pop-culture for the people

Hey aspiring artists. Sick and tired of people telling you that your work will never be recognized until after you shuffle off this mortal coil? That the best you can hope for with a BFA is to serve coffee to dirty hippies or work in an art retail store? Well…maybe this is the case, but it wasn’t for Andy Warhol. Andy brought a superstar image to art and made money hand over fist. Was he the first art superstar? Not really, Michelangelo made lots of money and exerted enough power to tell the Pope to piss off on occasion. Dali was pretty well recognized. But we’re talking a different class. A man who was on Love Boat and MTV. Celebrities sought him out to make portraits. A rock star of the art world. So who is he? Where did he come from? Did he want to save the world or destroy it? These and many other questions will be answered.

Andy Warhol’s past is shrouded in mystery. He gave conflicting accounts of his early life in order to confuse people and amuse himself. He was born Andrew Warhola, probably in Pittsburgh. Probably around 1928. Any other information is open to debate until we find a young (already balding) Andy attending college and posing like a diva in yearbook photos and making ink-blot drawings. After graduation he found success in New York City as an advertising artist. He was the Leonardo Da Vinci of women’s shoe ads. As much as Andy liked shoes and making an honest living, this was not enough. I say nay. He wanted to be a ‘serious artist’ whose work was in galleries and who got to attend big parties with interesting people. His first few experiments were paintings that copied panels taken from comic books, comic strips and advertising. This idea was not entirely new, as artist Robert Rauschenberg was already plastering comic strips onto his sculpture-paintings. But Warhol made them his focus. “I just paint thinks I always thought were beautiful, things you use every day and never think about…..I just do it because I like it.” His paintings would sometimes featuring runny lines of paint like the work of Jackson Pollack, perhaps to capitalize on the popular Abstract-Expressionism movement. These drippy lines were soon dropped in favor of straight painted representations, and his comic inspired art was dropped in order to differentiate himself from emerging artist Roy Lichtenstein. Unfortunately Andy wasn’t the worlds most technically skilled painter. But he was a bright lad, and soon came up with the idea of using silkscreen prints. This print technique could blow up any photo of soup cans, dollar bills, whatever and make a giant brightly colored print on canvas. Though he would play with the concept years later (returning to some drippy lines, sprinkling his paintings in goldust (ffffffffffffffff…....Gooooooooolllldust)). He had found his thing. Pop Art. Surface over Substance. The thing he would be remembered for. The thing that would keep the public interested in the ‘60s, ‘70s’ and ‘80s. He also found a ‘look’, the poofy white wigs, the dark shades, the cooler-than-thou attitude.

Giant paintings of Cambells Soup, Marilyn Monroe and a bevy of the beautiful people. Sure they’re art, but, what do they mean? A statement about consumerism? About celebrities being raised to a platform of kings and queens? Well according to Andy what you see is what you get. The surface is the core. Don’t look deep, just allow yourself to be blinded by the turquoise colors of a Jackie O portrait. See I could have written this article in once sentence. ‘Andy Warhol is’. Or ‘Don’t think so hard, it’s just Andy. Not to say these works don’t have merit….just don’t expect to find the secret of the universe in the works of Andy Warhol. For that I recommend joining a new age cult. Or becoming a rock groupie.

Andy’s later years were filled with tragedy. He was shot by Valerie Solonas,  a crazy and useless wanna be radical. He survived this injury, but never fully recovered mentally. Andy was getting on in years and getting tired. A virtual army of patrons had already turned the small-town boy into a filthy stinking rich man, so he spent more time on collecting shiny trinkets and following holistic medicine. Unfortunately his deep-seated belief in natural medicine contributed to his demise, as he waited too long for surgery to cure a gallbladder infection. Sadly, he passed away on February 22, 1987.

Andy is remembered for a number of things. His art studios (especially The Factory which was covered in silver foil) were known as party hotspots where people could watch the man work or mingle with a collection of drunk and disorderly weirdos. Andy himself endorsed amphetamines as his only vice. They make you go, go, go he said. He discovered the Velvet Underground and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He gave us the 15 minutes of fame catchphrase. A series of movies including remakes of the Universal monster movies, and ‘homosexual action/adventure’ flicks. We will forever associate Marilyn Monroe and Cambells Soup with Andy. He was rich, famous and will be remembered for a long time to come. A true superstar in the industry.

Super Special Bonus (at no extra charge)

Quoteable Andy Warhol (quotes taken from ‘Warhol’ by Andy Bordon)
“I could use you. I want to draw your feet”
“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the rich consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think you can drink Coke, too.”
“Buying is much more American than thinking, and I’m as American as they come”
“The fear of getting shot again made me think that I’d never again enjoy talking to somebody whose eyes looked weird. But when I thought about that, I got confused, because it included almost everybody I really enjoyed.”
“Oh it’s just so much fun to have money, isn’t it?”
“I believe that everyone should live in one big empty space. It can be a small space, as long as it’s clean and empty.”
“I like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a $20,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you, the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.”

Paintings, in order of appearance:
Turquoise Marilyn 1964
Skull 1976
Hammer and Sickle 1976
Big Torn Campbell’s Soup Can (Vegetable Beef) 1962

Andy Warhol Links
Artchive-Andy Warhol
Artcyclopedia-Artcyclopedia-listing of Warhol works in museums, and websites devoted to Andy
David Bowie’s Andy Warhol
Basquiat-featuring David Bowie as Andy Warhol

Art for Monkeys
Hello, Dali!  By Aperturius

When I was five or six years old, I had two very strange dreams.  In one, I was driving down the freeway in my car (at that age, Lord knows how I was able to reach the pedals), and I came up to a tollbooth.  Not just any tollbooth, but an EVIL tollbooth, because in my twisted little subconscious world it was common knowledge that these booths were occupied by nuns who would kidnap you if you were unlucky enough to pull up beside them.  Yes, nuns.  This may explain why I am a devout atheist today.  Of course, I was one of the unfortunate young drivers that day and the nuns dragged me down a spiral staircase and tied me with rope to a chair.  This is where the dream ends, for which I am eternally grateful.  In the second dream, I lived in an underground cave with the music group The Monkees.  We lived in our little shelter, underneath a shopping mall, and sat around the television set while we waited for the lottery numbers to be drawn.  Then if we won we would scramble up to the mall, go into the bank and collect our money.  It all seemed so logical at the time.  If I had been smart, I would have made some good paintings out of these dreams and sold ‘em for a pretty penny.

Salvador Dali’s paintings were based on dreams of this sort, which is partly why they’re so fucked up.  Dali was born in 1904 in Figueres, Spain (it figueres, doesn’t it?), to very wealthy parents.  You will see this a lot in art.  It’s much easier to become a well-known, flamboyant, wealthy artist when you’ve already got the wealth part down.  It’s the biggest hurdle, really.  Dali went to art school in Madrid, and while he was there, he came across the writings of a certain Sigmund Freud, who in his Interpretation of Dreams started a new era of psychology all based around sex and the subconscious.  It was brilliant.  Suddenly nothing sexual was your fault!  If you wanted to have sex with forty midgets under a waterfall of ginger ale while a baboon smacked your ass, well, it’s just the way you’re programmed!  You have no control over it, so don’t worry about it!  Freud was the first to say that everything in your dreams represented something you desired.  Dali realized that this could make for some really interesting artwork if he tapped into it.  He could paint whatever and however he wanted, and just blame it on his dreams!  This was the birth of Surrealism.

Dali’s Surreal Period lasted from 1929 to 1941.  In this time he created what he called the “paranoid critical method” of painting.  Basically, Dali forced himself into a subconscious frame of mind and dreamt up his strange images.  To the layman, this looked suspiciously like goofing off or just plain being lazy.  But to the trained artistic genius like Dali, this was the only way to create the paintings that made him famous, other than to take copious amounts of drugs.  Dali did not.  As he said, “I don’t take drugs; I am drugs.”  The most well known image from this time period is The Persistence of Memory, which contains the infamous melted clocks we all know and love.  What Dali was trying to relate was the feeling of time slowing down and having no meaning in a dream.  We’ve all experienced dreams that seem to last for days, only to wake up and find out it’s only been fifteen minutes in the “real” world.  Hell, sometimes we’re awake and we experience the same thing, like at work.

What’s really spectacular about Dali’s paintings isn’t just the paintings themselves, but their very imaginative titles.  Take a look at the following list, and see if you can figure out which one is NOT a title of one of Dali’s paintings:

-The Great Masturbator
-Man with Unhealthy Complexion Listening to the Sound of the Sea
-Eggs on a Plate Without a Plate
-Somnambulant Bouncing Baby Gyrating on a Silver Letter Opener
-Average Atmospherocepalic Bureaucrat in the Act of Milking a Cranial Harp
-Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano
-Hairdresser Depressed by the Persistent Good Weather
-The Weaning of the Furniture-Nutrition

(answer at the bottom of the article)

With titles like that, how can you NOT like Dali’s work?

Like I said before, dreams are supposed to be windows into your greatest desires, and it turns out that one of Dali’s main desires was cold, hard cash.  Dali was a true artistic sellout, which did not win him many friends among Surrealist circles.  Andre Breton, one of the founders of the Surrealist group, came up with an anagram for Salvador Dali: Avida Dollars, or “eager for dollars.”  In 1934 his Surrealist friends held a mock trial and expelled him from the group, convicting him of being contrary to the basic ideas and standards of the movement. Dali couldn’t have cared less.  When World War II began he moved with his influential wife Gala to America, where his fame exploded.  These years, which are known as his Classic years, are where things really started to get weird.

First, Dali’s artwork took a new direction.  He now practiced a method of thinking and painting which he called “Nuclear Mysticism.”  Basically, he attempted in his artwork to combine religion and science, and the outcome was infinitely more successful than John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth (then again, what wasn’t?).  Dali dabbled in painting, poetry, jewelry making, textiles, clothing design, stage sets, and everything else imaginable, including meeting with the man himself, Walt Disney, to create an animated masterpiece called Destino.  Hyped as Fantasia on drugs, Destino was to be Dali’s dream world come to life in full-color animation.  Unfortunately, the plan was scrapped due to lack of funding.  But wait!!!  Disney, who has surprisingly been doing some things right lately, has decided to resurrect the project and a six-minute Destino short, free of fuzzy bunnies and Phil Collins lyrics, will be released shortly!  In most cases I wouldn’t be advertising a Disney project that didn’t have to do with Pixar, but I’ll make an exception for this exciting turn of events. 

While expanding in his artwork, Dali also began souping up his social life.  He and his wife held surrealist balls in his homes in NYC, France, and Spain, where food was served in giant shoes, bartenders wore ties woven out of human hair, and live animals served as home furnishings and decoration.  Dali surrounded himself with a group of freaks and hippies called the Court of Miracles.  Often the evenings would wrap up with a nice, wholesome “sexual cabaret,” where dwarves and transvestites would engage in horribly wonderful lascivious acts.  It was a Freudian fantasy come to startling life, and it was so well done that even Michael Jackson couldn’t pull off a copy of it.  Eventually though, Dali’s manic social life and artistic career, like his moustache, started to droop.  He died in 1989.  Now he exists…(get ready for it)…only in our dreams.  Aww.

(Answer: Somnambulant Bouncing Baby Gyrating on a Silver Letter Opener.  Come on, you knew that!  That title is just CRAZY!)

Images, in order of appearance:

Salvador Dali, photograph (unknown date)
The Persistence of Memory, 1931.
The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can be Used as a Table, 1934.
Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, 1943.
Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, 1954.

Dear Mr. Bush,

It may have come a little late, much to my chagrin, but I think I finally understand what you are trying to do.
And I commend you for it.
You are much shrewder than the world gives you credit for.
It seems you are trying to thwart future terrorist attacks against the U.S, and make peace with a horribly alienated world community by bridging the gap between freedom-hating fundamentalist leaders and your administration.
Quelle genius!
By appointing a Christian zealot like Dr. W. David Hager to the FDA panel on Women’s Health, you will show the Muslim terrorists that we, too believe strongly in combining modern technology with our lust for archaic religious practices. By replacing beneficial medical science - whose anti-depressants help prevent and treat mental illness, and whose contraceptives provide a respite from the immense socioeconomic strain of unplanned births - with good ol’ fashioned prayer and Bible-readin’, you have taken us back to a time where we weren’t so different from these third world countries pumping out the angry anti-Americans of today. And that makes it easier for us all to come to the table together and work on a common vision. To suppress women.

These Whores of Babylon want to spread their legs to men they aren’t even married to (Married to! The sanctity of beneficiaries, tax brackets, co-signers and Do Not Recusitate orders must be preserved!!) and then have the audacity to want to choose not to allow fertilization to occur in their bodies! Who do they think they are? Men??
And birth control?? Who needs birth control?
So what if California can’t refine enough gasoline for its growing hordes of SUV-hungry soccer moms? With a little prayer and scripture reading, God will make minimum wages higher so the rest of us can afford $30 tank fills. Maybe He will fix my brakes, too!
And how about having so many people that the entire Northeast loses electrical power for 24 hours? Come on, it’s not so bad! Light a few candles and get right with Jesus. Maybe an electrical outage every month will get those godless heathens to look to heaven instead of television for its information. Except for Fox News, which should somehow beam hologram newscasts into the streets from satellites.
There is certainly no pressing need to control our population. Oh, except those pesky Mexicans who keep coming across the border and breeding like crazy. You know why they do that? Because they’re CATHOLIC.
Those crazy Catholics DISCOURAGE birth control use! Can you believe that? DISCOURAGE it!
We plan to go further by ERADICATING it. Take that, you limp-noodle loser Catholics!

Did you know that Dr. Hager, in his private practice at Lexington’s Central Baptist Hospital, refuses to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women? Of course you did. That sounds like a great idea.
What we’ll do instead is pray that human beings who reach sexual maturity but do not feel emotionally and financially prepared to marry just NOT have sex! Then, when they do, maybe we could punish them by making them have an unwanted baby that will grow up in abuse and squalor, like the 400,000 unwanted births that occurred this year. Then that kid can grow up and have unwanted kids, and so on, until our entire society is poorly-educated, malnourished and very angry.
Couple that with a fundamentalist religious government, and you have The Taliban!
What better way to keep us safe from our enemy than by becoming the enemy, itself?

Mr. Bush, this is only the most recent move in a presidency wrought with actions that have outraged (or at best, annoyed) most of America, and the world. Little do they know what you are really attempting to do. But I see. I know. And God Save You, Mr. Bush for your wisdom and cunning. God Save us all.

Sincerely,
Erin McReynolds
Orange County, CA