FINE ART PRINTMAKING
ANDY WARHOL
Time Capsule
Andy Warhol, Time Capsule 522, 1862-1985, undated; Bulk: 1984
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
TC522
One of Warhol’s obsessions was time, and he spent much of his career exploring ways of capturing its passing. In his photographs, prints and paintings he could freeze a moment in time and repeat it over and over again, while in his films he documented and slowed time down. In 1974 Warhol preserved time in his series of autobiographical Time Capsules. He filled 612 boxes filled with things collected from his daily life, such as magazines, books, taxi receipts, photographs and business files. He sealed these and put them in storage. (They are now held at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.)
Andy Warhol possessed both too much and too little. In his capacity to have done those things equally, he vitally characterizes how we engage with the profusion of objects made possible by life in industrial societies. On the one hand, by the time of his premature death, his house had become impassible because of the accumulated bulk of his art, furniture, tchotchkes, and personal effects, and the idea of his having to maintain what he called Time Capsules would be perfectly reasonable to anyone in the possession of that most modern of inventions, the storage unit…. His collections stagger us as we try to make sense of their meanings.e might begin to think that he was simply a pack rat unable to discard the mundane things he encountered in his daily life: he had too much. Simultaneously, as we begin to sort through the belongings that he gathered around him, we are tempted to wonder what he didn’t hold onto and whether we might discover the lost fragment (such as the precious discarded Rosebud of Citizen Kane) through which one life might be satisfyingly explained. No collection is ever complete and thus begs for those things that it fails to include: the collection always wants more. In short, Warhol’s collections could never be large enough to explain his life and art.
Matthew Tinkcom, Possession Obsession, 2002
Warhol's time capsule gives me some inspiration on how to deal with the large amount of goods produced in my life in the consumer society. In this era of consumption, I hate that consumption is encroaching on my life, but I have nothing to do about it. Time is always moving forward and can't go back. I think maybe I can take my life as material and record my traces in the consumer society. It may be a lifelong project, because I want to integrate temporality into my work. I hope this work can show the relationship between people and objects, social forms and artistic scenes from a private perspective.
Green Coca-Cola Bottles
Andy warhol 210 coca cola Bottles
More than any other artist of his generation, Warhol showed us that the ubiquitous imagery of mass culture had come to reflect and shape contemporary life. Coca-Cola bottles, newspaper photographs of car crashes, and the empty desolation of the death chamber are as closely associated with Warhol as they are with America. This powerful subject matter, however, has often obscured his radical explorations into different media. He painted and drew with silkscreen, made moving film images appear still, stitched together identical photographs, and filled a room with silver balloons. His life's project was to explore the aesthetic and cultural associations of the term 'media', questioning structural boundaries in a way now heralded by some as 'post-medium'.
Warhol uses screen printing to print the same pattern over and over again, which increases people's impression of the image. This is also the point I like this work very much, because the characteristics of screen printing, although the work has mechanical characteristics, no two images are the same, and the printing errors and stains in the work increase the "humanistic factors" of the work, making it different from ordinary mechanical brushes. I'm fascinated by this quality, so I tried screen printing in my works, and the effect was very good. Some printing errors and stains in the process also make my works look more handmade.
Green Coca-Cola Bottles was created the year that Andy Warhol developed his pioneering silkscreen technique, which allowed him to produce his paintings through a mechanical process that paralleled his use of mass culture subjects. Here, the image of a single Coca-Cola bottle is repeated in regular rows, seven high by sixteen across, above the company’s logo. The repetitive imagery and standardized format evokes the look of mechanical reproduction, but the black outlines were probably stamped by hand from a single carved woodblock onto green areas printed in a grid pattern. This engenders subtle differences in the work’s pattern; each of the bottles differs in both the evenness of the green underpainting and in the clarity of its stamped profile. The bottles are also often slightly askew, disturbing the overall regularity of the grid and making them appear simultaneously handmade and individualized, streamlined and mass-produced. In his deadpan and ironic way, Warhol at once criticized and glorified the consumerist idols and surface values of America’s media-saturated postwar culture. “A Coke is a Coke,” he explained, “and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.
Green coke bottle is one of my favorite works. In Warhol's works, he is always based on the image of popular culture and the concept of consumerism. In this work, Coca Cola bottle is selected as the object of printing. This is a point I like very much. I think Coca Cola is a symbol of the concept of equality, which blurs the boundaries between the rich and the poor and gives people good hope. But this point also aroused my thinking. I think the concept of equal rights, on the other hand, is also a marketing means used in consumerism. Consumerism is always using the concept of beauty to induce the audience to buy goods. It seems that if we buy the products, we can have the beautiful life shown in the advertisement. But in fact, continuous purchase will only increase the distance between us and capital. For this reason, we can only keep working to pay off the "debt of a good life". I think this is the charm of this work. Warhol didn't explain the moral of the work and give the audience some space to think. This is what I want to show in my works. I don't want to be clear about what to criticize. I think strong criticism has a sense of powerlessness. I hope that the audience can get different understanding of the same thing through my works, which is what I have been trying to do.