El Perro
01 Feb - 18 Mar 2007
EL PERRO
1 February – 18 March 2007
It is no exaggeration to say that our view of the world has been replaced by that of the mass media. But it’s nothing new. When Andy Warhol produced his series of silkscreens depicting Jacqueline Kennedy mourning the murder of her husband in 1964, he modelled his series on a newspaper picture. When asked by a reporter if he was trying to depict the murder of the American president, Warhol answered no. Did his images show the grief of Jacqueline Kennedy? No. What, then, were the pictures about, the reporter asked. Andy Warhol answered laconically, They are about how the mass media is mourning for us.
What Warhol identified with his 1960s work was how the mass media images had become a screen between us and reality. But that is not all. When an image is reproduced innumerable times it runs the risk of losing its original meaning. When postmodernism entered the art scene in the 1980s this development was read both in a positive and a negative way. The positive was the possibility of viewing art as a set of signs, like a language, which could be formulated and reformulated in all possible and impossible combinations. What is original and what is copy became unimportant. What was important was the effect, or influence, of the signs or the language – not what the signs originally meant.
1 February – 18 March 2007
It is no exaggeration to say that our view of the world has been replaced by that of the mass media. But it’s nothing new. When Andy Warhol produced his series of silkscreens depicting Jacqueline Kennedy mourning the murder of her husband in 1964, he modelled his series on a newspaper picture. When asked by a reporter if he was trying to depict the murder of the American president, Warhol answered no. Did his images show the grief of Jacqueline Kennedy? No. What, then, were the pictures about, the reporter asked. Andy Warhol answered laconically, They are about how the mass media is mourning for us.
What Warhol identified with his 1960s work was how the mass media images had become a screen between us and reality. But that is not all. When an image is reproduced innumerable times it runs the risk of losing its original meaning. When postmodernism entered the art scene in the 1980s this development was read both in a positive and a negative way. The positive was the possibility of viewing art as a set of signs, like a language, which could be formulated and reformulated in all possible and impossible combinations. What is original and what is copy became unimportant. What was important was the effect, or influence, of the signs or the language – not what the signs originally meant.