Song for Drella
Art is a very nebulous term, artist even more so. Many years ago, I was at a party talking with an interesting fellow who was a research neurobiologist. Someone walked up to us and introduced themselves as an artist. The biologist replied, “Such that we all are.” That was both amusing and about right.
Certainly in recent years, the term art has been abused endlessly. If you look at popular culture of the last century, it'd be very difficult to say much of any it is art. Though maybe, the correct radical answer is, it all is. Another question, how much of it will be remembered a century from now, almost none.
By one definition, art is work that both defines its times and transcends them, such as an ancient Greek sculpture or a Renaissance painting. By that definition, art that best represents American industrial culture is Andy Warhol's.
Warhol was born Pittsburgh in the late 1920s. No city and time better defined American industrialism. The son of poor East European immigrants, he remained until he died a practicing Eastern Catholic, some very dark stuff, a good spiritual match for east Pennsylvania's smokestack painted obscured skies. He also carried a small “d” democratic ethos. All characteristics that influenced his work.
Growing up in Pittsburgh, he’d visit the Heinz food factory. His public breakthrough came with his reproduction paintings of Campbell Soup labels, Coca Cola bottles, and Brillo box sculptures, art replications of industrial products.
While doing these works, he learned the silkscreen production process, which he used the rest of his life. Initial works consisted of black and white photographs of news and popular culture screened with various colors. Most interesting, while the Coke bottle and soup label paintings were precise replicas, the numerous silkscreens productions of any specific subject were all a little different, one might say organic.
At the time, much of this work was dismissed derogatorily as “Pop,” not really art. Maybe their greatest offense was the works’ inherent questioning of the long accepted value of virtuosity of technique as art. Is there anything more technically skilled than a machine stamping out the exact same product?
Many of Warhol's works are better appreciated looking at them together. You can better sense their repetitive mass industrial nature aside their individuality. Most striking is their semblance to that great cultural definer of the industrial era, film. Many of his works resemble snippets of film, a half dozen or dozen frames each of slightly varying colors and shades. These works clearly demonstrate one of Warhol's first influences, Walt Disney’s animations. Afterwards, he spent a few years making movies, years later amusingly commenting on the movies, “They're better to talk about than watch.”
His studio in the 1960s was dubbed The Factory, a former hat manufacturing space in Manhattan. It was literally an open house, a democratic forum, where upper eastside socialites, the latest mass produced media celebrities, models, business people, and downtown down and out druggies mingled and lingered, opera the ambient music.
Warhol dabbled in music, rock and roll music, which is best defined as the first mass produced electric music. He produced the first Velvet Underground album, electric it is. The Velvet's main song writer, Lou Reed said, Andy's production consisted of being in the studio so when the record company people complained, wanting to change the grating sounds they were hearing, Warhol would answer, “Oh no, that's great.”
In the 1970s, Warhol turned to the oldest artist money making scheme, portraits of the rich and famous.
The repetition in Warhol’s works is obviously industrial, less obvious, though still very much so, Catholic, for which repetition is essential too. In The Factory, work was the main mantra, again an essential ethos of both. Warhol's art and life betray a certain democratic aesthetic. He thought the world would be a much better place if everyone looked the same – industrial democracy.
A decade before he died, he was asked if he believed in the American Dream, which Warhol was the definition. He replied, “I don’t, but I think we can make some money out of it.” No artist ever better represented the era they lived.