Warhol's Marilyn Monroe Diptych

Andy Warhol's Serial Imagery

                                                   

Image by Tyler Silva Photography

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tylersilva/5305563442/



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.

A New Perspective on the Devil

A Change in Style

Emotion in Our Art

In the scope of humanity’s existence, the surrealism movement can be considered as very young. Originating in the time of World War I, this form of art did not gain popularity until the mid 1920s as the surrealist art was radically different in style than those before it. In Edward Henning’s “A Painting By Joan Miro”, Henning analyzes the change in style of surrealist Joan Miro over the course of his career by interpreting several of Miro’s painting, which were made during the 1920s and 1930s. This all leading to the conclusion that Miro’s paintings were constantly being influenced by the emotions that he was experiencing at the time of each work.

Miro’s style of painting was that he would paint whatever came to his mind. It would freely flow from his brush to the paper without thinking anything through before, relying strictly on his subconscious thoughts. This is where his extremely abstract paintings come from. And, the moods of the painting can be correlated to these subconscious thoughts as well as whatever emotions he experienced while painting affected the outcome as well. This is shown by the, “decisive change in style, culminating in brilliantly colored, densely composed” (Henning pg 235) style that he adopted in the early 1920s. At this point in his life, Miro had finally found a place among the surrealist community befriending people like “ Andre Manson, Henry Miller, and Ernest Hemmingway” (Henning pg 1). Finding a sense of purpose and friends could have led to this positive feeling in his paintings.

However, his paintings were to take a drastic turn in the late 1930s. Miro had a very strong connection with Spanish culture as he was raised in Spain for much of his early life. As the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, he was unable to return to his true home. This clearly had a deep emotional effect on Miro. In these later paintings, the “acerbic colors express Miro’s tormented mood” (Henning pg. 238), which were reinforced by the demonic figures that could be found more frequently and in greater numbers than in his previous art. In the end, Miro became so disgusted by human nature that he, “felt a deep desire to escape” (Henning pg. 239).

Clearly in the instance of Joan Miro, a style of a painter can be affected by one’s emotion and this conclusion is not all that surprising. By taking a look at some of the artwork found in and around UNC it is easy to tell what an artist was feeling. And although this may seem like an obvious answer, it still gives us a better understanding of what artists like Joan Miro wished to portray in their work.

Works Cited:

Henning, Edward B. "A Painting by Joan Miro." Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 66 (1979): 235-240. Print.

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