Andy Warhol- Karina Banda

Andy Warhol was an American artist born in August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with parents that emigrated from Slovakia. His family were Catholics and went to church regularly. His father was a laborer and worked in a coal mine.

During his childhood, he often had to stay at home because he was sick and he sometimes had bouts of Sydenham’s chorea disease, which is a nervous system disease that causes involuntary and uncoordinated jerking movements. Since he stayed home a lot, he became an outcast at school but grew very close to his mother.  His constant bad health though made him hypochondriac, which means he had a fear of hospitals and doctors.

            As he stayed home a lot, he would draw, listen to the radio, and collect pictures of movie stars.  As a kid he also took free classes at the Carnegie Institute and received his first camera around the age of 9 and would develop his own pictures in his basement. Although his dad passed away when he was 13, his father had recognized and supported his talent and had saved up money for Warhol’s college. Andy ended up attending Carnegie Institute of Technology studying Pictorial Design in 1945 and wanted to become a commercial illustrator.  While he was there, he joined the Modern Dance Club, where he was the only male, and the Beaux Arts Society. He also served as the art director of the student art magazine, Cano, where his first published artworks are featured in. Here you can see a drawing that he did that was used as the cover for one of the issues: http://www.warhol.org/Warhol/Content/collection/art/earlywork/1998-1-1590/. The younger of his two older brothers also operated a small photo studio that had a photobooth machine and the customers would get the black and white product but also a hand-colored portrait. Warhol himself worked in the display department at Horne’s department store during his time in college.

After graduating from college, Warhol moved to New York City with his classmate Phillip Pearlstein to start working as a commercial artist. In September 1949, his work debuted in Glamour which you can see here: http://www.warhol.org/ArtCollections.aspx?id=1673. He had a unique style of drawing and he became one of the most successful illustrators during that time. His signature drawing style was the blotted line technique, which he developed during his college years. Warhol would ink an image in reverse and then put it down onto a clean sheet of paper, which resulted in unique and playful imagery.

            Starting in the late 1950s he devoted more time to his art through his paintings and 1962 marked the beginning of his celebrity status, which is when he did his famous Campbell’s Soup Can series (http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79809) . What he is most famous for are his silk screen printings. For these, he would pick an image and have it be transferred into a high contrast black and white image on transparent film, which he used as his film positive and his stencil.  You can view the whole process here: http://exhibitions.warhol.org/interactive/silkscreen/main.html.

Warhol was a man of many talents and his mediums included drawings, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, music, and computer generated art. He was a leader of Pop art, which is the art movement that challenges the traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture.  The theme surrounding his work was the effects of media as a dehumanizer. The basis of his critique was that something can be very beautiful alone but when there are multitudes of it, it decreases its beauty or value. In popular culture, the mechanistic and mass production of an image erodes its meaning and value.  He mimicked this in this work through his use of screen-printing as it provided an easy and fast way to reproduce an image. He also mimicked this in his way of working as he set up his workspace almost like a factory and did call it The Factory. He structured the work inside the Factory like an assembly line where his interns and other hired personals would help complete his works. It was also known to through many parties and Warhol himself frequently went out to clubs and meddled with drugs such as Adderall and heroin.

            Warhol got his first film camera in 1963 and from then until 1968, he produced almost 650 films.  The styles in his films differed from silent portrait films and full-length movies that were from minimalist avant-garde to commercial “sexploitation”. Sexploitation films are films that exhibit non-explicit sexual situations and nudity. His early film works are more simple ones that recorded ordinary things with no plot. His first film was actually just a recording of a man sleeping for hours. Warhol liked to choose things that were icons, as the public share a meaning in it like Marilyn Monroe and coke cans.

In 1964, he came out with Empire, an 8-hour silent black and white film featuring footage of the Empire State Building at night (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqDHuaVFlyw). I actually was lucky enough to see this film while I was in NYC last year at the James Fuentes gallery but I did not stay for more than 30 minutes. The shoot was actually only 6.5 hours and shot at the standard 24 frames a second but is played in 16 frames per second because he wanted it to have a touch of unreality in it. The film, although very simple, keeps us thinking about the medium of film itself. As you stare at the image of the building, your attention is brought to the texture of the film’s image and flickering of the shot image. Most of the time with film, you forget you are experiencing it through a camera’s lens and the camera seems invisible but here it is brought to the center of your attention. Picking the Empire State Building also adds to the film as it is an American icon. You think of what it stands for and then you think of the building itself as a sculpture.

He started with plotless films but as he progressed, he started adding soundtracks and sketchy scripts. One of his later films, the Nude Restaurant from 1967, is a 95 minute length film shot at a restaurant. There are different versions of this film: one all male, one all nude cast, and one with all the actors in G-strings. Here you can see part of the all nude one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87uqMzj3lsI. The film actually starts in a bathroom with the main women in a tub with a man and follows her to her waitress job at a nude restaurant. The only action is really conversation throughout the whole thing. His films became a form of cinema verite where the delight was in watching strange people doing strange things. In 1968 though, Warhol was shot by one of the Factory people and he withdrew from filmmaking. Instead, Paul Morrissey helped direct the rest of his productions.