In my most recent digital work, I address the ideologies
of two modern art movements, Pop and Hard Edge or Minimal painting,
in their most reduced forms I am interested in these two areas given
the wealth of information available about these art movements, and
the on-going legacies left by artists from this period.
Pop art took everyday forms and reverted these to unanticipated
form for public delivery. I decided to take Pop and make it the form.
In using Warhol’s soup can paintings/silkscreen as my base,
I could cite a well critically acclaimed series of artworks and site
them in relation to their most basic indexical form available today,
the barcode. The barcode represents the smallest indexical unit available
in today’s culture that maintains the identity of a product.
In reproducing some of Warhol’s pictures in this reduced form,
an irony is formed between culture and perception. Warhol’s
pieces were recognizable by their form, shape and direct reference
to Campbell soup can labels, by using barcodes to reference the soups,
the relationship between the viewer and the object becomes distant
and estranged. The reception of the barcode as an artform parallels
Pop’s earliest reception – it is seen as cold and mechanical.
The work, though produced by an automated mechanism, the computer,
must be hand plotted. The barcode becomes a metaphor for societal
differences in perceiving computer generated art. The codes displayed
in large scale are easily recognizable in terms of their purpose;
however, the overlapping codes lose indexical use and become an abstract
field of lines reminiscent of the Hard Edge compositions of late
modernist painters like Newman and Noland.
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