Back in the early sixties Andy made a shift. As a commercial artist Andy’s work had been hand drawn from photos in a labored, blotted “New Yorker Magazine” style - somewhere between Beardsley, Cocteau, Steinberg and high fashion illustration - which made for a comfortable living and gave him introductions to the “in-crowd.” But his ambitions, both personal and artistic, were much larger than illustration, and he knew that this type of work would never excite the new society that was just beginning to push forward. In the art world at this time artists realized that ABEX had become a form of mannered physical paint handling. The new artists were having a field day challenging the overblown rhetoric of the Action Painters. Andy was enthralled with this scene and had been trying to ingratiate himself with the new artists - particularly Rauschenberg and Johns - buying their work, going to openings and schmoozing with art dealers. He wanted to be a part of this art moment, however, he had yet to determine what his work would look like. Andy was not an historian, an intellectual like Johns or Rauschenberg. He would not, could not take on that past, not even the recent past in the same way that they had, and so his early works paid little attention to the history of painting. He knew that his work would have to be about this time, this new face of popular culture. For Andy, the great Postmodernist, painting would be different.

Let’s start with Warhol’s dictum - “I want to be a machine.” But what kind of machine? Andy would use the mechanics behind the popular culture industry, and being a part of that industry, he was intimate with its functions. The production end of popular culture is a “readymade” tool in the sense that multiple mechanisms of production exist in depth, they are cheap and efficient to apply and they are readily accessible to everyone. For Andy it made perfect sense to use those familiar tools. He did not have to invent “the machine,” the technique or the style as so many Modernist painters did - the pictorial concept was included in the lens itself. In the printing industry most machines for reproductions are inexorably tied to lenses, and it is the lens that has been responsible for the massive proliferation of Popular Culture. Lens culture, powered by electronics, quickly became not only the means to capture images, but the means to reproduce, manufacture, manipulate and project those images as well. Warhol, who spent his youth transfixed by the endless photographic iconography produced by Hollywood, understood that these lens images are transformative. The lens brought fame, fortune, glamor and power to those who could control and frame their existences through its programs. Warhol’s bid to fashion himself as Art’s transformative machine starts with his use of the Overhead Projector.

What’s groundbreaking in these early works is Andy’s insistence on isolating banal newspaper advertising and realizing it as fullblown history painting. These paintings weren’t done in the academic fashion of realist painting where the mundane world is somehow made miraculous with painterly skill. Robert Henri’s command to paint the everyday world is not the point. Nor is he commenting directly about the everyday events of his time as the Cubists did. They displayed high and low together by including actual newsprint in their collages in an effort to obtain a poetic visual metaphor. Warhol simply focuses on the banal image used to illustrate a product then blows it up to heroic painterly proportions. There are no value judgments, no poetic inferences about the image, no elevation of the subject, only lens reproduction and mechanical assimilation. Underlying this process is the facility of the lens machine, the easy way it can instantly change the context of an image. Warhol’s machine easily reproduces any illustration that has been created for use by other machines. Graphic line drawings of water heaters or windows, cans of peaches, soda pop, wigs or comics from daily newspapers, photographs of ephemera are all simply banal documentation, schematics, rudimentary image maps of mundane products. Once projected, Andy quickly outlined these images, his paint dripped, he scrubbed in some areas with pencil or color, he left others blank, he allowed his hand to unmake the reproduction while remaking the projected image into a painting. In one fell swoop the banal becomes a new art form, a glamorized event, a lens driven action painting reduced to its physical components. This process removes any ABEX pretensions to high art (such as “action” or “emotion”) through the offhand application of the paint and the scaled portrayal of the ordinary image. He traces outlines reproducing the image without contemplating the subject. In other words, he scans rather than contemplates - he isn’t visually quantifying the rising subject. He is simply another lens machine reproducing the banal by repeating a programmed process - a process of surfaces. These first works ushered in an era where the lens would direct the act of painting in a way that it had never done before.

We might go on about Andy’s subject matter, but it’s been done much better by others. Glamor, fame, iconography, products, Hollywood, etc - these are all subjects of Popular Culture and we will take them up in another post. However, what we really want to understand is how Andy’s methods for transforming those Popular Culture subjects into “High Art” changed the way we interpret what art is, particularly in our Postmodern art world. As POMO has spread into our culture we have accepted and incorporated its most used technique - appropriation - into our everyday studio practices. Warhol was among the first to use this technique in such a deadpan way. Most all of his early images, the ones that were his subject matter, the ones that made him famous, were not produced by him, they were not lived by him. Those images were already public domain, public memories, false histories - easily reproduced, easily disseminated and instantly recognized. In Postmodern culture the found image is an accident, one receives it, stumbles upon it, but it is instantly known, because it is not distinct, it is not specific, it is generic, an avatar. We Postmoderns appropriate what we are not, we graft other public iconographies, other cultural memories into our lives. We present them as if they are our own, that we have experienced them, that we’ve lived them. As Hockney said in Secret Knowledge, “We thought we saw the 20th Century on the news, [in] film, and elsewhere, better than any previous century, although we could say we didn’t see it all - the camera did.” So it comes down to the idea that everything seen through a lens is a lived memory, that we know the the people in the image, that we can have the product, that we exist as a real component in this media. Art then is presented, contextualized through our collective experience - we appropriate and re-present the collective subjective as personal subjective - we become taste makers rather than innovators. The appropriation technique of using “found images” continues to be practiced in today’s art world. On the left is Richard Prince’s painting “Mission Nurse” from 2002. Prince executed this series of pulp fiction paperback covers as Andy did in the above examples. Today we have computers and photoshop to accomplish this task, so Prince may have used a computer and a printer instead of direct overhead overlays, but the lens reproduction and the conceptual approach is the same. His subject matter doesn’t move beyond the obvious Pop Culture associations - these illustrations detail pot boiler story lines, slightly risque media sexuality, banal and predictable figuration all wrapped up with a large gooey wad of nostalgia. Prince then resurfaces those covers customizing the reproduction. He handles the paint, he scratches the line, but ultimately, this painterly customization adds nothing to Warhol’s machine except empty painterly mannerisms. Andy’s conceptual practice in this case has been appropriated and reproduced - a Postmodern machine reproducing a Pop machine. 40 years separate these works, and yet, they both address the same conceptual issues of reproduction and lens based programming in the same way. Postmodernism and Popular Culture, are the collective mind, the false history, the always already, and what we continue to reproduce in our studios is this type of stylization and customization.

Warhol is truly a pivotal and protean figure in the history of contemporary art. With Warhol the concepts of high and low implode, there are no longer distinctions of meaning - every image can be manipulated, every image can be packaged. All the old requirements for innovating and making art are completely beside the point. We will be covering this in our next post on High and Low.

Pop Face

Content is what shows up, what we experience, what moves us, what we talk about and what we blog about. Content is the ephemeral, the incidental, the unknown element in the program itself. What will catch on, what will capture the imagination, what will drive the society, what has meaning, what will be sold? One minute we all watch American Idol, the next it’s Lost. One minute we love Jeff Koons, the next it’s Damien Hirst. So much of the unknown element that strikes a chord in us is driven by something deeper, something not necessarily quantified. It is what we desire without knowing why. It is the thing that entices us. Once we fall for this unquantifiable allure the machinery of the popular kicks in. Repetition is the ultimate goal for this programming. Repetition is the road that leads to the palace of success. We are inundated with images, phrases, slogans, jingles and packaged information in order to continue to foment desire in us. Once activated our desire can be mined for money, power or fame until like financial debt instruments, oil futures contracts, political catch phrases or Matthew McConaughey it bottoms out beneath our collective consciousness. Aside from the business that happens around the mechanisms of Pop Culture, something unaccountable has also transpired. We have created a kind of false history, a history of false events that impact our real lives. This cultural success in itself is not easily understood, but its effects can be easily tracked. What begins with the search for the X factor, the undefinable, always ends in the same way.

Through the years as technology has become more sophisticated so has the idea of controlling Popular Culture and its manifestations. Not just in what is presented, but how it is presented, how something gets to be popular, how it makes money and creates influence. Advertising, publicity and production all go hand in hand to create a roadmap for this content. The program is there ready to go, always already, waiting for the next unquantifiable thing to be slotted in. Those things that seemlessly fit into the code, proliferate quickly, those that don’t either morph into something else that can be used or fall away. It’s the seemlessness in the unquantifiable that creates the facility in the program. And we, as consumers, as viewers, as participants get wrapped up by the facility of it all. Let’s face it, the ease at which we can obtain and attain popular culture is astounding. It is far more than our personal preferences - that annoying jingle in your head, the half remembered commercial images or wearing corporate logos - none of this was “chosen.” The workings of this culture are more involved, more manipulative and they exist outside of the comfortable individuality that we believe determines our likes or dislikes. Just as the unquantifiable is the beginning of the program we are the end-part of that delivery system, the end-part of the program itself. We complete the circle in the programming of Popular Culture.

So What About Art?

Clement Greenberg’s critical writing was a long polemic against the power of Popular Culture. He was the last great Modernist art critic. He wrote about the rising materialism of American Postwar painting and laid out the end game that eventually left advanced painting in a no-win situation. The end finally came in the early 1960s as a new culture was proliferating in America. Unfortunately for Clement this newly rising tide of Postmodernism quickly sunk the withering power of the Modernist avant garde. With electronic media, consumer culture and the influx of new corporate money came the idea that high art should be no different from Popular Culture, that today’s Popular Culture would be tomorrow’s High Art. Any pretensions, any aspirations, intellectualizations or visualizations about what “high art” could be was made instantly redundant - for Art it was the end of history. The avant garde was dead, the expression of a greater or higher culture was passe, and artists were now machines producing in the now, “…bringing home the bacon.” For these new artists the popular culture was The Culture. The harder artworld would begin to cultivate this change using corporate business models to create markets and build institutions. It would develop its own Popular Culture industry. As artists pursued this new Pop attitude in their studios Postmodernism provided both a theoretical base for the elevation of Greenberg’s hated Kitsch and an institutional backdrop for the new face of contemporary art. Postmodernism allowed artists to develop a mass-market public image based on the business executive while recontextualizing the process of art making as a process of production and R&D. It was a spectacular and decisive paradigm shift. We’ll discuss this shift in the next post - Overheads and Screen Shots

The season in Chelsea and around NY has started with a whimper. Never has so much been made about so little. I think this has a lot to do with the current economic and political season that has begun as well. If you don’t live in NYC it’s kind of hard to understand, but there are so many millionaires per square inch in this town that you are hard pressed not to step on one as you leave your front door. Right now those folks are QUAKING in their boots. By the new year this town will be in a new place, and there will be a lot of folks without the means to participate. Investment bankers, traders, funders and the like are looking for the door and loading their pockets (with tax dollars) as they go. Our little art world is about to drown in their flop sweat. For those of us who saw the early 90s, that’s gonna look tame in comparison. What we don’t need is another period of self loathing and PC installation work - so try to keep that in mind as we go, please….

Don’t be surprised if we change the look of this thing. I liked the very simple format we had, but alas, it no longer works with this version….We’ll try to keep you appraised of what’s what. If things go wonky again just check us at our main page Henri.