Andy Warhol, Elvis 2 Times, 1963

Narrator: Two life-size Elvis Presleys stand with their legs apart, pointing their guns in roughly the same direction. In 1960, rock icon Elvis Presley made a western film called Flaming Star—the artist Andy Warhol took this image from a publicity still for the film.

He silkscreened these images of Elvis in black ink against a silver-painted canvas. They are two of many reproductions Warhol made for an exhibit in Los Angeles in 1964. Richard Meyer, the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University.

Richard Meyer: I think that Warhol, who was himself an incredible fan of popular culture, was in part thinking about the logic of reproduction, and the ways in which people become stars, in part through the mass distribution of their image. So it’s not about one Elvis poster hanging in one teenager’s room. It’s about thousands or hundreds of thousands of Elvis’s posters.

Narrator: While all the canvases exhibited in Los Angeles were the same height as this one, they had different widths and varying numbers of Elvises. Warhol mailed the silkscreens to his art dealer in Los Angeles on a giant roll of canvas without cutting them beforehand. He let the gallery divide the single roll however they wanted with the only instruction being to line the walls edge to edge, so that a visitor would literally be surrounded by gun slinging Elvises.

Richard Meyer: I think that this in a sense kind of encapsulates Warhol’s ideas about the relation between the fan and the star, which is that it is about a desire to be kind of overwhelmed by ever more images of the star.