Term Paper on "Andy Warhol Orange Country Museum of Art"

Term Paper 5 pages (1782 words) Sources: 2 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Andy Warhol

Orange Country Museum of Art: Political images from two recent collections entitled "Disorderly conduct" and "Art since the 1960s: California Experiment"

Karen Findlay's "The Eyes of Condoleezza Rice" is an explicitly political work of art that grapples with one of the most divisive issues of our age: the morality of the war in Iraq. Findlay, as an artist, clearly comes out as against the war, but the actual meaning of her anti-war painting is far more subtle and nuanced in its visual impact. It shows the ability for visual art to provoke questions about an issue, rather than to merely incite debate like a verbal work of art, such as a novel, editorial, or even a film.

On first glance, "The Eyes of Condoleezza Rice" seems like a spare and delicate portrait of a plane, in soft pastel blues and grays. However, the serious implications of the work become evident as the viewer looks closer and sees that it depicts a fighter plane dropping objects upon a plane. The slim, oblong-shaped objects look like bombs -- or eyes -- or both. Immediately, because of the title of the work, the question arises -- whose eyes do they belong to? Are they an endless repetition of the Secretary of State's eyes, being tossed down into Baghdad, ensuring that the land remains under her watchful gaze and the gaze of the administration she serves? Or are they the eyes of servicemen in the service of their country, under Rice's control, forced to look upon the horrors of war? Or are they the broken body parts of the Iraqi people themselves, being co-opted by the American government? The disembodied eyes suggest a mutilation of some kind, no matter who they belong to, even if only a disturbingly metaphorical level.

The negative message of the painting is evident by its transposing of the human eyes upon an image militarism, and its juxtaposition of what should be beautiful, namely the eyes of a feminine woman, into a warlike image of soulless, faceless, modern violence. The pilot of the plane has no identity, only the eyes of the bombs hurtling into the distance have a human presence. The faceless, disembodied eyes are beautiful and eerie and stare blankly ahead, without compassion, as if they do not care where they fall. The painting also raises the absence of an explicitly American image in the work. No flag is evident on the plane, and there is no reference to President Bush, who was responsible for beginning the war. There is no sense or image of American pride or honor, even ironically depicted.

Does the watchful image suggest that Rice is the president's all-seeing, but nonjudgmental eyes and ears, with no body or identity of her own, other than her eyes? Is her ability to be a gazer, but not an informed and active participant as an advisor, the reason for the work's portrayal of Rice as a series of eyes, a spy rather than a fully-fledged individual? Significantly, there is no mouth, the body part one might first associate with someone who is supposed to provide counsel.

It is hard to forget that Rice is not simply a Secretary of State enforcing an unpopular policy, but also an African-American woman despite her marked physical absence in the painting. The lack of her physical presence and the very light, hazy tones of the work make no reference to her race, in fact, they seem to explicitly ignore her race as well as the race of the Iraqi people. Does this mean that her race is irrelevant to what she does, or that she has somehow sacrificed her race, and let it go up in smoke, like smoke from a plane? The image, although politicized, is not racialized or nationalized in any fashion.

The final, meta-difficulty in interpreting Findlay's work is the question of assumed knowledge on the part of the gazer. To truly understand the artwork, presumably one must know who Rice is, and her race and history with the Bush administration. Without this knowledge, the image might be powerful, but it would lack its historical context in the mind of the viewer, and thus lack its full impact. This suggests that some political art requires knowledge not just of art, but politics, for the viewer to fully appreciate the value of its statement.

However, this is not necessarily true of all artwork, as some art makes a political statement that is general and philosophical, rather than grounded in a moment in time. Pearl C. Hsiung's "Saint Perpetuum" also takes on the political issue of war from an anti-war perspective, but in a far less explicitly personal manner. The work depicts a colorful conflagration next to a volcano-like crevice. A flower is nearby. The work seems to strive to represent all wars, violence, and destruction that has occurred since the beginning of all time, not a specific conflict, event, or historical period. For example, the clouds hanging above the gulf at the center of the painting are not the stereotypical mushroom cloud of a nuclear war, although that image would certainly have been available to Hsiung at the time of the work's creation. The clouds have a sun lurking within them, suggesting that destruction shades the hope of the sun, but does not obliterate light and hope.

Thus Hsiung's painting offers the viewer more hopeful vision than Findlay's work. Findlay offers no images of resistance to the ideology of war in her spare, sparse colors and hues. Findlay's work suggests atmospherically a fading out of everything except an amoral gaze. "Saint Perpetuum" suggests the perpetual and active hope of regeneration and life, even in the midst of destruction. The small pink flower by the volcano is proud, tall, and untouched. It has sprung up in the soil of a vast valley of destruction, and looks healthy and whole.

The suggestion of a partially natural disaster in the form of the volcano and the hints of a solar eclipse as well as a bomb implies that the artist hopes to hold out perpetual hope in the fact of every possible affliction that can affect humankind. The more positive atmosphere of the Hsiung work is also reflected in the brighter colors. The back of the canvas is dark and murky, but even the red fire in the core of the crevice has a kind of beauty. There is some pink light at the horizon that picks up the pink tones in the center of the flower, suggesting that hope is on the horizon and within the heart of the flower. The dawn is coming, even in the midst of fire. The images of the arrows hanging in the cloud are not merely war-like but suggest the passion and suffering of a medieval image of a saint like St. Francis being martyred, but still holding out hope for redemption.

The dark, thick black smoke emerging from the cauldron and stretching up to blanket the earth is not entirely frightening, but has a kind of twisting, human quality to it, like hands or legs, as if even the obliteration of the landscape still has the potential to do good. For every resurrection, there must be some destruction beforehand, for things to begin anew. The human like twists and swirls of the black shows humanity is present everywhere, even in darkness. But Findlay's work suggests that humanity is the root of destruction, and that even the human body can become instruments of torture, terror, and war, however sleek and silver and modern the bombs dropped by the plane may seem to the eye. Hsiung shows how nature as well as humanity can be cruel, but nature is utterly absent from Findlay's color palette as well as the images of her work, unless the human eyes qualify as nature.

As disturbing as the gaze from Findlay's work may be, it is Andy Warhol's "Electric Chair," however, that may be the most frightening image of all. Findlay's work has a clear perspective, and the artist looks with an opinion from her canvas. Warhol's instrument of death is banal in its evil, a work of pure and artificial pop culture. Warhol was clearly intent upon showing the accepted instrument of death in a very matter-of-fact way, much like his portraits of celebrities. In fact, Warhol could be arguing that the electric chair has become a kind of media image or celebrity, like Marylyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor, part of a cultural circus that is fascinated with violence and serial killers, even while it claims to see the electric chair as part of the justice system.

The chair is not given any reverence. The chair almost looks like a harmless folding chair, rather than something that can kill a man. It is not repeated, to give it power, it exists only in a singular, static image. There is no poetic, metaphorical imagery that challenges the viewer's mind like "The Eyes of Condoleezza Rice" or primitive palate… READ MORE

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