Episode #19: My Obsession With Warhol

How did I fall into this obsession? It really was an accident, something I never intended. When I studied Art in high school there were so many artists that fascinated me. Mainly from the modern art movement. I remembered Andy Warhol's soup cans and silkscreens; but  they weren't anything special.

It wasn't until much later that I realized we had similarities that went beyond any artistic technique or style. My family was in no way similar to Mr Warhola's religious upbringing - far from it. My family is very British. What we shared is a little horrific. 

What my fascination did spark for me was a kinship with Andy Warhol. I wanted to know more about his background, his life in the 60s' and 70s'. Where he discovered his eclectic style of using consumerism as a motif. Join me as we do a deeply different dive on Andy Warhol. One that feels a little bit more real than what the history books are telling you.    

Transcript

My Warhol Obsession: The Factory Foreshadowed YouTube

My obsession with Mr. Warhola started when I discovered more about him in my early days at Ontario College of Art and Design. I was a fledgling wanna be Art Star. I was the top of my class at my high school – waiting to be chopped at the knees of most of the artificial exuberance and bravado I had mustered from my tiny little high school in Eastern Ontario. This was where I had done so well, as many other art students had in their own schools.

In my late teens I also had gotten into liking the band The Velvet Underground. I’m not sure why. It may have been, as it was for many of my choices of music, been entirely based on the album cover. There was something strange about their covers that drew me in. I also think I had heard Lou Reeds Wild Side song, and from what I remembered, from my high school art classes – the soup painter Andy Warhol from the 50s with his silver haired wigs; I was really into them too. There was some sense of mystery about it all that I couldn’t put my finger on. 

I was hooked. I went down the rabbit hole of his art career, his influences, his family, his colleagues, his Factory. His eclectically run and wonderfully energized factory that had a mish mash of peculiar and decidedly weird and beautiful people that walked up and down those halls. What he called his ‘Factory’ was YouTube for the 1970s. He wrote about it in his diaries. If you know anything about Art, Design, or celebrities in the 1970s you know about Andy Warhol. You may be familiar with his silk screens of Elvis, or Marilyn Monroe. 

The glam and his extreme uses of colour. And of course, his party mentality. This was such a contrast to his family background of Eastern European white-collar workers. They barely knew the language let alone manipulating images to represent something else. Yes of course, he had people who worked for him – what successful artist hasn’t? But how did he harness his talent and mold the public perception to be what he wanted? Let’s take a deep dive.

I better unpack what I shared in common with him. He died from a gun shot wound from Valerie Solanis,  a deranged fan.  I also had a gun shot fired at me, but thankfully I wasn’t hit with the bullet. Mine happened to be a deranged boyfriend at the time. He apparently didn’t like me giving him the silent treatment. I spoke after that, realizing this guy is psycho.

Andy Warhol’s use of repetition is essential in Modern Art as no one has any attention for anything anymore. Have you noticed how society is moving in this direction? Our attention spans keep getting smaller and smaller. Shorter and shorter. Alas, that’s why even the videos we watch on YouTube are called shorts. Warhol understood the power of repetition using advertising of soup cans, he translated this into pop art. You may know this, but did you know the personality behind these neon images? He was an almost recluse. I read his diaries, and they were very detailed. He was swept away by celebrity and the momentum that it brought.

I know that technically we can never truly know what he was thinking or feeling as he was extremely private. But because he had so many close friends and partners in his factory, there must be a few threads of truth to this. As why would they work together to make all their stories line up? And what would the purpose of that be? I digress; Warhol was a whirlwind.

When you walk into a grocery store you would easily recognize a can of Campbell’s Soup; but it wasn’t until Warhol took it out of the store, and painted it’s portrait, that people began to see it differently. At that time in the early 1960s conceptual art had never been heard of. Taking an image and repeating it 50 times was not done for aesthetic reasons, it was done for the concept itself. Warhol said, ‘The important thing is what each one of you thinks…I’ve already made my statement - right there.’’

Warhol taught us to look at the work differently; with this podcast, specifically this Warhol Podcast, I want you to see how one Artist for me changed how I thought about Art, and the world around me. As many Artists have over the years. From Picasso to Duchamp, Man Ray, to Monet. Those of course will be other pods for us to contemplate. Because this is what we are all about. Dissecting and analyzing, diving and discussing what creatives are about. How they think, feel, move, and imagine. 

What brought Warhol to that distinctive moment where he took that can out of the grocery store and brought it into his studio? Was it as simple as the repetition of that childhood memory of his mother always serving that very same meal over and over? Was he recreating his youth? Or was he bringing himself and his composition into a new way of seeing? Was he predicting the future of consumerism and mass production, Globalization and over production? 

He is an enigmatic Artist that we continue collectively to conjure up an idea of what he believed and how he saw things. Forever a mystery that intrigues us and inspires us. Join in me on the Creatively Thinking Podcast where we do deep dives with some contemporary Canadian artists who are currently shaping and changing our social landscape. Visit creativelythinkingwithcarolynb.buzzsprout.com. To continue to share, shape, and transform our creative social dynamics share this with your friends and family. All of us are a part of the contemporary Artsphere.

Thank you for taking the time to listen to me rant on about Andy Warhol, I’ll see you next time as I take you down another rabbit hole of cultural complexity in today’s every changing fabric of creativity.