Guns 1981

Andy Warhol made this print of ‘Guns’ using screen printing, and those colors are so simple, right? Red, black, beige, white, like a newsprint ad, or a distressed political poster. The layering of color makes a kind of visual buzzing, everything is just slightly misregistered. The flatness of the screen printing shows up the textures and patterns of the guns themselves, like the hatched grip of the handle. It’s so machine-made, but somehow the process of printing brings out the roughness and the ready-made quality of the gun as an object. Look at the way the red smears at the top of the frame, see how that texture creates a kind of violent energy in the work? In a way, Warhol is not just making art about violence, but the mechanical process of making art seems to echo the mechanics of violence itself. I can’t help but think of the way Ed Ruscha also used commercial printing to make work that was both deadpan and critical. It’s all connected, you know?