The making of accidents

Andy Warhol, Green Coca-Cola Bottles (1962), Synthetic polymer, silkscreen ink and graphite on canvas.

'I maintain that Warhol's imagery is meaningful because it is revealing of the significance of the mundane, which includes not just the ordinary everyday life but also features of the familiar world, such as previous cultural and aesthetic icons and practices. Crucial to my analysis here is the notion of difference, for Warhol's serial images reveal that the activity of making things the same makes them different. When this apparent paradox is read in the context of Warhol's mundane imagery, it leads to a way of understanding the structure of the mundane as a dynamic structure of serial actualization and that everything in the mundane world - including Warhol himself - is taken to be an instance of that structure.'

Jennifer Dyer, 'Metaphysics of the Mundane: Understanding Andy Warhol's Serial Imagery', Artbus et Historiae, 25: 49, (2004), 35.

'Warhol is the machine perfected ... He knew how to exploit the imperfections of the photo-silkscreen, the blurs, the variations of inking, the "surface incidents" (as he himself said), and the more he repeated identical images, the more their accumulation made differences between them apparent and underscored their individuality. What Warhol fulfilled is the historical necessity for the painter to want to be a machine.'

Thierry de Duve, 'Andy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected', October 48 (Spring 1989), 12.