Andy Warhol Robot | |
---|---|
Artist | Andy Warhol |
Year | c. 1981 - 1982, perhaps continuing until c. 1987 |
Medium | Sculpture |
Subject | Andy Warhol |
The Andy Warhol Robot is an animatronic robot created by Andy Warhol in 1981, as a self-portrait. [1] [2]
Pop artist Andy Warhol had a fascination with Hollywood, television, and fame. His dream was to create his own stage production, Andy Warhol: A No Man Show, where a robotic life-size replica of himself with a "prosthetic resembling his face" [3] could provide interviews and a performance to audiences across the world. [4] Warhol claims his space despite being absent and the robot promoting his work without the need for his physical presence. [5] Warhol pioneered the idea, so prevalent today, that "all publicity is good publicity". [6] In 1981, Warhol worked with Peter Sellars and Lewis Allen to create his show as a traveling theater production that would read from Warhol's diaries and his books The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Exposures. [7] Inspired by a promotional automaton puppet of Muhammad Ali advertising a film in Penn Station, Allen proposed for the Andy Warhol Robot to act as human as possible to trick the public into believing it was Warhol himself. [8] In Blake Gopnik's book Warhol: A Life as Art , Gopnik writes that Warhol worked in collaboration with robotics expert and Disney Imagineer Alvaro Villa Galvis to create a humanoid version of Warhol. [9] Warhol was quoted as saying, "I'd like to be a machine, wouldn't you?" [10] [11] Warhol's robotic double could be seen in philosopher Jean Baudrillard's terms as "the simulacra [sic] of Warhol replacing the artist himself." [12] [13] Bob Colacello, former Editor-in-Chief of Interview declared, "It really would have been the greatest thing that could have happened for Andy. It would have almost been like coming back from the dead. And he really loved the project. He sat for hours at some high-tech place in the San Fernando Valley where thy made a mold of his face and his hands… there's a whole photo session of it." [14] Warhol's "relationship between man and machine, and in particular the increasing power and effects of media technologies, is perhaps the key problematic of Warhol’s work: in approaching the issues raised and in exploring how they resurface across his art in various media, the concept of telepresence proves particularly useful." The term comes from the work of cultural theorist Paul Virilio." [15]
The Andy Warhol Robot was also featured in the Netflix show The Andy Warhol Diaries by Andrew Rossi. [16] Rossi shared with Entertainment Weekly that Warhol cultivated his image in the 1960s during his time at The Factory as an "asexual robot." [17] This led Rossi to create an AI voice for Warhol in the series from conversations between Warhol and his friend Pat Hackett, performed by actor Bill Irwin. [18] [19] Warhol was quoted as saying, "Machines have less problems," "‘I do have feelings, but I wish I didn’t," and, "the reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine." [20] [21]
Pop star Beyoncé's Renaissance World Tour set was designed with Warhol's Factory and robot in mind including dancing robot arms "shot through with the silver-sequinned joy, liberty, and luminosity of LGBTQ+ ball culture." [22] [23]
Video and performance artist Nam June Paik, considered the "Father of Video Art" [24] created his own Andy Warhol Robot (1994), it is currently in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. [25] Paik's robot however is not a recreation of Andy Warhol's physique, but an assemblage of television screens broadcasting images of Warhol's works and various components that exemplify Wahol's artistic oeuvre. Paik began making robots in 1963, [26] and in 1982 for his retrospective at the Whitney Museum his first robot, Robot K-456, was displayed. [27] [28]
The Andy Warhol Robot was featured in an exhibition, "Mike Kelley: The Uncanny", by American artist Mike Kelley at the Tate Liverpool and Mumok in 2004. Frieze (magazine) writes, "Taking its cue from the resurgence of figurative sculpture in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Sigmund Freud's essay 'The Uncanny' (1919), the exhibition brings together mannequin-related artworks, mostly from the 1960s onwards," including from ancient Egypt to the early 2000s. [29] In Freud's 'The Uncanny,' he writes, "It may be true that the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it." [30] Kelley explores "memory, recollection, horror and anxiety through the juxtaposition of a highly personal collection of objects with realist figurative sculpture." [31] Kelley remarks in his essay for the exhibition, "works develop a life of their own by virtue of their existence in the world outside of my control," and "I had intended to rework the original essay for 'The Uncanny,' "Playing with Dead Things," into dialogue form for a theater piece but never got around to it," akin to Warhol's urgings for his robot theater piece with Allen and Sellars. [32] Kelley also makes reference to Jack Burnham who writes, "the liberalizing tendencies of modern art and the discoveries of archaeology finally compelled historians to consider the aesthetic merits of [substratum figures as a fine art] and an increasing range of other anthropomorphic forms," [33] and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel who shares, "lying between life and death, animated and mechanic, hybrid creatures and creatures to which hubris gave birth, they all may be liked to fetishes." [34]
Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, film director, producer, and leading figure in the pop art movement. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" to describe the future of telecommunications.
Michael Kelley was an American artist. His work involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance and video. He often worked collaboratively and had produced projects with artists Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, and John Miller. Writing in The New York Times, in 2012, Holland Cotter described the artist as "one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion."
Interview is an American magazine founded in late 1969 by artist Andy Warhol and British journalist John Wilcock. The magazine, nicknamed "The Crystal Ball of Pop", features interviews with celebrities, artists, musicians, and creative thinkers. Interviews were usually unedited or edited in the eccentric fashion of Warhol's books and The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again.
Bob Colacello is an American writer. Born in Bensonhurst, New York, and raised in Plainview, Long Island, he graduated from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in 1969, and also has an MFA degree in film criticism from Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts.
Robotic art is any artwork that employs some form of robotic or automated technology. There are many branches of robotic art, one of which is robotic installation art, a type of installation art that is programmed to respond to viewer interactions, by means of computers, sensors and actuators. The future behavior of such installations can therefore be altered by input from either the artist or the participant, which differentiates these artworks from other types of kinetic art.
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel was a leading French psychoanalyst, a training analyst, and past President of the Société psychanalytique de Paris in France. From 1983 to 1989, she was Vice President of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Chasseguet-Smirgel was Freud Professor at the University College, London, and Professor of Psychopathology at the Université Lille Nord de France. She is best known for her reworking of the Freudian theory of the ego ideal and its connection to primary narcissism, as well as for her extension of this theory to a critique of utopian ideology.
Campbell's Soup Cans is a work of art produced between November 1961 and June 1962 by American artist Andy Warhol. It consists of thirty-two canvases, each measuring 20 inches (51 cm) in height × 16 inches (41 cm) in width and each consisting of a painting of a Campbell's Soup can—one of each of the canned soup varieties the company offered at the time. The works were Warhol's hand-painted depictions of printed imagery deriving from commercial products and popular culture and belong to the pop art movement.
Jack Wesley Burnham Jr. was an American writer and theorist of art and technology, who taught art history at Northwestern University and the University of Maryland. He is one of the main forces behind the emergence of systems art in the 1960s.
Lewis Allen was a British-born director whose credits included classic television series and a diverse range of films. Allen worked mainly in the United States, working on Broadway and directing 18 feature films between 1944 and 1959. From the mid-1950s he moved increasingly into television and worked on a number of the most popular shows of the time in the US.
Jeffrey Deitch is an American art dealer and curator. He is best known for his gallery Deitch Projects (1996–2010) and curating groundbreaking exhibitions such as Lives (1975) and Post Human (1992), the latter of which has been credited with introducing the concept of "posthumanism" to popular culture. In 2010, ArtReview named him as the twelfth most influential person in the international art world.
Blake Gopnik is an American art critic who has lived in New York City since 2011. He previously spent a decade as chief art critic of The Washington Post, prior to which he was an arts editor and critic in Canada. He has a doctorate in art history from Oxford University. He is the author of Warhol, a biography of the American artist Andy Warhol.
John G. Hanhardt is an American author, art historian, and curator of film and media arts. Hanhardt was the Consulting Senior Curator for Media Arts at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, where he developed exhibitions, collections, and archives in film and the media arts. He is considered to be one of the leading scholars on video artist Nam June Paik.
Roh Soh-yeong is a South Korean art museum director. She is the founder and director of Art Center Nabi.
Victor Hugo, born Victor Rojas, (1948–1994) was a Venezuelan-born American artist, window dresser, and partner of the designer Halston.
Barbara Allen de Kwiatkowski née Tanner, was a model, journalist, and socialite. She is also known as an associate of Andy Warhol, working with him on Interview magazine.
Warhol is a 2020 biography of American artist Andy Warhol written by art critic Blake Gopnik. It was published by Allen Lane in the UK and Ecco in the US. At 976 pages in length, it has been marketed as the definitive biography of Warhol. Waldemar Januszczak of The Sunday Times wrote that "it is impossible to imagine anyone finding out much more about Andy than is recorded here. In that sense it's definitive."
The Andy Warhol Diaries is an American documentary streaming television limited series from writer, director Andrew Rossi, and executive producer Ryan Murphy, based on the 1989 non-fiction book of the same name by Andy Warhol, as edited by Pat Hackett. The series features the famed pop artist narrating his own diary entries through the employment of AI. The series premiered on Netflix on March 9, 2022, consisting of six episodes.
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