Andy Warhol: The factory master (1989)
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 03 January 2010
This article was published in New Statesman & Society on 8 September 1989, pp. 38-39 at a time when there were several Warhol shows in London.
Andy Warhol cannot be judged simply as a painter, because his work spanned a dozen different media—illustration, window display, films, books, magazines, records and television. The range of his output is staggering: one would have to go back to the Italian Renaissance to find an artist proficient in so many fields.
Today, someone who specialises in painting or sculpture however good he or she is, could not attain the recognition Andy Warhol did—specialism is at odds with the nature of our multimedia world. But, not only did Warhol work within the various media, he also understood how they function in combination: his silk-screened canvases of the early 1960s were a synthesis of painting, photography and printing, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable of 1967 was a multimedia disco, his Index Book, published in the same year, included photographs, a record, pop-ups and a balloon.
In certain respects Andy Warhol was himself like a mass medium—he was a channel permitting a flow of images and information about the world. His art was not about original subjects and personal expression: he asked others what he should paint, he took as his themes commonplace supermarket products, the newspaper images and headlines of his day, he reworked the icons of the famous, from Marilyn Monroe to Chairman Mao. This is why his art was so emblematic of American culture, and particularly the American culture of the 1960s; it both mirrored and helped to constitute that culture.
Andy Warhol shared with radio and television newsreaders a coolness of presentation no matter how horrific the news. Like them he set aside his personal opinions and, even though a practising Catholic, he did not make moral judgments. This made much of his work disturbing and subversive—it threw the responsibility for making such judgments back on to the viewer—but, on one level, all that Warhol was doing was imitating the relay function of the mass media. In reality, though, his paintings were never pure reproduction—he would often change and heighten his source material.
From the mid-1960s, film, still cameras and tape recorders were Andy Warhol’s daily companions. Like the news media, he relentlessly recorded his surroundings and experiences, both important and trivial. He responded to the age of surveillance by undertaking self-surveillance and then packaging and selling the results. The films and diaries that were generated by these methods were a strange mixture of realism and the avant-garde: what could be more avant-garde than the idea of a film of a man sleeping for six hours? And what could be more authentic as a recording of reality?
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