Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again
At the beginning of the 1960s, Warhol’s work looked new because of a technique new to art—the half-tone silkscreen. It was the ultimate low-to-high inversion. Screen printing uses the method by which photography’s gray scale, its range of lights and darks, is translated into a pattern of tiny dots, known as benday; it’s what allows photographs to be reproduced in newspapers. The same dot pattern, expressed as tiny, pin-prick holes, can be bonded to a piece of silk, which is then stretched taut on a frame of wood or metal. When ink is forced through the silk using a rubber squeegee, the photographic image, reconstituted by the tiny dots, appears on the printed surface—in Warhol’s case, the canvas. The print can be repeated any number of times, and the amount of ink used, as well as the degree of force applied to the squeegee, will produce variations in the resulting image.
Warhol was the first artist to grasp the potential for pattern and rhythm released by the screen-print process; it could be both mechanical and expressive at the same time. This pictorial rhythm was tied to a feature of the silkscreen: it exaggerates the contrast in a photographic image between light and dark, amplifies their power to convey a sense of form, and also makes the dark areas of a photograph feel almost animated. In a profound act of poetic equivalency, Warhol further realized that the true substance of photography is the shadow cast by and on its subject. This was the essence of his major innovation, which still reverberates today: the reciprocity between painting and printing. What was his alone was the identification with the fatalistic glamour of a shadow.
The Star of the Silken Screen (NYRB)
via:
Warhol was the first artist to grasp the potential for pattern and rhythm released by the screen-print process; it could be both mechanical and expressive at the same time. This pictorial rhythm was tied to a feature of the silkscreen: it exaggerates the contrast in a photographic image between light and dark, amplifies their power to convey a sense of form, and also makes the dark areas of a photograph feel almost animated. In a profound act of poetic equivalency, Warhol further realized that the true substance of photography is the shadow cast by and on its subject. This was the essence of his major innovation, which still reverberates today: the reciprocity between painting and printing. What was his alone was the identification with the fatalistic glamour of a shadow.
The Star of the Silken Screen (NYRB)
via:
