Miller_Warhol

=Steve Miller's Commentary on Andy Warhol's Saturday Disaster= =For Rose Museum Tour=

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The Andy Warhol "Saturday Disaster" 1964 is undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of the the Rose Art Museum collection. This painting encapsulates the best aspects of Warhol's work, distilling the American voyeuristic fascination with death and disaster, with maximum force, by using the concise and efficient silk screen technique, permitting the image to be repeated. At the same time the artist connects to an art tradition that shocked audiences from earlier historical times with similarly powerful images, such as Goya's disasters of war or Picasso's Guernica. Each of these artists were significant forces in their own eras and the force of Warhol still continues to reverberate today in the work of innumerable artists such as Richard Prince, Jeff Koons and Damian Hirst, just to name a few examples. Warhol was brilliant at selecting images that mirror the the time in which he lived, which was the rise of mass media and popular American culture. In "Saturday Disaster" the American dream of freedom and personal mobility (a chicken in every pot and a car in every driveway) is displayed as a riveting tragedy.

In 1962 Warhol started to use the commercial photo silk screen technique in his work and he made his first disaster paintings at this time shortly before he made his images of Jacki, Liz and Marilyn and Elvis, for which he became a household name and a celebrity in his own right. The silk screen technique removed the traditional artist touch, allowed for an easy repetition of the image and used the technique of commercial printing from mass media and brought this technique into the realm of fine art. It was a revolutionary concept; the presentation of the image and the speed of it's making is simultaneous. It was also a mode of production that allowed Warhol to produce vasts amount of work in the manner of "the factory" for which he was known.

As an artist, I was also fascinated by the silk screen technique because it saves the time of slavish rendering and gets the image quickly onto the canvas. I began using this technique in 1986 and still use it today. In fact, this technique was taught to me by two of Andy's assistants, Robert Bardin and Donald Sheridan. They showed me how to make a photographic film positive of the image and fix this image onto a photo-sensitized silk-like fabric stretched onto a wooden frame. Once the image is exposed onto silk screen, the screen can be positioned anywhere on a flat canvas. With a large squeegee, ink can be pulled across the fabric with the ink pushing through the fabric where ever the image has been exposed. In this manner the image is quickly transfered to the canvas. The speed of this process allowed Andy to produce art, like a machine and to produce images on a large scale.

It's always been my thinking that the best art always uses advances in visual vocabulary and technique to represent itself. The Renaissance used the mathematical perspective to create a new realism and the rise of photography freed painting from the need to reproduce reality and permit the direction in art towards abstraction. With the silk screen technique, Warhol can select any image in the media and place any photograph into the context of fine art, in the manner of the Duchamp ready-made.

In "Saturday Disaster", the Rose Museum is fortunate to have an early and powerful example of Warhol's images combined with the technique he would use for the rest of his career. Warhol is a cultural anthropologist and THE original media junkie who has spawned a million more, viewers such as us looking and thinking about this painting.