Inspiration on the Bathroom Walls

I saw a series of really cool And Warhol prints on the wall of a restaurant bathroom in Asbury Park, N.J., and was incredibly inspired by them. They were just four rather boring portraits of Warhol, digitally pontilized with some of his inane sayings at the bottom (they are posted on the left sidebar of this blog). I thought that I would try to do something similar, stealing Warhol's basic concept. These are just a few of the images that I came up with, although I hope to keep adding more until I eventually have about 1o in total.

What I would like to do next is to use the power of repetition, just as Warhol did (1) to take a series of 100 shots of someone taken against a white wall with natural lighting, attempting to capture 100 different aspects of his or her personality, or (2) to do a series of 100 portraits of different people at Molloy like the ones of myself above with their own inane philosophical statements.

I admit that these are derivative, and not original, ideas. But who cares! Perhaps there are no truly original ideas anyway, so the very desire to try to achieve originality in art, music, literature, philosophy, or any other creative enterprise may very well be fool's quest. In the end, I think Warhol's insight about art is essentially correct: just crank out whatever interesting ideas you have and let others be the judge of their originality or basic worth.

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Continued Musings [September 18, 2008]

It struck me as I was thinking about the Warhol shots again that it is the form of presentation of these pieces that gives Warhol's "philosophical" statements a depth and gravity that they would not otherwise have.

When I did my own--admittedly inferior--version of these pieces, I intuitively recognized that, no matter what idiotic pronouncements I made on them, they would be treated seriously because the format that I was using rendered my own observations on life inherently profound. This is true even if the statement that I had chosen for one of these pieces was something as dumb as, "I like pizza." Given the visual context, that statement would be as lofty and inspiring as any made by Einstein or Schweitzer.

Perhaps in the kind of slick, superficial, advertisement-driven society in which we live, every one's observations on life deserve to be treated as seriously as that of the greatest philosopher or scientist. So here's the new "concept": 100 photos of 100 different people from all walks of life with their "profound" statements on life printed on the bottom, photoshopped to make them look like commercial art, and posted in a prominent location. The cleaning women treated as the intellectual equal of Plato...I like that!