Image by Tyler Silva Photography
Nine years after Andy
Warhol’s death the art world decided to put together a large-scale exhibition
of his work to consecrate his reputation as one of the greatest artists of the
twentieth century. Jennifer Dyer’s article “Understanding Andy Warhol’s Serial
Imagery” was intended to explain her thoughts on how the work inside Warhol’s
exhibition should be analyzed. She believed that as a result of a
media-oriented society and Warhol’s celebrity like lifestyle, the structure of
his work should be viewed through his powerful public persona. Although the
environment of “A Factory” was drug-based, sexually charged, and full of
iconography from that time, she argued Warhol used his work as a mechanism to
illustrate the meaninglessness of it all. Warhol felt that the “sex, drugs, and
rock and roll culture” had over ridden society and created a false stigma of
what really was important in life. By analyzing the slightly altered techniques
of abstract expressionism utilized in Warhol’s work, Dyer argued that Warhol’s
work expressed the significance of the mundane and the idea that actuality is
good.
The first major element Dyer describes is the
structure of Warhol’s work, which she sees in the cultural and political
environment of the day. She argues that the connection between Warhol’s persona
and the artwork are formulated from this environment and that through their
relation we may understand his art. Dyer believes Warhol’s style of reworking
features of abstract expressionism can be seen as invalidating his era’s
predetermined models of artistic value that he felt were unfitting. In many of
his pieces he challenges traditional conceptions of iconography by repeatedly
presenting them as meaningless. This forced viewers to take a stand on issues
that had been normalized such as death, penalty, racism, and late modern
capitalism. Dyer thought his views of society were even more evident by how Warhol
concretizes the American soul and exploits aspects of the media-oriented
culture in much of his work. The large, repetitive, and simple pieces that
Warhol created didn’t incite the viewer to ponder its meaning, which Dyer
believed to bring the realness to these messages.
A second argument Dyer makes, based on Warhol’s
sarcastic personality and attempts to slight the culture of the day, Warhol’s
works must be viewed ironically. Since image making is supposed to be an
extremely meaningful practice, the viewer must read them as a humorous challenge
to the sacred tradition. Dyer believes Warhol accomplishes this by presenting the
insignificant and arbitrary which reveals the significance of the mundane
things of ordinary life, previous cultural icons, and practices in the world. By
the treatment of these mundane entities as divine, the serial imagery reveals
the significance of every day’s continual repetitious activity. He uses this
technique to pull the glamour out of the casual, everyday things. When most
people view images such as his, they think that glamorous imagery is supposed
to manifest what viewers can never be. Warhol used things like Campbell’s soup
cans, toys, and car crashes to change tradition and add even more significance
to the mundane.Another large feature of Warhol’s works is that there is no distinction between ground and image. All of his images are continuous and no elements in the pieces are delineated over another. Dyer argues that this continuity makes for little depth or perspective, unlike the traditional use of perspective to sharpen the unreality of the images. The lack of depth restricts the viewer from accessing the subject in the image and deflects the viewer’s attention away to the surface of image. The viewer then sees the painting in its entirety and doesn’t spend time deeply gazing into the painting to figure out its meaning. Warhol made it very obvious the subjects in his images and never tried to trick people or use complex imagery in his paintings. Dyer believes that getting people to view Warhol’s images as a whole helped get his point across that the mundane is not a concealed mystery. It is something that shouldn’t be hidden by the media dominated culture and its significance needs to be remembered.
Dyers opinions on how to view Warhol’s exhibit and
the idea that he viewed the mundane as significant stemmed from her idea that
Warhol was a product of his synthetic free activity. Warhol participated within
society in such a manner as any other celebrity would, but never allowed the
media or fame change his personality. Dyer believed that Warhol realized the
importance of uniqueness and understood that he transposed this through his
paintings. His continual freeness by awareness led to his work’s message that
the mundane is significant.
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