Download or read book Themes in and Implications of Andy Warhol's Blow Job written by Lana Pearl Beardslee and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis examines how Andy Warhol's Blow Job structures and emphasizes the viewer's polyvalent experiences, with the aim to present the film in a new light, while elaborating on certain points that past scholars have touched on, but failed to fully develop. Within this thesis I discuss the film's historical place, its connections to minimalism and pop, the film's use of sexuality, the theme of boredom, and period-specific theories of vision and issues of "the gaze." I use Blow Job to explore how these themes were engaged in the 1960's and discuss why the issue of experience was placed at the foreground of many artists' work during this period. Though many of Warhol's films can be seen as engaging with the issue of experience, it is in Blow Job that Warhol truly succeeds in creating a film that transcends the trappings of traditional cinema, and allows and requires the viewer to be an active participant in their own experience. Many of the issues and theories I discuss are problematic and even contradictory, however I feel this is a fitting and important component of Blow Job and Warhol's larger artistic career. Blow Job is not only an illustration of the main concerns of 60's film practice, but exists today as evidence of Warhol's ability to create a work with endless contradictions and possibilities. Every experience is created by cooperation between a self and its world, and as I will argue in this thesis, it is Blow Job's blurring of these defining lines that makes it such a provocative film. Blow Job deliberately confuses the divisions between subject and object, viewer and the viewed, audience and participant, and passivity and action in order to destabilize the prescribed role of the viewer and to create a more open and active space for the viewer to experience within.