Warhol

Photo: Arpingstone / Wikimedia Commons

Touring from the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, this Tate Modern retrospective brings together more than 150 paintings, sculptures and films. Campbell’s soup, Marilyn, the electric chair… That Warhola kid had an eye for an icon. His most familiar works, icons of icons, became icons themselves. It’s their familiarity, now, that makes them strange. When paintings and prints of grocery cans and Coke bottles first surfaced, they must have seemed uninterpretable, drifting free of paradigm. Now the struggle is to separate them from four decades’ flotsam of mechanical art, no cultural phenomenon unreferenced, no reprographic tool unexploited.

In hindsight, paradoxically, Andy’s automation looks quaintly craftsy: daubing Monroe first in his mind’s eye, preparing the screens, stirring and scraping the thick inks one by one. The Coke bottle canvases are visually compelling not because the stamped repeats are identical, but because each imprint is different, flawed, unintentionally human. He was gone before Photoshop arrived. Would he have upgraded? And would his products in any case have been superseded by the next generation?

First published in ‘Twenty/20’, MacUser, 22 February 2002

Tagged as: Art, Design, MacUser