LISTENING TO ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
Two images of very familiar objects are seen above. I’ll bet most of you have seen these images before. These are typical of the Warhol images that you tend to see with great frequency.
They look unremarkable, don’t they? So simple, so straightforward. In fact, these images look like they were taken straight from ads… so what’s the big deal??
Throughout the history of the human race, people have created works of art as a reflection of their lives. One reason that works of art from the past are so valuable is that they give us insight into what life was like in a certain time and place.
What Warhol is saying is this: If art is supposed to be a reflection of culture, then here, let me show you what your culture looks like.
What truly dominated the visual landscape of the everyday American in the 1960s, when these works were made? Gods and legends? Spirituality and philosophy? Nature? No. The most pervasive visual information in the 1960s, as today, was/is advertising and marketing.
Think about your daily experience with visual stimuli, and you will immediately recognize that what you are confronted with most often is advertising: on TV, in magazines and newspapers, at the grocery store, on highway billboards. It is impossible to get away from! You are bombarded, every single day, with advertisements which are designed by very, very clever and visually savvy marketing experts and graphic artists.
It used to be that if you wanted to make a pot of soup for your family, you started early in the morning, out in your garden, picking leeks and potatoes and carrots. Then you spent hours in the kitchen peeling, chopping, and cooking. The soup was tailored for your family’s tastes and nutritional needs.
In the sixties, if you wanted to make a pot of soup for your family, there was a greater chance that you went to the corner store and bought a couple cans of Campbell’s Soup. Just heat and serve! And after all, why not?? It’s sooo much easier than all that from-scratch work. Hey, this is America! We’re lucky enough to live in the land of convenience. Why not take advantage of it? (Sodium and preservatives notwithstanding…)
What is a greater part of the average American’s visual landscape: growing and blooming plants in the earth, or grocery-store shelves lined with infinite products?
Warhol was reacting against the direction of 20th-century art, which had become increasingly abstract and psychological. If we’re going to be honest here, he was saying, these paintings and prints of soup cans and coke bottles are the only possible accurate reflection of what our culture has become.
You may or may not realize to what extent advertising and marketing affects you. Advertisers are no dummies! They are experts. They know exactly how to use the visual elements and principles of design in order to manipulate you into buying a certain product. This needn’t be seen as some sort of sinister ulterior motive; it’s simply their job, and they’re good at it.
Nothing in a magazine ad is there by mistake. It is made for the express purpose of mind control, to put it rather dramatically.
Another issue raised here is that this is what most gainfully employed artists do these days. There isn’t much call for imperial portraiture, or huge wall-size history paintings that extol some moral virtue, or jewel-encrusted gold reliquaries and church statues. The true successors of the artists and artisans of the past are the graphic designers of today.
In the middle ages, the vast majority of artists did not sign their works. They are nameless to us today. But this was the way they saw themselves. Since most medieval artists were creating religious works of art, they would not dare be so proud (sinful, in those days!) as to put their own measly name on them. They were working for the greater glory of God, not for their own fame.
Who are the nameless artists of today? How about the brilliant designers that create the wonderful Super Bowl ads that millions of Americans tune in to see? Aren’t these works of art? Don’t you often enjoy looking at the ads on TV?
Do you ever see an artist’s name on an ad? Not likely. Much like the medieval artisan, who worked to sing the praises of his God, today’s graphic artist is creating work to publicize a company or a product.
Warhol is showing us, in the images above, repeated images of two examples of contemporary art: the label of the Campbell’s soup can, and the Coca-Cola Bottle, which, by the way, is probably one of the most-purchased sculptures in the world. Somebody designed these things! These were the nameless artists of the 60’s. When we see a Campbell’s soup can, we think about what’s in it, not who designed it.
Why show so many almost identical images of the bottles and cans? Why do you think Warhol would show us 50 or 100 or 200 cans rather than just one?
It is certainly a commentary on the culture of mass-production that dominated the later 20th century and now, the 21st. Seeing multiple images of a coke bottle reinforces the way we experience coke bottles. When we go to the store, or even reach into our own fridge, we see many coke bottles which are all the same, not just one. We don’t view it as a work of art because we don’t see each bottle as an individual object. It is one of very many.
In addition, Warhol’s use of multiple repeated images reflects the way in which we are bombarded with the same visual information over and over and over and over again. We become numb to it. After a while, we don’t even see it any more! We see the same ads, the same product designs, over and over and over. Eventually, we tune it out, or so we think…
So, what is Warhol saying here? This two-panelled print displays multiple repeated images of the Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe. Is this just evidence that Andy loved Marilyn’s movies?
What might he be saying about Marilyn here?
Remember that Marilyn Monroe was really Norma Jean, and that she was not, in fact, even a blonde? What does she have in common with a can of Campbell’s soup? A Coca-Cola Bottle?
She was a product. She was created, packaged and sold. She was transformed into the standard-issue Hollywood bombshell. She was not a person. In fact, Warhol’s images of her were created just after her death, probably by suicide… Kurt Cobain killed himself when he became the thing he hated most: a corporate rocker. Is there a connection there?
When you take a human being and redesign her, drain her of all her personality and replace it with a new, fake one, what happens to her? Marilyn’s story answers that. Warhol shows us not one image of her, but many, with hair, eyes and lips that look badly-stenciled on, like they don’t belong, like they are unnatural…
These two works (above) are also by Andy Warhol. But I’ll bet you’ve never seen them! At least, you haven’t seen them as often as the ones we’ve discussed so far.
The one on the left shows repeated identical newspaper photos of a car wreck. The one on the right shows repeated identical photos of the electric chair.
What are these about?
Think about the way the media operates today… if it bleeds, it leads. Just try to watch the local newscast with your kids in the room. It’s worse than an R movie, that’s for sure. The bloodiest, sickest, most sensational story always leads the newscast, whether it is in fact of great importance for us to know about or not.
Remember the Rodney King police beating? If you’re not old enough to remember that, how about the woman who was caught on tape a few years back beating her child, who was strapped into its carseat in the back of the woman’s SUV? The footage from these kinds of horrific events gets distilled down to its most disturbing few seconds, and those few seconds of tape are shown over and over and over again.
The first 50 times you saw King get beaten, it made you sick. After that, no matter how much you hated that you felt that way, you thought, “this again.” You can become numb to something by being subjected to seeing it over and over again.
Warhol is saying: aren’t there some things that we should never become desensitized to?? If a horrific car accident and an instrument of death by execution can become “just pictures” to us after repeated viewings, haven’t we lost some of our humanity?
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So what in the world is the point of all this…
My point is this: be aware. Look. See. Don’t tune out. This course is all about looking and noticing our visual landscape.
Project 1 requires you to apply what you’ve been learning about art to the art you see most often: advertising. It is easy not to think about it because we see it so often. Restore your visual sensitivity. De-numb yourself by simply opening your eyes.