Warthko
I finished a project last night. It could’ve come out better. Now I have another week of adjustments to do to it. Or more. And maybe a companion piece. Or I could call it day and move on to other things I need to do. I have to choose whether to indulge in convenience or obsessiveness. I’m not sure which is the preferable trait. But all of that is a non-sequiter.
This piece is about a month or so old. Its made of leftover masking tape stencils I used on canvas that I’ve mounted to paper I drew on with markers.
The obvious point of camparison is Warhol here, whom I seem to reference a lot because of the way I do things, but I’ve also referenced Rothkoesque compositions a lot, so don’t lose sight of that little plagiarism here. And you thought the only thing they had in common was changing their names to sound less Jewish!
On the Warhol point, this piece made me think last night that people will compare this to him because its 1- figurative 2- a stylized, simple style and 3- repetitive. The first 2 might be what people are more consciously aware of, but repetition is the big one for me.
For all the traits that Warhol is famous for, his use of repetition maty not be the first people think of but is central to his oeuvre. He definitely didn’t invent its use, but he’s the first in my mind to popularize it as a powerful compositional tool unto itself.
The first example I know of is his Soup Cans. The image above is of many individual paintings (this is before he turned to printing methods to speed things up). Everybody knows the basic Pop ideology behind any one of those pieces, but if you see them all together it amplifies the idea immensely. A single can is a commentary on a banal object in your cabinet. A full wall of cans is a comment on the supermarket itself, the standardization of products in the commercial-industrial world of the early 60s. Treating the paintings with the same form of mass production as their subjects amplifies the content of the piece greatly not just conceptually, but visually. One such painting is a novelty. the full wall hits you over the head with the statement behind them.
 |
 |
While later pieces used repetition to continue to illustrate the consequences of the printing processes he was using, the greater takeaway for me is that repetition (or repetition with variation) allows simple processes and statements to be amplified. Warhol’s hasty coloration of a single Monroe silk screen is famous in its own right, but the version you see imitated and referenced as a cultural icon is the repetitive grid form. Even without variation among the coloration the repetition works by de-emphasizing the actual subject in favor of the process. Its an effect that can be either anxious or meditative depending what you bring to it.
Personally, my processes often have nothing in common with silk screening (other methods I use do, like the image at the top of the post) or automation, but repetition/variation is vital to what I do for the exact same reasons as it was important to Warhol. Do something once and its good or bad. Do the same thing 20 times and it will have to be taken more seriously, whether good or bad, because of the effort of repetition.
Even last night, seeing the piece I wish had turned out better, one of the solutions I presented myself is to create a sister piece to help visually contextualize it.
In music they say a mistake is something you play once, play the mistake twice and you’ve got yourself a tune. Play it 50 times and you’ve got a modern masterpiece (not really but let’s pretend).
Anyways, this essay was impromtpu and doesn’t really have a formal conclusion.
Piece out,
-JD
May 18, 2010 at 3:17 pm
the death of instrinsic value. that is what post modern feels like, why repitition seems so powerful. am I just another brick in the wall? am I just the sum of the parts of my consumption? What’s wrong with Jewish names? We all eat out of a can. There is nothing new under the sun. All of it non-sequitor – i think that is the core crisis of the age and the core crisis of the work – how do I make a name for myself when there is no more meaning in things – All of it non-sequitor. is sensual gratification enough? color, texture, form, smell, taste, context … if i don’t tell the story of my abstraction with words it becomes a solopsist ink blot – but as long as the viewers derive pleasure from the work I am ok that it doesn’t have any identity apart from the viewer? no meaning. Too many meanings. No message? Or at least no connection to any universal themes. Oh, but there is at least one. The shape of the vacuume is signifigant. What’s wrong with Jewish names? Was it their existance or your use? Nothing new under the sun. I have heard it all before. Don’t grow old if you can help it. Its painful and boarig. Nothing new, you see ….
May 18, 2010 at 5:14 pm
Thank you! Glad you liked the piece!
June 26, 2010 at 9:18 am
[...] me a package that included a stash of pazzle pieces, the likes of which we’ve seen in many of his works. I was even more delighted to find among the pieces several silhouettes of our favorite cottontail. [...]