Friday, March 27, 2009

Warhol's Last Supper












Here is the piece I wrote for Christian Courier as mentioned in class:


In a time before Leonardo’s masterpiece The Last Supper was insidiously deconstructed by the grand conspiracies of Dan Brown it was a favorite subject for kitsch reproductions. Like Gioconda’s smile, L'Ultima Cena has endured many an indignity over the years. It has been reproduced in tapestry and needlework kits, lacquered-on and laser-cut from plywood, painted on black velvet and illuminated with black light. You can carry it on your lunch box, reconstruct it as a jigsaw puzzle and replicate it in paint-by-number. It has been carved from butter and chocolate, assembled from spools of thread and Legos and has been recast in sand, salt and Simpson’s characters. With each reproduction, The Last Supper was lifted out of the world of “high art” to become an image so instantly familiar, so deeply inscribed in our cultural imagination, that it took on a new life as a logo or emblem for both Christianity and art quite independent of its existence as a painting in Milan.

In the final year of his life (1986-1987), the American artist Andy Warhol offered his own unique dialogue with Leonardo. In the early eighties Warhol began making works derived from other major artists including Raphael, Botticelli, De Chirico, and Munch. With the Last Supper, Warhol found his last grand inspiration, a sustained reimagining of Leonardo’s masterpiece. The impetus for the project was a proposal for an exhibition to be held in the Credito-Valtellinese, a Milanese bank located directly across the street from the Church of Santa Maria della Grazie where Leonardo’s original dilapidated fresco is housed. Warhol considered this project central to his life and work, and created far more work than the commission and the available space demanded. In the end, his series grew to encompass more than 100 paintings, a body of work that is considered by many critics to constitute his most important work. Indeed, it could be argued that the epic extent of the monumental series indicates an almost obsessive investment in the subject.

Mixing the sacred and secular with reckless abandon, Warhol combined the language of corporate logo with religious kitsch. In The Last Supper (Dove), for example, Warhol superimposes a price tag and the logos for General Electric and Dove soap and over a line drawing taken from a schematic outline drawing of the original he found in a children's coloring book. As with the other works in the series, Warhol’s "Last Supper" series is based on inexpensive secondary reproductions of the famous image and not on the image itself.

One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Andy Warhol left an indelible mark on the history of modern art and culture through his imagery and personal style. Best known for his multiple silkscreen representations of celebrities and product labels, Warhol embraced the debased ephemera of contemporary mass culture and raised them from the level of consumption to contemplation. By reiterating images derived from popular culture through hands-off techniques and mechanized repetition that directly recalled their origins in standardized mass reproduction, Warhol positioned himself as both a critic and a celebrant of mass culture. A self-described “deeply superficial” person, Warhol embraced American popular culture with deadpan neutrality. In public, Warhol appeared indifferent to issues of meaning, value or taste. His persona of postmodern insouciance came to epitomize the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll indulgence of the eighties’ Soho club scene.

But in private, Warhol’s aesthetic strategy of indifference broke down. Although it is not widely known, Warhol was raised and remained a devout Christian his entire life. Raised in a Byzantine Rite Catholic community in Pittsburgh, Warhol continued to attend mass almost daily, regularly helped to feed the homeless at an Episcopal Church on the Upper East Side, and even had a private audience with Pope John Paul II in 1980. This is a side of himself that Warhol kept modestly secret, hidden from the flashbulbs and paparazzi.

It is difficult to match this description of a quietly pious Andy Warhol with the façade of celebrity and voyeurism he worked so hard to create. I am not sure what to make of this disconnect. Part of me is deeply saddened that he was never able to fully integrate his faith and artistry. But part of me understands Warhol’s discomfort at bringing his faith into the hot focus of the spotlight. Warhol’s art not only cut through the divide between high and low art, but the pretensions of quasi-spiritual artwork that offered secular experiences of mystery, transcendence and beauty. For Warhol, art offered no answers – it could only reflect the emptiness of a culture fixated on consumption. His faith was the one thing that was real to him. Before God he could offer himself up, with all of his sins, contradictions and eccentricities, to the mystery of grace. Before God he could be authentic.

In Last Supper (Dove) Warhol treats Christ and the apostles as elements in a collage of postmodern iconography. Like the almost religious jingoism of GE (We bring good things to life!) and Dove’s “beauty” bar, Leonardo’s ubiquitous painting is a shortcut to a cheapened and nostalgic view of Christianity. Warhol’s first exposure to art was through looking at painted icons in church as a boy -- an influence that would constantly reemerge in his “Pop Saint” icons of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and John Wayne. In these final works, Warhol overtly explores the intersection between the worlds of art, commerce, and religion. On one level, his Last Supper paintings may be interpreted as a reminder that we live in a culture where everything is on sale, including religion. Yet the price tag also suggests that real grace, while free, is never cheap.


Chris Cuthill, March 25, 2009

Collaboration

Question:

Have you ever considered collaboration in your own work? What inhibitions might you have about doing collaborative work? To what extent do you think your reservations are flavoured by Western notions of individual expression? How might a Christian concept of community challenge or inform some of these assumptions?

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Looking at a "fake" Pollock

Think of how you might react if you were to discover that a Jackson Pollock painting you were looking at in a gallery was in fact a parody of his work produced by a lesser artist for a bet. The institutional theory of art suggests that a Pollock is important because it is "a" Pollock. To what extent do you think your appreciation of a particular work of art relies upon what you know about the work/artist and your personal beliefs. How might thinking about your expectations/assumptions challenge a formalist approach to art?

Postmodern Icons

“The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.”

Umberto Eco
Modern and Modernism

Question:

In a postmodern world, do you think its possible to create art that overtly references Jesus or the biblical story without some degree of ironic distance? What do you make of Andy Warhol's "Jesus" images? Are they an ironic commentary, genuine icons for an image saturated society, or something completely different?

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Art and Propaganda

One of the working definitions that I use for describing good art is suggested by Cal Seerveld -- that it is allusive and imaginative. The artist's worldview is always present -- but is usually muted or subordinate to the work itself. Sometimes, though, the artwork is weighed down by its heavy-handed ideas. Works of art created by Marxists and evangelicals are two common examples of this approach. The artwork becomes more of a sermon, a form of propaganda. The imaginative becomes blunt and the allusive becomes didactic.

And yet.... there are examples of people like Rivera who embrace the idea of art as propaganda. And their work is strengthened because of their commitment.

And so, given what Seerveld says about art and propaganda -- what do you think about this use/abuse of art? Is it ok the create propaganda? Is there a fine line between art and propaganda? Thoughts, ideas, opinions?