Bianca Jagger with Andy Warhol below:

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Andy Warhol Sleep

Uploaded on Jan 25, 2011

Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000 years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 “The Age of Fragmentation”, episode 7 “The Age of Non-Reason” , episode 6 “The Scientific Age” , episode 5 “The Revolutionary Age” ,  episode 4 “The Reformation”,  episode 3 “The Renaissance”, episode 2 “The Middle Ages,”, and  episode 1 “The Roman Age,” . My favorite episodes are number 7 and 8 since they deal with modern art and culture primarily.(Joe Carter rightly noted, “Schaeffer—who always claimed to be an evangelist and not a philosopher—was often criticized for the way his work oversimplified intellectual history and philosophy.” To those critics I say take a chill pill because Schaeffer was introducing millions into the fields of art and culture!!!! !!! More people need to read his works and blog about them because they show how people’s worldviews affect their lives!

J.I.PACKER WROTE OF SCHAEFFER, “His communicative style was not that of a cautious academic who labors for exhaustive coverage and dispassionate objectivity. It was rather that of an impassioned thinker who paints his vision of eternal truth in bold strokes and stark contrasts.Yet it is a fact that MANY YOUNG THINKERS AND ARTISTS…HAVE FOUND SCHAEFFER’S ANALYSES A LIFELINE TO SANITY WITHOUT WHICH THEY COULD NOT HAVE GONE ON LIVING.”

Francis Schaeffer’s works  are the basis for a large portion of my blog posts and they have stood the test of time. In fact, many people would say that many of the things he wrote in the 1960’s  were right on  in the sense he saw where our western society was heading and he knew that abortion, infanticide and youth enthansia were  moral boundaries we would be crossing  in the coming decades because of humanism and these are the discussions we are having now!)

There is evidence that points to the fact that the Bible is historically true as Schaeffer pointed out in episode 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? There is a basis then for faith in Christ alone for our eternal hope. This link shows how to do that.

Francis Schaeffer in Art and the Bible noted, “Many modern artists, it seems to me, have forgotten the value that art has in itself. Much modern art is far too intellectual to be great art. Many modern artists seem not to see the distinction between man and non-man, and it is a part of the lostness of modern man that they no longer see value in the work of art as a work of art.” 

Many modern artists are left in this point of desperation that Schaeffer points out and it reminds me of the despair that Solomon speaks of in Ecclesiastes.  Christian scholar Ravi Zacharias has noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term ‘under the sun.’ What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system, and you are left with only this world of time plus chance plus matter.” THIS IS EXACT POINT SCHAEFFER SAYS SECULAR ARTISTS ARE PAINTING FROM TODAY BECAUSE THEY BELIEVED ARE A RESULT OF MINDLESS CHANCE.

Here is what Francis Schaeffer wrote about Andy Warhol’s art and interviews:

The pop artist man is Andy Warhol. The Observer June 12, 1966 does a big spread on Warhol. He deserves I must say a big spread. He is a very important man today in expressing this whole situation of the absurd. He is the man who paints all the Campbell Soup cans, but there is something very interesting about painting the Campbell Soup cans that I found out, and that is that he doesn’t paint them, but they have what they call the factory.

His assistants make them from a silk screen and they sell them for $8000.00 a piece.

He has been making films. His film “Sleep” consists solely of a man sleeping and lasts 6 hours. (Audience laughs.) Do you laugh or cry? I have a hunch  that it is a different kind of a sick joke. For 6 hours the camera grinds on him and he tosses in his sleep. Warhol himself says, “I haven’t thought about my films. They just keep me busy.”

I think now you are in the game of absurdity. The people who are really  in this understand that the reason they go through the motions of a game is because that is all there is. What you do is fill up time. You could do the opposite thing, it really doesn’t matter. (That is why Warhol does not direct in his films.) None of that matters.

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Picture from the movie SLEEP:

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John Giorno

Left: John Giorno being shot by William Burroughs on August 31, 1965
Right: John Giorno in 2007 while in London for the showing of Sleep with Erik Satie’s Vexations

John Giorno was the star of Sleep and an early boyfriend of Andy Warhol prior to the Factory – when Warhol was using an old fire station as his studio. Giorno continues to do performances internationally and to write poetry.

The following interview with John Giorno appeared in the Guardian newspaper (London) on Thursday 14 February 2002:

My 15 Minutes

Our interviews with Warhol’s friends and collaborators continue with John Giorno, 65, poet, Aids activist, friend and confidant of Warhol and subject of his film, Sleep. Interviews by Catherine Morrison.

The first time I met Andy was at his first solo New York Pop show in Eleanor Ward’s Stable gallery in the fall of 1962, but it was at a friend’s dinner party around that time that we really got to know each other. For the next two years we were very close; we saw each other every day, or every other day.

I was a kid in my early 20s, working as a stockbroker. I was living this life where I would see Andy every night, get drunk and go into work with a hangover every morning. The stock market opened at 10 and closed at three. By quarter to three I would be waiting at the door, dying to get home so I could have a nap before I met Andy. I slept all the time – when he called to ask what I was doing he would say, “Let me guess, sleeping?”

We used to go to Jonas Mekas’s Film-makers’ Cooperative in 1962 to watch these underground films. Andy saw them and said, “Why doesn’t somebody make a beautiful film?” So he did.

On Memorial Day weekend in 1963 we went away for a few days and I woke up in the night to find him staring at me – he took a lot of speed in those days. That’s where the idea for the movie came from – he was looking for a visual image and it just happened to be me. He said to me on the way home: “Would you like to be a movie star?” “Of course,” I said, “I want to be just like Marilyn Monroe.”

He didn’t really know what he was doing; it was his first movie. We made it with a 16mm Bolex in my apartment but had to reshoot it a month later. The film jumped every 20 seconds as Andy rewound it. The second shoot was more successful but he didn’t know what to do with it for almost a year.

The news that Warhol had made a movie triggered massive amounts of publicity. It was absurd – he was on the cover of Film Culture and Harper’s Bazaar before the movie was finished! In the end, 99% of the footage didn’t get used; he just looped together a few shots and it came out six hours long.

You either really loved it or you hated it; I thought it was brilliant and daring. But then I loved so much of Andy’s work. I remember walking into the first Factory in 63 and seeing the silkscreen silver Elvises for the first time. They were like these jewels, radiating life and joy, and they were just lying on a dirty floor in an old firehouse! It was so exhilarating.

He transformed my life. He wasn’t afraid of anything – if he had an idea, he acted on it. If it turned out lousy, so what? If it turned out well, then that was great.

I didn’t see him much after 1964 although in the last year of his life, I saw him a lot, about a dozen times in seven months. I’m so glad now that I did see him and talk to him before he died.

Andy Warhol said, “What I was actually trying to do in my early movies was show how people can meet other people and what they can do and what they can say to each other. That was the whole idea: two people getting acquainted. And then when you saw it and you saw the sheer simplicity of it, you learned what it was all about. Those movies showed you how some people act and react with other people. They were like actual sociological ‘For instance’s. They were like documentaries, and if you thought it could apply to you, it was an example, and if it didn’t apply to you, at least it was a documentary…” –

For Andy Warhol (1928-1987)

“The world outside
would be easier
to live in if we
were all machines.
It’s nothing in
the end anyway.
It doesn’t matter
what anyone does.
My work won’t
last anyway.
I was
using
cheap paint.”

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• File
• File history
• File usage
• Global file usage

Robert Indiana, elusive Pop-Art legend, offers a private view into the events, people and places that have shaped his art. Filmed on location at Indiana’s island home, the film, narrated by Indiana in an exclusive interview, details the pictorial memoir he has assembled about his long life, from his origins in the state he made his namesake to his role in the creation of the Pop- Art movement in downtown New York through his involvement in the Museum of Modern Art, his eventual disillusionment with the New York art scene, and the great resurgence of interest in his work both in Europe and the United States, as he takes stock of his life and legacy.

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An 8-minute preview of American INSIGHT’s half-hour documentary-in-progress celebrates the artistic ingenuity of American Pop artist Robert Indiana, who considers Philadelphia his spiritual home. Creator of one of the world’s most famous statues, Indiana remains virtually anonymous to younger generations, yet highly prolific. Since 1969, he has lived and worked on an island 15 miles off the coast of Maine.

Inventing, but never patenting, the iconic LOVE statue, Indiana continues to use words and typographic forms to define his distinctive approach to both language and art. Exploring the boundaries of shape, line, color theory, and meaning within letters and signs, he challenges our traditional conventions of language and art. From large sculpture installations to hard-edged paintings, Indiana incorporates the lyrical nature of poetry while expanding the boundaries of our visual thinking.

American INSIGHT has captured hours of rare footage containing both intimate conversations with him and several public appearances during the past decade: the only such footage taken of this intensely private man during that time.

American INSIGHT

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An excerpt from the Dale Schierholt film – A Visit to the Star of Hope: Conversations with Robert Indiana

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Trailer from the film by Dale Schierholt, Conversations with Robert Indiana

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Extended interview with Andy Warhol (1966)

Andy Warhol och hans Factory – Clip 01-12

Uploaded on Dec 26, 2010

Artist Robert Indiana “Hope & The New Year” Rosenbaum Contemporary

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Robert Indiana’s new message in 2010 was the word “Hope,” but how can that be attained without bringing God back into the picture? What hope does man have if we are just a product of chance? The people who are promoting this idea in the framework of a materialist worldview are taking a leap into the area of nonreason.

Episode VII – The Age of Non Reason

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Review by W.M.R.Simpson in 2005 of Escape from Reason  by Francis Schaeffer

Francis A. Schaeffer (1912-1984), philosopher, theologian
and the founder of L‟Abri Fellowship, believed he had the
answers to the dilemma of modern man. In Escape from
Reason, Schaeffer traces the development of his despair
of finding any meaning and purpose in life, culminating in
the irrational “leap of faith” promoted by religious and
secular existentialists in an effort to escape the intolerable
futility of an empty, deterministic universe.

When we began to see the intellect as autonomous, and „nature‟ set free
from „grace‟, Schaeffer argues, nature “ate up grace”, removing the
„upper story‟ (God the creator, heaven and heavenly things, the unseen
and its influence on earth, man‟s soul, unity) from the rational sphere.
Thinking independently of God‟s revelation, rationalistic man was unable
to find any „universals‟ (grace) which would give meaning and unity to
all the „particulars‟ (nature). Once the particulars were set free, it proved
impossible to hold them together. The results of man‟s failure came to a
head in what Schaeffer called “the line of despair”; a point in history in
which the philosophers abandoned their age-old hope of finding a
unified answer for knowledge and life. The relativism that followed has
shaped our thinking, our culture, and our theology….

Following Hegel, Kierkegaard (1813-55) is Schaeffer‟s symbol of “the
real modern man” who has finally abandoned the hope of a unified field
of knowledge. The original problem, which had been formulated in
terms of „nature‟ and „grace‟, and then „freedom‟ and „nature‟, has at last
(under Kierkegaard) degenerated into a dichotomy between „faith‟ and
„rationality‟, separated by a vast chasm that no amount of rational
thinking can bridge. Meaning and truth are now disconnected from
reason and knowledge; if we are to attain them, we have no alternative
but to make an irrational “leap of faith”.

The new philosophy – or anti-philosophy – wasn‟t kept bottled up in an
ivory tower. Hegellian relativism and Kierkegaardian irrationalism filtered
down to the masses in three different ways; it spread geographically
from Germany outward, penetrating Holland and Switzerland, then
reaching England, taking some time to arrive in America; it spread
through the classes, beginning with the intellectuals and then, through
the mass-media, infiltrating the workers ranks (but failing to penetrate
the middle-classes); it spread through the disciplines, beginning with
philosophy (Hegel), then art (the post-impressionists), then music
(Debussy), then general culture (early T.S. Eliot), and finally theology
(Karl Barth). The hope of finding a unified field of knowledge is gone.
Modern man now lives in despair – “the despair of no longer thinking
that what has always been the aspiration of men and women is at all
possible”.

But all this proves too much for man; “he cannot live merely as a
machine”, and this new way of thinking slices him into a cruel

dichotomy, where any meaning, values and hope can only be obtained
irrationally. “What makes modern man modern”, Schaeffer observes, “is
the existence of this dichotomy and not the multitude of things he
places, as a leap, in the upper story.” Since no one can live consistently
within this system, they must steal things from elsewhere, in order to
live their lives, often plucking them (out of context) from a Christian
worldview.

This escape from reason was objectified in the secular and religious
existentialism that followed. On the secular side, Jean-Paul-Sartre
(1905-80) talked about „authenticating‟ yourself by an act of the will.
What you actually do, however, is neither here nor there – so long as
you do something! Jaspers (1883-1969), on the other hand, pointed to a
„final experience‟ that somehow imparts a certainty that you are really
there and gives some hope of meaning. But being an irrational
experience, it cannot be shared, and is difficult to retain. Heidegger
(1889-1976) spoke of angst – a vague feeling of dread – as something
upon which to hang everything. And on the religious wing, Karl Barth
(on Schaeffer‟s interpretation) held that, whilst the Bible contains
mistakes (the so-called „higher criticism‟), there was actually no rational
interchange between the upper and lower spheres and we should
believe it anyway, expecting a „religious word‟ to be imparted
nevertheless.

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The irony of modern man, according to Schaeffer, is that this autonomous intellectual enterprise initiated through man’s self-confidence in his power to independently reason his way to the answers, has ended, not in the triumph of rationality, but in its actual abandonment. By clinging to his autonomy, man has lost his rationality. His reason has been engulfed by his rationalism. Man remains at the center of the universe, still clinging to a hope, but without any rational basis.

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Schaeffer‟s solution is simple: Christianity has the answer to the very
thing modern man has despaired of ever finding: a unified answer for
the whole of life. True, it demands that we abandon our rationalistic
autonomy and return to the reformation view of the Holy Scriptures, but
in so doing we get back our rationality, our meaningfulness, and
ourselves. Authentic Christianity is no existential leap into an irrational
upper sphere; Schaeffer insists that the Bible speaks truth “both about
God Himself and about the area where the Bible touches history and the

cosmos.” Man can have his answers to life “on the basis of what is open
to verification and discussion”. And a unified answer to life is, Schaeffer
asserts, what man really wants. “He did not accept the line of despair
and the dichotomy because he wanted to. He accepted it because, on
the basis of the natural development of his rationalistic presuppositions,
he had to. He may talk bravely at times, but in the end it is despair.” In
truth, “Modern man longs for a different answer than the answer of his
damnation”. Christianity, with its reasonable and consistent framework
for understanding the world we live in, can put an end to this despair by
putting man right with God.

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Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 1 “The Roman Age” (Schaeffer Sundays)

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)

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