Themes in and Implications of Andy Warhol's Blow Job

2010 Art, Modern

Author : Lana Pearl Beardslee
Release : 2010
Genre : Art, Modern
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Themes in and Implications of Andy Warhol's Blow Job by : Lana Pearl Beardslee

Download or read book Themes in and Implications of Andy Warhol's Blow Job written by Lana Pearl Beardslee. This book was released on 2010. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis examines how Andy Warhol's Blow Job structures and emphasizes the viewer's polyvalent experiences, with the aim to present the film in a new light, while elaborating on certain points that past scholars have touched on, but failed to fully develop. Within this thesis I discuss the film's historical place, its connections to minimalism and pop, the film's use of sexuality, the theme of boredom, and period-specific theories of vision and issues of "the gaze." I use Blow Job to explore how these themes were engaged in the 1960's and discuss why the issue of experience was placed at the foreground of many artists' work during this period. Though many of Warhol's films can be seen as engaging with the issue of experience, it is in Blow Job that Warhol truly succeeds in creating a film that transcends the trappings of traditional cinema, and allows and requires the viewer to be an active participant in their own experience. Many of the issues and theories I discuss are problematic and even contradictory, however I feel this is a fitting and important component of Blow Job and Warhol's larger artistic career. Blow Job is not only an illustration of the main concerns of 60's film practice, but exists today as evidence of Warhol's ability to create a work with endless contradictions and possibilities. Every experience is created by cooperation between a self and its world, and as I will argue in this thesis, it is Blow Job's blurring of these defining lines that makes it such a provocative film. Blow Job deliberately confuses the divisions between subject and object, viewer and the viewed, audience and participant, and passivity and action in order to destabilize the prescribed role of the viewer and to create a more open and active space for the viewer to experience within.

Andy Warhol's Blow Job

2003 Art

Author : Roy Grundmann
Release : 2003
Genre : Art
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 722/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Andy Warhol's Blow Job by : Roy Grundmann

Download or read book Andy Warhol's Blow Job written by Roy Grundmann. This book was released on 2003. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ground-breaking and provocative book, Roy Grundmann contends that Andy Warhol's notorious 1964 underground film, Blow Job, serves as rich allegory as well as suggestive metaphor for post-war American society's relation to homosexuality. Arguing that Blow Job epitomizes the highly complex position of gay invisibility and visibility, Grundmann uses the film to explore the mechanisms that constructed pre-Stonewall white gay male identity in popular culture, high art, science, and ethnography. Grundmann draws on discourses of art history, film theory, queer studies, and cultural studies to situate Warhol's work at the nexus of Pop art, portrait painting, avant-garde film, and mainstream cinema. His close textual analysis of the film probes into its ambiguities and the ways in which viewers respond to what is and what is not on screen. Presenting rarely reproduced Warhol art and previously unpublished Ed Wallowitch photographs along with now iconic publicity shots of James Dean, Grundmann establishes Blow Job as a consummate example of Warhol's highly insightful engagement with a broad range of representational codes of gender and sexuality. Roy Grundmann is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Boston University and a contributing editor of Cineaste.

Andy Warhol

2008-03-14 Art

Author : Peter Gidal
Release : 2008-03-14
Genre : Art
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 413/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Andy Warhol by : Peter Gidal

Download or read book Andy Warhol written by Peter Gidal. This book was released on 2008-03-14. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical close-up of Warhol's famous film and its cultural impact In Andy Warhol's silent black-and-white movie, Blow Job (1964), a youth is filmed as he is apparently being given the sex act named in the title. The 35-minute film is accentuated by the paucity of expression on the actor's face: we see only his head and shoulders, rigidly framed so that all offscreen space has to be imagined, or avoided. Sometimes the young actor looks bored, sometimes as if he is thinking, sometimes as if he is aware of the camera, sometimes as if he is not. Like the protagonists of other Warhol films, he is apparently left to his own devices. Warhol's 16mm films (including Blow Job, Sleep, Empire, and Henry Geldzahler), with their take on boredom, voyeurism, and the supposedly unmoving camera, continue to be influential today. In their own era of the early 1960s, they forced avant-garde film away from various forms of romantic illusionism and onto the reality of the specific film-as-projected. The film process itself became inseparable from the act of the viewer's viewing. In this extended examination of Blow Job, Peter Gidal deciphers the structures, abstract and concrete, of Warhol's crucial film. Warhol's techniques—the use of the close-up, the general use of camera movement, and the complete theatrical mis-en-scène—(especially when compared to the Godardian cinema verité of the time) make the materiality of the film process, its making and viewing, ineluctably present. Peter Gidal has written books on the works of Samuel Beckett, Andy Warhol, and Gerhard Richter, as well as on avant-garde materialist film. An experimental filmmaker himself, Gidal has had retrospectives at the London Film Co-op, LUX, the National Film Theatre, Centre Pompidou, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was one of the twentieth century's most important artists and cultural icons.

Stargazer

2015-02-17 Biography & Autobiography

Author : Stephen Koch
Release : 2015-02-17
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 879/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Stargazer by : Stephen Koch

Download or read book Stargazer written by Stephen Koch. This book was released on 2015-02-17. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIVThe classic study of a man who redrew the boundaries of art/div Andy Warhol’s work and personality changed American visual culture forever, making him an international superstar. His rise to global fame, his entanglement with the seedy New York sexual underground, and the shocking assassination attempt that almost ended his life are chronicled in Stephen Koch’s indispensible classic Stargazer.DIV In this must-read volume, Stephen Koch provides unprecedented detail on Warhol’s life and work, giving particular attention to a medium that found Andy at his wildest: film. In one who made paradox into an art form, Koch finds that there was inspiration and brilliance on both sides of the public image that Warhol so meticulously crafted./divDIV/div/div

Andy Warhol

2001 Art

Author : Wayne Koestenbaum
Release : 2001
Genre : Art
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Andy Warhol by : Wayne Koestenbaum

Download or read book Andy Warhol written by Wayne Koestenbaum. This book was released on 2001. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sixties were the "sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll" era, and Andy Warhol was its cultural icon. Painter, filmmaker, photographer, philosopher, Warhol was both celebrity and celebrant, the man who put the "pop" in art. His studio, The Factory, where his free-spirited cast of "superstars" mingled with the rich and famous, was ground zero for the explosions that rocked American cultural life. And yet for all his fame, Warhol was an enigma: a participant in the excesses of his time who remained a faithful churchgoer, a nearly inarticulate man who was also a great aphorist ("In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes"), an artist whose body of work sizzles with sexuality but whose own body was a source of shame and self-hatred. In his bravura account of Warhol's life and work, scholar and culture critic Wayne Koestenbaum gets past the contradictions and reveals the man beneath the blond wig and dark glasses. Nimbly weaving brilliant and witty analysis into an absorbing narrative, Koestenbaum makes a convincing case for Warhol as a serious artist, one whose importance goes beyond the sixties. Focusing on Warhol's provocative, powerful films (many of which have been out of circulation since their initial release), Koestenbaum shows that Warhol's oeuvre, in its variety of form (films, silkscreens, books, "happenings"), maintains a striking consistency of theme: Warhol discovered in classic American images (Brillo boxes, Campbell soup cans, Marilyn's face) a secret history, the erotic of time and space.

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