Review | So, what is the role...

Generated on 2024-05-27 07:31:07

Result #1

So, what is the role of the artist? In one way or another, artists respond to the challenges of their times. These challenges could be existential, as in the case of Lascaux or Goya. Or they could be non-threatening, as in the case of the Dutch Baroque artists, who painted pretty pictures for their middle-class patrons to enjoy. Equally non-threatening are Warhol's soup cans. He used them to poke fun at middle-class American values in the 1960s. In 1969, the Warhol retrospective opened at the Whitney Biennial. This time, the curator, Sharon Erlich, allowed Warhol to return to New York, where he left his label, the Sculpture Inventories, in 1986. His second exhibition, this one being centered on Warhols Warhol Art, contains the first one.There is no shortage of Warhols little-known works, most of them from the late 60s and early 70s, which capture the first impression of contemporary life after the war: a framed newspaper photograph of the artist in a yellow bathtub, a photocollage of a marketing poster, and the Sculpture Inventories no. 2, 1962, a reproduction of the magazine covering the artists 1974 performance of the same title. Warhols efforts to transform a previous technique into an art of materiality failed, but his desperate gesture of merging a popular medium with the serendipity of the everyday found a poetic and not-so-subtle echo in this show.Warhols little-known works and his ads for his products, along with the new sculptures and collages on display here, reprise the themes he explored in his earlier work, as well as his current interest in the notions of leisure and the commons. The artist went out to a hamlet called Kupka, a little village in the hamlet of Quai de Sade. He conducted a little experiment in artmaking there. He decorated one of his works with colorful paper clips, thus indicating a kind of gift. He also attached to a length of mesh mailer a sculpture by the French artist Michelangelo Pistoletto that he had made with the artist from the same village, consisting of two statuettes of a young boy (it was rumored that his legs had been amputated at birth). As he expected, the sculpture did not come to life.

Result #2

He used them to invoke social power. It seems to me that Warhols reliance on them is an attempt to replicate those same values of power that came into existence in the 50s and 60s.Warhol, however, is too busy painting the American war machine. The real warrior in this context is his wife, Suzanne, who has become a unique part of his art. But she is not the only force in his art that is subservient to and dependent on the American war machine. Warhols work is constantly evoking and parodying the very concepts and methods of modern industrial society. There is a love affair with big picture and a fascination with small objects that is less political and more personal than most. Warhol is drawing us into his world and his art, and, in this process, our art lives.It is not hard to see why Warhol is so successful at all these times. Warhol is able to create so many images that he becomes not only a symbol but a classic. A classic has many meanings, including the metaphor of the image as a vehicle for meaning; the classic may also be a political signifier; it may be the model for an idea or a device; or it may signify a cause or a belief. The classic may also function as a symbol of invention. There is a love affair with big picture and a fascination with small objects that is not political and more personal than most. Warhol's art is always relevant to and integral to our time, but his work is also timeless and timelessly personal.

Result #3

So, what is the role of the artist? In one way or another, artists respond to the challenges of their times. These challenges could be existential, as in the case of Lascaux or Goya. Or they could be non-threatening, as in the case of the Dutch Baroque artists, who painted pretty pictures for their middle-class patrons to enjoy. Equally non-threatening are Warhol's soup cans. He used them to poke fun at middle-class American values in the 1960s. An artist must, of course, maintain the critical distance necessary to use his or her art effectively. I doubt that if this had been the case, the works couldnt have been critically defended. But again, we have to remember that the art, unlike the rest of life, cannot be given a critical history. This is why I find myself bitterly disappointed in the omission in this show. This history is the art of politics.The curators, Margarite Minow, and John McAuley, have just reassembled this first in-depth survey of the work of the artists, including sculptures, drawings, and works on paper. Assembled by the Smithsonian, the exhibition is an exploration of the cultural relationships among artists, who are told to be best served by a multiplicity of views, not a single, monolithic, accepted position. Each artist is to be judged on a variety of views. Because the traditional disciplinary approach was not always followed, the shows curators have created a series of approaches to the art. The results, in my opinion, are mostly good.They are one good example of a group of artists working with an arsenal of images to create a synthesis. Andrew Ginzel, who was featured in the exhibition, is one. He uses the same tactic as Warhol in his drawings of Warhol-like sculpture. Ginzels drawings are remarkable. His works on paper are illustrated by the images on them. He creates the illusion of physical or conceptual loss in the viewers mind. The drawings are beautifully illustrated.The exhibition at the Whitney involves a lot of images, and a lot of thought. Many of the images are captured in Ginzels abstract paintings, which are based on old literature. His literary use of imagery is a sort of avant-garde comic relief. In one picture Ginzel makes a drawing of the dialogue between two characters, both of whom are standing.

Result #4

So, what is the role of the artist? In one way or another, artists respond to the challenges of their times. These challenges could be existential, as in the case of Lascaux or Goya. Or they could be non-threatening, as in the case of the Dutch Baroque artists, who painted pretty pictures for their middle-class patrons to enjoy. Equally non-threatening are Warhol's soup cans. He used them to poke fun at middle-class American values in the 1960s. This is why, in his art, Warhol has always been a Marxist—and thus an heir of Picassos legacy, like a Picasso in the 20s who goes back to the middle of modernism and restores it. Warhol has a long history in the art world, and in any case is more difficult to define than he is. The artist is always somewhere between, on the one hand, a social critic and a social artist.On the other hand, if you exclude Warhol from this picture, it does make a very definite statement about the nature of contemporary art: it is art that remains within the arena of the social. Warhol was no doubt a social critic, and not just any social critic. I dont know that he is an artist; he is a social artist—even at his best—but as he says in one of his early paintings, I want to be something more than I am. To be a social critic is to struggle against the supremacy of individual taste in art. This struggle is sometimes fatal, and usually defeats it. Warhol thought that his art would be more successful when it seemed less revolutionary than other art, and he made the wrong decisions. A social critic is only an artist when he is trying to make the most out of a limited amount of resources, and in that case his art would always be more revolutionary than the art he is making. If you think that Warhol was an artist, you must also think that he was a social critic. Warhol thought that his art would be more successful when it seemed less revolutionary than other art, and he made the wrong decisions. A social critic is only an artist when he is trying to make the most out of a limited amount of resources, and in that case his art would always be more revolutionary than the art he is making. If you think that Warhol was an artist, you must also think that he was a social critic.

Result #5

So, what is the role of the artist? In one way or another, artists respond to the challenges of their times. These challenges could be existential, as in the case of Lascaux or Goya. Or they could be non-threatening, as in the case of the Dutch Baroque artists, who painted pretty pictures for their middle-class patrons to enjoy. Equally non-threatening are Warhol's soup cans. He used them to poke fun at middle-class American values in the 1960s. Der Eiten sind die Tagen (The descendants are tired of this) and Schlecks Geesemoen (Children are dying of thirst), both 1965.The iconic, Enniesque image, like the icon of the modern era, the secular, bourgeois one, has passed into the memory of the elderly. This represents a long-overdue fate for an artist like Warhol whose works transcend the mediums of memory. In the meanwhile, the artist still lives in the public consciousness and his art is endlessly reproduced in books, magazines, and collector's guides. Most of his postwar works are commemorated with paintings. The greatest of them are the Brancusi originals: La Borde (Beverly Hills), 1964; La Folie de Chien (Friedrichs golden chad), 1965; and La Chine des Oiseaux (Checks of beauty), 1966. Not far from Warhol's paintings on wood is a painting by Andy Warhol, Jr., entitled Flux, 1965. Here again, in his latest work, the artist creates a contradiction: On the one hand, Warhol expresses himself through a single work, but on the other, he keeps his faith in the power of painting to speak to the hidden side of its self-consciousness.On the same wall, a picture by Klaus Nomi, entitled Forza Italiana (Italian Way), 1966, features a horizontal band of black paint against a white background and a faceless figure. After the painting, Warhols way of life will be forever forgotten. But what about his way of life as a Christian, a person of the Church? The answer is that he has transformed into a Mussolini. What happens when a Mussolini, a fascist, and a Christian at the same time? In this case, the rebirth of the Church at the expense of the personal life of the Catholic Church is a profound irony.