Pop Art and Andy Warhol

Last class we talked about Andy Warhol and boy, was he a character. He came across as such a complete pompous asshole and it was rather amusing. Emerging in a time when the reactionary beatniks were lashing out against society, pop artist Andy Warhol and his followers said "hey, let's just embrace it." His art completely mirrored commercialism and the media at the time. Much like Marcel Deuchamp, his paintings of ordinary objects (such as the campbell's soup can and the coca cola bottles) were decontextualized, taking out of their natural contexts and deemed art. Someone even was quoted in the documentary as saying that Andy Warhol would point his finger and say, "That's art!" I also had no idea that he produced the music to the Velvet Underground...pretty cool! Toward the end of class we watched a bit of video footage on Yves Klein who was one of the first examples of performance art. He would have women put blue paint on their bodies and press themselves up against a blank canvas, creating imprints. I thought the work of Rachel Whiteread was really interesting. She would make molds of the empty space of objects such as chairs, staircases, bookshelves etc. So she would make say a mold of the inside of a house and all of the empty space would create the mold. I thought it was a brilliant idea.