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Sunday, December 7, 2008

Some brief-ish thoughts on Warhol, who I hadn’t thought about in quite some time before watching the splendid American Masters documentary last night, while paper-procrastinating. Just to get them on paper:

By drawing attention to the imperfections of the invisible technologies that delivered culture to us, Warhol pointed them out, made us reflect upon them, and tried to make us question how they transmitted the messages they did. His mark—“mark” in the sense of painters describing their unique visual trace on the canvas—registered on an aesthetic level, sure, but, like photography, it registered much deeper at the level of how we interpret our surroundings. By repeatedly silk-screening an image, and making the machinery print the “same” thing with slight differences, he highlighted the superficiality of commodity culture. Bazin said that the advent of photography, and photography’s attendant narrative of imagery presenting an indexical, true vision of the world around us, freed painters from their obligation to represent reality. After photography came the radical shift of Picasso.

Warhol and Pop Art’s major contribution to our personal hermeneutics, however, was telling us that the camera (and the other technologies of transmission) doesn’t represent anything close to reality, but only mutations of it co-produced with our own subjectivities. Warhol drew attention to the constant flow of commercial media surrounding urban life at all times, by capturing the everyday and re-presenting it as “art,” which, by definition is something you have to critically regard. He made us realize, partially because he was obsessed with becoming famous himself, the ways in which we self-actualize through media. Along the way, he helped do away with the discursive distinction between “art” and “commodity,” by forcing the two to speak to each other.

These ideas were in the air already, and others were using them in different ways. It’s just that Warhol made them irresistable, and irresistably hip. Right?

(Also, that if the copyright climate were like it is today, Warhol very likely would have been bullied out of existence by corporate lawyers the second he tried to sell something. Right?)

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A couple other things said in the documentary by people who are experts:

Dave Hickey: “What Andy understood is that the batting of Marilyn Monroe, doesn’t just represent Marilyn, it represents you. Take the “Lifesaver” Marilyns. There’s a mint one, there’s a green one, there’s an orange one. You know, all these different flavors. What this implies is: we all want Marilyn. She is the object of our desire. We cannot have Marilyn, but we can have the picture of Marilyn that suits our taste. So in a sense, we are all one in our desire for what we can’t have. We individuate ourselves in what color we want our desire to come in. And I think that was pretty much Andy’s view of the thing. We all want Campbell’s, some of us want the bean. You know what I mean? That’s a pretty consistent language of imagery in Warhol. In other words, not that we get what we want, it’s that everybody understands that we’re wanting creatures, and that we’re one in that particular theatre.”

And:

(I can’t find this guy’s name at the moment, will do ASAP): “He understood all of the paradoxes of stardom, and he was the greatest philosopher of stardom who has ever lived, Andy Warhol was. Andy understood intuitively the implosiveness of one identity being made that big. It’s the stuff of nightmares.”

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