POP ART & THE COLD WAR II: Andy Warhol’s Mao

Mao (1973)

Mao (1973)

Mao (1973)

Mao (1973)

Mao (1973)

Mao 8 (1973)

Mao (1973)

Mao (1973)

Mao (1973)

Andy Warhol consistently made use of imagery related to Communism, the Cold War, and Marxism throughout his career.

In 1972, President Richard Nixon made a historic state visit to China, where he met with Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong. The summit established diplomatic ties between the two nations and inaugurated a series of cultural exchanges. In 1973, Warhol began an extensive series of paintings and prints based on the official portrait of Chairman Mao, visible everywhere in China at the time.

Responding to Mao’s vanity and global fame, Warhol used the format and style of his commissioned portraits of socialites, celebrities, and capitalist entrepreneurs to depict the ascetic Communist leader. The plain grey worker’s clothing and neutral background are transformed by beautifully-harmonized colors and extravagant, painterly brushwork, while the impassive face is given a makeover. Taken as a whole, the sumptuous and glamorous Mao paintings were the most unabashedly beautiful images Warhol had made to date.

Warhol also used Mao’s image as a wall paper design, his official reason being that Mao rhymed with cow, the image used in Warhol’s first foray into wallpaper design in 1965.

Warhol visited China in 1982, where to his surprise, no one knew who he was.

Diffusion

One night I dreamed I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it. And I did. I worked on that painting a long time. It’s a very rotten painting— physically rotten—because I began it in house enamel paint, which you paint furniture with, and it wouldn’t dry quickly enough. Then I had in my head this idea of something I had read or heard about: wax encaustic.
— Jasper Johns, 1955,

Jasper Johns chose to paint the flag in a nation that has an entire Legal Code devoted the the proper display and handling of the flag and requires school children to swear a daily fealty oath to the flag, and secondly, “to the republic for which it stands.” He chose to paint the “living symbol” of the nation at the height of the Cold War, a historical period marked by government-sponsored inquisitions, witch hunts, blacklists, loyalty oaths, censorship, and espionage. The established careers and reputations of Elia Kazan, Dalton Trumbo, Lillian Helman, Ring Lardner and Herschel Bernardi, the voice of Charlie the Tuna, were destroyed on account of suspected Communist sympathies perceived in their work. Johns chose to paint the flag at the onset of his career, before he had savings and a professional network to support him should he be accused of un-American activity. To put it more directly, Johns risked much when he elected to paint the flag.

Johns’ dream about painting the flag is the artist’s explanation of his unusual choice in subject matter. In placing that choice in the  locating that choice  within an unconscious, passive, psychological context, as opposed to a conscious political one, Johns can deflect potentially risky questions about his motives. In the dream he doesn’t fashion the flag for any practical or ceremonial purpose, he merely represents it.

Johns wants the viewer to see the flag as an image and not as a symbol. The belabored design and overworked brushwork stress the flag’s status as a crafted image, while the, uneven, tactile, encaustic layer and applied to an unframed supports which makes the flag seem to project forwards into a third dimension, foregrounds the work’s status as object.  The image-ness and object-ness of Johns’ Flag ask the viewer to see the painting, and not see through it to a discursive symbolically-coded meaning.

Propaganda is structured around a reflexive, unthinking response to a simple, immediately recognized image. Insofar as Johns’ flags disrupt that process, they have a political function and should not be understood as empty ontological conundrums.

CPU DIE SHOTS

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The Aesthetic of the Chip

THE DIE SHOT is the computer industry’s version of the money shot. These gorgeous photographs of a chip’s die, a block of the semi-conducting material of which integrated circuits are composed, are shot under intense light with a high-resolution digital camera using a macro lens or with a combination of microscope and camera. With their geometrical abstract forms and iridescent, jewel-like colors, the die shots look like a psychedelic form of modern art—think Paul Klee on blotter acid. These ravishing images were taken from, several sources, including IC Die Photography and CPU World

De l’inquiètude

“Les yeux ont cela de commun avec les autres organes des sens qu’uos ne veulent point être interrompus dans leur fonctions, et Il faut convenir que plusiers personnes qui parleraient dans un même lieu, en même temps et de même ton, feraient de la peine aux auditeurs qui ne sauraient lequel entendre.”

Roger de Piles, Cours de Peinture par Principes (1708)

Intricacy in form, therefore, I shall define to be that peculiarity in the lines, which compose it, that leads the eye a wanton kind of chace, and from the pleasure that gives the mind, intitles it to the name of beautiful: and it may be justly said, that the cause of the idea of grace more immediately resides in this principle, than in the other five, except variety; which indeed includes this, and all the others.

William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1753)

The higher inquiètude is vision without attention.
The “led eye” is a fallacy.
Artists are observers of vision, “organic intellectuals” as Gramsci put it.