After a teenage years in Pittsburgh, a diploma in pictorial design at the Carnegie Institute, Andy Warhol took off in New York where he began as an advertising illustrator. Undoubtedly we must see in this course the etiology of the desacralized relationship to the art of an artist who himself will live as a brand, building a public figure between narcissistic self-celebration and underground icon. Andy Warhol liked to define himself as "a commercial artist". Provocation ?
An unprecedented artistic practice
DIn his studio, the Factory, where he employs assistants, he will be one of the first to worry about productivity, importing both consumerist and productivist codes in the production of works and their silkscreen prints.« Being good at business is the most fascinating art form »The artist finds an unprecedented place among the celebrities, those he rubbed shoulders with while he worked as an illustrator for the fashion magazines Vogue or Harpers Bazaar. The series of portraits of stars - and self-portraits - will remain as emblematic within a prolific and diverse work, playing the score of all the ambiguity of Pop Art.
Towards a post-modern aesthetic?
« Before the media, there was a physical limit to how much space a person could occupy on their own »
In 1967, one of the figures of the movement, Richard Hamilton, defined pop Art in a letter addressed to his architect friends Peter and Alison Smythson: “Pop Art is popular (designed for a mass audience), transitory (short-term solution ), consumable (easily forgotten), low cost, mass produced, young and youth-centered, funny and witty, sexy, clever as a gadget, glamor and big business ”.
Should we see in this aestheticization of the object, this stylization of everyday life and this exaltation of opulence one of the first manifestations of postmodernity in art? Many of Andy Warhol's works illustrate well this form of cynicism that nourishes the illusion of happiness and completeness in the object of consumption.
« Buying is more American than thinking »
Pop Art plays on ambivalence: when Andy Warhol affirms that he does not believe in the American dream but that on the other hand he intends to profit from it, finally is this a way of saying that lucidity does not protect anything and that do we not escape this postmodern discourse which claims to remove the irreducible incompleteness which specifies to be human, the inadequacy of the desiring subject to the object of jouissance? In the consumer society, the lack is no longer referred to what the subject lacks, the cause of desire is no longer inscribed in the subjective lack but in the real object. Does Pop Art play on what the philosopher Marcuse called total reification in the total fetishism of the commodity? Is Pop Art a symptom, a cynicism, a criticism? Question that remains unanswered: the best way to activate thought.
The new realism of the 60s, taking up the inspirations and codes of Pop Art, will renew the aesthetic language in the sense of a more frontal approach to consumer society, taking a more radical bias than American Pop Art, which remains ambivalent in its critical claim.
