Keith Croshaw - Andy Warhol, Lucas Samaras, and Roland Barthes

These three articles are about three different artists, who have very different ideas on creative practice. Andy Warhol is a very interesting character, I’ve never come to a conclusion whether or not I enjoy his work or loathe it. Lucas Samaras is an artist who I feel really gets into his internal feelings through a simple interview. Roland Barthes is a wordy author who basically states that when an author or artist creates their body of work they in a sense die.

Andy Warhol’s interview really sums up how I have interoperated his work, in his own words, “boring.” Now perhaps you think I’m not looking into the deeper meaning of his work or the way that he kind of just slaps the label art on anything, which is pretty risqué, but I feel that there is no real emotion or drive behind his work. I do agree with one of his statements in the interview in which he states that just being alive is work, and this is the other half of me that sees where he is coming from. He states that making money is art, and while that is the taboo of the art community money is the basis of our capitalist society and if you can procure it through work of any kind than that is a skill.

Lucas Samaras starts out his interview very defensively, stating he does his interview to protect himself from people’s imaginations. The interview asks the same questions over and over to the artist, each time getting a different answer, I almost envision this being filmed and for each time he is asked the same question he is wearing some different disguise or outfit. He also mentions that his body feels like a separate portion of himself, which could let him down. Roland Barthes is an interesting writer who writes about how an artist dies when they complete their body of work and the viewer is born when they view his or her work. This is an interesting concept, but what happens when the artist or writer creates a new body of work, are they resurrected, or reincarnated as a new being? One of his ideas did seem to resonate with me, which I interoperated to mean that a reader or a critic might never really truly understand the meaning behind the work.