Both Ana Mendieta and Andy
Warhol are really great artist which spent their whole lives on artwork, and
they all succeed as artists. However, different life experiences cause the art
difference between them.
Ana Mendieta focus more
one female body and nature. This mainly because she immigrated to the United
States at the age of 12 to flee the oppressive Castro regime, leaving her
parents behind in Cuba. Many of her artworks addressed her desire to return to
her homeland. She said that "I decided that for the images to have magic
qualities I had to work directly with nature. I had to go to the source of
life, to mother earth." For 15 of her 37 years, she explored this leaving ache
through her work, which was primarily performance, photography, and film-based.
Because she leaves home for years, much of the passion that went into making
her work was stoked by a desire to have everybody recognize those considered
"other bodies" and to accept humanity as one throbbing whole rather
than a world of disjointed individuals. She aimed to jostle the nonchalance of
people in ways that would provoke them to connect with each other more
authentically, to understand that they were essentially one within humanity,
and that the earth was the supreme mother to all. She wanted to pierce the
veils of perceived difference in many spheres including gender, race, and
geography and asked us to perceive our own indifference to more unsettling
things within our midst such as prejudice and violence. She said: “My
exploration through my art of the relationship between myself and nature has
been a clear result of my having been torn from my homeland during my
adolescence; It is a way of reclaiming my roots and becoming one with nature.” Her
sustained use of the body's simplified and often nude form to depict both
presence and its opposite, absence is an essential component to her work
whether denoting the human or the ethereal. The consistent use of blood and
other organic material such as feathers, rocks, flowers, fire, and the earth
reflect Mendieta's passion for religious ritual. She was especially inspired by
the strain of Cuban Catholicism known as Santeria. Much of her artwork
materialized as a sort of rite, orchestrated to articulate the perpetual cycles
of life, death, womanhood, rebirth, and renewal. Ana Mendieta's short life was
a study in displacement and its effects on a person's soul - both positive and
negative.
Andy Warhol also
influenced by his childhood experience. As his family is really poor, he focuses
more on commercial art. He was the most successful and highly paid commercial
illustrator in New York even before he began to make art destined for
galleries. He’s more commercialized than Ana Mendieta. His crowning achievement
was the elevation of his own persona to the level of a popular icon,
representing a new kind of fame and celebrity for a fine artist. Some view his
Death and Disaster series, and his Marilyn pictures, as frank expressions of
his sorrow at public events. Others view them as some of the first expressions
of 'compassion fatigue' - the way the public loses the ability to sympathize
with events from which they feel removed. Still others think of his pictures as
screens - placed between us and horrifying events - which attempt to register
and process shock. Warhol famously said that "business art is the step
that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as
a business artist.Warhol began using advertisements and comic strips in his
paintings in 1960. These works, examples of early Pop art, were characterized
by more expressive and painterly styles that included clearly recognizable
brushstrokes, and were loosely influenced by Abstract Expressionism. However,
subsequent works would mark a direct rebellion against Abstract Expressionism,
by almost completely removing any evidence of the artist's hand. Late in 1961,
Warhol started on his Campbell's Soup Can paintings. The “Campbell’s soup can” is
an acknowledgment of the similarities between the visual sophistication of the
new advertising of the twentieth century and the social function of art.(PG151)
In 1962, Warhol started to explore silk-screening. This stencil process
involved transferring an image on to a porous screen, then applying paint or
ink with a rubber squeegee. This marked another means of painting while
removing traces of his hand; like the stencil processes he had used to create
the Campbell's Soup Can pictures, this also enabled him to repeat the motif
multiple times across the same image, producing a serial image suggestive of
mass production. His first silk-screened paintings were based on the front and
back faces of dollar bills, and he went on to create several series of images
of various consumer goods and commercial items using this method. He depicted
shipping and handling labels, Coca-Cola bottles, coffee can labels, Brillo Soap
box labels, matchbook covers, and cars. Art materializes the imagination; it
turns objects into surfaces that can be overwritten by the imagination. Advertising
achieves the same. (PG152) This quote means that the repeated sign of the soup
can make the sign of the product so familiar that it becomes part of an
interior language. The repeated sign is part of everyday consciousness. Since
1965, he focuses more on movies. As a founding father of pop art, Andy Warhol uses
sharp, lines, colors and focus more on common people’s interest than Ana mendieta
to achieve his commercial goals.
Work cited
“Ana Mendieta”. Artnet, http://www.artnet.com/artists/ana-mendieta/.
“Anddy Warhol”. Artnet, http://www.artnet.com/artists/andy-warhol/
“Ana Mendieta”.Artnet, http://www.artnet.com/artists/ana-mendieta/biography
Finkelstein, Joanne. The Art of Self Invention: Image and Identity in Popular Visual Culture. I.B. Tauris, 2007.
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