Shallow subjects: Andy Warhol and the painted surface.
Item
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Title
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Shallow subjects: Andy Warhol and the painted surface.
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Identifier
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AAI9807909
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identifier
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9807909
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Creator
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Burns, Jennifer.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Carol Armstrong
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History
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Abstract
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In 1967, Andy Warhol told an interviewer that "if you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it." This statement is frequently quoted in discussions of Warhol's art, usually to support the notion that since there is "nothing behind" his paintings, they must be either meaningless or utterly indeterminate in their meaning. The same statement, however, suggests a different possibility: that the meaning of Warhol's paintings is to be found not beyond or behind them, but on their surfaces. The dissertation explores this possibility in two ways: first, it locates Warhol's focus on the painted surface within a much broader art historical context than has been attempted previously, and second, it charts a range of consequences that flow from seeing Warhol's advocacy of the surface as an historically significant and programmatic feature of his art. The first chapter thus links Warhol to predecessors in the colorist tradition who also favored the pleasurable effects of the painted surface over the intellectual rigors of design. The second chapter situates Warhol within Clement Greenberg's history of modernist painting, which accorded great importance to the flat surface of the picture plane. Once it has been placed in historical perspective, Warhol's privileging of the surface can help us to rethink a number of interpretive problems. In the last two chapters I consider the assumptions of formalist and iconographical modes of interpretation, the significance of authorial intention, and the contested dividing line between elite and popular culture, arguing that each debate can be reconfigured if we take into account the metaphors of surface and depth in which these problems are formulated. Given my focus on Warhol's surfaces, my arguments are advanced through close readings of selected paintings from Warhol's most fruitful and challenging period, 1962 to 1966.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
