Paper Topic:

Art History: The Artist`s Body

THE ARTIST 'S BODY AND ANDY WARHOL

2007

Where is Warhol himself in his apparently affectless , neutral pictures and films

Figurative art regarded the body as commercialised - something chopped up and sold for parts . Abstraction claimed to reflect the artist 's inner state , but it has been much criticised for lacking an essential human quality : the reality of human relations , which are often described as messy and even bloody . Andy Warhol did not praise the human figure indeed , he buried the human body in his flat , affectless art , such as

his silkscreened paintings of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell 's Soup cans These works of Warhol suggested that for Warhol , people were only another advertised commodity . An example of Warhol 's impassionate pop aesthetic is Birmingham Race Riot (1964 , his silkscreened painting of a news photo . The tonal values of the painting 's surface gives equal emphasis to the black stubble on the policeman 's cheeks and the dark colours of the black man 's slack , which were being ripped apart by an attack dog . Abstraction emphasized the mythology of the artist as solitary genius merely expressing the inner states of mind . Pop art , as embodied by Warhol , clearly speaks of Warhol 's scorn of high art - that commercial art and subjects were no less important than high art , and that artists could use the figure of the human body to explore new ideas with new media

Warhol himself was quoted in saying that all he ever wanted to mould his life into was a vacant , vacuous Hollywood - something plastic white-on-white . In understanding where the author is himself in his apparently affectless , neutral pictures and films , art critics such as Flatley (1996 ) argues that the use of Pop aesthetic actually allowed Warhol to gain access to the public sphere and to bring himself and his colleagues inside it as active participants . In other words , Warhol 's affectless style , and his counter-Hollywood attitude actually allowed Warhol , previously snubbed by the art world for being a commercial illustrator and thus considered as an outsider , to acquire a public persona and to participate in the growing concept of self-abstraction His work has not exactly been entirely affectless , as with the case of his In the Still Life (1975 ) and Hammer and Sickle (1977 ) paintings where the artist confronted shadows as a subject in their own right , and where the artist himself described their genesis in a photo in my studio , his studio assistant pointed out that Warhol asked him to take photographs of shadows generated by maquettes devised expressly to create abstract form . Thus , the artist 's presence in his affectless art is apparent in their very affectlessness , since this was a style the artist practiced , and it was the style he became known for

Warhol produced both comic and serious works , and used the same techniques - silkscreens , reproduced serially , and often painted with bright colours - whether he painted celebrities , everyday objects images of suicide , car crashes or disasters . The unifying element in the...

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