"Resemblance never remains stable within itself...
each resemblance, therefore, has value only from the accumulation of all the others..."
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Chair of the History of Systems of Thought, College de France
Les Mots et les choses (1966) The Order of Things - The Limits of the World
Andy Warhol is regarded justly as America's greatest artist. By elevating commercial imagery to the status of art, he destroys the existing system of art and establishes a new system of visual perception in its place. I regard Warhol as a seer, an oracle of the time, foreseeing the future. He predicts the internet, for instance, the explosion of discourse globally: "In the future, everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes." Warhol pioneered the creation of the multiple image in art, similar but with variations in gradation and colour, as an art design student prodigy, using carved erasers to create stencils in the late 1940s. Later, more famously in the 1960s, he invented the silkscreen process to sluice paint through in varying colours and pressures, resulting in variable coats of paint, some thick, some thin, and some virtually absent.
One of his greatest works is Electric Chair (1964), from his Death and Disaster series, later with variations, a silkscreen image of the electric chair at New York's Sing Sing prison, used to execute the Jewish couple, the Rosenbergs, convicted and sentenced to death for passing nuclear technology secrets to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. This single graphic image, taken from a news media photograph source, contains many powerful themes (no pun intended). Brilliantly, Warhol does not attempt to explain or be didactic in regards to the work, which would narrow and reduce its definition, its scale and importance. Warhol's magnificent crimson version of Electric Chair recalls Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650).
The electric chair image touches upon a myriad of themes: the Cold War, the death penalty, nuclear technology, Jewish ethnicity, paranoia of the "other", fear, modernity, the sacredness of human life. In a time of media hysteria (not uncommon these days!), the Rosenberg case and trial was a cause celebre for the left, seeking to overhaul the death penalty. Warhol leaves the myriad of meanings open to the viewer to interpret, decipher and discover, even today. A master work of art, of the highest order and importance, which indeed lives on forever.
Warhol is the father of the postmodern era in which we live. He reduces and sometimes eliminates the hand of the author, the gesture of the brushstroke, highlighting the "death of the author".
The silent, taciturn Warhol presents a powerful, eloquent image. He is the all-seeing, omniscient eye, discerning as if by a divining rod, through the strata of repressed layers of knowledge, the conscious and unconscious layers of discourse, the issues of the day.
Warhol transcends the "limits and thresholds" of discourse (Foucault - the Archaeology of Knowledge). He transcends discourse, and attendant critique, to create new uncovered meanings which pulsate and fulminate today. Warhol remains silent, enigmatic, and the power of the image multiplies and proliferates.
