Through doing my repetition of Katy's faces, one artist that my tutor suggested I look into was Andy Warhol and his repeating images. He seems to use repetition as a basis for his work, and not prefected repetition, he actually lets the prints fade, or he applies too much ink to some. This repetition has a meaning behind it and each one is the same, but different. It allows sentiment and lack of sentiment, care and carelessness, to collide. Warhol used silk screen printing, so slightly different from my solar etching, but still, printing all the same. Since the medium of silk screen could easily be used with more precision, and is not in his work, the purpose must be to call attention to the fact of repetition by not repeating precisely.
According to Editorial @ ASX "Warhol succeeds at failing to repeat, and this failure suggests that successful repetition is to be pitied, while the failure to repeat is to be feared. When there is such passivity in the images, and such repetition of the images – when repetition is the style, and passivity is the content – then the result is the mutual implication of repetition and passivity: an instance of one is an instance of the other. Passivity is seen as the suffering of repetition. Suffering (in the other sense) seems not to be in the particular pain or unique horrible action, but in the repetition of it. The suggestion is that pain is not suffering until it is repeated, that suffering is pain in retrospect and in duplicate, and that there is passivity in suffering the repetition. But sufficient repetition passes beyond any suffering into blankness, numbness, and a repeated pain becomes an aesthetic."
The images below on the left, look quite perfect really, whereas the images of Marilyn on the right have much more of a meaning behind. They also seemed to contain a secret to the sadness of a superficial life. To challenge how we as a society look to fame and look to these figures as a sort of deity, when really they are still just human beings with a life and a story.
As Tate suggests "One of the canvases is vibrant and bursting with energy, representing the star’s flamboyant public personality. The other is monochrome and sombre, the uneven application of ink causing her face slowly to disappear. The two contrasting sides of this work capture the contrast between Marilyn’s artificial public persona on the left and the harsh reality of her troubled private life on the right. Warhol did not originally intend these two canvases to be shown together as a single artwork. It was the collector who bought the artwork from Warhol who suggested the idea: '[when] I said I thought they should be presented as a diptych, Andy replied ‘gee whiz yes’'
Looking at this in my own work, especially the colourful images of Katy alongside the monochrome ones, you can see the juxtaposition of having the angry, desperate faces in colour and then again in monochrome; this casts a completely different energy and meaning to the images.
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