THE DAILY PIC: This image is not by some 1960s acolyte of Ellsworth Kelly or Tom Downing, the D.C. dotmeister. It is not, in fact, abstract at all. It is an
evocation of Catholic communion wafers rendered as the dots from
Wonderbread wrapping, and was made in 1968 by the artist known as Sister Corita. A show of her work opened Friday at the Andy Warhol Museum
in Pittsburgh, and it’s fascinating. I admit to having been ignorant
of Corita’s work, and worried in advance that the show would be
feel-good family fare. Instead, it turned out to present one of the most
sophisticated offshoots of Pop art that I know, and some of modern
art’s most subtle and witty text-based work.As the story goes,
Corita, already launched as a tame printmaking nun, saw Warhol’s first
Campbell’s Soup show, in Los Angeles in 1962, and it shook her world and
her art. Instead of becoming Andy in a habit, however, she took things
in her own direction, using commercial lettering as a scaffold for
philosophical thought – I love her piece about flesh and spirit that’s
built on the tomato-sauce tag-line, “Makes Meatballs Sing”. Corita
hybridized the corporate logos and texts of General Mills and Del Monte
with ideas from the Catholic church – another megacorporation, as
Corita’s work always implied, even though it took her some time to
abandon formal religion. Her work had the same love-hate relationship to
theology and scripture that Warhol’s did to consumer culture; both were
too immersed to divorce themselves from those roots, but too smart not
to probe their immersion – and ours.The Daily Pic also appears at ArtnetNews.com. For a full survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.