About Warhol and minimalist artists

Warhol

« The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machinelike is what I want to do. » Warhol wanted to be a machine. He said it again and again, and it is often what people remember from him. As a matter of fact, for several years, he has striven to actually reproduce an almost automatic movement to produce his works, as if he was working on an assembly line. His creative process matched perfectly with his speech.

However, in a normal industrial process, there is no place for defects. Any uncalibrated part is thrown to the trash. And if the machine itself produces a high rate of defective parts, it is very likely it would be quickly scrapped.

But Warhol is interested in accidents, and I am not talking about his series "car crash" here, but those left on the canvas: his patterns are wonky, not in line or they encroach upon each other, some of them are too bright, some others too dark, etc. Finally Warhol gives the impression of a machine that has some flaws. If these imperfections make his work interesting plastically, the result opposes the discourse about the machine which involves the absence of defects.

Minimalism

From this point of view, works of minimalist artists are closer to the idea that we have about mass production: the artists conceived the "specific object" –to quote terms from Donald Judd– but they did not build the parts that constitute the artwork: they had them built by manufacturers. Thus, in their creative process, the minimalist artists went a step beyond than Warhol, even though they had never referred explicitly to mass production. Moreover, the geometric modules that make up these works, made of industrial materials (steel, aluminium, neon, ...) perfectly machined, assembled serially and selected for their emotional neutrality give the strong impression of artworks, or rather objects that are mass-produced.

However, these works, being literal, have the disadvantage of not being very readable for anybody, for in the collective unconscious, the idea of art implies something that transcends the material object, and an aesthetic experience can not be limited to a phenomenological one. This is precisely this idea of transcendence that these artists refuse. For them, the object is to be regarded as an entity in itself, as Frank Stella said once about his black paintings: "What you see is what you see." Subsequently, minimalist artists are de facto disconnected from the general public, although their works are widely recognized by the art world: they can be seen in any major collection, and critical literature abounds about them.

A contrario, the iconography used by the pop artists, taken from everyday life and mass medias is much appreciated by the general public, because it refers to something known and familiar. And if the pop artworks are not affordable –as it is usually for cases of unique or limited edition pieces–, their reproductions, mass-produced on various supports, are best-sellers.