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Example research essay topic: Andy Warhol Closely Related - 1,504 words

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Environmental sustainability of Pop Art The retrospective confirmed Warhol's importance as a painter while simultaneously extending his longstanding interest in environmental art -- or installation art, or more plainly, "decor. " This interest helps us to elaborate on the environmental sustainability of art using Warhols works. Judging from "Portraits of the 70 s, "decor" continues to be at least as important to Warhol as portraiture. Following plans devised by his longtime collaborator, David Whitney, Warhol checkered the gallery's walls (painted glossy brown) with 56 pairs of portraits, resulting in what 19 th-century artists would have called a "decoration. " According to art dictionaries of the time, the term referred to broadly painted stage scenery and by extension to interior spaces articulated with pictorial suites. For example, van Gogh painted the variations of his well-known Sunflowers as a "decoration" for his studio at Aries, and Monet devoted his final decades to "decorations" of related water-lily murals. Many of their colleagues likewise aspired to create integrated pictorial ensembles for special settings. Twentieth-century art would be the poorer had not artists such as Matisse and Rothko found clients for similar expansive projects.

Of course, Warhol disclaims lofty artistic purposes, preferring to encourage the communal participation of non artist friends, and to make art fun (and thereby to make it more broadly and directly appealing). As a result, his installations largely express irreverence for traditional gallery and museum display that is predicated on optimal presentation of individual works. Since the start of his art career, Warhol has repeatedly suggested non-art contexts for his work. When in 1961 Bonwit Teller commissioned him to dress a display window for fashion mannequins, Warhol used the opportunity for the public debut of his comic strip paintings which he incorporated as chic backdrop. For a gallery exhibition the following year, he again limited himself to a group of related pictures, this time near-identical paintings of the 32 varieties of Campbell's canned soups.

Although his decision followed installation innovations initiated a century ago by Degas and Monet, who frequently restricted their public exhibitions to variations on a single pictorial motif, Warhol extended their principle, since his ensemble systematically exhausted the possible variations of a finite theme. Warhol was delighted when Irving Blum, the gallery's director, purchased the entire group in order to preserve its total impact. Nevertheless, Warhol has been largely indifferent to whether or not closely related works remain together, even though he initially presents them grouped in provocative ensembles. In 1964, for example, he transformed a gallery space into a stockroom when he piled it with trompe l'oeil sculptures representing shipping cartons for brand-name packaged goods. And that same year he virtually wallpapered another gallery space with his Flowers, which he later claimed were only one big painting that was cut up into small pieces. These installations exemplified Warhol's outspoken disregard for conventional art contexts: You go to a museum and they say this is art and the little squares are hanging on the wall.

But everything is art. Indeed Warhol's two installations at Leo Castelli's gallery in 1966 effectively extended his art to include "everything. " He sprinkled one room with helium-filled silver-colored pillows, what he called "floating sculpture, " the mirror surfaces of which incorporated everything present (walls, spectators) into the work. And he covered the walls in a second room with Cow Wallpaper, thereby relegating his work to the status of commonplace backdrop, but in the process extending art around the entirety of the space. Warhol's experiments with decor earned him an invitation in 1968 to " 12 Environments" in Bern for which he reproduced several of them. Earlier that year, when Pontus Hunter, then director of Stockholm's Moderna Must, organized a Warhol exhibition, the artist went so far as to cover the museum's Neo-Classical exterior with Cow Wallpaper. Warhol continued to create bizarre installations during the 1970 s.

As already mentioned, he insisted upon having an art background (Cow Wallpaper) for his Whitney Museum retrospective. Invited to contribute to "Art in Process" in 1972 at Finch College, Warhol vacuum-cleaned the galleries. Although his efforts were virtually unnoticeable (he displayed the vacuum cleaner's collection sack), they were to be thought of as having transformed the museum setting for art and spectators alike. For a 1973 show at the Musee Galeria in Paris, Warhol fabricated a Mao Wallpaper which served as background for his Mao silkscreen paintings in several formats, all based on the same frontispiece photograph to the Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung (published in English-in 1966).

Installed edge to edge in uninterrupted horizontal rows, the paintings rivaled the decorative role of the wallpaper pattern. The wallpaper portraits dwarfed the smaller paintings and were themselves dwarfed by the larger ones. Altogether, 1, 951 images of Mao loomed and receded as painting and decoration in tandem orchestrated the gallery space. Warhol returned to the Cow Wallpaper for the premiere of his Ladies and Gentlemen (a portrait series of drag queens) in Frascati in 1975, this time covering even the doorways, so that spectators burst through shredded paper to enter the exhibition.

And in 1978 for a retrospective in Zurich, Warhol designed a new wallpaper based upon a self-portrait. Prior to the "Portraits of the 70 s" exhibition last year, the Lone Star Foundation presented Warhol's Shadows, 83 large, closely-related paintings in 17 color variations which he installed just above floor level, side to side, continuously around the perimeter of the two huge rooms. Warhol's concentrated investigation of portraiture began in the early 1960 s when he was among several artists who decided independently of one another to use pedestrian images familiar from everyday life as the basis for pictures. Like the art of Lichtenstein, Rosenquist and Wesselmann, Warhol's responded to large, simple close-up images common to merchandise media-movies, magazines. At first Warhol made drawings after publicity photographs for stars (like Ginger Rogers) which he had collected from magazines and books.

The uncomplicated pictorial qualities of publicity photographs appealed to Warhol, who ardently admires related characteristics of popular folk art. Perhaps more important, photographs of posing stars appealed to Warhol because by temperament he ponders distinctions between what is genuine and what is counterfeit. I don't know where the artificial stops and the real starts, he explained. Of course, all representational art is concerned with where the artificial stops and the real starts, since all representational art is forgery, a substitute for some distinct counterpart in reality or imagination. But Warhol's art undermines fundamental goals of representational art, since he represents things which in themselves are tokens or containers for something else.

For example, he painted money which is a certificate for precious metal, green stamps which are tokens to exchange for other goods, and soup cans whose labels only indirectly indicate their hidden contents. Warhol paints movie stars whose play-roles, like those of drag queens, hide true identities -- he paints shadows removed from whatever cast them. Most often Warhol's images are literally photographs transferred to canvas with silkscreens. This is always the case with his portraits, which strictly speaking represent photographs of individuals, not the individuals themselves. Ever since photography's invention, the use or approximation of photo graphic images and processes by painters has aroused debate. More than a century ago Baudelaire and his associates spoke out against art that recorded visual appearances in minute detail as if to rival the verisimilitude attainable in photographs, since for them such art was mechanical and impersonal, whereas truly great art always expressed a master's unique manner of vision.

Warhol often seeks the same still unwelcome impersonal character in his art, and his work with photographs and movies must at least partially satisfy his often cited wish to be himself a machine. Yet despite Warhol's artistic inclination for repeated units arranged mechanically in grid compositions, when he uses mechanical techniques he is intentionally careless, and he apparently instructs assistants and commercial fabricators to maintain standards such as clumsy or sabotage-minded machines might be imagined to set for themselves. The most notable example of his attitude is the characteristic misalignment in his silkscreen paintings of color and outline. Such "slippage" in his portraits displaces say, the local color of lips or hair into adjacent areas of the face and background. As a result his images are inept -- smudged, broken and doubled. For over a century already, of course, sophisticated artists have added rich dimensions of meaning to works with purposeful ineptitude.

Man Ray, for example, whose photographic portraits have been an inspiration for Warhol, explained that art was designed to amuse, bewilder, annoy or to inspire reflection, but not to arouse admiration or any technical excellence usually sought for in works of art. Bibliography Bockris Victor and Gerard Malaga. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story. New York: Quill, 1983. Kagan Andrew. "Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the Anti-Culture of Punk." Arts Magazine 53 (September 1998): 119 - 21. Rosenblum Robert, and David Whitney, ed.

Andy Warhol: Portraits of the 70 s. New York: Random House for Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989.


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Research essay sample on Andy Warhol Closely Related

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