Making the Case for Pop Art’s Role in the Postmodernist Movement
Photograph taken by Jonathan Muzikar at MOMA’s 2015 exhibition, “Andy Warhol: Campbell's Soup Cans and Other Works, 1953-1967.”
The emergence of postmodernist art in the 1960s bore witness to revolutionary new art forms that opposed the art scene’s existing rules and styles (Meyer). In this opposition to its predecessors, the movement itself fights a succinct definition as its artists entered unchartered territory; however, within the wide-spanning realm sits Feminist Art, Conceptual Art, Neo-Expressionist Art, and Pop Art, amongst other Modernism adversaries (Meyer). Postmodernism was “the reflex and the concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism,” and indeed, the budding and overstimulating culture of the 60s, and the ways in which culture and capitalism impacted the arts, led to an explosion of Pop Art in the American art scene (Jameson xii). As Bann writes, Pop artists “were reinvigorating the traditional position that the external world—the world of everyday life—offered the artist an inexhaustible store of visual motifs, while the world of art offered the modalities for the representation of those motifs” (Bann 117). Artists like Andy Warhol reflected this dynamic and layered atmosphere in their work; his 1967 Marilyn Monroe Complete Portfolio is a standout example of this movement and the shift towards postmodernist artistic expression more broadly explored in this decade. His legendary Monroe silkscreen prints champion the postmodernist agenda; as a series of Pop Art portraits, they blend the spheres of art and popular culture, consist of multiple mediums and techniques, and withstand and complicate straightforward interpretation, especially when considering Warhol’s opinions on meaning and anonymity.
Warhol’s Monroe portfolio is one of the great examples of Pop Art, an inherently distinct postmodernist style from its modern forerunners as it fled the realm of high art. As Meyer writes, an essential quality of postmodernist art is not only a “grand rejection of boundaries between high and low art,” but also “the mixing of high and low culture through the use of industrial supplies and pop culture images,” which was achieved “through employing styles such as collage, assemblage, montage, bricolage, text as a central element, appropriation, and simplification in art pieces” (Meyer). Warhol’s portfolio embodies these styles; the collection is made up of ten 36x36” silkscreen prints, all varying slightly in color, light, and definition, and all derived from the same Gene Korman photograph of Monroe for Niagara, her 1953 film (“Andy Warhol. Marilyn Monroe. 1967”; “Marilyn Monroe Complete Portfolio”). This portfolio, and Warhol’s Pop Art from this time, speaks to the changing art scene largely accelerated by artists like himself. In his writing about 1960-1963, Warhol explains, “Pop was everywhere [...] to us, it was the new Art. [...] Once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again” (Warhol and Hackett 39). As for the creation process itself, Pop Art’s multiplicity of techniques and materials is witnessed through Warhol’s explanation that “[w]ith silkscreening, you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time” (Warhol and Hackett 22). Warhol’s silkscreens, in their layered mediums and inherent lack of personal touch, embody not only the movement’s departure from high art, but the concept of a “postmodern artist” as described by Lyotard: “the work he produces [is] not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement,” as their art “denies the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste,” and “searches for new presentations” (Lyotard 81). Indeed, Warhol’s silkscreen prints embody all three of these traits, in both their amalgamation of art and culture and in the layered and almost craft-like process behind their creation.
A Pop Art portrait is especially intriguing in this discussion of multiplicity and postmodernism. As Steiner writes of Warhol’s 1962 Marilyn Monroe in “Postmodernist Portraits,” “although they catch her visual appearance and sensuality, these are so artificial and so repeatable that all claims to uniqueness seem ironically undercut”; that this argument can be borrowed for his 1967 portfolio demonstrates the multiplicity and reproduction at play in a Pop Art portrait (Steiner 174). As opposed to a painted portrait, onto which the artist embeds as much personality, emotion, and meaning as she chooses, Warhol’s silkscreen “is a technical medium,” one which “does not even need to be reproduced by the individual artist” (Whiting 69). The artist’s hand is essentially removed from the canvas. Warhol was intrigued by this removal, by whether or not “you could completely remove all the hand gesture from art and become noncommittal, anonymous”; he goes on, “I knew that I definitely wanted to take away the commentary of the gestures” (Warhol and Hackett 7). Thus, in his silkscreening, Warhol was not only aware of this distance between himself and the outcome of his work, but he delighted in it: “It was all so simple—quick and chancy: I was thrilled with it” (Warhol and Hackett 22).
Warhol’s intrigue behind the anonymity of silkscreening prints, and the tinkering, curious nature felt through his writing further speaks to Lyotard’s description of a postmodern artist. If the artists of this movement were unrestricted by previous artistic rules and customs, then, to follow that logic, there were also no accompanying rules for interpretation. As Sandberg articulates, “the goal of Pop Art is not simply to present, but to transform the image of our contemporary American consumer economy into ambivalent and provocative forms. The interpretation of this imagery remains a fundamental problem” (Sandberg 231). Indeed, it is in this ambivalence that the movement “embraced complex and often contradictory layers of meaning” (“Postmodernism”). And if Warhol’s silkscreening techniques “take away the commentary” through their “quick and chancy” nature, the lack of an in-person connection between artist and subject complicates the viewer’s ability to interpret even further. As opposed to “the direct physical and personal encounter between artist and canvas which occurred in action painting,” Monroe did not sit before Warhol (Whiting 69). In creating this portfolio, he did not witness her features himself; as a subject, she had already been altered before being printed onto Warhol’s silkscreen, begging the question of how one can rightly interpret the Monroe in his prints if, in making them, he never had the chance to interpret her for himself. In becoming the anonymous artist through the printing and reproduction of a preexisting photograph, Warhol keeps the viewer many steps away from the real Monroe and, thus, from a clear interpretation.
In all ten prints, Monroe is void of imperfections, void even of the most basic facial details, and yet remains undoubtedly identifiable, speaking to Sandberg’s assertion that “[t]he Pop artist’s goal is to distort the image, to modify it enough so that it is no longer naturalistic, yet not enough to make it unrecognizable” (Sandberg 228). As a result, the viewer can only engage superficially with Warhol’s Monroe prints as they are untouched by the “gestures” present in painted portraits. Instead, they are the result of two mechanical devices: first a camera, and then his silkscreen. As Whiting writes, “Warhol emphasized the ‘brand-face’ of his stars by minimising detail, emphasising outline, and exaggerating expression,” which is seen in this portfolio through Monroe’s widely recognized attributes: perfectly curled hair, dramatic eyes, and exaggerated lips, each feature on “the verge of caricature” (Whiting 58). In highlighting Monroe’s most recognized features, Warhol further expanded the gap between viewer and subject, the possibility for clear interpretation lost somewhere between the two.
In this way, the Monroe portfolio embodies Sontag’s stance on Pop Art’s opposition to interpretation; she writes that while abstract painting stresses an uninterpretable nature, simply, through its desired lack of content, “Pop Art works by the opposite means to the same result; using content so blatant, so ‘what it is,’ it, too, ends up being uninterpretable” (Sontag 10). Warhol’s almost cartoon-like encapsulation of Monroe speaks to this reasoning; however, it, along with Pop Art more broadly, can also be viewed as a manifestation of Sontag’s stance that “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art,” what with its outburst of color, repetition of prints, and artistic commodification of a celebrity hyper-sexualized by the media (Sontag 14). This thought is mirrored by Jameson, who, as Grudin writes, believes “Warhol's work epitomised a new era of postmodern superficiality, since, ‘There is ... in Warhol no way to complete the hermeneutic gesture and restore to these oddments that whole larger context of the dance hall or the ball, the world of jetset fashion or glamour magazines’” (Jameson 8-9 as qtd. in Grudin 214).
Warhol’s perspective on interpretation and reproduction adds crucial insight to the postmodernist nature of his Monroe portfolio. Breaking the stereotypical artist mold, Warhol offered little depth of comment on his work, choosing to remain as allusive as possible. As Whiting points out, “[h]is public statements of the early 1960s lack any sort of personal stance on current issues, much less a commitment or even a judgement” (Whiting 70). Thus, critics cannot with confidence argue for Warhol’s intended meaning. As Sandberg asks of Warhol’s silkscreening process and the inevitable variations between prints that ensue, “[i]s Warhol implying that mechanical means of reproduction fail when dealing with the human personality, or is he emphasizing his role as a creative artist, intervening to sabotage the perfection of an impersonal product? One does not know. But it is evident that he is making a statement and contradicting it at the same time” (Sandberg 230-231). Much is left for questioning, though one can gather how interested Warhol was in becoming the anonymous artist; he writes, “[i]n August ‘62 I started doing silkscreens. The rubber-stamp method I’d been using to repeat images suddenly seemed too homemade; I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly-line effect” (Warhol and Hackett 22). He spoke openly about his striving towards meaninglessness, at one point noting, “the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel” (Warhol and Hackett 50). Transferred onto this portfolio, Warhol’s opinions reveal the emptiness of meaning he was chasing through his printing techniques; nonetheless, this goal was ultimately contradicted. When an immediate and clear interpretation is removed from a work, what is left is a blank canvas of sorts onto which each viewer may project their own ideas. Whiting’s articulation of Warhol perfectly encapsulates this contradiction; she writes, “he offered himself up as an empty receptacle that could be filled with whatever others want to see in him, and as a mirror that could reflect back to others an image of themselves and their culture” (Whiting 70). His Monroe portfolio is both another empty receptacle and, paradoxically, an infinite receptacle for meaning. The only variation between the ten prints “occurs [...] in the public realm of visual aesthetics,” and therefore whatever interpretation is placed onto these variations is simply a reflection of the viewer (Whiting 66). If there is to be a point to his portfolio, I believe it to be just that: the subjectivity of the gaze itself.
In this discussion of Pop Art and postmodernism, what becomes clear is that the movement is centrally tied to a multiplicity of perspective and meaning (Note 57). This essay has discussed postmodernist multiplicity as it pertains to style, medium, production, and interpretation. Warhol’s Monroe portfolio encapsulates this multiplicity in its manifold meanings. On the first level, there is the physical repetition of Monroes in the portfolio. Moreover, as each of these printed Monroes is a multiple of an original photograph, there exists a chain of lenses and gazes between the real-life Monroe and Warhol’s Monroes—starting with the eye of the photographer himself, the camera lens, Warhol’s eye, Warhol’s silkscreen press, and lastly, the eye of the viewer. Further, there is the multiple and in fact infinite number of interpretations bound to ensue from viewing this portfolio, and from Pop Art portraits more broadly. And finally, there is the continual reproduction and commodification of Warhol’s Monroe prints, and therefore their continual “undermining [of] originality,” which is perhaps the ultimate argument for their lasting postmodernist nature (Meyer).
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