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STRATEGY FOR THE DAY: fluff it up

I watched a tv special about Andy Warhol last night called Superstar. It was pretty boring, actually it was very boring. Lots of pointless edits and cleverly disjointed segments. The filmmaker must've thought he was being very Warholian, but only Andy Warhol was good at being Warholian, and even he had to work hard at it a lot of the time.

I notice that I am attracted to Warhol's use of repetition. Warhol used repetition the way musicians use rhythm. And he used color as a musician uses harmonic changes. The individual images he painted or silkscreened were merely copies of something that already existed but, by lining them up, repeating them, shifting the colors, adding and subtracting brightness, he created work that was similar in some ways to that which was being produced by composers such as Steve Reich, Terry Reilly, and Lamont Young. Warhol's films - like Sleep and Empire State Bulding - were reminiscent of the all-night performances given by Terry Riley on Mount Tamalpais - lots of drone and repetition and slowly shifting tonalities. It's no coincidence that Warhol had a house band (The Velvet Underground) at The Factory. I sense that much of what he was doing was inspired by the musical experimentation going on around him. He was certainly interested in cross-pollination between the arts. He himself was not a musician but he appropriated the musician's toolkit and applied it to visual art.