From: natashavita@earthlink.net
Date: Fri Aug 16 2002 - 12:27:41 MDT
Being a member of MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) has its value. One is
the current Andy Warhol Retrospective.
After viewing room after room of large and colorful silkscreen (serigraphy)
prints, two silkscreen/paintings took my breath away -- “Oxidation” and
“Shadow Painting”. Both are beautifully balanced and finely executed
abstract pieces. The former looking like the detail of an oxidized yet
luminous copper pot, and the latter like a golden raw silk cloth textured
with black like a remaining shadow of a Japanese brush stroke.
Warhol started out as a commercial artist, designing illustrations for
advertisements in newspapers and building window displays for department
stores. Through this period, Warhol began expanding his artistic eye.
“Employing mass-production techniques to create works, Warhol erased
traditional distinctions between fine art and popular culture, subtly
blurring the boundaries of mass art and high culture with his striking
appropriations. His choice of subjects tapped into important themes (at
that time): power, fame and tragedy. With the unerring eye for iconic
images, from common objects to celebrities and disasters, Warhol produced a
lasting oeuvre that captured the essence of American culture.”
MOCA’s exhibition of Warhol’s silkscreen prints was inspirational. Having
dabbled in silk-screening designs (I was owner and master printer of a
serigraphy business in Colorado), I fully appreciated looking up close and
intimate at the texture of inks across the canvasses. Out of the 200
imaged exhibited, several images stand out as awesome – the flower series
and a very large red canvass with an image of an electric chair.
The exhibition built in momentum. Winding us around the stages and
evolution of his work, from drawings to filmmaking, the most spelling
binding final images were fun. A single color (black) photographic
silkscreen image of da Vinci’s “Last Supper” what seemed to be a 20’ by 10’
pink canvas and the mammoth image of Mao. I didn’t realize it was so
large. It catches you in your tracks and demands your look at it – if not
only for its size, but also for its orange, greens, blue and yellow colors.
What I appreciate most about Andy Warhol (unfortunately I never met him and
my only stories are certainly well within reach, but ultimately second
hand), was his ability as a commercial artist and his development into both
a fine artist and an entrepreneur. This is not an easy bridge to cross.
Commercial designers have different training than fine artists. Our
academic structure is established to train us to think differently and
produce differently. Just as it is a tenable bridge to cross in the arts
and sciences (although many of us have succeeded, to be sure); it is a
fragile bridge to cross between the rails of commercial/illustrative art to
the abstract poetic field of fine art.
But that wasn’t the only trek he took. Warhol was extropic in some of his
ideas. He was inventive, far reaching, and also worked with robotics. He
sometimes had someone dress like him and make appearances parties on his
behalf – a type of future avatar. He trekked the commercial art world,
fine art world and then entered the underground film community, which was
at its most innovative in the late 1960s with the likes of Kenneth Anger,
Carolee Schnemman and Stan Brackage. In the early 1970s he began began
publishing “Interview” magazine, which still limelights artists such as
rock stars, actors and fine artists. His widely known and an artistic
phrase that has been realized throughout culture has significance: “In the
future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”
Warhol died after unexpected complications after gall bladder surgery. I
wonder what his work would be like were he alive today. I have little
doubt that he would be using digital designs, robotics, and all sorts of
novel innovations in an ExPOPic Art mode. Would he be a cryonicist?
Perhaps.
Whether we knew it at the time or not, Andy Warhol left an indelible
impression on many artists from the 70s onward.
I was trained, from early childhood, to be a fine artist. My father was a
successful commercial artist in New York City and preferred that his
children learn to be “fine artists”. It wasn’t until my early twenties
that I started my first commercial art business and did a nosegrind through
the difficult discipline of graphic design and advertising. Today, I am
able to skip along the fluid and fuzzy bridge that seems to separate the
two fields apart while inviting them to come together.
My latest fine art piece is titled “A-Life Swarm” and resides in our living
room peeking 14 feet by 5 feet. I used one computer-generated image
repeated over and over again with a slight to dramatic change in its
texture and tone so to create an overall effect. It was inspired by the
repetitious design expressed in Warhol’s prints.
Last night, while at MOCA, I stood breathless before some of Warhol’s
images. But most importantly, I was impatient to silkscreen again. I look
forward to new technologies that allow a toxic-free textile paint for the
silkscreen process as well as toxic free photographic tools with which to
photosynthesize the silkscreen surface. Even though my bladder cancer is
the unfortunate result of my silkscreen business, and even though I have
sworn off fiddling with these toxic materials, I look forward to a safer,
cleaner process for this technique, and I yearn to print again.
Natasha
http://www.moca-la.org/museum/exhibitiondetail.php?id=319&PHPSESSID=5f3abcc8
57df3ded27e35df2deee310c
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