 | | | Warhol was the quintessential Pop artist, his bizarre persona received almost as much attention as his artworks. His fame is like that of the rock stars he depicted. He used his studio, "The Factory" in 1962 to produce silk-screens, assisted by a team of workers which he called a human 'printing press'. Warhol claimed he wanted to be a machine and strove for anonymity in the production of his works. Warhol tries to anaesthetise the viewer's reaction to the, often morbid (e.g. Mrs Kennedy after the assassination and Marilyn Monroe after her suicide), images he presents. This imagery is most often repeated, almost endlessly, as it is silk-screened onto canvas. The repetition and crude synthetic colour are the instruments of a moral and aesthetic blankness which has been deliberately contrived. Warhol had an obsession for boredom, which manifested in his six hour movie 'Sleep' of a man sleeping and nothing else. Warhol's working method is a constant process of action and reaction; he leaves the borders open between production, product and reproduction, between the image, the depiction and the depicted. His art is informed by the knowledge that it is the appearance given to a thing or an event, the manner in which it is mediated or presented, which gives it its meaning. The medium is itself the content of the message. Warhol characteristically takes the shortest possible route from reality to the picture. |
|
