Repetition

Frederic Jameson talks about the work of Andy Warhol, a popular artist in the sixties known for his Campbell’s Soup Can piece where he showed 32 soup cans repeated as one image. Jameson says that this specific image as well as many others created by Andy Warhol, “explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statements” (M488). This is a strong statement that seems to be true.
In a society that focuses on materialism and mass production, the work of Andy Warhol did a great job of mocking them. By repeating the image of a product for sale in a collage of the exact same picture of that product, like the Campbell’s Soup Can piece, he is showing the consumers as well as the advertising agencies how obsessed with consumption we are. We are so fascinated and/or distracted with images that we don’t take the time to notice perhaps why we are buying these products of which pictures of are being thrown at us all day everyday.
Andy Warhol used simplicity in his artwork in order to get a simple but important message out to his audience. His works demonstrated that if you see something enough than it becomes something normal to you and something that you have to have. It can be compared to the psychological idea that if you repeat an activity enough than it will become a common habit for you, or if you see something and are trained to react a certain way when seeing that image than that reaction will become normal for you as well when seeing that image. We can relate to this in America today with all of the advertisements that one person views everyday, as well as the product placement in movies and television shows. If someone sees a certain product a considerable amount of time and told that it will work well etc than that person will be likely to go and purchase that product. The simplicity of repetition is very effective in the media.