Andy Warhol

7 Warhol and Repetition

In Unacknowledged Legislations, Christopher Hitchens draws our attention to an episode in Graham Greene’s novel Travels With My Aunt where an English artist has begun painting pictures of Heinz soup cans. When someone points out that Andy Warhol has already made this area his own by painting Campbell’s soup cans, the English artist protests and speaks of Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation;

“Botticelli wasn’t put off because Piero della Francesca had done the same thing. He wasn’t an imitator. And think of all the Nativities…In a way, you see, the more people who paint soup cans the better. It creates a culture. One nativity wouldn’t have been any good at all. It wouldn’t have been noticed.” (pp.99-100).

Hitchens is absolutely right to describe this as a ‘brilliant Warholian apercu’ (in Unacknowledged Legislations, p. 172). And while we know that in reality Pop Artists largely tried to avoid trespassing on each other’s graphic territory (Warhol, for instance, stopped painting cartoon superheroes once Roy Lichtenstein had made those his trademark), it is undeniable that if Warhol had simply painted one soup can, made one portrait of Marilyn, made one silk-screen of an electric chair, and so on, the effect would have been lost. The fact that he endlessly repeated himself was the whole point. And it was certainly noticed.

Obviously there are times when repetition can be simply boring or numbing, but this is by no means always the case. Boredom is always an aesthetic issue for Warhol, and sometimes he presented himself as a connoisseur of boredom, taking special pride in being able to find finding boring things very interesting.

We know that as a student Warhol attended a lecture by the avant-garde composer John Cage, and it was Cage who said;

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”

This strikes me as another profoundly Warholian apercu.

Repetition as an avant-garde strategy goes back much further than either Warhol or Cage. Warhol surely would have recognized the French composer Erik Satie as a precursor and kindred spirit. In 1893 Satie composed Vexations, a piece of music consisting of 18 musical notes which have to be repeated 840 times. The first complete performance, organized by John Cage incidentally, was not until 1963, and it lasted 18 hours and 40 minutes.

Satie, in his way as much of a prankster as Warhol, regarded the repetitiveness in his music as a form of rigorous spiritual exercise, like the ritualized repetition of prayers. One could make too much of Warhol’s Catholic background, but certainly Catholicism, more than some religions, is one of rituals and repeated prayers, and also of icons.

Of course, the composer and the painter begin with very different materials and vocabularies. All western music is a variation on just 12 notes; theme and variations is a basic musical concept, and yet within this repetition there is endless, infinite possibility.

Pop music, of course, involves a deliberately restricted use of these possibilities, and most of the successful Pop Artists quickly identified themselves with a particular set of images or ideas that became their signature. Jasper Johns had his flags, Wesselman his American nudes, Hockney his swimming pools. Most visual artists find themselves coming back to the images and themes that obsess them, and yet Warhol takes obsession, as well as repetition and variation, to a new level.

If one Coke bottle is an arresting image, then how about a work, such as the 1962 Green Coca-Cola Bottles, which shows 102 of them on a canvas that is 8272 inches by 57?

Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written in 1935, has become a vital text for much of the visual art of the twentieth century, but it has particular resonance for Andy Warhol. Benjamin writes;

“In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new.”

Benjamin, coming from a hardline leftist perspective, believed that the existence of machines capable of making art would be profoundly democratic, that it would brush aside bourgeois ideas of art along with ‘outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery’.

Given the price of Warhol’s work today, this was at best a forlorn hope, and while it seems unlikely that Warhol ever sat down and read Benjamin’s essay, he seems to have absorbed its message at source. Certainly Benjamin could have been prophesying the future work of Warhol when he wrote;

“To an ever greater degree, the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.”

Benjamin addressed the problem of what he called the ‘aura’ of works of art. Once a painting has achieved even the smallest amount of fame it will inevitably be more widely seen in reproduction than in the original. We have all had the experience of encountering a work of art previously seen only in books or as a print, and found it strangely disappointing. The original seems much less vital and powerful than we were expecting, than we were wanting it to be. Its authenticity apparently counts for nothing. It may even seem less ‘authentic’ than the reproduction we are familiar with.

Warhol addressed this issue in several ways. First, his art frequently used images that were already reproductions to begin with, and therefore made no claims to authenticity: the postage stamp, the dollar bill, the publicity photograph. Every dollar bill is by definition as good as every other dollar bill. There is no ‘original’. A publicity photograph is a machine-made print designed to do a very specific job. In making his own interventions on reproduced images such as the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, Warhol was treating their reproduced images in much the same way.

Warhol took these endlessly reproducible images and reproduced them endlessly. Sometimes he would fill a whole gallery with versions and variations of a single image, whether this was his first show at the Ferus Gallery of 32 soup cans, or whether it was the 2000 Mao variations he exhibited at a gallery in Paris in 1974. There was, however, one very important difference between the images in those two exhibitions. The first soup cans were hand-painted oil paintings. The Maos were silk-screened.

Warhol started using silk-screens in 1962. He had previously experimented making multiple images with rubber stamps and wooden blocks but the silk-screen was to be by far his preferred method, and it completely changed the nature and the look of his art.

Silk-screening is essentially a form of stenciling. A screen of silk or similar material is stretched across a wooden frame, some sort of paper or card pattern is then placed on the screen and ink or paint is pressed through it using a squeegee and leaving an un-inked area where the pattern was. Warhol’s technique was slightly more complex than this in that he generally used a photographic image as the basis for the pattern, but the principle was much the same.

Silk-screening was a cheap, and technically uncomplicated form of printing, which was just as well, given Warhol’s professed lack of interest in the technicalities. He said;

“Oh, I just found a picture and gave it to the man, and he made the silk-screen, and I just took it and began printing. They all came out different because, I guess, I didn’t really know how to screen.” (Painters Painting, p.122).

Warhol may well have begun making silk-screens because he wanted to be able to put out a lot of products very quickly, but he made a virtue of necessity. Oil painting is a slow, intense, time-consuming process, even when one is dealing with banal or repetitive subject matter. Perhaps also in a modern, ‘Pop’ world it seemed rather high-brow and old fashioned. Spontaneity, casualness, quick response — these are vital aspects of the Pop sensibility.

Silk-screens had the immediacy, and the apparent disposability, of a poster. They could be made briskly on a production line. They could even be made by others with greater or lesser degrees of supervision by Warhol.

Speaking of his soup cans he said;

“I tried doing them by hand, but I find it easier to use a screen. This way I don’t have to work on my objects at all. One of my assistants, or anyone else for that matter, can reproduce the design as well as I could.” (quoted in Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonee, p.9).

As with many of Warhol’s elegantly provocative statements this isn’t entirely true.

Warhol was often quoted as saying that he wanted to be like a machine, and a machine, certainly a printing press or a photocopier, is able to reproduce the same identical image indefinitely. Printing is a ditto device, according to Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist and author of The Medium is the Massage.

But in using silk-screening as his means of production, Warhol was deliberately choosing a process that was very low-tech. The kind of machinery and the kind of mass production that Andy Warhol embraced here was of a distinctly cottage industry variety. And as Warhol said, results varied.

Silk-screening is a very hands-on process. However careful or skilled the inker is (and some of Warhol’s assistants were neither), there are likely to be variations in the amount of ink and pressure applied, and the final images will be similarly non-identical. It is a machine process that leaves behind traces of the human being who uses it. Warhol made this work entirely to the advantage of his art.

It is all too easy for the repetition of an image to reduce its impact. It may make us immune to its beauty or its horror, and blind to its meaning. Inevitably we have come to know the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the atom bomb explosions, the race riots of the 1960^s as a series of vivid media images Because the image is so immediately recognizable, indeed so familiar, there is a tendency to think that we know all about this subject and think there is no need to explore it any further. The images have become iconic, and icons are not to be questioned or challenged. It was Warhol’s self-appointed task to change that.

Sometimes, however, repetition can make us look more closely, especially the way Warhol uses it, for example, Lavender Disaster (1964), is a grid of 15 black silk-screened images of the electric chair, printed on a lavender background. (Other versions of course used many different background colours and different numbers of images.) On one level one could interpret the repetition of the image as suggesting that death is common, and that death too can be mass produced, just like a photograph. But then we see that these multiple images of the chair aren’t exactly identical after all. The hand of the silk-screener is evident. Some images are darker than others, they have more ink, they are denser, blacker, more sinister. There are small but important differences between them. It wouldn’t be over-interpreting to take from these images the realization that, even though death is ubiquitous and commonplace, no two deaths are ever identical.

And yes, there is a sort of grotesque beauty in Warhol’s electric chairs, one he obviously recognized. He said;

“You wouldn’t believe how many people will hang a picture of an electric chair in their room — especially if the color of the picture matches the curtains.”

However much Warhol enjoys playing with and subverting aesthetic notions about the produced image and the nature of mass production, his use of repetition also raises a more humane issue. Warhol’s professed reason for painting multiple soup cans was that he had eaten Campbell’s soup for lunch every day for 20 years. And this is surely how most of us live our lives. However much we crave variety or novelty, however special we consider ourselves to be, our lives are essentially made up of repeated acts — eating, sleeping, working, having sex. Warhol’s art embraces these multiple repetitions. He celebrates and redeems them.

Summary

All Warhol’s work involves repetition and multiple images.

He chose silk-screening as the cheapest, simplest way of producing multiple, yet slightly varied images.

His work finds fascination and variety within repetition.