Flowers by Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol’s “Flowers” (1964) take flowers to their basics and because of that simplicity, his “Flowers” endure today in a world where we live amid simulations, screen prints, and virtual applications to guide us to our favorite restaurant in a wireless way. All of this is according to plan, I think. Andy used a process, a technique that someone started calling, “blotted line drawing”, a way to draw by printing, pressing inked lines from one piece of paper to another. These drawings were really prints, not the drawing itself but an image, the simulacrum, a copy. It seems, this technique, to be a continuation of things, a throwback to Albrecht Dürer perhaps, and for today, his art along with others like Rosenquist, make for an appreciation of what we see on our screens. It makes me think of the art today…and Andy Warhol’s art, how he practiced it, and worked it, made it in the commercial art world of the 1950s in NY, drawing shoes. Rosenquist painting billboards. Are the website artists, the graphic digital artists, the CAD-wielding designers creating something we’ll call something later on like when we called what Warhol did, “Pop”…when Pop was called Pop, Pop was done, when the Beat was called the Beat, the Beats were eating lunch in the Algonquin Hotel, when punk was called punk, punk was Top 40. Then there’s “Flowers” and it all begins to make sense in a nonsensical way.