising the mass produced form to the dignity of an art object, he provided an opening for the 'low' subject matter which constituted Pop Art. Andrew Ross observed that 'Pop arose out of the problematising of taste itself.'4 The juxtaposition of Duchamp's artifacts such as The Fountain and L.H.O.O.Q. with Warhol's suggests not only similarities but, I would argue, also notable differences between the two artists' approaches to mass culture. Duchamp's recontextaulisations of banal, anonymously manufactured objects in gallery spaces had shown that, placed in the right frame, any mass produced object could be regarded as art. According to this notion, art turned out to be a relative value, a function of frame and context. Consequently, Duchamp raised the conceptual aspects of the art work to the level of importance occupied by the formal aspects.
 
 
 

For his part, Warhol confirmed Duchamp's demystifying strategies, but his own appropriation of mass cultural forms had a somewhat different bias. He stressed that art was fundamentally a commodity ­merchandise subject to the same publicity strategies and market fluctuations as soup cans, soap boxes and movie stars. Moreover, if relocating the Brillo box to the gallery was an artistic procedure, as Warhol seemed to suggest, perhaps the 'art' in the procedure stemmed neither from the materials transposed nor from the spaces connected in the transaction, but from the process of translation itself. The basic structural procedure in art was, therefore, the translation or re-coding of an object's original meaning with a new set of significations. It is suggested by Calvin Tomkins in Duchamp: A Biography that Andy Warhol was Duchamp's truest heir, the one artist who pushed the implications of Duchamp's ideas to conclusions that not even Duchamp had foreseen.5 While Duchamp was ambivalent about Pop Art it is clear that publicity, repetition, irreverence and all out commercialism; the elements on which Warhol's art and world are based, draw on a Duchampian consciousness and extend it by further erasing the barriers between avant-garde art and the mass public. 
 
 
 

At nearly every level of his work, Warhol challenged and parodied the fantasy of artistic production as original, unmediated expression. Brian Selsky writes in 'I Dream of Genius' that Warhol toyed with social anxieties about reproduction but he refused to set himself up as master or originator. He dispelled the mystique of artistry and genius by comparing artistic and industrial production. He called his studio 'The Factory,' and expressed a desire to be a machine, hiring others to duplicate and even to execute his work. The images were in series and involved reproducing images already found in popular culture. Thus, the very way he made his work reconfigured agency. Through his very art-making process Warhol tinkered with authorship and boasted that his art-making was so routinised that no matter who followed the routine the result was the production of a Warhol. He repudiated claims to artistic invention by copying grocery labels and cartons and in this way he undermined traditional notions of what constitutes originality in art. He questioned and complicated the assumed uniqueness of art objects by manufacturing virtually identical paintings and sculptures in quantity. Warhol's art-making practice seemed to imply that he was primarily concerned with mass production, commerce and the business of making money.6
 
 
 

Pop Art reconfigured the values of the old art in favour of cartoonish characters, cheap industrial tools, gimmicky special effects, a flattened out and exaggerated sense of colour, repetitious imagery and factory-like production. For many commentators, Pop endorsed the elements of television's dominant practice. Warhol himself articulates this shift in subject matter, asserting: 'The pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognise in a split second - all the great modern things that the Abstract expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.'7 Warhol's work thus heralded an elision of the gap between Art and contemporary culture and as such it could be suggested that this fusing of previously disparate realms was a forerunner of the kinds of media engagement later taken up by activist groups such as ACT UP. 
 
 

Just as Warhol reconfigured the terms of the work of art, the same methods were later used to political ends by Gran Fury. The influence of Andy Warhol's Pop Art is evident in the images found in Douglas Crimp's AIDS Demographics. The parallels are not only in the demonstration of the value of publicity, but also in Pop's formal devices; the emphasis on faces, fame, recognisability, repetition and reappropriation in service of a political and educational end. Warhol's art revealed a preoccupation with the materiality of things, a preoccupation that could perhaps be described as indicative of twentieth-century consumer culture. This seeming embrace of the excess of contemporary culture immediately set Warhol against the dominant voices of the avant-garde which imagines itself as a 'resistance to the seductive lure of mass culture and abstention from the pleasure of trying to please a larger audience'.8 The Pop artist does not create, he chooses. His choices are made from images that have already been processed so his art was literally one of production as consumption. 
 
 

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1 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol - From A to B and Back Again (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1975), 13.
2 Outlined by Juan A. Suarez in Bike Boys, Drag Queens and Superstars: Avant Garde, Mass Culture and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 217.
3 Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 415.
4 In 'Uses of Camp' No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. (New York: Routledge, 1989), 152.
5 Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 460.
6 This link was made explicit in Warhol's assertion in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: 'I like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up and hang it on the wall.' (p133-4)
7 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1980), 3.
8 Jennifer Doyle, 'Tricks of the Trade: PopArt/Pop Sex.' Pop Put: Queer Warhol. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and Jose Estaban Munoz (eds.) (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 191.