The Metaphysics of the Mundane: Understanding Andy Warhol's Serial Imagery

Abstract

The serial structure of Andy Warhol's silkscreens articulates a dynamic structure of actualization of which anything is an instance, thus providing a model of how the mundane world comes to be, persists to be the same, but is always changing. His serial works enact iterative structures of free, synthetic, iterative self-realization, a rational process of the actualization of things. In making numerous depthless images identical, Warhol makes them different through obvious surface printing accidents, spontaneous traces of differentiating activity. They reveal the constructive activity irreducible to any element involved in making the series. This underivable activity is spontaneous, non-deterministic and free, but also relational because serial.