GUESS WHAT...TELEVISION MOMENTS INSPIRE US TO CREATE

Ninety-nine percent of American homes have a television that the average person watches four hours a day. Television is reaching viewers like no other medium has done before; it captures our ears, our eyes, and often our hearts to the characters and news stories that pour out of the speakers. Before his death in 1987, Andy Warhol began a portfolio focused on important TV moments, which spoke to the idea that some the most memorable times of our lives are staring at TV screens. In the late eighties there were plenty of popular TV moments to fill the portfolio, but the only one he completed was of Buzz Aldrin’s moonwalk in 1969. It’s a theme throughout Andy’s work that the best art reflects on the happenings in society.
My original love of all Warhol art was the simplicity of it. It’s not extremely difficult to make a screen print compared to one of the massive realist paintings in the Louvre. Yet, I still preferred Warhol’s pieces to anything I’d seen before; this was in complete contradiction with what I thought art was at the time. I believed it was the effort and skill that was the basis of art, and the ability to be patient and persistent with your medium. Andy flipped my world around because suddenly this simple art that could be pumped out of a printer was more eye-catching and meaningful than a tirelessly worked Manet. It wasn’t just the process that intrigued be either, but the banal subjects he used. They were of soup cans, bananas, shoes, cats, and then the pictures that we’ve all seen hundreds of times like Marilyn, Mickey, and Mona Lisa. The images weren’t just pretty, but they gave me feelings and memories that I had not associated with art until that point in my life.
The moonwalk affected me in a very peculiar way. First I looked at the piece and realized it was on the moon, and then noticed the pinks and blues. I glanced over the white blur in the flag and artistically placed lines in the drawings. The significance of a piece never seems to hit me right on, but I slowly ease into meaning and deeper context of the work. The moon landing is an important period in our history- a time of patriotism and national unity. It represents the conspiracy theories and how television can blur the lines between fact and fiction. It’s the mystery of space and a fear of the unknown. There is so much conveyed with a single image that we’ve all seen many times before, but when its colored and blurred and hung in a museum it’s no longer just a picture. It’s social commentary.