Post 6 - Deanna Glogowski

"Traces" - Ana Mendieta

"Untitled" - Ana Mendieta

"Marilyn Monroe" - Andy Warhol

"Campbell Soup" - Andy Warhol

     Both the works of Ana Mendieta and Andy Warhol are very famous within pop culture and art circles today. Though, they do appear quite different on the surface. And Warhol seems to make colorful silk screens based on celebrities and basic, seemingly, unimportant objects. Meanwhile, Ana Mendieta creates morbid and somber silhouettes set in nature settings and are, often times, more photographic. However, there is a great deal of similarities within the two's art that can be seen, if looked at deeply enough. For one, both draw artistic inspiration from their biographical background when making their masterpieces. Ana Mendieta more so than Andy Warhol, but they both take aspects of their childhood and overall life to help create their works of art. Also, both construct art that is important to them. However, the same can be argued about almost any artist one happens to find on the internet or in a gallery or in a museum. What truly binds Andy Warhol's work to Ana Mendieta's work is their shared view on their art and the reaction people have to it. To them, their art is a representation of their lives. Ana Mendieta's works of art are called bloody and morbid and down right disturbing. She responds, however, by merely pointing out that what she created was her world as she sees it. Her reality and her perception of the things and world and places around her. Andy Warhol has the same approach using his own view of the world and perception of the things and places and people around him. He shows that the world around him is about those fifteen minutes of fame he has always craved and how popular culture is a central focus of his life. He takes things around him that seem unimportant and show how important an artist can make them. As John Berger put it in his book, Ways of Seeing, "Nevertheless the special relation between oil painting and property did play a certain role even in the development of landscape painting," (Breger, 106). Property has always been exaggerated and romanticized and worshipped in art and Andy Warhol uses his work to show that any bit of property or even junk can be art if presented that way in art. That is how Andy Warhol sees the world. A place where any one and any thing can be famous and be big if only given the chance to shine. That is the way that both artists are alike. Both take their view of the world, whether it be morbid and bloody or ambitious and fame driven, and put them into their works of art to display to the world.

     In Ana Medieta's work, some very prevalent themes are death, nature and femininity. All three themes, death, nature and femininity, litter Ana Medieta's every single work. She uses the earth and trees and sand and rocks and paints them in blood. Blood of the silhouette of someone, usually if not always a woman, painted with blood. Once more referencing John Breger's Ways of Seeing, "She is not naked as she is. She is naked as the spectator sees her," (Breger, 50). Seeing as Ana Mendieta does a lot of silhouette works, there is not a body actually seen. However, Ana Mendieta also has a lot of works were a body is seen and those often times feature a woman naked in nature with blood covering her. It is so prevalent, that theme of femininity that becomes associated with death, that even when we can't see the model, we can. She is a woman who lay naked in the sand or in the forest of on the rocks before her body was carted away only leaving the traces of a patch of blood behind her. These themes do not just speak about Ana Mendieta's works, but also her life. Ana Mendieta was separated from her family at the age of twelve due to Fidel Castro's regime in Havana, Cuba. She traveled to the United States with her little sister and was in foster care. She spent the better part of her life since feeling like an outsider in the midwest and never feeling the able to relate to the concepts of mothers, home, identity and belonging while she was in the United States. That is a feeling that she explored through her art work. She puts so much nature into her works of art because, to her, they symbolize the idea that we are all of one world and we are all the same deep down. Her world is stained with feminine blood because of the disconnection she has to mothers after being separated from hers for so long. It spurned her to become more in tune with her own femininity and she then used her art to call attention to the violence and evil done against women every day. Thus, the subject must be a woman. It worked well for Ana Mendieta, though, as she is now a very famous and respected artist in her field. She used her fame. She used it to make her statement on violence against women and the brutality she highlighted in her work and she used it to travel all over the world and further feel that we were all apart of one big planet. Ana Mendieta used the earth itself to convey that. She used nature and put her naked body in it, often times looking bloody, to show those ideas of violence and connection through the earth. It had to be that because those were the best ways to show all of the themes of death and femininity and mother earth that Ana Mendieta wanted to show. Ana Mendieta invented herself through her works. When she felt lost and misplaced, her art was the one thing that let her show and express that feeling. She then found ways to us it to shape her. She made a living out of that art that conveyed her feeling of misplacement and her identity was centered around the art she made. She became a star at highlighting those feelings and getting even more creative at expressing them. The ideas of death and femininity and violence against woman and that we are all apart of one world and we are all connected by mother earth.

     Andy Warhol also had an immigrant background. He was a very shy and strange boy, which prompted people to look at him constantly. Shy though he was, he seemed to want to turn all the stares he got into stares of awe by becoming famous. It is said he did not spend more than an hour without thinking about becoming famous. He was first introduced to art, though, by his mother. They did not have a lot of money growing up, so, when it was too cold to go outside and play, Andy Warhol's mother told him and his siblings to draw a picture for her and whoever won would get a prize. Needless to say, Andy Warhol always won. As a child, he was the odd one out for choosing to draw rather than play sports. He was also considered autistic and dyslexic. He was bullied constantly. All of that is reflected in his art. Andy Warhol was not seen as anything except strange as a young boy. Yet, becoming a famous artist turned his oddities into artistic works he became celebrated for. The same thing occurs in his art. He takes something infrequently looked at and simple and presents it in a way that suggests it have great value and rarity. Also, in his childhood, he always sought out fame. He dreamed of it. He was also interested in pop culture and what was new in magazines and in movies or shows. His work also reflects that when his art centered around famous celebrities. He was also very commercial of an artist. He, himself, was a blank canvas. It was harder for him to come up with great ideas. He often times asked for what people wanted and what ideas they had, like a commissioned artist would. One who makes art for a specific patron for money. It was once said that he liked money and that showed in his commercial works and the like. Andy Warhol's war was made using a silkscreen and he soon became synonymous with the craft. One could not think of silkscreen and not think of Andy Warhol. It was what he was famous for. Andy Warhol handled his fame by changing the world. He was seen as odd and changed that perspective by becoming famous. He used his fame to make other things that seemed so meaningless and unimportant into things of value to focus on. He even did that for people. He had an art studio he called, The Factory. It was frequented by people who lived on the fringes of society. He changed society's perspective on those people by giving them a place to hang out and be with themselves. They stopped being such unthinkable people because of how a famous artist allowed them near him. Andy Warhol's biggest tool was change in his art. When he painted the Campbell soup, he made hundreds of copies, but each with a different label. That made each one he silkscreened feel unique, like there was a deep meaning. Making each can feel special. Same with the pictures he made of celebrities. He changed the color of the background or the face or the clothes and that made each copy feel special and different in their own special way. That greatly showed off his themes of changing perspectives and giving value to valueless things. Andy Warhol was an odd man and was very shy, but, in the public, he presented himself as a great artist. He showed himself off as a creative and respectable artist. Does that mean he actually was not a creative and respectable artist? No. Merely that he presented his quirks and oddities in a different way. It was in Joanne Finkelstein's book, The Art of Self Invention, where they wrote, "At minimum the self is bifurcated, it has a double; there is the conscious and unconscious, private and public, civilized and base, good and bad, and we can create ourselves as well-rounded beings from the management of these seemingly opposed elements," (Finkelstein, 126). Who we are is a double-edged blade. In Andy Warhol's case, he was odd and shy and weird, but he was also inventive and talented and great at what he chose to do. He found his niche in art and turned his quirks into a positive in society with them. Also from Finkelstein's book, when mentioning John Banville's, The Untouchable, and speaking about Victor Maskell's double consciousness, "He repeatedly describes himself as having double, quadruple, multiple lives and interests: 'in my world, there are no simple questions, and precious few answers of any kind'; 'everything was itself and at the same time something else' (Banville, 1997: 28, 47)," (Finkelstein, 61). In Andy Warhol, there were multiple interests and lives. He was more than an autistic and strange child, he was a great artist. He merely needed a different setting to show off that different part of him. As an adult in the art world, it gave him a chance to show of the side of him that was a great and powerful artist. He was still an odd child, but he was able to present himself in a different light when he grew and became an artist. 

     Both artists had very hard backgrounds, but those backgrounds turned them into famous artists and gave them a passion to express themselves the way the conventional world could not. Ana Mendieta was able to express her feelings of desire for home and belonging and mothership. Andy Warhol was able to express his love of fame and fortune and to turn his oddities into the admirable qualities of an artist. Both had hard times, but both overcame them to become the great artists whose art lived after them both. Both will like continue to inspire artists for even longer than years from now as well.

Works Cited

Finkelstein, Joanne. “The Imposter, Trickster and Spy.” The Art of Self Invention: Image and                Identity in Popular Visual Culture, by Joanne Finkelstein, I.B. Tauris, 2007, pp. 61.

Finkelstein, Joanne. “Identity.” The Art of Self Invention: Image and Identity in Popular Visual           Culture, by Joanne Finkelstein, I.B. Tauris, 2007, pp. 126.

Breger, John. “Chapter 3.” Ways of Seeing, The Penguin Group, 1972, pp. 50.

Breger, John. “Chapter 5.” Ways of Seeing, The Penguin Group, 1972, pp. 106.