Andy Warhol

The great American artist Andy Warhol once mused, “I am a deeply superficial person” (Andy Warhol Quotes). Strangely enough, critique of the artist’s work and persona is anything but. As some argue that all artwork is a reflection of its time, Warhol’s work is often linked to postmodern theory and philosophy by the likes of Baudrillard and Debord, and defined as commentaries on the dissemination of reality and meaning and the rise of the spectacle. In negating the role of the artist, Warhol allows his work to become more accessible, and thus it becomes easier to engage his viewers. Due to the commercial quality and mechanical production methods employed in creating Warhol’s art, the works themselves become objective pieces, allowing his audience to easily identify with them. Warhol’s installation piece entitled Silver Clouds, created for a 1966 exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, aims to place its viewers in a complete environment. With its use of various media and its ability to transform the viewer, Silver Clouds is a total work of art both in concept and structure. Art lovers should be weary though, these floating silver pillows are strictly for the enjoyment of the deeply superficial, which, in postmodern society, means basically everyone.

Warhol created an environment that was a room filled with floating silver clouds, helium-filled balloons made with mylar, a thin but strong polyester film with a metallic pigmentation (Web Definitions), that moved with the air currents. At the time, they challenged traditional expectations by mingling with and touching the viewer (Andy Warhol Museum). The balloons’ movements both affect an are affected by the viewer. Within this set environment, Warhol creates “an ethereal, joyful atmosphere” for the viewer (Andy Warhol Museu) and thus changes their mood. The viewer is also transformed in that they become participants within this space. The floating clouds tempt the viewer’s curiosity and coerce them to interact physically. Silver Clouds succeeds in immersing the viewer within a complete environment by employing visual, tactile, and auditory stimuli. What is interesting about this work is that the participant is the one who imbues the work with some of these stimuli, or it may even be said that they become part of the work themselves. They touch and move the clouds around while their vocal reactions make up part of the auditory experience of the work.

Through this installation work, we see an evolution taking place for Warhol, as well as for modern art in general. Some of the elements of modernism’s utopian promises included a stance “to evolve from pictorial plane through sculptural object to architectural space” and to embrace the tactile mode of participation.  The confines of the private viewing mode of the easel painting are abandoned in favor of a space that offers simultaneous collective perception (Michelson 33). Concerning Warhol’s Silver Clouds, a collective perception and experience is offered in that all participants in the work are experiencing the work itself, and each other’s reactions at the same time. Although Warhol’s work does fulfill the aforementioned promises of modernism, the artist has taken a rather “atopian” approach in doing so (Michelson 33). In both its structural and conceptual framework, Silver Clouds is meant to be light and not imbued with meaning. The work seems too fun to be representing any sort of manifesto. Warhol’s only intention here, if there even was one, is to create a specific atmosphere and to elicit responses and physical reactions from the viewer until the viewer himself is an inherent part of the artwork.

The Situationist International was a group of political and artistically-minded individuals that characterized modern capitalist society as an organization of spectacles in which it is impossible to actively participate or experience real life (Plant 215). They believed that people were spectators of their own lives and that every experience was second-hand. The situationists opposed the capitalist idea of a certain mode of survival which they thought, hindered human development and excluded “the possibility of a life of playful opportunity in which the satisfaction of desires, the realization of pleasures, and the creation of chosen situations would be the principal activities”. The Situationists called for imagination, creativity, desire, and pleasure, in place of the cold, blatant commercialism that had fell upon society with capitalism (Plant 2). Warhol’s Silver Clouds, in true conjunction with postmodernist thought, demonstrates a sort of celebration and acceptance of this superficiality. The somewhat cold, harsh designs of the silver pillows, mostly due to their material, whose metallic sheen is evocative of the industrial nature of modern life, are softened by their shape and the fact that they float about. The viewer amuses themselves nonetheless, within an essentially superficial space. With Silver Clouds, Warhol realizes the situation of postmodern society. Individuals are caught among countless images that vacuously “float around” and instead of pondering their predicament, the viewer participates in and actually celebrates it. In this postmodern moment, Warhol’s created environment, his spectacle of dancing silver pillows, becomes reality. The Situationist concept of the spectacle prefigures contemporary notions of hyperreality and superficiality. While they are described and celebrated by today’s postmodernists, the Situationists subjected these notions to passionate criticism (Plant 5). In postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s work, it suggests that “modern society has become hyperreal, a world in which the spectacle becomes more real than reality itself” (Plant 8). Baudrillard also advanced the theory that the postmodern world is made up solely of images that come to be more real than their referents until there is nothing left but the image. In a world in which everything is transformed into a commodity, “the spectacle is the materialization of ideology” (Plant 12).

The Situationist notion of the spectacle conveyed the sense that alienated individuals of modern life would spend their lives watching themselves (Plant 10). Silver Clouds contributes to the collective identity of its participants in that part of the excitement of  experiencing the artwork, is experiencing it with others and watching the surrounding reactions. People are more likely to be moved emotionally when they are in a group for the reaction of others elicits the reaction of the individual.

Vassily Kandinsky, who briefly taught at the Bauhaus school, once said, “I always find it advantageous in each work to leave an empty space; it has to do with not imposing. Don’t you think that in this there rests an eternal law—but it’s a law for tomorrow” (Michelson 16). The “empty space” to which Kandinsky refers to is a form of negation. Like Warhol who negates the role of the artist and aesthetic imposition, Kandinsky believed that negation allowed the viewer to “situate himself or herself in a relationship of mutual dependence with the open artistic construct….[and reject] the assignment of ideological meaning” (Michelson 16).

Kandinsky was one of the founding members of The Blue Rider group. The group was formed in 1911 and the name was chosen due to the founders’ mutual admiration of the color blue and horses (Kleiner 742). They created paintings that captured their feelings visually and, aimed to elicit intense responses from the viewer (Kleiner 742). The artist’s goal was to completely engage the viewer in this type of emotional color. The group also put on performances which involved Kandinsky producing a watercolor painting which was then expressed through a series of performances such as a piece of music and dancing. The painting, in Kandinsky’s case, the original work, creates a chain reaction of other artforms, which in the end leads to a unification of all these artforms.

Similar to thechain reaction in Kandinsky’s case, after seeing Warhol’s Silver Clouds, choreographer Merce Cunningham was inspired to use them in his new dance piece entitled Rainforest. The piece was premiered in 1968 with a set designed by Warhol (Andy Warhol Museum). Like the Blue Rider Group, who would express an artwork through music and dance, Cunningham was inspired by Warhol’s clouds to the point where he thought they reflected his dance performance, and included them in the set. This endeavor, like Kandinsky’s involved a unification of multiple artforms.

Warhol’s Silver Clouds is a total work of art in both concept and structure. In it, different media are used to engage the senses The work presents a unification of artist and engineer, and a unification of different media. “Made of helium and oxygen-filled metalized plastic film”, the Silver Clouds were created with the assistance of Billy Klüver, an engineer who sought to bring together artists and new technology, namely in the major exhibition of 1966 entitled 9 Evenings:Theatre&Engineering (Andy Warhol Museum). Artists soon came to realize that technology could be used to take art further and recognized its ability to engage the whole sensorial spectrum. Essentially, the aim was to make art more theatrical by using technological aspects such as light, sound, and performance for a truly synaesthetic experience in and to unify the arts to create a total work of art for the spectator.  Warhol is definitely known for taking advantage of technology to pursue an artistic idea to its fullest. For example, The film used to create the balloons had to withstanding to touch seeing as how the work is highly tactile and the museum received countless visitors each day. The metalized plastic film on the silver clouds provides a distorted reflection of its surrounding due to its shape, and the air currents that move the clouds provide a visual treat and elicits a giddy response from the viewer. The work both surrounds and engages the viewer.

Part of the reason that Silver Clouds engages the viewer so, is that the work is allowed to become what it may. Instead of being affected by the artist, it is affected by the audience. In the 1960s, Fluxus provided a unique forum to performance artists. Pieces performed by this artistic group, “opened up music to random and trivial events more characteristic of everyday life than what had been thought of as art” (Oren 185). For example, an artist may perform a piano piece by doing nothing more than placing a vase of flowers on a piano. In giving the viewer full reign of the artwork, the artist allows him/her to become a participant. Both Fluxus works and Silver Clouds, subject themselves to chance and it is this element of chance that becomes exciting for the viewer and coerces him/her to participate and decide in which direction the artwork will go. Warhol’s work is essetially a spectacle in that the viewer becomes an actor in the artwork.  In other words, concerning Warhol’s Silver Clouds, the work cannot be without the participation of its viewer.

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