On Repeat

“My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat - or in film's case 'run on' - manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing.” – Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was the king of repetitive art. His pop art paintings created during the 1960’s depicted everything from celebrities, ordinary objects, and even uncomfortable scenes of death. That, as his quote claims, Warhol believed we “see” things throughout life without observing, or understanding, can relate to today’s culture of omnipresent media.

Think about it: ads for the same products are everywhere, and digital screens display any image at any time provided by search engines connected to every website in the world. We are living in a period of time that not only provides this kind of repetitive communication… we the consumers are asking for it. Particularly, social media provides an outlet for this need to observe repetitive representation, which allows for photo albums upon photo albums representing the self.

Yet, this kind of image indulgence is not something I view as overtly negative. Unlike the points presented by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction, it appears that throughout history humans have craved repetition; technology has risen and advanced to fulfill this need. Photography, for example, shortened the amount of time necessary for artists to capture a particular moment. Even so, photography as a medium has even outpaced itself during the transition from purely analogue film photography to digital… The examples go on, but the central need noted by Warhol to truly observe life through repetition is a natural progression of image (and art) understanding. Through repetition comes more opportunity to critique and try to get to “know” just what it is we are seeing.