Modern Iconography

November 28, 2017

In today’s society, it might seem strange to think that the essence of monotheistic icons such as the Christian Madonna depicted in historical religious art have such a strong prevalence in the contemporary psyche. These symbols and motifs of religious worship have been displaced by secular alternatives. It is part of the obsession and collective consciousness of modern culture to follow patterns of ‘secular’ worship in such a consumer led, celebrity driven community. This is something that has been captured by artists throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries. As a culture, a psychological consensus has emerged in a need to fixate on and create a hierarchy; a hierarchy that has built ‘celebrity’ as the apogee.

Andy Warhol perhaps typifies the notion of celebrity idolatry with his ‘Andy Suits’, acting as catalysts to this movement. Warhol became a symbol for ‘the invented self’ as he underwent a disassociation with his interiority by adorning himself with a costume that transformed him into a celebrity. By doing so, he was cementing his image into people’s mentalities as his own brand, epitomising the power and promotion of celebrity. His celebrity became his own alter-ego. It could even be said that Andy Warhol’s greatest artistic work is Andy Warhol.

This dichotomisation between the normalised and image of the modern icon is also seen in idolater of Warhol himself, David Bowie. Bowie’s ‘Thin White Duke’ is a persona he adopted for the experimentalist theatre dimensions of his musical performances. He described the characters as “a very Aryan, fascist type; a would-be romantic with absolutely no emotion at all but who spouted a lot of neo-romance.” Bowie blamed his erratic, fascist comments on the performative nature of the Duke, claiming that they did not reflect his own actual views. There is a clear duality between person and persona: it is the ‘persona’ that today is subject to mass dissemination.

Warhol was a delineator of the ‘persona’. His silk screen prints of multiple celebrities including Mick Jagger, Jackie Onassis and Michael Jackson have become lurid contemporary versions of the gold leafed religious icons found globally in places of worship. Yet perhaps most recognisable of these examples of modern iconography is Warhol’s ‘Marilyn Monroe Series’. The images created act to canonise Monroe and combine the two themes: Celebrity and Death. The garishness is discomforting, maybe reflecting upon modern sensationalism and heightened reality. Warhol doing so fixes Monroe’s face as a permanent mask of colour, functioning for her immortalisation. Layers of paint are offset so that the edges are blurred, giving the portraits a macabre, ghostly quality. This is a distortion of Monroe’s media formed image. Other versions of the same print show the fading of colour to black and white symbolising the transience of celebrity, adding a dimension to the ‘glowing’ icon that signifies modern tragedy.

Bowie creates a parodic reinvention of this theme in the music video for his song ‘The Stars (Are Out Tonight)’, in which he stars alongside Tilda Swinton as a seemingly conventional suburban husband and wife who increasingly yearn for fame. The video as an artistic, performative piece serves as a crystallisation of Warhol’s revisited themes of celebrity perfectionism and death. As the lyric suggests: “Stars are never sleeping / Dead ones and the living.”

The wax work museum ‘Madame Tussauds’ is also brought to my attention when I consider the sinister dimensions of the modern age of the celebrity. There is something unsettling about the wax delineation of a person outliving the corporeal person themselves. Similar to the celebrity ‘icons’ depicted in art, the figures are inert, plasticised and preserved, continuously stimulating a consumerist insatiability. More recently active artist Jeff Koons has taken these ideas and revived Warhol’s ‘Marilyn’ with his gold embossed statuette of model Kate Moss. Koon deifies Moss and advances the artistic tropes of the ancient ‘goddess’ and female divinity of the Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelites.

Under Warhol’s tutelage, Surrealist photographer David LaChapelle reforms Andy’s depictions of 70s celebrity to suit the celebrity of the 21^st century. Often parodying religious icons and motifs and superimposing them onto contemporary scenes such as that seen in his piece ‘The Last Supper’, it can be said that LaChapelle most overtly demonstrates this fusion of iconography and the celebrity age. With a powerful Michelangelo and Renaissance influence in his photographic compositions, he finds a new way to interpret iconography through a modern medium; the dramatic stances of the celebrities he portrays almost bear resemblance to the tableaux of Caravaggio.

His photographic translation of the Kardashians plays on the idea of icons and branding. The glossy ‘K’ as the mark of the Kardashians can be seen as a textual icon and motif brandishing consumerism. The inclusion of shop mannequins and wax work figures deconstructed across the floor as almost surrealist mirrors of the celebrity figures reiterating Warhol’s examination of death and celebrity, make the image a strange blend of both the critical and celebratory of celebrity culture.

So the question I am left with is whether Warhol, Lachapelle and the likes are acting as ‘iconoclasts’ of the modern age, or merely highlighting the powerful nature of the celebrity?

Twitter: @eleanorgustard