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As a Critical Studies Media Studies Major I think it would be interesting to pursue and research some of the following topics: 1. Commodification of industry specifically in that of fashion and the music world (focus on historical and social correlations as well) Adorno 2. Social history of media in a specific time frame (1960’s) 3. Media, music, fashion, pulp culture and pop art influences over a certain generation 4. Media and Finance – market moving news
- I have a lot of ideas spurring from my specific critical studies route, but I also have personal interests in music, fashion, sports, communication, and writing. I hope some of you guys have similar ideas from the notes that we picked up yesterday I think a lot of our final project ideas are going to overlap, which is great*
Lecture Proposals - Information session on gathering different essays what essays or theorists would be most helpful (specifically for critical studies or our individual projects) - Lecture of screen writing - Lecture on media theory application: how we as media studies majors can apply a theory or develop a theory to a new aspect of media
- After some really interesting readings in art history classes I've been taking this semester I am interested in exploring identity construction through the Pop Art movement of the 1960’s. I wanted to focus on consumerism and commodification and how both social and artistic constructs in the 1960’s affected each other.
Contents |
First Draft of Paper
Nancy Planitzer Senior Seminar 11/17/08
Pop Goes the World: Andy Warhol and Consumerism
As a younger nation, it was important for the United States to develop a national identity. For every citizen developing a personal identity is somehow associated with the identity they’ve previously established from their nationality. As a nation built around and upon the, “American Dream,” identity, the United States is a nation driven by consumption and progress. In order to achieve greatness wealth must be accumulated, and the best way to physically show an increased accumulation of wealth is to physically increase exposure to material possessions. Though the “American Dream” can be achieved in many different metaphorical and psychoanalytical ways, as a democratic country with a free market economy, material wealth is a very popular concept to any American Citizen interested in pursing their nation’s “motto”. A corollary of material goods and personal wealth is a relationship that is not exclusive to America, but prominent throughout its social and economic development. In the previous century one artist not only built his career around this relationship, but exposed America, and the rest of the world, to the real reality of what the achievement of the, “ American Dream” had instilled within it’s citizens own personal identity construction, and that artist was Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. His father was a mill worker, and his mother, a mother. Warhol attended the Carnegie Technical Institute, now Carnegie Mellon University and graduated in 1949. After graduation, Warhol moved to New York City, and began his career as a commercial artist and illustrator6. Working in advertising, Warhol quickly saw the mass appeal and power American media advertisement had over its audience. If American citizens could be so captivated by its nation’s cyclical consumerist lifestyle that they continued to buy and produce, Warhol saw no reason why not to adopt and appropriate the “American Dream”, commodity fetishism lifestyle into the art world. Warhol left the commercial art industry to pursue a career in the fine arts. By exploring the new appeal of consumerism Warhol would not only embark upon a new concept of material art within fine arts, but he would also explore a new media perspective as well as an aesthetic link between commodity and identity. The relationship of increased wealth yields to an increase in material possessions, as does the relationship between commodity fetishism and the social and political practices of the 1950’s and 1960’s generation. A Warhol silk screen canvas cannot reach someone as fast as an instant message or pop-up advertisement on the internet, as current advertisements do, but it can show how important commodity consumerism was and still is today. During his career Warhol revealed through art that what a society buys and consumes, eventually consumes society. In the end, Consumerism and commodity fetishism show that by consuming and interacting with media, as empowering as the viewer or audience may feel, in reality, the object, or product contains the power and control of identity; the consumer has no control. In his book, The Rise of the Sixties American and European Art in an the Era of Dissent, Thomas Crow states of Warhol’s work, “Warhol cam to produce his most powerful paintings by dramatizing the hollowness of the consumer icon: that is, events in which the mass-produced image as the bearer of desires was exposed in its inadequacy by the reality of suffering and death” (Crow, 86)4. Warhol saw the truth and beauty behind consumerism and the American public. Though Warhol played with his exploitation of reality by appropriating images and reproducing images, the truth of his art was always present, and achieved the same goal of exposing the emptiness and lack of identity within the consumer who mindlessly consumes, as much as it spread aesthetic pleasure. Andy Warhol gained great fame and acclaim in the early 1960’s with his commodity reproduction series. In his 1962 oil on canvas painting, One Hundred Cans, 6’ by 52” (182.9x131.cm) 6, Warhol painted 100 replications of a Campbell’s Soup can container. The iconography associated with Warhol’s now infamous representation of the initially unaesthetic or artistic can has now become a symbol of the then unfamiliar or unpopular, Pop Art movement of the 1960’s. But to Warhol who stepped away from his previous career as a commercial artist, to artists, using soup cans as a subject and symbol of his work was an expression of exploring a construct of something he was already familiar with, from working in advertisements: the commodity. Robert Rosenblum describes, Warhol’s work in his art essay, Warhol as Art History, when he states,
For one thing, the subject matter of his work, now that we are beginning to see it in full retrospect, covers so encyclopedic a scope of twentieth-century history and imagery that, in this alone, it demands unusual attention. To be sure, in the early sixties, his work could be sheltered under the Pop umbrella shared by Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, and others, joining these contemporaries in what can now be seen more clearly as an effort to re-Americanize American art…”(Rosenblum,26-27)6. As an artist, Andy was exploring a subject matter that he as a former commercial illustrator was very familiar with. However as a member of the 1950’s and 1960’s generation of commodity Warhol was establishing a critic on American art and America as subject matter. But in exploring America, and what it meant to be an American, Warhol was to revisiting the movements of the Hudson River School Painters, who sought inspiration in the natural beauty of New York States, Hudson River Valley, Warhol was looking to the everyday American citizen, a member of the US workforce, an average “Joe”, looking to establish and achieve their own “American Dream”. Rosenblum in his critic believes that Warhol’s choice of subject matter is how he achieved his notoriety. Rosenblum explains, But what is less obvious is how Warhol’s initial inventory of ugly counter-aesthetic Americana expanded to unexpected dimensions. Looking back at his entire output, the sheer range of his subjects comes not only international…but mind-boggling in its journalistic sweep….In terms of the role of the artist as chronicler of his times…Warhol, might be something…Recording cross-sections of both the lowers and the highest strata (Rosenblum, 27)6. Warhol was establishing himself as a fine art, artists, by using everyday common goods as a mean to represent his message. By using such commonplace commodities, and infusing them with such a presence of reputable status in the art world, Andy Warhol was beginning to blur the lines between high and low class art. As an increase in one’s personal wealth can change their social and economic status in American society from middle or lower class, to upper, Warhol’s art was able to show that the everyday production and consumption of art, commodity, or both could re-establish ones concept of self within a material obsessed community. This idea of establishing identity by commodity is what the Pop Art Movement sought to exposes through its’ work, and what Andy Warhol prided himself in with his specifics works. However, this fear of commodity obsession and control over identity is not solely associated to Warhol or other aesthetically creative artists. It is also a hugely political and social constructs of the Communist Movement, and Marxism. In Maynard Solomon’s book, Marxism and Art Essays Classical and Contemporary, many articles are accumulated together exploring the relationship between art and representation weather it be political, social, or economical. In Plekhanov’s essay Art and Social Life, Plekhanov believes that, “Society is not made for the artist, but the artist for society. Art must promote the development of human consciousness and the improvement of the social order” (Plekhanov, 128)8. For Plekhanov and other Communist thinkers anything created in society for the people’s pleasure must yield to an increase in the populous’ productivity within society. Art must nurture, educate or inspire the masses to continue on the great journey of societal evolution. Art cannot deter or distract citizens from the more important tasks at hand, for example, working in the factories. Warhol understood this idea of arts purpose in society as well. Unlike the Communist thinkers, Warhol used art as a tool to teach and communicate the current commodity driven conditions of America to the American people. However, Warhol did not indulge or invite his audience to choose a new way of life away from commodity fetishism; he encouraged his audience to take part in it. By buying, or viewing a piece of art like, One Hundred Cans6, Warhol was exposing his audiences to the idea that simple middle class commodities, or any commodity expensive or inexpensive defined the owner. In other words to Warhol and much of the 1960’s generation ownership of commodity equated to identity. Marxs and Engle believed in this concept to the construct of commodity fetishism. Marxs and Engels’ state, There it is definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in this world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities (Marxs & Engle, 83)9. Marx and Engle continue, “The particular commodity, with whose bodily form the equivalent form is thus socially identified, now becomes the money commodity, or serves as money. It becomes the special social function of that commodity, and consequently its social monopoly, to play within the world of commodities the part of the universal equivalent” (Marxs & Engel, 80)9. Marx and Engel believe that commodities take on a social identity within culture besides their initial physical material purpose or use as object. Object-hood and purpose are replaced with statues symbols, and monetary hierarchy, thus erasing the power or individual identity of the worker. Marx and Engel feared the overzealous and hyper intensified statues and necessity of commodity status, and commodity fetishism. This idea of societal obsession is what yields them to create and Communist Manifesto. Andy Warhol embraces this idea of commodity fetishism on the other hand. He see’s and envision the new concept of Americana in the industrial age of family T.V dinners, and suburban utopian society. America is becoming a society of convenient creations and predictable action. Unlike contemporary artists who used their art to re-established new social ideals through aesthetic expressions or performance art, Warhol reinforced and in fact, to some extent became apart of his mechanically reproducible America. One Hundred Cans6, shows viewers Warhol’s idea and concept of America as an American made products created by reproduction, with the purpose of consumption and future recycling and reuse. Gerard Malanga describes Andy Warhol’s conception of, One Hundred Cans6, saying, “ ...he took ordinary, everyday, common objects that we would see…and he thought that was an appropriate image of art. Just as anything else would do-a still life…these were the images and essentials that we were dealing with in life. So why not make art out of them?”(Smith, 171)7. Commodity products were an everyday part of life, Andy Warhol chose to take the everyday and re-frame the common, into a concept of the uncommon and fantastical. Using his art as a vehicle of personal expression about the socialized material obsessed status of American Pop culture, Andy Warhol was able to captivate and intrigue the American Public with his fascinating use of appropriated commodified and symbolic figures. One such image was Double Mona Lisa created in 1963, it consisted of silkscreen ink on canvas and was 28 1/2x 371/8” (72.4x94.3)6. Warhol’s image of Double Mona Lisa6 basically consisted of a reproduction and appropriation of de Vinci’s painting copied in black and white and duplicated twice on the canvas. Unlike recreating and repeating Coke cans or Campbell’s Soup cans, Warhol is choosing to recreate an iconic and overly commodified work of art. By reproducing, reframing and appropriating de Vinci’s image, Warhol is continuing to reiterate his statement about commodified cultural identity. However, in this case he is choosing to show how the concept of commodity does not remain solely in the premises in the corporation. In the art world and culture, the model and subject matter of Mona Lisa is very mysterious and captivating. Who she is, and what her smile means continues to instill puzzlement within any who visit her. In terms of a product the face and historical significance attached to de Vinci’s piece has created a massive fan following and tourist attraction. The image of Mona Lisa can be found anywhere from gift store tie shops, to dinner placemats, or tourist t-shirts. In relation to choosing his subject matter, Warhol wished only to choose the objects and people that would evoke a specific cause or emotion within the viewer. As random or irrelevant to some, as his subject choices may seem, to Warhol, and the community which he had created these works of art for, subject matter was a pure corollary to the society in which Warhol was working. Kynaston McShine explains in his art book. Andy Warhol A Retrospective, that, The celebrity icons Warhol started to produce by means of the photo-silkscreen technique in the late summer of 1962 are tinged by the same awareness of catastrophe. The mass media, upon which he drew for both series, are not just a conduit of violent and traffic news but a catalyst for dreams of glory and glamor. Encouraging in many belief that the impossible is possible-that even the ordinary child from ordinary surroundings can become a star (Kynaston, 17)6. Though his reproduction of Mona Lisa may not have be as renowned or as media recognizable as Elvis Presley, the action of reproducing artwork that was already established and well respected in the art community called into question the idea of authorship and ownership within the Pop Art Movement. Warhol was creating work, that was not original in subject matter, but highly original, and unique in reference and meaning to the material world of the 1960’s. Double Mona Lisa6 also illustrates a new frame of reference of Warhol’s work: the bifocal lens. Robert Rosenblum explains in his art essay, Warhol as Art History, …bifocal composition, that is, one that obliges the spectator to look side by side, or above and below, at two identical or equally compelling images…Mona Lisa…This vision often transformed literally into a diptych structure, undermines the absolute authority of those unique images so precious to artists of pre –Warhol era, setting up instead an either/ or situation. Or else creating a world of multiple replications, where even the artist’s self-portrait is double as a means of diffusing any on-to-one focus on what might once have been a singular revelation of face and feeling at a particular time and place. (Rosenblum, 29)6. Reframing and establishing iconic images allows Warhol to critic them in a manner that is applicable to the current status of his Americana vision. Warhol wants to reframe what is held in high authority by the high-art world, and exhibit it in the company of other works like One Hundred Cans6. To Warhol no one subject holds more precedent over the other, they all stand for the same thing, and that is social critic. Ownership, consumption or even knowledge of de Vinci’s work culturally associates ones identity to a social status. By appropriating Mona Lisa, Warhol reframes the message and meaning associated with the applauded art piece. In doing so he reframes and critics how commodity in culture is assimilated by the spectator and associated to influence identity by knowledge and status. Andy Warhol’s ideas of eliminating preconception by appropriating or reframing historic images is a physical representation of what theorist Roland Barthes believes in his critical essay, The Death of the Author. Barthes believes that in order to truly believe and commit to a unique idea and underlying message whether the medium is art, literature, or conversation, one must completely relinquish all previous held attachments to any previous knowledge of the context. It is only when one is truly opened minded and fully aware of all possibilities that actual messages and ideas can be honestly relayed10. Barth explains, …our subject slips away, the negative where al identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing…the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’ – the mastery of the narrative code- may possibly be admired but never his ‘genius’. The author is a modern figure, a product of society…The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or women who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author is ‘confiding’ in us (Barthes, 142-143)10. Barthes fears that the message of the author is lost within the aura of the author. The true message of work cannot be experience because the viewer or spectator is too consumed and enthralled by the tangential opportunities of previously established information. The only way to truly empower the viewer and acknowledged the author, according to Barthes is to destroy the concept of the author, and ownership, thus instilling endless opportunity within the reader, viewer, or listener. Barthes explains, …there is, however, someone who understands each word in its duplicity and who, in addition, hears the very deafness of the characters speaking in from of him – this someone being precisely the reader (or here, the listener). Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted…the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author (Barthes, 148)10. Barthes believes in the empowerment of the viewer as does Andy Warhol. By reject authorship, in the eyes of Barthes then, and only then, is the reader able to understand clearly the ideas of the “deceased author”. By appropriating and reframing images Andy Warhol is not claiming authorship of a new work of art, but condoning the original message of the status symbol in society of his subject and opening it into a new realm of understanding and critic on a more individual level. Warhol had a reason and a message behind everyone of his reproduction. In an interview conducted with Henry Geldzahler a former curator for 21st Centaury Art at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art7, Geldzahler states,” It was the image of art in the public mind. And he felt that the Mona Lisa was being seen so often and being seen in so many reproductions that his serial way of silk-screening it was – he had another way of doing it”(Smith, 184)7. Warhol used the previously established fame of Mona Lisa to increase the notarization and notability of his Double Mona Lisa6. Warhol was determined to spread his message and explore his idea of art and conceptualization of identity. By appropriating previously established societal symbols, Warhol found a new and more accurate way to reach the American masses. Consumers, who had become so blinded by their consumption that they were unaware of the forced identities they were being projected upon them. The bifocal lens allowed Warhol to approach his audience on a more personal level; this level of communication would only increase when Warhol chose to explore this method on a new subject: Marilyn Monroe.
Endnotes
Endnotes 1. Considine, David M., and Haley Gail E.. Visual Messages Intergrating Imagery into Instructuion. 2nd. Englewood : Teachers Ideas Press, 1999.
2.Crone, Rainer. Andy Warhol a Picture Show by the Artist Andy Warhol The Early Work 1942-1962. New York: Rizzoli, 1987.
3.Cross, Gary. An All-Consuming Centuary Why Commericialism Won in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
4.Crow, Thomas. The Rise of the Sixties American and European Art in the Era of Dissent. New Haven: Yale Univeristy Press, 1996
5.Gasper, Phil. The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Frederick engels A Road Map to History's Most Important Political Document. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005.
6.McShine, Kynaston. Andy Warhol A Retrospective. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989.
7.Smith, Patrick. Warhol Conversations about the Artist. London: U.M.I Research Press, 1988.
8.Solomon, Maynard. Marxism and Art Essays Classic and Contemporary. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1973.
9.Marx, Karl, and Frederick Enfels. The Communist Manifesto. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005.
10. Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text - Death of the Author. New York: Hill and Wing,
11.Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text - Death of the Author. New York: Hill and Wing,
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text - Death of the Author. New York: Hill and Wing,
Considine, David M., and Haley Gail E.. Visual Messages Intergrating Imagery into Instructuion. 2nd. Englewood : Teachers Ideas Press, 1999.
Crone, Rainer. Andy Warhol a Picture Show by the Artist Andy Warhol The Early Work 1942-1962. New York: Rizzoli, 1987.
Cross, Gary. An All-Consuming Centuary Why Commericialism Won in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Crow, Thomas. The Rise of the Sixties American and European Art in the Era of Dissent. New Haven: Yale Univeristy Press, 1996
Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text - Death of the Author. New York: Hill and Wing,
Gasper, Phil. The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Frederick engels A Road Map to History's Most
Important Political Document. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005.
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Enfels. The Communist Manifesto. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005
McShine, Kynaston. Andy Warhol A Retrospective. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989.
Smith, Patrick. Warhol Conversations about the Artist. London: U.M.I Research Press, 1988.
Solomon, Maynard. Marxism and Art Essays Classic and Contemporary. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1973.
Work in Progress
Art Work # 3
I still plan on describing my 3rd work of art which will be Marilyn Diptych. 1962 Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas; two panels, each 6’ 10” x57” (208.3 x 144.8 cm) 6
- art history interpretation - media theory interpretation – Guy Debord – The Society of the Spectacle
Compare Marilyn Monroe to Campbell’s Soup and Mona Lisa - combine all media message of work to focus on individual identity critic - incorporate Warhol as artists and generation member ( a commodity himself)
CONCLUSION
