There is a blown up, grainy image of Scarlett Johansson in Jonathan Meese’s Amherst College Manifesto (2008). With its scribbled on moustache and doodled-on eyes, Meese might not immediately recall the popular repetitive print style that Warhol Andy Warhol employed in his late work Myths. However, these images share traits that move past aesthetic similarity. A comparative analysis of these two series, made about thirty years apart from each other, clearly demonstrates the ways in which the circulation and reproduction of images helps write and re-write popular narratives. Their use of repetition and of re-creating generates new myths – new forms of narrative, texts, and stories that evolve and change from consumer to consumer. The circulation of images is no exception to this rule, as outlined by the use of collage and found images in Warhol and Meese.
To begin, I want to point out that the idea of the photographic image as a symbol, a single representation of broader ideas and narratives, is not a new one. However, these ideas continue to resonate with the constant re-creation and perpetually re-dispersive movement of photographic images in contemporary culture. Once a subject is photographed, and turned into an object, that photographic image takes on a life of its own, as reflected in the works by both Meese and Warhol. In Roland Barthes’s text Camera Lucida, he discussed this process and argued that it turns the person being photographed into a “target…[a] referent, a kind of little simulacrum”[1] that represents the person and contains multiple imitations and reiterations. In other words, once a figure is photographed, they become an object that can be repeated, mimicked, passed around and circulated. Both Warhol and Meese use and re-use highly circulated pictures — images that have become not like a simulacrum, but full-blown symbols. They stand in for larger cultural narratives, which easily translate in one way or another to the artists’ audience.
These two artists are distinctly different, yet there is mythology inherent in the artistic narratives of both of these artists. Meese’s manipulated photographs are part of a multi-media practice; he is known for his messy statues, elaborate installations, loud performances, and collage works, reminiscent of the grotesque works of Mike Kelly and Paul McCarthy.[2] Warhol also worked in many different forms, but came to create a specific public persona for himself. In this way, he is an idol of sorts, as suggested by the inclusion of his own image in his Myths. However, there is still mythology inherent in the narratives of both artists’ work. The audience easily reads Warhol’s Myths, with its references to cultural icons that are imaginary but no less important because of that.
The Johansson image that Meese uses repeatedly in the collage works similarly alludes to cultural iconographies and myths, but in a less straightforward way than Warhol’s icons. Johansson, with her hair in bouncy blonde curls and her lips painted a scarlet red, alludes to the image of the iconic actress Marilyn Monroe, whose figure has become a symbol of western beauty standards, among other themes and narratives (a celebrity status which, of course, Warhol exploited his various Marilyn series.) Therefore, Meese’s appropriated image of Johansson holds a much more complex narrative of perfection and idolatry, of art as “propaganda,” as Meese repeatedly states in the scribbled writing that appears over all fourteen images included in the Amherst College Manifesto. Like Warhol, Meese also repeats the image of Johansson over and over again in this series, as if to similarly solidify her status as idol, and reinforce Monroe’s image as myth. Marilyn Monroe may have passed over half a century ago, but her recognizable style traits are still a staple in the world of beauty and celebrity, as made clear by the images of Johansson. She has completely become a fictive construct – to be used regularly to tell stories that the original Monroe was never a part of – much like the way that Warhol’s many mythic images have developed. Images, photographs, figures, they take on a life on their own once they begin to circulate, through print or through digital platforms.
Meese’s use of the term “manifesto” suggests a long history of incendiary printed matter: broadsheets and pamphlets made of images and texts meant for wide circulation to an anonymous audience. Myths are more deeply embedded and immaterial, part of complex written, pictorial and oral traditions, often without clear origins and with evolving purposes. Yet for Meese and Warhol, the differences between manifesto and myth are perhaps less distinct. All of these images inherently develop and redevelop their perpetually transforming narratives along the path that the art object takes through it’s newly mediated life, creating an ever-expanding story that bleeds over the side of the canvas and the edge of the page.
Written by Pauline Miller, 2014
[1] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Macmillan, 1981), 9.
[2] Michael Wilson, How to Read Contemporary Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013), 250-251.
-
