Silver clouds

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Silver Clouds (Silver Cloud) is a kinetic space installation of American Pop Art -Künstlers Andy Warhol from the year 1966th

description

The installation consists of silver, with helium -filled balloons made of polyethylene in pillow shape, the size of 99 × 150 × 38 cm. The reflective material shows the surroundings in a distorted way . By lifting gas balloons in the fully filled state float to the ceiling, but fall down due to the loss of gas to the floor after some time. In the original presentation, the balloons were held at half the height of the room with the help of weights, later the air cushions floated around freely in the room. The clouds react to contact , drafts , temperature changes and static electricity . As soon as one pillow touches another, a chain reaction occurs and it takes some time for the objects to calm down again. The constant play of activity and passivity gives the viewer the impression that the pillows have an uncontrollable life of their own.

background

“ Painting was just a phase that I have now behind me. Now I am making floating sculptures: silver rectangles that I inflate and they float. "

- Andy Warhol

Warhol presented the silver clouds together with the screen printing series Cow Wallpaper from April 2 to 27, 1966 in the rooms of Leo Castelli 's gallery in New York . After Warhol had announced to Ileana Sonnabend in Paris in May 1965 that he now wanted to withdraw from painting, the exhibition was to be all about the artist's departure from art. This created a mixture of utility and conceptual art . The walls of the gallery were papered with larger-than-life cow heads in pink, luminous color on a signal yellow background, while the silver cushion objects floated freely in the room. Warhol took up current trends in contemporary art and reflected on the "soft sculptures" by Claes Oldenburg and the kinetic sculptures and mobiles by Alexander Calder . The silver clouds also referred to the silver factory .

As a homage to Jasper Johns , Warhol originally wanted silver light bulbs as balloons, but these could not be realized. (Warhol had a drawing of an incandescent lamp by Johns, which gave him the idea of ​​making flying incandescent lamps as early as 1964.) Warhol had developed the cloud cushions in collaboration with Billy Klüver, a Swedish electrical engineer who worked for Bell Laboratories . In the 1960s, Klüver was known as “the scientist for art” and was well known for his collaboration with the Swiss installation artist Jean Tinguely . He also worked as a technical consultant for Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg . After a few calculations, Klüver came to the conclusion that a flying light bulb with its own power supply was not feasible because the batteries are too heavy for it.

Harold Hodges, a colleague from Klüver, discovered a metal-coated plastic film for the project that had actually been designed as packaging material for the Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company ( 3M ). The material called Scotchpak consisted of a layer of polyester film and a layer of polyethylene film that had been vapor-coated with aluminum . The film was weldable and relatively airtight. When Klüver brought the foil to the factory, Warhol said: “We'll make clouds out of it.” The US Army used a similar material for its altitude research balloons ; the packaging artist Christo used the film in 1966 for his major project 42 390 Cubic Feet Package in Minneapolis .

The clouds were originally intended to mimic the curved shapes of cumulus clouds , but the curves were difficult to create, so Warhol was satisfied with rectangles. The film only needed to be folded once and welded on three sides. Although the seams were flawless, after a while the balloons had to be refilled as the plastic let the gas through. The production of the silver clouds was cheap - each for 50 dollars - but the collectors shied away from buying the floating works of art, because after a while they had to be refilled with helium by their owners. Billy Klüver was of the opinion that the silver clouds could be sold with a 10-year maintenance contract, which would have been more expensive than the clouds themselves.

Considerations

Art critics compared the silver clouds with an installation by Marcel Duchamp from 1938, which he created for the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in 1938 in the Parisian gallery Beaux-Arts. Duchamp's installation consisted of 1,200 old sacks of coal that hung from the ceiling of the darkened gallery and turned the room into a gloomy basement. In contrast to Duchamp, Warhol did not pursue a traditional artistic context with the Silberwolken.

The Warhol biographer Stefana Sabin : "If the cow wallpaper should show how practical pop art was, the silver clouds were metaphors for art as a consumer item: Warhol wanted them to be understood as throwaway art, because you could let them fly out of the window."

The art historian Charles Stuckey: "These installations illustrated Warhol's open disdain for conventional contexts of art."

Calvin Tomkins , art critic for the New Yorker , commented, “Hardly anything was sold at this show, but production at the Factory was in full swing. And then - the timing was downright scary - Warhol declared Pop Art dead and began a new phase. "

aftermath

Financially, the Silver Clouds and Cow Wallpaper exhibition was not a great success. It was not until 1977 that Warhol made another major exhibition at Leo Castelli.

The arbitrary ease of silver clouds inspired the choreographer Merce Cunningham , who as a stage decoration of his plotless ballet Rain Forrest (rainforest) used, which premiered 1968th

The Silver Clouds are part of the permanent exhibition of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and are filmed there by a webcam .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e David Bourdon: Warhol . DuMont, Cologne 1989, ISBN 3-7701-2338-7 , pp. 229-232
  2. ↑ a b c d Stefana Sabin: Andy Warhol . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1992, ISBN 3-499-50485-5 , pp. 79-81
  3. ↑ Monika Wagner: The material of art . P. 254
  4. ↑ a b Victor Bockris: Andy Warhol. Claassen, Düsseldorf, 1989, ISBN 3-546-41393-8 , p. 268