Perspectives of the 'Figment': Andy Warhol

Winnipeg Art gallery features exhibit Warhol: Larger than Life

Laura Blakley

Copy infringement? “It was a bitch throughout his lifetime.” — Thomas Sokolowski, director of the Warhol Museum in Chicago, IL.

Artists seem to have an aura about them; something that makes them different than a normal person. An average citizen is boring, can’t draw worth a darn, and therefore is unworthy of our attention or admiration. But an artist is interesting, dynamic, and can show you why you don’t need drawing skills to be a smashing success. Andy Warhol, for example, proved to a nation that all it takes to be an artist is some silkscreen machines, some photographs of celebrities in their glory days, and a great wig.

The Winnipeg Art Gallery recently opened its exhibit on Andy Warhol, which showcases his brightly coloured reworked photographs and sketches from his early days as a commercial magazine illustrator.

Though Warhol was famous for his prints, he himself was not particularly good at the detail-oriented tasks and minutiae of actually carrying out the silk-screening reproduction process. Since Warhol was aware of his strengths and weaknesses as an artist, what suited his vision and what did not, and conscious of his innovations with the process, he paid other people to do the screening for him.

As the screen-printing process goes, the screen gets more clogged with paint and dye with every print, and after about four or five prints are made one needs to change the screen, clean it out, and start again. This means, that although all of Warhol’s prints are made through the exact same process, every portrait piece differs subtly in textures and lines. Warhol himself would review the pieces that were made in The Factory (as the studio that created his pieces was called), so that only the ones he chose would be sold as authentic Warhol pieces.

When Warhol first unveiled a show comprised of the portraits for which he is now so famous, people were nonplussed and believed his time to be over. There was no Warhol exhibition for four years after the portraiture demo. People thought it wasn’t really art, but merely taking photographs and changing the colours around.

Over time, Andy Warhol`s fan base changed its mind. Once the public got used to the idea of a Warhol portrait, the portraits started selling for $37,000 a piece.

Warhol’s specialty was taking a common object, and demonstrating how the color and shapes surrounding an object can change our perception of it. For example, one of his photographs is a photograph of a car accident. At first glance, one sees a large ’50s-style car on its back with people inside. The image is graphic, horrifying, possibly (or probably) taken from a newspaper, and dyed an Incredible Hulk green. You can stare at the image itself for quite some time before you even realize what you’re looking at — the meaning behind Warhol`s art is that when the image looks so incredible, so surreal, your brain may take a while to register what it is you’re looking at. It takes you awhile to realize that there are human eyes peering out from it, and that — oh my God — maybe someone was hurt in the crash.

Warhol’s “camouflage,” originally called dazzle paintings, were also a theme for Warhol’s. One of the pieces featured the colours red, white, and blue, accompanied by the “flesh” color (that peachy, pale pink color that has since been renamed in your box of crayons). Does this mean that there is only one color of flesh of true Americans? Did Warhol use the metaphor of camouflage to cover up racism? What was he trying to say?

When asked about his method, and what he was trying to say about the death penalty with his photo of an electric chair, Warhol replied, “If you want to understand me . . . look at my art as a mirror.”

In Warhol’s own self-portraits, having his finger or his hand to his face was a common theme. This may have played up his flair for the dramatic in his still portraits, as well as in his personal life.

Thomas Sokolowski, who gave a lecture on the exhibit, pointed out that he thought it interesting that Warhol work is being exhibited at the WAG, when “wag” is slang for a gossip. There were always interesting things happening around Warhol, and often times the gossip and the craze was a direct result of Warhol himself spreading rumors in The Factory about other people just to see what would happen. Because of this, people started to notice a Cinderella/Dracula dichotomy in his behaviour, and so he was eventually nicknamed Drella.

Valerie Solanas, a writer and actress who had sent a script to The Factory, shot Andy Warhol in June 1968. His heart stopped in the operating room, but he was resuscitated and didn’t die again until 1986, when it was final. Warhol wore a medicinal corset after the shooting, which, after dying them strange and beautiful colors, he hid from the world under his clothes.

Warhol, in his eccentric fashion, wanted his tombstone to read “Figment,” saying that if it did, maybe he’d never have existed.

From a man who was born on the day the A-bomb fell on Hiroshima came a lot of pieces, some fascinating, some seemingly mundane, and was well known for layering colors upon colour upon colour, and turning everyday objects into art. And though Warhol may have claimed that his art was a mirror of himself, the beauty of his work may lie in the fact that it actually revealed less about him than it does about ourselves.

Warhol at the WAG is an exhibit on until January 6, 2008, student admission is $6.