Paper Pop! An homage to Andy Warhol, by Matt Hawkins
In Paper Pop! Matt Hawkins captures the gesture of the seated Warhol effortlessly. As he writes on his website, he created this homage to Warhol for a pop
art themed holiday party at his day job at C3, as a favor and decoration.
Papercraft, a low-barrier entryway to the collectible designer toy field, has been experiencing an interesting resurgence in popularity. Hawkins has helped with his book Urban Paper, featuring a kind of popular sculpture that people can print, cut, fold and build. For example, you can create your own Warhol avatar simply by downloading this instructional two-page PDF from Hawkins’s website.
This work made me have a “D’oh!” moment. I had just finished a commissioned papercraft work for a local gallery show of Warhol’s work in photography. I like my work fine, and it’s completely different, but Hawkins’s piece made me wish I’d thought of it in the same way he had. It might be the purest expression of design envy I’ve ever experienced: I wish I could have made this delightfully simple and expressive portrait.
For those of us with creative practices, assembling papercraft created by someone else may seem constraining and uncreative. “Give me a blank piece of paper, scissors and glue! I’ll show you creativity!” But papercraft offers a joyous entryway into making with one’s own hands, and one that is more than welcome, and perhaps necessary, as I’ve seen the continued defunding of arts education in P–20 and the de-skilling of handicrafts.
Papercraft also offers an interesting oscillation from visceral to virtual and back again. The culture of sharing blank, as well as embellished, outlines as printable files also resonates strongly with contemporary models of participatory culture and a quirky kind of opening of source files. The sharing of blank outlines is itself the design of platforms. Hawkins’s Paper Pop! isn’t a platform, but it serves to remind me of other works that are. It’s reminiscent of the tension that exists between the ideal of the pop multiple and the actual of the controlled and sanctioned (and tradable) copy.
For those of us with creative practices, assembling papercraft created by someone else may seem constraining and uncreative. “Give me a blank piece of paper, scissors and glue! I’ll show you creativity!” But papercraft offers a joyous entryway into making with one’s own hands, and one that is more than welcome, and perhaps necessary, as I’ve seen the continued defunding of arts education in P–20 and the de-skilling of handicrafts.
Papercraft also offers an interesting oscillation from visceral to virtual and back again. The culture of sharing blank, as well as embellished, outlines as printable files also resonates strongly with contemporary models of participatory culture and a quirky kind of opening of source files. The sharing of blank outlines is itself the design of platforms. Hawkins’s Paper Pop! isn’t a platform, but it serves to remind me of other works that are. It’s reminiscent of the tension that exists between the ideal of the pop multiple and the actual of the controlled and sanctioned (and tradable) copy.
