Modernism and Post- Modernism

What was the driving idea behind Andy Warhols Factory? Pop Art is popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business These were the words used by the artist Richard Hamilton, to describe the 1960s avant-garde art movement, which quickly became known as Pop Art. It rejected conventional artworks and styles in favour of more outrageous paintings and prints, installations and performance pieces. A new and groundbreaking art movement was well and truly born, with Andy Warhol as one of its chief instigators. It was new, it was witty and above all it was bold. First seen in the work of Warhol and his contemporary Roy Lichtenstein, this new movement was condemned by conventional art critics, in the belief that it aimed to mock the emotionally fuelled works of abstract expressionist painters and the work of the great masters. Originally a commercial artist, Warhol created popular images and films that everyone could identify with and which were easily recognisable to the general American public. He

adopted the approach of a modern realist and transformed normal everyday images into prints and branded them as an entirely new art form. These famously included everyday domestic products like Brillo, Campbells soup tins and images of movie stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando. He used scandalous or outrageous events to his advantage and as a means of publicising his works. By means of mass production and serial repetition, he managed to create a pseudo reality with everyday images, giving them a new meaning and significance. His work carried no narrative and did not aim to evoke emotion in its viewer, yet did highlight the daily newspaper events of modern culture. His painting Green Coca-Cola Bottles of 1962, can be taken as an example of how Warhol incorporated everyday mundane objects into his anti-narrative work and by using a commercial art process, transformed them into iconic images of 1960s urban culture in America. Not only did Warhols work become instantly recognisable but he too gained celebrity status in New York, socialising with the rising stars and artists of the day, and making a household name for himself. However, it was the creation of Warhols Factory that granted artists and musicians the opportunity to explore various new art forms and cinematic productions in a relaxed and alternative environment. One of the most pioneering and well known artists of our time, Andrew Warhola was born to Czechoslovakian parents, in Pittsburgh in 1928. Shy and reserved as a child, he attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he studied for a degree in Fine Arts, before moving to New York, where he worked as an illustrator for a couple of prestigious fashion magazines and even came to the attention of his idol, the writer Truman Capote. Ambitious and driven, Warhol as he now called himself, quickly gained recognition, and even achieved an Art Directors Club Gold Medal. New York offered Warhol the freedom to explore his repressed homosexuality and new emerging art forms by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. He produced a number of books, theatre sets and held several exhibitions, including one based on drawings of his idol, Capote. None of these were particularly successful and Warhol failed to sell many of his works. Nevertheless, this work proved valuable when presenting his work to various art directors and magazines. He would later gain a commission for the I Miller

shoe store, which guaranteed him a steady income for the next few years and this demand meant that Warhol even needed to hire a studio assistant. These shoe images were to become some of his most popular works, before his decision in 1958 to leave the security of commercial art and explore more abstract and popular art forms. I feel I am very much part of my times, of my culture, as much a part of it as rockets and television.1 Inspired by the innovative works by Johns and Rauschenburg and eager to make his mark on the American art scene, Warhol began to paint outside the realm of commercial art, and sought the advice of his friends on subject matter for his paintings.

Warhols original New York City studio of the 1960s became known as the Factory. Famed for its outrageous parties, the Factory quickly became a meeting place for the artists, drug users, superstars and musicians of the day. Here Warhol and his friends created silk-screen prints and lithographs using various everyday images. Inspired by the co- modification of American urban culture, he mass produced his images just as if they were consumer goods and he used those around him as his inspiration for much of his work. They starred in his films and created the atmosphere that inspired the type of art that Warhol aimed to produce. It was a well known fact that he loved beautiful, charismatic, young people and in order to create, he felt the need to surround himself with these witty and artsy characters2. He craved fame and power and in order to achieve this, he knew that his works needed to be taken seriously by the public.3 Ive got to do somethingthe cartoon paintings, its too late. Ive got to do something that will really have a lot of impact, that will be different enough from Lichenstein and Rosenquist, that will be very personal, that wont look like Im doing exactly what theyre doing4 Driven by his desire for fame and recognition, he set to work on his images of the Campbells Soup Tins and Dollar Bills in 1962. The driving idea behind Warhols Factory stemmed from his desire to portray man as a machine, equally capable of the mass production through art of the very emotionless objects that were created by the
1 Quote: P.9, Andy Warhol, The Velvet Years Warhols Factory, 1965- 1967 Text by Lynne Tillman, Photos by Stephen Shore, Pavilion Books Limited, London, 1995. 2 Reference: P.38, The Velvet Years Warhols Factory, 1965- 1967 Text by Lynne Tillman, Photos by Stephen Shore, Pavilion Books Limited, London, 1995. 3 Reference: P26, Andy Warhol Eric Shanes, Grange Books Ltd., London, 2005. 4 Quote: P.27, Andy Warhol Eric Shanes, Grange Books Ltd., London, 2005.

leading industries of the sixties. Using a silk screen process, to transfer photographic images onto a canvas, Warhol created a form of mechanical repetition and produced images which appeared to have been commercially produced in a factory. To critics, he justified his work by claiming: I want everybody to think alike Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and were getting more and more that way. I think everybody should be a machine5 Often referred to as the Silver Factory, Warhols original studio was a large open space at 231 East 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan. Covered in tin foil, silver paint and cracked mirrors, it was decorated for him by his friend, Billy Name. The interior represented the glitzy and carefree lifestyles of those who frequented it, with a red couch forming a focal point for Factory guests. Much of Warhols earnings were spent on financing their sordid lifestyles and throwing wild parties for them, while Warhol himself abstained from much of the alcohol and drug use. Although he was a strict Catholic, Warhol openly encouraged the practice of sex in the Factory and often filmed his friends performing sexual acts and used these in his works. People of various sexual orientations frequented the Factory, with drag queens, transsexuals, homosexuals and porn stars among those who took part in Warhols films, such as Blowjob and Couch. Orgies were frequent in this sexually liberal environment and drug use was rampant amongst the artists, intellectuals, radicals and musicians that hung out there. Truman Capote, Edie Sedgwick, Mick Jagger, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground were just some of the superstars who were regular visitors to the Factory. He designed album covers for the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones and they in turn came to rehearse at the Factory, yet the term rehearse should be taken in a loose sense of the word. He encouraged his friends to make art with him while they were hanging out there and he even employed a couple of them, including Billy Name and Nathan Gluck, as his personal assistants. Despite the fact that his studio was fundamentally different to any conventional factory of the sixties, he had assembled a production line in the form of his friends and contemporaries who hung out there and it was with this help that Warhol came closer to achieving his driving idea of portraying man as a machine.
5 Quote: P.30, Andy Warhol Eric Shanes, Grange Books Ltd., London, 2005.

By the end of 1962, Warhol had finally gained some success and recognition. Following the death of Marilyn Monroe, he used her image to create silk-screens which highlighted the glamorous life that she had led before her untimely death and these works would go on to become Warhols most iconic images. Controversial topics featured more and more in his works and during the racial tensions in the south of America, he produced a series of paintings of police and their dogs attacking black people in Alabama. Continuing with the theme of death, he created many more images of death, car crashes, electric chairs and shocking news headlines. The Factory became increasingly infamous and controversial, and in 1968, a Factory regular Valerie Solanas shot and injured Warhol and a friend, which in turn led to a change in the Factory. Warhol now withdrew from the public eye, announcing his retirement from painting and limiting public access to his studio. He had started shooting films in the Factory around 1963 and held private screenings for his friends at his studio, before releasing them to the public. However, because of the sexual and abstract nature of many of his films, traditional theatres refused to screen them and therefore he would turn to night-clubs and occasionally even porn theatres. The Factory became not only a studio but a film set for the many films he produced in the sixties. Edie Sedgwick, Taylor Mead, Henry Geldzhaler, Lou Reed and the Velvets were just some of the characters that starred in films such as Poor Little Rich Girl and 13 Most Beautiful Boys. Perverse, abstract and erotic, his films were in many cases borderline pornographic. The Factory acted as a free space for experimentation and Warhol created films here which examined in close detail the mundane activities of his friends, such as in the film Sleep, which explored a sleeping man over an eight hour period. The Factory regulars were his driving force and inspiration and in turn it seems that the driving idea behind the Factory was to gather the brightest, most beautiful and talented people of the sixties in one place, in order to put them in focus and closely follow their activities, through the medium of paint, film and photography.

Warhol was symbolic of what was to come in the following years, in terms of art.

His character and work was shocking to many, but to those that frequented the Factory, he merely focused his viewers attention on the events which were occurring in the world everyday. His difference, his indifference, his queernesses, his conformity, his contrariness, his charisma, his passivity, his activity.6 According to Lynne Tillman, these were the characteristics which appealed to so many in such an artist. He courted fame and had a great desire to have it all, money and power. Greedy one might say, yet Warhol was never described in this way. People were drawn to Warhol and the Factory and the Factory existed only as a result of those that chose to hang out there, making art with Warhol. The Factory was essentially a faux Hollywood studio in a loft7, full of images of fallen stars and frequented by the rising stars of the sixties. A prolific worker, without the Factory and its components, Warhol may not have found the inspiration for many of his paintings and films. Always wanting to remain a mystery, in character he was many things that the Factory was not. However, he was magnanimous, witty and good company and drew people to him, therefore one can perhaps argue that, Andy Warhol himself was essentially the unique driving force behind the Factory.

6 Quote: P.12, The Velvet Years Warhols Factory, 1965- 1967 Text by Lynne Tillman, Photos by Stephen Shore, Pavilion Books Limited, London, 1995. 7 Quote: P.12, The Velvet Years Warhols Factory, 1965- 1967 Text by Lynne Tillman, Photos by Stephen Shore, Pavilion Books Limited, London, 1995.

Bibliography
Bocola, Sandro The Art of Modernism - Art, Culture and Society from Goya to the Present Day, Prestel, Munich, London, New York, 1999. Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh Art Since 1900 - Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 2004. Hunter, Sam, John Jacobus and Daniel Wheeler Modern Art Third Revised Edition, Harry N.Abrams Incorporated Publisher, New York, 2000. Jones, Amelia - A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., USA, Britain and Australia, 2006. Shanes, Eric Andy Warhol, Grange Books Ltd., London, 2005. Shore, Stephen and Tillman, Lynne The Velvet Years Warhols Factory 1965 67, Pavilion Books Limited, London, 1995. The text is by Tillman, with the accompanying photography done by Shore. Websites consulted: www.nyc-architecture.com www.warholfoundation.org