wledge and embrace as Warhol did. Andy Warhol's contributions to the history of art was one of profound influence and magnitude. Never before had an artist promoted such indifference to his work style and captured such public opinion.

Pop Art focused its attentions upon familiar images of the popular culture. One aspect that set Pop Art apart from the recognized conventions in art was the tedious character of the object selected and thus, many regarded the movement as an assault on the accepted norms. All through the 1950s, a person's identity was linked to consumption as it had never been before, but at least people were given the freedom to purchase as they desired. In an ocean of identical looking houses in identical neighborhoods, the selection of a particular couch or rug offered a reassuring statement of individuality and self-possession. However, in Warhol's hands, repeated images of mass-marketed goods implied that even consumption is manipulated and controlled by a force larger than the individual.

Warhol's work flowed from one central insight: that in a culture glutted with information, where most people experience most things at second or third hand through television and print, through images that become dull and disassociated by being repeated again and again and again, there is a role for affectless art. There is no longer a need for detail or precision as there had been in traditional art forms. You can take an indifferent approach. Warhol did not have to discover this, he already felt it and he embraced it. If you look at a more traditional artist who had painted the same motifs in order to display minute discriminations of perceptions, the shift of light and colour from their works, and how these could be recorded by the subtlety of the eye and hand. Warhol's thirty-two soup cans are about nothing of the kind. They are about sameness: same brand, same size, same paint surface, and same fame as product. They mimic the condition of mass advertising, out of which his sensibility had grown. This affectlessness, this fascinated and yet indifferent take on the object, became the key to Warhol's work; it is there in the repetition of stars' faces, and as a record of the condition of being an uninvolved spectator that it speaks eloquently about the condition of image overload in a media saturated culture. Warhol offered the first suggestion of the severe influence and nature of the media upon our society. But that was it, and gradually people became bored of the 'boring' and his appeal died out. However, no artist since has provided such an insight on its affects, and because of this, Warhol will remain one of the most influential artists of our times.

In his search for artistic truths, Warhol stripped away the layers of make-believe and repression that had obscured the dark memories and knowledge that all of us share. His imagery gripped the imagination, striking a hauntingly responsive chord with his viewers. One such work originating from a photograph of an electric chair at Sing Sing Prison , is entitled Electric Chair (1965). The chair stands in the middle of an empty room and in the upper right hand corner we see a small sign bearing the single word 'SILENCE', imprinted in bold letters. This kind of mindless comparison generates its own peculiar horror. Warhol often searched for this kind of juxtaposition and used it to heighten the effect of his creations. They are the same as the found objects artists use in collage and assemblage. A lot in Warhol's imagery can be moralized upon, although not according to Warhol himself. Images of a grief stricken Jackie Kennedy, or Marilyn Monroe, a woman transformed into commercialized property are repeatedly inflicted upon us, throwing us into a confusion of reading the images as just 'images' or discovering the messages reflected within them.

Of all the Pop Art images, Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can series is probably the most famous and is easily recognized as

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