Shi Haopeng/Wen is a simple and easy-to-understand theme, a seemingly non-existent theme, a light and interesting idea, and an empty and flashy beauty. In the past art history, if these elements appeared at the same time, they would be pointed out by thousands of people, and they would be rejected for their low aesthetic level, and could only satisfy physical pleasures--when most people were still struggling with the subsistence line, hedonism had its "original sin".
But PopArt caught up with the good times, and now the commodities are extremely abundant, and people generally no longer feel difficult for material deprivation, but often fall into the state of boredom after drinking and eating, and need to attract attention and interesting things to happen. Finally, hedonism became a group consensus, no longer criticized, and with its empty and flashy aesthetic, it also had legitimacy, and hedonistic art was no longer the privilege of a small number of people, and through the operation of commerce, it established an intimate connection with the public.
Since then, pop art has become popular. In the eyes of the public, Andy Warhol is equivalent to pop art.
What is Pop Art
Born in the United Kingdom in the 1950s, pop art is used by pop artists as a fresher element as a fresher element. They advocate justifying consumer culture, and having said that, their position is still based on the style of elite art. This comes from Pop Art's early masterpiece, What Makes Today's Family So Different and So Attractive? The meaning of reflection can be seen in ". Subsequently, pop art emerged in the United States, and the compositional logic of their works remained elitist, their works either meant something or were unclear, but the ultimate thrust pointed beyond ready-made and ready-made images.
It wasn't until Andy Warhol appeared that all changed, and the theme of his creation was the images he presented, popular and easy to understand, brightly colored, straightforward paintings that made his art peers look like chewing wax. However, every audience entering the exhibition hall can understand, the familiar image, the bright colors, anyone can say a few words about the work in front of them, coupled with Warhol's aggressive reproduction technique, let the fresh pop art wrap the audience in it, rather than rejecting people like the previous contemporary art, making people trapped in obscurity and confusion.
As pop art, pop art's previous profundity and coldness were abandoned and began to cater to the tastes of the public, but this was not the decline of pop art, on the contrary, pop art only then captured the essence of consumer culture: the picture is simple and bright, the theme is easy to understand, strategic marketing, topical, coupled with the cunning of the artist - to this day, Warhol's process is still being used by the top art stars.
But after that, Pop Art became more and more empty, pompous, monotonous, so meaningless, although there is too much ambiguity and uncertainty behind the meaninglessness to explore, but this meaninglessness eventually led to a blossoming nothingness, and commercial operations made this nothingness even more righteous. Those existential values that were once prepositioned are dissolved in the prosperity of materials and the prosperity of science, and we can see in pop art all kinds of ultimate propositions: life and death, fate, gender, religion, politics... But as soon as we gaze at these beautifully colored images for a minute, you will instantly understand: except for the consumer taste of these propositions and the money in the hands of collectors, these pop artists care about nothing.
Become Andy Warhol
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art/Editor
Zhejiang Photography Publishing House
September 2021
A great artist must be a masterpiece of endowment and destiny, and fate is wrapped in the torrent of the times, and in the album "Becoming Andy Warhol" of the UCCA exhibition of the same name, the city of Pittsburgh, where Warhol grew up, is regarded as the starting point of his artistic career. In Pittsburgh, Warhol not only received a professional and avant-garde art education as a student, but also received the enlightenment of commercial civilization.
It should be noted that there are two street scene photos of Pittsburgh in the book, and it is easy to ignore that the photos were actually taken at noon without looking closely. Pittsburgh in the 1940s was a modern city with a very industrialized and commercialized economy, where the fog was shrouded and brightly lit all year round. Pittsburgh's industrial fog, as if shrouded in Warhol's mind, led to his obsession with the process of industrialization and foreshadowed his future views on art machines.
Warhol spent his time at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, as free and vibrant as most people's college life, and in the "barn" of their studio with their classmates, they experimented with various forms of contemporary art, including video works. At that time, the "barn" already had the prototype of the later "silver factory", and warhol's image experiments, although expensive, have been continuously photographed, and even maintained expenses by customizing portraits of celebrities and rich people, which should have a lot to do with the artistic ideals he established in the "barn".
After graduating from college, Warhol came to New York, he started as a commercial illustrator and commercial designer, and only after a small achievement began to create his own works, when doing window design for department stores, he did not sign under pseudonyms like other artists, deliberately distanced "commercial art" from "pure art". For Warhol, there is no natural boundary between the two, and it is this attitude towards art that makes him have a very different appearance and operation method of other artists, he is like an individual who completely lives in popular culture, has not bypassed the detours of serious art, his works are full of the alienation of commercial society, and his creative method is also well versed in the way of commercial operation.
Warhol did not limit himself to the box of traditional artists, those traditional art practitioners care about the performance skills and interpretation space, he has been brushed over, and never entangled in the views of critics, he through the shape of the position, the four-seat speech, the overwhelming exposure and a series of behaviors to create the "Andy Warhol" art brand, and his well-known works are only his visual products on the assembly line. At the same time, Warhol is very aware of the importance of the media, but also very good at the use of media, he through publications and lenses, constantly deepen the brand influence of "Andy Warhol" to his audience, so that his simple and bright, highly recognizable artistic symbols appear repeatedly.
Through various unconventional operations, he brought the pop art movement out of the shade of serious art, confidently walked out of the European artistic tradition and killed everyone. At this point, pop art has rapidly spread to other fronts of popular culture, film, television, pop music, product design... Pop art became popular, becoming a microcosm of American culture and becoming popular art in the true sense of the word.
Of course, all this also brought Warhol great fame and fortune, and a steady stream of orders, and after becoming famous, he always appeared in various social occasions, and often held parties in his villa and "silver factory". The well-known "Silver Factory" is a stronghold of avant-garde art, with maverick and deviant people inside, people on the outside always mentioned with the infamous prefix, it seems that chaos and madness are happening here at any time, this is the production workshop of Warhol's art products, and it is also the shooting site of his well-known experimental films.
These images are very infectious, forward-looking, and have received unanimous praise. The first time I saw Warhol's video work, I was struck by the sense of nothingness in the work, which was a piece of debris left behind after a carnival, and the emptiness after the release of desire was extremely direct and unadorned, and I was amazed at the precision with which he captured the feelings.
Andy Warhol chose to jump into the void in advance
Another Andy Warhol
The success of being innovative, making friends with powerful people, and frequent appearances on camera can bring to Warhol seems to be full of opportunistic flukes and is not praiseworthy, so the contempt of art critics at that time was also understandable. But when we think of Warhol as a clever man who is good at drilling camps, some of his public remarks are surprisingly humble:
"Born like being kidnapped and then sold into slavery",
"I'm in art because I'm ugly and I can't do anything else.",
"I don't have a future at all in my work, and I know that."
Warhol, who has been so ostentatious, actually said that his works are not worth mentioning, and these statements seem to contradict the pursuit of fame and fortune, which inevitably makes people think that he is pretentious and difficult to distinguish whether it is true or false.
From the perspective of the times, it is possible to describe the cultivation of an artist, but in addition to the formation of the artist's style, its subconscious and early childhood experience are also an important part, but because the darkness in the depths of the human heart cannot be clearly perceived, it is even more difficult to say, we can only try to speculate on the possible reasons from the motivation of creation.
Warhol grew up in the slums of Pittsburgh during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Material scarcity makes Warhol sensitive and inferior from childhood, and what is more tragic is that he has experienced three mental breakdowns and can only be closed for several years - many great writers and artists have had misfortunes in their childhoods, and the trauma of childhood often makes a person feel and insight more acute than ordinary people, but at the same time, trauma will accompany his life, and he will live in uneasiness all his life. Fortunately, his mother's company and encouragement opened up an imaginative world for him, and he often immersed himself in that world alone, when Warhol had already shown the artistic talent inherited from his mother.
The constraints of his early life made Warhol understand what money meant, and his commercial illustrations and celebrity portrait paintings were in the same vein, the model was very similar, and they also achieved commercial success, bringing stable revenue to his life and art; on the contrary, his experimental images have been "losing money", but he still has no remorse, which is the artistic ideal he began from the "barn" period, which fascinated him and provided him with spiritual nourishment.
These two types of works that are completely opposite to each other help Warhol resist insecurity and nihilism, and he strives to maintain a balance, while playing a striking pop art star, while immersed in the endless emptiness after the insight into the essence of business, like a vanity fair flower butterfly in a strange costume and long-sleeved dance, flapping its wings to drop an aphrodisiac and hallucinogenic powder, and under the gorgeous wings is an introverted and inferior little boy, although he has experienced the baptism of dust and noise, he has not yet grown up, still sitting in the shadows with his arms on his knees. Silently watching everything that happens under the colored lights, silently, like a fire.
The repetition of Warhol's paintings is the same as the delay of his video works, both of which are an emptiness, a meaninglessness that cannot be stopped, but compared with the breakthrough of the video language, the progress of his painting language is very slow, and it was not until the 80s or so that the illusion in his paintings had a strong infestation. In the "Myth" series, his painting language has been pure and relaxed, the glare of the consumption elements in the work is entangled with the obscurity of the breath of death, and he seems to no longer cling to the human designs he once laid down to the masses, which may stem from the decline of his materialism or the deterioration of his physical condition, and in "Myths" he does not show the same brightness and firmness as before, but reveals his fragility and the deep awe of being a Catholic.
Warhol in the 1960s and 1970s was a new York art and fashion icon, attracting many young people who wanted to get close to the center of the circle, but fashion was always easy to become outdated, and Warhol was very concerned about his age and worked hard to maintain his avant-garde public image. The book also records a short story: In 1985, when the young hippie Steve Jobs delivered an Apple computer to Warhol, Warhol suddenly felt old and outdated.
In 1987, Warhol died unexpectedly during an operation.
We will eventually fall into the void
Although Warhol had achieved great secular success during his lifetime, his value was not taken seriously enough by prudent art critics, and it was not until his influence slowly emerged on a global scale that people realized that Andy Warhol was underestimated, so that art history had to redefine him several times.
"Falling into the Void" is the masterpiece of Yves Klein, a pop artist with the same name as Warhol, and the two lives in the same era have many things in common, the same sensationalism, the same treachery, but Klein, who died young, did not become a prophet of an era like Warhol.
"In the future, everyone can become famous for 15 minutes" Warhol's words, which have been quoted countless times, seem to be talking about today's short video era, and the images he shoots of sleeping and eating hamburgers are also like the current live video broadcasts, boring to the point of being addictive. At that time, he saw clearly the lack of nothingness in commercial society. We don't know what he likes or dislikes about it, but his attitude of embracing it all without hesitation is sober enough to chill people's backs.
The sense of existence that has nowhere to be placed, the desire to consume, and the technology that is out of control will inevitably lead to the advent of the era when everyone consumes everyone, and when it sweeps in, people will have nowhere to hide. Andy Warhol chose to jump into the void in advance, whether it is wise or pessimistic, helpless or helpless, to be able to accept alienation so calmly, it is always inevitable to sigh, just like the proverb "I want to be a machine", his future has been inevitable. In other words, our future is inevitable, in the face of the disorderly expansion of the material world, consumption has become our subconscious behavior inertia, without asking whether it is fate or robbery, with the degradation of judgment ability, thinking will become our burden, we will repeat superficiality and happiness in a short and fast beat, and we will continue to sink.
Warhol ushered in an era of pop art, he created an American style, which then spread to the world, and later became a world-renowned art star Jeff Koons (Usa), Damien Hurst (Uk),Murakami Takashi (Japan), all inspired by his artistic language and operational experience, unfortunately, Warhol's experimentality was not inherited by them, because compared with Warhol's time, it is undoubtedly a mediocre era.