We discussed Warhol today in my Art from 1940-1970 class, and I must say I've always kept myself emotionally distant from Warhol because as a figure who constructed his own image I found him to be someone as a person that I didn't really like very much. Now, I'd seen lots of these disaster images when I went to the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh a couple of years ago, and they were striking in their scale but I was left pretty confused because I didn't know that much about Warhol other than his most iconic images of the Campbell's soup cans and the Marilyn Monroes. To me, they hadn't resonated with other images I'd known by him up until that point, particularly since they weren't emotionally cool images. However, talking about these in class today, I was really struck by these, mostly in how disgusting it is that as a society we are proliferated with repeated images of gruesome disasters. It made me particularly think about the repeated playing of the video of the planes flying into the World Trade Center and how it makes you wonder if we really need to actually SEE it over and over again. Granted, there might have been some political reasons behind the 9/11 instance of repeatedly showing that, but still, I kept making this connection today. Warhol claims in his interview with Gene Swenson (1963) that repeated images of disasters just desensitize us and have no emotional effect, and maybe that was his intention with these or maybe that's just what he wanted us to think that that was his intention, but I don't find that to be entirely true. I think they speak more with what we focus on in the news and what we want to hear about, which connects these to his images of celebrities and commercial products. Anyway, I guess my point is that I've grown to really value these images and I am more compelled by them than with his celebrity images or more playful, cool, distant images.
