ANDY WARHOL AND THE CAN THAT SOLD THE WOLRD

ANDY WARHOL
And
THE CAN THAT SOLD THE WORLD

BY GARY INDIANA






For Charles Rydell and Mary Woronov




I

ABJECTION AND EPIPHANY



1

It’s too hard to look in the mirror.
There’s nothing there.
Andy Warhol, interview with Jordan Crandall,
Splash No. 6, 1986



In an essay by Thomas De Quincey, “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant,” the genius junkie of Edinburgh achieves a veritable coup de foudre of scholarly self-effacement, so arch and dry-tongued that if few attentive readers could be fully taken in by it, an ineffable mystery and magic inheres in its flawless balance of the sublime and the idiotic. De Quincey assumes the narrative guise of Christoph Wasianski—Kant’s actual amenuensis—translating Wasianski’s recollections while altering them at whim, disputing Wasianski’s claims in footnotes De Quincey ascribes to De Quincey.

I take it for granted that all people of education will acknowlege some interest in the personal history of Immanuel Kant, however little their taste or their opportunities may have brought them acquainted with the history of Kant’s philosophical opinions. A great man, though in an unpopular path, must always be an object of liberal curiosity. To suppose a reader thoroughly indifferent to Kant, is to suppose him thoroughly unintellectual; and, therefore, though in reality he should happen not to regard Kant with interest, it would still be amongst the fictions of courtesy to presume that he did.

It’s generally known that Kant never ventured outside the Prussian city of Konigsberg. While he wasn’t regarded as quite the scarecrow oddity that Soren Kierkegaard was in his native Copenhagen, the less ascetic Kant was one of Konigsberg’s unique attractions. Perhaps its only attraction. Residents set their clocks by the famed thinker’s daily constitutional, which never deviated by a minute.
De Quincey invests every flyspeck of the great philosopher’s habits with pedantic significance. Later in the essay, De Quincey-as-Wasianski notes:

To return, however, to the course of his day, immediately after the termination of his dinner party, Kant walked out for exercise; but on this occasion he never took any companion; partly, perhaps, because he thought it right, after so much convivial and colloquial relaxation, to persue his meditations [here De Quincy inserts a risibly long, quibbling footnote] and partly (as I happen to know) for this very peculiar reason—that he wished to breathe exclusively through his nostrils, which he could not do, if he were obliged continually to open his mouth in conversation.

De Quincey’s conflation of the grandiose and the nose-breathingly trivial ripples wavelike across history’s funhouse mirror, a century later, in a plethora of lore haphazardly glued to the life and personality of Andy Warhol, American artist: axe-sharpened memoirs, academic ruminations on thematic lint, biographies, interviews, gossip, whole books manufactured from hallucinosis or obsession, misplaced transformations of Warhol’s works into political badminton birdies. (Did he betray the ‘gay movement’? Was he queer enough? Cool enough? Empty enough, abject enough, ugly enough? Was his work subversive? A tease? Did he ditch his liberal beliefs to win portrait commissions from right wing Republicans? And so on, ad nauseam.)
Hernia-inducing catalogues, books on the least engaging material he produced, redundant documentaries, Warhol-derivative art projects, and “recreated” Warhol moments would fill several industrial warehouses, and probably do.
Twenty years after his death, Warhol remains an artist of questionable artistic achievement. The value of his work generates intense disagreement, ambivalence, and incomprehension, despite its surreal financial appreciation.
There is a museum devoted to his work in Pittsburgh. A foundation bearing his name, that distributes millions for worthwhile artistic projects. A completed catalogue raisonne, years in production, may unravel some dense knots of confusion with concrete data on how, when, where, in what sizes, shapes, and circumstanes his oeuvre was generated. The mythic-making porousness of Warhol’s enterprise, however, makes it a favorite subject of a perpetually revised history, before it’s actually become history, in the sedimentary sense, rather than mere “pastness.”
The totality of what he left in his wake hasn’t begun to achieve maximum exploitation. There will always be more to say about it to those who have little to say of anything else. No one will get the final word on Andy Warhol. Every interested party wants to drop a quarter into the Warhol slot machine and score three cherries, the Vegas version of “closure.” The slot’s rigged, though. It can only pay out in more speculation, more lucky guesses.
Somewhat akin to De Quincey contra Wasianski concerning Kant’s nostril-breathing, the mind-numbing quantity of writings about AW includes factual slippages and impossilble-to-confirm episodes in the artist’s life. Careers have been made from inventories of the innocently repeated, thousand-told Warhol apocrypha and “factual” assertions with dubious moorings in reality. Warhol liked obfuscation, pranks, disseminating bogus information. So do many of his former associates.
What De Quincey writes about “all people of education” having an interest in the personal history of Kant is pure Scots tongue-and-cheek. But at least Kant had precious little personal history to become interested in. In Warhol’s case, an impersonal personal history has been scrambled by selective and invented memories, skewed perspectives of people who “knew” him. Unavoidably. Every person is a different person to a different person. We create each other in the process of transpersonal exchange. We each can be one person’s saint, another’s bastard, a third’s genius, someone else’s imbecile. Warhol was that rare individual who could be all these things at the same time to the same person.
He continually revised and obscured his background. This was embellished by those who heard contrary versions, though now, in posthumous finality, Warhol’s heavily veiled life has become…slightly less veiled.





2

It is a waste of time to criticize the inevitable.
Andrew Carnegie, “The Gospel of Wealth”


Will your favorite Warhol legend, if you have one, ever be convincingly dismantled? We prefer myths to truths. Unless you know everything about Arthur Rimbaud, romantic scenarios suggest themselves from his abandonment of poetry, his gun-running in Arabia and Ethiopian slave-trading. It’s even been asserted that in his later life, Rimbaud “lived poetry” instead of writing it, but nothing was less poetic than the atrocious colonial enterprises he assisted. To read his letters home, study the fundaments of his final years, is to discover the banal and pathetic, finalized by horrific physical disintegration.
You may physically examine authentic copies of Andy Warhol’s birth certificate. His birthplace was just plain Pittsburgh—not McKeesport, Mars, Hawaii, and other places he said he came from; trace his movements from birth to his arrival in New York, and, with more complexity, afterwards.
The rudimentary origins of his art are imputed to his mother’s Easter egg decorations, derived from Ruthenian folk art, and to the brightly colored flowers she cut from tin cans and peddled door-to-door. His shrinelike depictions of Marilyn, Liz, Jackie, and Elvis are allegedly homologous to the massed-together gilded icons Warhol gazed at for years in church. Other astral omens: precocious drawing skill, colorist ingenuity, an insatiable appetite for movie magazines and “personalized,” autographed photos of film stars. Three childhood “nervous breakdowns” are attributed to St. Vitus’s Dance, more normally linked to ergot poisoning than nervous breakdown. These always occurred in summer, when Warhol rarely left his island bed, listened to radio serials, scissored paper dolls, crayoned coloring books, frottaged his Charlie McCarthy dummy.
Radio was the flume of the psychovisual imaginary in the 20s and 30s, the murmuring hearth of American homes, acrackle with darker implications and individual stimuli to fear, crisis, and wish-fullfillment than TV later homogenized into collective reception. Everyone pictured this auditory world differently. (It remains a peculiar feature of radio days that Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, ventriloquist and dummy, enjoyed vast radio popularity. As Dorothy Parker remarked when told Calvin Coolidge had died, “How could they tell?”) Warhol’s fantasy fed on radio, comics, and Photoplay. He prized radio’s Niagra in chattery grade-school girl friends, later substituted by Superstars like Ondine, a torrent of questionable insight and enraged wit fueled by massive amphetamine consumption, and Viva, who droned engagingly for hours about her Catholic girlhood, whether anyone were listening or not.
Andy staked out special child status among three Warhola brothers—Andy, Paul, and John. The latter two, in late middle age, continue feuding over which was their mother’s second favorite. His father was conspicuously absent. Although elder Paul became putative family head after Ondrej’s death, Andy was its moody, tyrannical centerpiece. His real and imaginary illnesses, his pathological shyness, his developing talent intimidated the family menagerie into obeying his wishes.
The “holy terror” described in Bob Colacello’s biography is the calculating crybaby and revered brat in adult form. Tiny Andy was mother’s tantrum-prone, acne-riddled albino lion cub, smothered with attention and chocolate rewards when he completed a page of a coloring book, along with reminders that he was ugly, his nose too big, that he was nothing. A sissy. His father’s dying ukase demanded that his savings be spent on Andy’s education.
Andy had panic attacks and hysteria. He shaped weaknesses into weapons for rejecting anyone he didn’t like and avoiding anything he didn’t want to do. Such children compromise the view of childen as “innocent.” Children are inexperienced, not innocent. Fluent liars, manipulative upon arrival, they carry prodigious, unarticulated, ever-growing knowledge with them.
A six year old knows if his father’s a loser, his uncle’s a queer, knows his mother is terrified of sexual intercourse. Well before six, a child knows what he can safely get away with, and how to make hurtful actions look unintended. Children glean early how to see through and defend against the Gargantuan monsters known as their parents.
Children look innocent in photographs. Their faces haven’t weathered enough life to betray what lies behind them. Andy wore this face throughout his life.
He refused to go to school after a black female classmate slapped him. Lonely Mother, with her shrewd peasant gift for sculpting permanent dependency, kept him home for two years while Dad was away, until brother Paul put his foot down. After a mild bout of malingering Andy prolonged into a full month in bed, a family friend forcibly carried him to school. Andy immediately had a histrionic relapse that lingered for months.


Andy’s brothers sold produce in affluent neighborhoods from a truckbed. Andy tagged along, pitched in, and earned extra quarters selling dashed-off sketches of the customers. Turning art into cash was a precocious knack, an insight into capitalism and the power of flattery.
Child Andy’s quirks and family are well-recalled enough that some bear credibly on his later development. The isolation of the Ruthenian ghetto resembled Ruthenia itself. Descriptions of Andy’s childhood evoke bravely maintained family cohesion in abject circumstances. Warhol described this ur-home as the worst place on earth. On another occasion he remarked that being born was like being kidnapped and sold into slavery.
He manifested the estrangement and neediness of a gifted child, cursed and blessed with qualities foreign to everyone around him. The misery of such a child, “kidnapped” into a Depression-era, uneducated family is immeasurable. Regardless of the family’s idea of unitary love, its failure to comprehend him, his inability to comprehend himself, inevitably nurtured all-around resentment, produced sadistically impossible demands and intolerable behavior.
Cluelessness and anger hid behind resource-draining sacrifices to satisfy Andy’s wishes. These wishes couldn’t be satisfied. This gifted child was incapable of happiness, an impossible ideal that most people learn to live without. He could only be placated. In any case, he wanted idolatry rather than happiness.
Generally the family appeared content to struggle with its lot. It may have appeared that way to itself. Its intrinsic dysfunction was deflected and rationalized as a series of temporary, surmountable problems. In the Warhola family, only the problem child posed a threat to the family’s community image, and its image of itself. Efforts to heal an intractible wound—excessive love and material favoritism—further disturbed the family’s equilibrium, depriving Andy’s siblings of equal attention and care. Warhol’s parents knew this. His mother’s disproportionate doting became entangled with contempt for the Little Prince.
She told him he was special, and that he was nothing. He intuited her resentment. Her pride in him warred with her envy: sins joined at the hip. Julia’s psychic cannibalism was “well-meant,” and devastating. She shaped Andy into Nothing Special, and a Special Nothing. Warhol’s acute sense of the void is the basis of all his best art. His awareness of Nothingness, and his terror of it, were crudely “balanced” by his lifelong Catholicism. This religion instills the notion that anything can be forgiven if penance is made, forgiveness asked for.
After AW became a celebrated artist, Julia told an interviewer: “Movies and books and poetry and pictures and photography, everything he does is great…That I did that, you know that, that’s really a creation don’t you think it’s a creation to produce Andy Warhol. I, Mrs. Warhol, I sometimes don’t believe it that I could do that but you see all the things he does, the good the bad and the lousy and the shocking, terrible and the fairies and the girls and the be [sic] and the drugs. It’s all here it’s all in him and he pours it out and pours it out and he gives everything and that’s why he’s a great artist.”
In effect, Julia snipped off Andy’s balls while proclaiming his greatness. Her need to control him, and her inability to, partially accounts for the alcoholic depression that eventually overtook her during the years she lived with him in New York. (“That I did that…that’s really a creation.” Thus spake Victor Frankenstein.)
Even though she usurped his identity and claimed his success as her own achievement, Warhol was lucky that his desire coincided with her own wishes. He was also fortunate not to be born a bourgeois. The risk involved in becoming an artist had the cachet of liver cancer for Depression-era poor families who scraped their way into the middle class, and placed their highest premium on security, predictability, steadiness, and advancement within a conventional form of work. When you come from nothing that goes nowhere, you have little to lose by tossing the dice. Of course, many among the poor are as overweeningly security conscious as the nouveau bourgeoisie, but this is seldom an inherited trait.
Ondrej died young. He worked most of his American life for a company that transplanted houses from one place to another. Both Ondrej and Julia came from the polyglot region of converging national borders drawn after World War I, generally called Ruthenia, a Carpathian obscurity of impoverished villages, epidemics, illiteracy, and hapless placement in the path of incessant territorial skirmishes between “real” countries.
Julia Zavacky married Ondrej Warhola in 1909. But Ondrej, who’d already worked in the US, returned to America three years later. A baby daughter, born after his departure, died, before Ondrej earned enough to bring his wife to their new country. Julia never fully recovered from this baby’s loss. Nine years passed before she could join Ondrej in Pittsburgh.
Warhol later said he barely remembered Ondrej.



Julia was maniacally devout. She took Andy with her on daily, two-mile treks to St. John Chrysostom Eastern Rite Greek Catholic Church, the very name of which suggests how complicated the Ruthenian ethnicity is.
Described as a gentle, kind person, Julia probably was, but more complex than the blurred impression of her best conveyed by Duane Michals’s photograph of her with Andy behind her in sharp focus. Pretty, talented at drawing, funny, and, until her last years, able to contain the melancholia that haunted her. She repined for the world of her childhood. She never mentally left Ruthenia, which the Hill section of Pittsburgh resembled in many ways—dirt poor, spiritually bonded to an amalgam of religions with allegiance to the Pope.
Over the 20 years Andy and Julia lived together in Manhattan, their relationship was a mixture of mutual support and loathing. They kept one another amused and furious. Julia could never control Andy, but he easily controlled her. Her presence kept him leashed to a suffocation he wanted to escape. Yet it provided stability and encouragement.
Simon Watney, in a characteristically insightful essay, “Queer Andy,” published in Pop Out: Queer Warhol, writes: “He seems to have lived with his mother in Manhattan to guarantee the undermining of any sexual self-confidence he might have achieved, just as throughout his adult life he played his immediate friends and colleagues against one another as he had learned to play members of his family against one another when he was a child.”
Watney pinpricks the Freudian dynamics of AW’s childhood and its hangover into the contradictory behavior of Famous Andy. Had Warhol never become famous, his story mght have been more normative, if not more abnormal, than that of other homosexuals of his time, and of many heterosexuals as well. The neurotic recreation in adult life of familial dysfunction and its participants is a stubborn, insidious imperative of the unconscious, the family being both the cauldron of insanity and the site of physical safety and nourishment.
The reprise of an original family configuration in adulthood, however, produces a corrosive, womb-like pathology and a chimerical safety. Seeking friends who correspond to the figures of childhood, we gravitate to the flaws, addictions, destructive patterns and emotional disorders we learned to consider intrinsic to our comfort zones, rather than the strengths and virtues that offset their negative impact.
Warhol’s eventual arena of family reenactment, The Factory, became one of the most significant cultural phenomena of its time. The adult Warhol was an anomaly, a figure commanding massive cultural space, whose most evident feature was a massive lack.
“Don’t be pushy,” Julia Warhola instructed him, “but let everybody know you’re around.” He manufactured a space too large for himself, that could not be satisfyingly filled by others, and only controlled by the punitive exercise of his will.


A few years ago, the precipitant of spongiform encephalitis, known as Mad Cow Disease, was isolated by scientists, who were confounded and alarmed by what they found: something inorganic, unrelated to the biological understanding of life. It was called a “prion”—a tiny, rod-shaped ‘non-organism’ that contained no nucleic acid, an essential component of everything living, an infectious agent consisting entirely of protein.
Prions “infect and propagate by refolding abnormally into a structure which is able to convert normal molecules of the protein into the abnormally structured form.” Something like a deadly, microscopic piece of folded pita bread without yeast, flour, dough, or gluten.
There are many who might say, in different words, that AW operated with the ruthless efficiency of the prion, in his ambition to impose his scary singularity on the society he inhabited. When his will to power came in contact with New York’s cultural rock face, the latter gradually turned sponge-like, permeable, structurally unstable, ripe for collapse. Just as the nature of prions remains a mystery, the nature of Warhol’s impact on American culture remains indefinable, unprecedented, inexplicable.



3

In art it is hard to say anything as good as:
saying nothing.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures,1932-1934


Recalling my first awareness of AW in 1964, in art magazine photos of Andy and Edie Sedgwick in a Philadelphia museum, trapped on a spiral staircase by mobs of chanting fans, I’m now struck by the lack of critical elaboration, or disputation, that now exists over common statements about W: that he was “the most important artist of the second half of the twentieth century,” possibly even “the most important artist of the twentieth century,” indubitably “the artist who changed everything.” What, incidentally, is “everything” in this formulation?
These banalities come tripping to the tongue, and one could trip over one’s tongue after examining them. We have heard them so often that we no longer question what they mean. Warhol “changed the way we perceive the world around us.” He “made us see reality in a different way.” He “completely changed American culture.” He may, for that matter, have changed all culture, for all time, through epidemic alchemy.
Is any of this true? How? In what way? Can these changes be empirically measured? Did the culture change through W’s agency, or was W added to a metamorphic collusion of many factors?
Marcel Duchamp, for example, is thought to have “revolutionized art,” for those concerned with art. Yet he didn’t even call his own activity art, except in its Sanskrit meaning of “to make.” Duchamp made eminent sense: no false modesty, but no hubris, no folie de grandeur, no egregiously contemptuous irony inflected his entirely individual itinerary. He neither embraced nor rejected the world as he found it; like the writer George Perec, he played certain games that others found great merit in. The only artist Duchamp competed with was Duchamp. His world had room for other artists, with whom he could maintain a generative dialogue rather than strike a pose. He altered the conceptual terms in which art might be understood, but the word “might” itself places this notion in the provisional realm, and Duchamp wasn’t reluctant to admit it.
Claims for Warhol may be more sweeping in reach, more unthinkingly embraced, because, unlike Duchamp, Warhol was infatuated with celebrity and the values of mass media—the values of propaganda, as set forth by Edward Bernays, the father of the public relations industry. Warhol’s demolition of rigidly defined categories of art practice, which Duchamp accomplished by an abstemiously limited production, followed W’s motto, “Always leave them wanting less.”
Warhol’s meshing of mechanical reproduction with “the original” generated excessive quantities of artwork of varying quality that became a nightmare for his dealers. His purported repudiation of the “hand-made” also made for a commercially detrimental surplus of saleable works.
The fusion of painting with printmaking and photography; the droll indifference to emerging conventions within Pop and other art itself; in short, his unencumbered approach to subject matter and method guaranteed ubiquity and cast doubt on his reputation.
On a simpler level, not everyone in line at Gristede’s would recognize Marcel Duchamp, but Andy Warhol would be mobbed and begged to autograph shopping bags.
Duchamp knew he was nothing. Warhol need continual, sycophantic reassurance that he was something.
Polar opposites in an important sense: Warhol, workaholic, motored by ravening ambition and sublimated orgasmic pleasure in making things, happily produced as much as possible; Duchamp, imperturbably content to play chess, leave art to its own devices, and, more as a hobby than an all-summarizing statement, to fuss with the same single, secret tableau, to be exclusively viewed through a keyhole, when the spirit moved him, during 20 years of feigned indolence.
They understood each other well. Duchamp hadn’t anxious memories of poverty; he’d been consistently undaunted, even amused, by rejection. Warhol, a passive-aggressive personality, regressed to infantile petulance when left out of a show, when feeling slighted, or short-changed of the attention he demanded.
His capacious mind was tweaked by the emotional affect of an eight-year-old. His insight and cunning deserve acknowledgement; so does his awesome immaturity. His knowingness about people matched his inability to sustain mature relationships: he encouraged their “inner children” to act out, recording it on film.
W had the perspicacity to say that an artist only really paints one painting in his life, and he really did paint only one that turned the cultural world on its head.
His underlying kinship with Duchamp is the conceptual thread of art-as-idea that extends from the first half of the 20th century through the second. In both artists, the desire to “finish off art” is palpable. Yet neither could finish with art, for as Duchamp well noted, half the work of art is its reception, and the receivers inevitably wanted more.
One could argue that Duchamp was “anti-retinal,” whereas W was all retinal. W’s “retinality,” however, was a conceptual demystification of images, a philosophic proof demonstrated through seriality and repetition. All things can be made to resemble the same thing—not because of an artist’s so-called signature style, but because his or her attitude permeates the presention of any subject.


“I should have just kept painting the soup cans,” Warhol asseverated many times, knowing he’d be remembered by those pictures, and, moreover, remembered for the gesture rather than the object. Not by art historians and archivists, who would pore over everything Warholian with a proctoscope, but by the media-bedazzled public that consumed canned soup, Coca Cola, Elizabeth Taylor, and Warhol’s mere signature. In that matter, Warhol could exercise no control whatever. Duchamp signed cigars that his artist friends then smoked; Warhol, on the other hand, would have these objects encased in a vitrine.
From this perspective, Warhol shares Duchamp’s indifference to aesthetic strictures. Warhol’s need to control, his cultivation of personal publicity, runs counter to Duchamp’s reclusiveness and willingness to relinquish control to accidents of matter, to welcome chance. Both, in very different ways, refused to be “known.”
W’s forays into film, video, theater, spectacles like The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and his own iconic registration in the gallery of famous faces, caused his constituency to spill beyond the art world into the larger society. As one of the era’s principal eccentrics, W fascinated those who found him repulsive as much as he mesmerized those who saw him as the Cipher Messiah.
If one’s memory is long, one can recall how appalled, scathing, dismissive, enraged, even murderously negative Warhol’s initial reception as an artist was. Warhol phobia predated his first “Pop” shows at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and the Stable Gallery in New York, and continued through the 1960s—though the middlebrow critics of Time, Newsweek, and even more conservative mass market opinion-sculptors were compelled, periodically, to acknowledge the scope and implications of Warhol’s industry.
The New York Times, a/k/a the voice of the Politburo, gave his work the kind of double-jointed dismissal and conspicuous attention that note unavoidable achievements in generally deplored categories. While “art” is invested with absurdly earth-shaking importance for “what it says,” movies get off easier. Either you enjoy watching one or you don’t. The films were sometimes simply graded for their entertainment value (and, make no mistake, the art critics of The Times et al. are generally in the business of handing out grades), but even such reviews insisted on having things both ways. The Chelsea Girls was recognized as an unparalleled breakthrough of “underground” cinema into commercial viability, and, simultaneously, described as a summa pornographia of unsurpassed social depravity.


As the essays included in the book Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Doyle, Flatley, & Munoz, eds.) elucidate, W’s early rejection by the art establishment had partly to do with his overt homosexual mannerisms and the raunchy material he focussed on. These essays also examine the critical paring away of the most obvious features of Warhol’s work. The formalist reduction of his paintings, movies, and other projects occluded their baldly faggoty content.
This distancing of W from his subject by declaring him a “voyeur,” merely a recorder of perverse and taboo material, eventually facilitated his assimilation into the canon of high art, distancing W from what he made art about. He was a voyeur; too many of his intimates have said so for that to be disputed, though an artist who isn’t a voyeur would be difficult to find, even if he or she is only a voyeur of his or her own solipsism. What Warhol chose to be a voyeur of, then, received trifling attention from the critical pylons supporting a trite, superannuated formalist edifice.
When the Warhol Phenomenon spread instead of going away, efforts to treat his work as an over-the-top dirty joke reflected the marginalizing of any contemporary art combining sex with humor, invention with absurdity and polymorphism: Larry Rivers got the same loutish treatment for works like Lampman Loves It, a plexi commentary on American race relations in which one figure sodomizes another, with blinking lights casting a hydraulic coupling in antic explicitness.


Today, encomiums decorating the dust jacket of Pop Out: Queer Warhol also seem superannuated. “Pop Out fulfills its fabulous mission—to reclaim Andy Warhol has a queer artist/icon…Andy would hae said it best: Gre-e-at!”, “And that’s what I want to say to the editors and writers of these essays. Thank you for calling Warhol queer, for calling his art queer, his public persona, his interviews, his philosophy, queer.”
This “queer” recuperation seems too belated, enough to qualify as moot. One rebarbative aspect of books like this “reclaiming” Warhol as a homosexual artist should not go unmentioned: their conflation of all formal study of W’s work with a sinister suppression of his sexual identity. This misrepresents the intentions of many such examinations, and reduces W’s work to a single, allegedly hidden secret about it.
The flawed assumption is that his homosexuality was ever secret in the first plae. Some of this can be attributed to the fact that many current exegetical writers have no memory of Warhol’s era, and assume they’re discovering things everyone knew at the outset. Warhol flaunted his sexual orientation, waving it like a red flag in front of a bull.
This “re-queerification” is often overdrawn, grossly overstated, notably in Richard Meyer’s discussion, in Outlaw Representation, of Warhol’s installation of Thirteen Most Wanted Men, twenty-five uniformly sized silkscreen-on-masonite panels bearing mug shots of criminals, as his contribution to the decoration of the New York State Pavillion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. The mural was banned, either by architect Philip Johnson, who commissioned it, or on orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Warhol offered to replace it with multiple, identical portraits of planning commissioner Robert Moses, a promptly rejected idea. Warhol then had the mural painted over in aluminum housepaint. An interesting statement in itself.
Meyer “interprets” the intact mural as an allusive, homoerotic companion work to W’s Flowers, links those to Genet’s novels, especially Journal de Vouleur, in which an affinity is ascribed to flowers and convicts, a motif also found in Genet’s film Un Chant d’Amour.
This can only be a tertiary subtext in a work that was a far more potent political provocation. For the host country of a World’s Fair to exhibit a gigantic mual of its most wanted criminals, past and present, is, io ipso, a blatant subversion of everything a World’s Fair is meant to showcase: namely, the most positive and “advanced” features of participating nations.
Just as obvious is the mural’s relation to Warhol’s icons of Marilyn Monroe and other popular celebrities: its criminals are presented as “stars” in their own field of activity, and represent celebrities of a different sort, who nonetheless fit within the definition of celebrity.
Warhol retained the screens used, and produced indvidual portraits of the “wanted men”—these, in an entirely different context, depict full-face or profile views of men ranging from physically plain, downright ugly, and a few who might be considered erotically attractive. But the subversion Meyer ascribes to the World’s Fair work is an example of a single-minded focus on “queerness” that deprives W’s work of its broadest social meanings, a limitation copiously reflected in the writings of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The notion that W’s art was only about his homosexuality, or anyone else’s, seems as repressive and circumscribed as the formalist criticism that detectably aoids the subject completely.
Writers militating in favor of Meyer’s method have a tendency to believe everything is about homosexuality and its suppression. This is ludicrous in Warhol’s case, since his homosexuality was never “suppressed” or concealed, though in later life its most confrontative earlier expression downshifted. For Warhol, it had outlived its usefulness.
On this point, Bob Colacello’s Holy Terror sensibly answers the question: What happened to Andy? with the inescapable answer that what happened to Andy is what happens to all of us: he got older.
Andy also got shot, he got scared, he got greedy, and he never waited for a fresh idea but filled time between inspiratins with sloppy work. He also became enamored of his evolving, unique morphing into respectability.


Fascination with the penis and the male body persists throughout Warhol’s career. Its most direct manifestations occupied him in the 1960s. His “serious” work continued to depict bodies, torsos, sex organs, and beautiful male faces.
Later refinements and transmutations of these objects of desire echo in the Piss Paintings, Torsos, Ladies and Gentlemen, and other series, which rarely were shown in the US until years after their production. The same applies to the Rorschacht tests, the Hammer & Sickle series, the Diamond Dust pictures, Reversals, and the Shadows series. They were more often shown, and well-received, in Europe.

Warhol did change American culture, I think, profoundly: he brought its underlying nature into stark visibility. The paradox is that we’re reluctant to look at the culture we have, its imperialist presumptions and its incredible ugliness, the direction it’s taken, and where it is leading us, and to recognize W as the weather vane of its unassimilable condition and the prophet of its ultimate endgame. It isn’t possible to ascribe uncritically positive value to a levelling practice, however useful as a rejection of ossified values, popular delusions, and comforting methods of psychic anaesthesia.
W’s disengagement, his refusal to assign meaningful intentionality to his art, leaves us with a body of work that defines and reflects the condition of things American, like an encyclopedia of symptoms.





4

If they took people at the pawnshop
I wonder how much I would get for myself.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books



Warhol's years at Carnegie Tech, and his decade as a commercial illustrator in New York, will find their way into these hopscotching ruminations, but Warhol's most instantly identifiable "Pop statement" can serve as a window facing forward and backward in the same frozen present.
The appearance of Warhol's Campbell Soup paintings at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, on July 9, 1962, ranged evenly along the walls like supermarket merchandise, was not, at that moment, Le Sacre du Printemps, or even Last Tango in Paris. The paintings drew more derision than enthusiasm--and, maybe worse from Warhol's point of view, nothing like the outraged reception of Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase at the 1913 New York Armory Show. (Henry Geldzahler and others would, in subsequent months and years, proclaim the Campbell Soup paintings "the Nude Descending a Staircase" of its time.)
Warhol stepped up his production of commercial images and objects, silkscreens of young film stars, and works which, in effect, made the soup cans, retroactively, the quintessential icons of an era. 1962 was a year of spectacular productivity for Warhol: the screen paintings of one and two dollar bills, the screened and carved-rubber-stamp grids of S&H Green Stamps, airmail stamps, tins of Martinson coffee, the Do-It-Yourself, paint-by-numbers pictures, dance diagrams, the first sequence of Marilyns, Baseball, Troy Donahue, Warren Beatty, Natalie Wood, Tuesday Weld, the Coca Cola bottles, Red Elvis, Young Rauschenberg #1, and the first "Death and Disaster" paintings were all executed that year.
The equalizing effect of Warhol's technique on diverse subjects emphasized the omnipresence of the received image, the mediated nature of contemporary reality through the symbolic: the naked, isolated soup can repudiated subjectivity, and everything "outside" became the same thing as a soup can.
The Campbell Soup series consolidated the ascendancy of new developments in painting, sculpture, music, literature, and aesthetic taste. They indicated the unanticipated effects of technological changes in the way Americans lived after World War II, changes in mores and values produced by the experience of the war, and the accelerated transformation of citizens into consumers, democracy into a synonym for capitalism, and art into brand-name commodities.
Warhol condensed what was happening in the bourgeois world, just as Campbell's condensed the ingredients for soup. Add water, apply heat, stir, presto, you have a bowl of something nourishing and artificially preserved, saved time at the expense of quality, and participated in the reduction of daily life to the practice of consumption.

5


The spectacle is not a collection of images;
rather, it is a social relationship beween people
that is mediated by images.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle


There is nothing ambiguous about a soup can. But a painting of that soup can, in 1962, bristled with suggestiveness. It could represent an indictment-by-quotation, related to uneasiness with America's soulless materialism, its sexual repression, its racism, the physical ugliness of its cities and towns: this is what we eat, and what we eat, we are.
Transferring an unembellished, flat commercial image to the "sacred space" of art was fresh in the sense meant when children are told, "Don't get fresh." And fresh in another sense: a brisk, sharp wind blowing away old ideas about how art functions, who is or isn't qualified to dictate "taste." Pop could mean populist or popular, as you liked.
Warhol's paintings mocked the importance conferred on art by timeless criteria, scrambling categories such as "major" and "minor," "commercial" and "fine." They moved the work of art into the realm of objects that are, by their nature, products. The site of idolatry and the supermarket drew intimately closer. Warhol's agenda was not to empty American banalities of their pallid thereness, but to make banality valuable. Friends from the '50s with whom Andy eventually parted ways sometimes declined the gift of one of his Pop paintings, or re-sold them for peanuts after accepting them. Warhol's reaction was, more or less: Are you nuts? That picture will be worth a fortune some day!
The Soup Can paintings were of their time, about their time. Their predecessors were paintings of cartoons, black-and-white tabloid advertising images, before and after nose jobs, bakelite telephones, and canvases and drawings in which Warhol's reluctance to forego "the painterly" as practised by the Abstract Expressionists persisted in hash marks, splatters, and somewhat arbitrarily vivified brush strokes.
These transitionals to Pop marked a dramatic break with the ornate whimsy of Warhol's commercial work and non-commercial drawings, despite the thematic continuities we can now discern between "before" and "after." Pop Art revived Warhol's determination to break through into "fine art.” He feared missing his moment--he was virtually the last Pop Artist to be "discovered" as one of its important practitioners.
Warhol plunged back into his original "fine art" ambitions shortly before 1960. Never abandoned, they’d waited in abeyance. Although he lacked a way into the established gallery system of the 1950s, during those years he was involved in a more than touristic way with the "underground" poetry and performance scene in downtown Manhattan: an excited witness to and participant in the hardly unpublicized realm of little art and poetry magazines, beatnik reading venues, and experimental theater. He was in a band for a while with Oldenberg and Marisol.


In the summer of 1952, Julia Warhola moved into Andy's basement apartment on East 75th Street. She arrived to look after "her Andy." They slept in the same bedroom, and acquired two Siamese cats, which became many Siamese cats. Despite impossible clutter and Andy's lack of work space, mother and son appeared to enjoy each other's company, two refugees from the goyim shtetl.
The following year, they moved to a larger apartment on Lexington Avenue in the 20s, shared for a time with Leonard Kessler, an art director friend. Julia and Andy again shared a bedroom. The cat population exuded a dizzying stench, while the noise from Shirley's Pin-Up Bar on the ground floor blasted through the windows.
In the townhouses he later acquired, Julia's living space was confined to the basements, where she carried on, someone said, a completely medieval life in the middle of Manhattan: inhabited by memories of her Ruthenian childhood, alienated from the outer world, she began drinking scotch throughout the day. She defected back to Pittsburgh on one occasion, angered that Andy's financial help to the rest of the family was less generous than he could afford. Warhol couldn't manage without her, and soon invited her back.
Victor Bockris’s biography quotes art director Joseph Giordano, whom Julia demanded be present when she returned: "she slammed her suitcase on the floor, looked at [Andy], and said 'I'm Andy Warhol.' And there was a big discussion about why she was Andy Warhol…the crux of Andy Warhol is that he felt so unloved, so unloved. I know it came from his mother..She made him feel insignificant. She made him feel that he was the ugliest creature God ever put on this earth."
Warhol is said to have carried on several sexual affairs, despite Julia's presence in his various residences. He just went home with other people. One anonymous informant told Bockris that Warhol was skilled and uninhibited in bed. Unrequited infatuations, obsessions with unavailable men, and friendships Andy vainly hoped would flower into "relationships" are more amply documented. Romanticism permeates his delicate, often fey and fetishistic '50s drawings, the whimsical fairy tale creatures that people his privately produced books of drawings, and his early obsession with Truman Capote. Warhol was in love, if not with Capote (one imagines a fight for the bottom), than with what Capote represented: androgynous prettiness, entrée to all the right circles, money, fame.
The Capote fixation built to daily missives ("Happy Tuesday," and the like), and a brief, pub-crawling connection with Capote's mother, Nina. Capote found Warhol pathetic and quickly cut him off.
An earlier crush on television set designer Charles Lisanby culminated in a shared trip across several Asian countries. (En route home, a stopover in Cairo placed them there at the peak of the Suez crisis.) After a queasy start, attributed to Andy’s unwelcome overtures and jealous rages, the adventure unfolded amiably. Andy’s drawings of their travels are fascinating, little masterpieces of ruins, temples, street life, people in fabulous masques and costumes. Yet upon arrival back in New York, Andy stalked off by himself at the airport, bitterly telling friends he’d “gone around the world with a boy and never got a kiss.”
Warhol had a penchant for holding grudges, but I have to question the idea that Lisanby wouldn’t have known perfectly well the nature of Andy’s interest in him; that he perhaps wasn’t attracted to Warhol, but gleaned something from W’s company that he deliberately misrepresented as the possibility of something else. It’s much too simple to say that someone who embarks on such a trip with someone infatuated with him sexually is the victim of “stalking” or of aggression. As we know about Lisanby for no other reason than this trip, could it be that he thought he could somehow assimilate Andy’s abilities while holding out the promise of an eventual sexual connection? That kind of parasitism isn’t uncommon among those smart enough to know they lack something someone else has in abundance, but not bright enough to know that another person’s talents can’t be “assimilated” or vampirized.
A yearning side of W’s personality seems incompatible with his eventual persona, but W expresses it often enough, in scornfully unemotive terms. His wish throughout college, and a succession of early apartment shares in New York, to “share problems” with flatmates (who, he bewailed, only wanted someone to share the rent), his remarks that having feelings is too hard, too painful, the gelid aphorisms he minted as armor-plating against emotional hurt: the gifted may be monstrous, but the ungifted can be worse, forever trying to be something they’re not equipped to be.
Trying to be a machine is hard work, however “easier” it makes perceiving others as utilitarian objects. To be unloved, and to wish for love, truly is “too hard” unless one turns to stoicism.
Warhol’s stifling of emotional display is mirrored in his presentational makeover, in the early ‘60s, when eager-to-please “Raggedy Andy” of commercial art began invading parties with shifting entourages of marauding rent boy types, and adopted a tougher, invulnerable carapace: leather jackets, jeans, ungovernably messy wigs, sunglasses, teddy boy ankle boots. The pathological shyness of his childhood returned with a menacing edge, an exaggerated aversion to tactile contact.
Whatever antagonisms rankled between W and Julia, she attended his basic needs, serenely infantilized him and made him safe from adult disappointment. Her presence turned his homes into closets. Whenever Julia mt one of Andy’s female Superstars, she urged the woman to marry him.
At his studios, his second homes, he was the presiding spirit, however evanescent, the unquestioned boss. He never wanted to leave himself open to rejection again.
Bob Colacello’s biography stresses that no one ever got invited inside Andy’s houses, however often he’d been a guest in theirs. Relatives from Pittsburgh, on the other hand, were welcome to visit on weekends. He got on best with the children: he had become a child again, a child with a toupe.
Exclusion of friends from his living space was an incremental process, and another chapter of his self-defining legend. Eventually, Andy’s houses became Fortresses of Solitude, like Superman’s icy lair. People could imagine all manner of secret things going on inside them without Andy ever divulging what did, or more likely didn’t, happen. In this way he could at least pretend to have “a private life,” until even the pretense of having one became unnecessary.
He lived for years with Jed Johnson, who worked for him as a film editor and cinematographer, directed the extraordinary film Andy Warhol’s Bad, and decorated Andy’s last townhouse. Warhol rarely allowed Jed to entertain company.
So private had he become that after Julia was sent to a nursing home in Pittsburgh, Andy never mentioned that she no longer lived with him. When she died, he never informed Jed of her death.
That fame brings isolation is inevitable, if one’s main focus is being famous—or one’s main defensive weapon. Fame brings all kinds of things: it unbottles demons, issues a license for bad behavior,
----
An earlier crush on the set designer Charles Lisanby resulted in a shared trip through several Asian countries. After a rocky start owing to Andy's unwelcome overtures and jealous rages, the adventure became amiable, and Andy's drawings of their travels are fascinating, little masterpieces of ruins, street life, people in fabulous masks and costumes. Yet upon arrival back in New York, Andy stalked off by himself at the airport, bitterly telling friends that he'd "gone all around the world with a boy and never got a kiss."
A yearning side of Warhol's personality seems contradictory, but Warhol adumbrates it often enough, in almost scornfully unemotive terms. His desire throughout college, and during a succession of early communal apartments in New York, to "share problems" with others (who, he gripes, only wanted someone to share the rent), his claim that having feelings is too painful, the gelid aphorisms he minted when fame provided a kind of armor-plating against emotional vulnerability: trying to be a machine is hard work, however "easier" it might make the perception of others as utilitarian objects.
Warhol's suppression of overt emotions is obvious in his presentational remake, beginning in the early '60s, when the eager-to-please "Raggedy Andy" of the commercial art world began showing up at events with a shifting entourage of rent boy types and adopted a tougher, unapproachable carapace: leather jacket, jeans, ungovernably messy wigs, sunglasses, teddy boy boots. The pathological shyness of his childhood returned with an aggressive edge, an instinctive aversion to being touched. Whatever antagonisms rankled between Warhol and his mother, Julia looked after his basic needs, and effectively infantilized him, her mere presence sufficient to turn his home into a closet. Whenever she met one of Andy's female Superstars, Julia urged her to marry him.
His studios became second homes, places where he was the presiding spirit and ultimate boss.
Bob Colacello's biography makes frequent anecdotal references to the fact that virtually no one was ever invited inside Andy's houses, no matter how often Warhol was a guest in other people's. Relatives from Pittsburgh were allowed to visit for weekends, and the exclusion of friends was an incremental process. Eventually, Andy's houses became forbidden fortresses. Although he lived for years with Jed Johnson, who worked for Warhol as a film editor and cinematographer, directed the extraordinary film Bad under Andy's aegis, and decorated Andy's last townhouse, Warhol almost never allowed Jed to have guests in. (In Julia's last years, when she was sent away to a nursing home in Pittsburgh, Andy never revealed her absence to people who asked after her. When she died, he never informed Jed of her death.)
That fame brings isolation is an inevitable if one’s main focus is being famous. Fame brings all kinds of things. It unbottles demons and issues a license for bad behavior. It induces paranoia and hypersensitivity. It inspires revenge against life's manifold insults. Warhol's reinvention of himself as a brittle, silent, withholding spectre emphasized his reversed position vis-a-vis the imperious and demanding fashion editors and graphic designers he'd catered to for years; evidence, too, that he would no longer play the desiring half of any unrequited romance. He became an absence among surrogate presences, a dead planet circled by vividly festive moons that wobbled in their orbits and often drifted away into outer space. Outer space, in The Factory milieu, was where everybody heard you scream and nobody cared.
Pop Art, as Warhol conceived it, was the negation of interiority, the refusal of sentiment, sadness, disappointment. Of the suicides and car crash victims, the ladies who ate the poison tuna fish, the unknown fatalities in the "Death and Disaster" series, Warhol dismissed the idea that he felt any empathy for them.
It may be a cliché that the longer a person wears a mask, the more it becomes his true face. But it's often a true cliché.














6


It's a great big chance for me and a great big
challenge. My faith in radio and the makers of
Campbell Soups have enough confidence in me
to give me the direction of the Campbell
Playhouse. Let's hope nobody is mistaken…
Everybody likes a good story and I think radio
is just about the best storyteller there is. The
Campbell Playhouse is dedicated to the radio
production of good stories.

Orson Welles, introducing the Campbell
Playhouse production of Daphne du
Maurier's "Rebecca," broadcast Dec. 9, 1938



Whether the chronically bed-ridden, ten-year-old Andrew Warhola, who listened nightly to such radio fare as Lux Radio Theater and the dark exploits of Lamont Cranston, a/k/a The Shadow (decades later, Warhol devoted a panel strip of the "American Myths" painting to a self-portrait called 'The Shadow'), tuned into Orson Welles's Campbell Playhouse productions of "A Christmas Carol," "A Night To Remember," "Theodora Goes Wild," "Dodsworth," or "Mr. Deeds Goes To Town," we have it on the artist's word, and that of his brothers, that Campbell Soup and a sandwich comprised Andy's unvarying childhood lunch. (Andy got to pick the flavor.) It's unlikely the God-like radio voice of Welles, an American theatrical legend at 23, would have escaped the attention of a boy who collected 8x10" autographed glossies of film stars and had adopted the mannerisms of his idol, Shirley Temple.
As Welles biographer Simon Callow writes, soon after the Mercury Theater of the Air unintentionally spread panic throughout depressingly large, credulous regions of the U.S. with its dramatization of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, the Mercury's radio venture went south with its final transmission, Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Callow writes that the original ensemble’s tone "was only occasionally reverential, more often blithe, high-spirited, dashingly dramatic. Not all of that was lost with the reinvention of the programme as The Campbell Playhouse, but it was a radically different animal, and it made of Welles a rather different animal, too."
The difference is striking when you compare the Mercury Theater broadcasts with the Campbell-sponsored ones. The latter, preceded by a ponderous Bernard Hermann fanfare, lavishes several minutes of an announcer's deifying resume of Welles's theatrical career, followed by Welles's own purple lucubrations over his co-star--in the debut broadcast, Margaret Sullavan.
"This new tone, quite different from his Mercury manner: what would later become familiar as the manner of the chat show, but which in 1938 was the unmistakable tone of the sponsored programme. It is about selling, about puffing…The Welles of The Campbell Playhouse…was a significantly different person to the Welles of the Theater of the Air: master of ceremonies, celebrity, leading actor, salesman, he had become appreciably more a product of the image makers…He has, above all, gone commercial, the selling of the sponsor's product and his own indistinguishable from one another; both indistinguishable from the selling of himself. The tone in which he extols the beauty of radio as a medium is the same as the one in which he lauds the makers of Campbell Soup."
Between segments of Rebecca, Welles intoned testimonials to the Campbell Soup Company's public-spirited virtu. "I know the Campbell kitchen, the Campbell soup, the Campbell men: their success is due to the human side of this business, its policy." A notable feature of these commercials is a recurring theme of modernity: the modernity of the Campbell Playhouse's selection of "the finest of today's drama," blended with the modernity of rich, wholesome, possibly better-than-homemade tomato, vegetable, chicken, and other Campbell Soups whose preparation requires nothing more than a pot and a can opener. What could be more modern than getting dinner from a can?
The description of Welles's metamorphosis from artist to celebrity entrepreneur evokes Warhol's own arc. Like Welles, Warhol became as much the product he sold as the art he made. The scope of his ambition enlarged exponentially when he realized what unlimited success was available to him. Warhol didn't have Welles's hammy eloquence, the ability to make a Gallo wine ad sound like a soliloquy from Henry V, Welles's high culture snobbery and effusive bonhomie.
Warhol was more fluently conversant with high culture than he usually let on, but cultivated a repertoire of exactly the opposite methods of self-presentation. He understood the power of silence, of the clipped riposte. His aggressive passivity couldn't have been further from Welles's act as bon vivant and raconteur.
What they shared was a mandarin dexterity in manipulating other people in the service of a boundless ambition; the ability to set members of their coteries at odds with each other through well-placed gossip; and severe late career slumps never fully overcome, though legions of cineastes, in Welles's case, and art historians, in Warhol's, have achieved prodigies of recuperation on fizzled experiments, aesthetic atrocities, and unfinished works.
The archival industry that springs up around a figure of large cultural importance has history as its natural ally. The fragmentary and the tentative, the whimsical gesture and the leftover idea, accrue a compelling fascination when the source has become posthumous.
And of course Welles and Warhol shared a logical involvement in Campbell Soup:
Of Warhol's paintings during his dicey transition from illustrator to fine artist, it's been said that his subjects could be traced back to the contents of his mother's supermarket cart, to the icon hoarde flanking the altar of St. John Chrysostom Church, to the newspaper "funnies" he enjoyed every day as a child. There were also the advertising back pages of Enquirer-style tabloids, ads for typewriters, rhinoplasty, rupture trusses, corn removers, television sets, and other dreams not much money could buy. The high-end fashion drawings and blocky downscale ads for self-improvement devices share a retroactive pathos, the commodity's eternal, perpetually revised promise encapsulated in Barbara Kruger's BUY ME I'LL CHANGE YOUR LIFE.
The foregrounded pricing of the commodity's hard-earned availability assuaged common postwar anxieties. Can we really save enough for that TV set? Will be always be able to afford a 19 cent can of soup? How many green stamp books do we still need to exchange for a toaster? Warhol's class background helps account for his hysteria-inflected parsimony and sporadic binges of gift-giving. Julia Warhola passed along the pack-rat instincts evidenced by Warhol's "time capsules," and the horror vacuui of treasures jammed into his townhouse, many still in their shopping bags and boxes.



11

GO: Were you interested in any politics?

AW: I listened to the speeches on the radio--Truman's.

GO: Were you impressed by him?

AW: No.

Glenn O'Brien, Interview with Andy Warhol





While modern art was glibly vilified in the tabloid press, detested by a large segment of the public that took any notice of it, and greeted with the timeworn epithets of charlatanism and fraud by traditionalist artists and educators, its most clamorous enemies in the late '40s and early '50s could be found among the Great Apes of the United States Congress, eager to capitalize on Sen. Joseph McCarthy's crusade against domestic subversion wherever it could be imagined to exist. During their European honeymoon, McCarthy's aides Roy Cohn and David Schine even cleansed USIA and armed forces libraries abroad of books containing un-American themes and stories, some 30,000 of them, including books by Jean-Paul Sartre, Alberto Moravia, Sherwood Anderson, Pearl S. Buck, Erskine Caldwell, John Dewey, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Dashiell Hammett, Howard Fast, Arthur Miller, Mickey Spillane, Edgar Snow, Norman Mailer, Georges Simenon, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, and Theodore Dreiser. Also expunged from US-sponsored cultural events abroad were works of composers such as Aaron Copland and exhibitions of architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright.
The political crusade against modernist painting was triggered by State Department planning to send "advanced" American art abroad, in a series of government-sponsored exhibitions, as part of a wide-reaching propaganda effort on behalf of "the American way of life." While Harry Truman loathed modern art and pretended to know a thing or two about the more elevating masterpieces of the past (he could, after all, play the piano), Dwight D. Eisenhower, who saw the wisdom of shoving American art down Europe's throat, declared that "as long as artists are at liberty to feel with high personal intensity, as long as our artists are free to create with sincerity and conviction, there will be a healthy controversy and progress in art…How different it is in a tyranny. When artists are made the slaves and tools of the state; when artists become chief propagandists of a cause, progress is arrested and creation and genius are destroyed." Hear hear. (Dwight D. Eisenhower, 'Freedom in the Arts,' MoMA 25th Anniversary Address, 19 October 1954, in Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 1954, quoted in Frances Stoner Saunders's The Cultural Cold War.) Both Saunders, in the book just cited, and Serge Guilbaut, in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, have written lively, detailed accounts of one of the Cold War's most curious chess moves, but the story bears repeating, in abbreviated form.
Not everyone saw a flowering of free expression in modernism, and quite a few people intent on bringing free expression to "enslaved" countries didn't much believe in allowing free expression in America. A Missouri congressman named George Dondero led a charge by legislators by declaring that "all modern art is Communistic," citing the specific wiles and devious methods by which Cubism, Futurism, Dada, "Expressionism," and "Abstractionism" sought to demoralize and mentally unbalance Americans, and, ultimately, tools of the Kremlin that these artists all were, destroy Americanism, an increasingly ill-defined and ever-diminishing quality, or quantity.
A lunatic, obviously. Like many lunatics, Dondero enjoyed enthusiastic support from other lunatics. According to Saunders, one of Dondero's posse revealed that "Modern art is actually a means of espionage…if you know how to read them, modern paintings will disclose the weak spots in US fortifications, and such crucial structures as Boulder Dam." (Saunders, p 253) This must have come as startling news to artists who had little familiarity with Boulder Dam and other crucial structures or fortifications, and the idea of Communist spies meticulously scanning reproductions of Pollock's Blue Poles with magnifying glasses and decoder rings really was beyond the pale. Whether or not the artist carried some memory of this legislator's paranoid fantasy in mind, one of Andy Warhol's last paintings, a crude black and white map indicating known Soviet missile sites, carries a rich irony indeed. (A further irony: Warhol's father had worked on the construction of Boulder Dam.)
Dondero & Co. caused endless trouble for the State Department, which endorsed Eisenhower's strategically liberal view of modernist art. The artist should be free to realize his or her autonomous vision without state interference. "Socialist Realism," the approved art of the Communist world, restricted the artist to oversaturated realist paintings of joyful workers operating tractors and their beaming comrades servicing industrial machinery. This was, in actual fact, not terribly different than the kind of thing most Americans recognized as art, most typically in the form of Norman Rockwell's cover paintings for The Saturday Evening Post.
Yet the more shrouded enclaves of American government perceived a clear propaganda value in showing the new art abroad, and resorted, as they habitually did and do, to covert means of accomplishing this goal. To put it simply, the CIA, using agent Tom Braden as its point man, laundered the money for overseas exhibitions through a network of private foundations and institutions, primarily the Museum of Modern Art, presided over by Nelson Rockefeller.
Saunders identifies the links between MoMA's committees and the Central Intelligence Agency. Rockefeller himself was chairman of the Planning Cooordination Group, "which oversaw all National Security Council decisions, including CIA covert operations." (Saunders, p 263) Moreover, the Rockefeller Brothers banks, Chase Manhattan, were among the first such institutions to decorate their lobbies and interiors with abstract paintings.
Numerous MoMA trusteees had close ties to the Company. Jock Whitney had belonged to the CIA's forerunner, the OSS, and, after the war, established J.H. Whitney & Co., "a partnership dedicated to the propagation of the free-enterprise system."
One partner in Whitney's venture, William H. Jackson, was the CIA's deputy director. William Burden, appointed chairman of MoMA's advisory committee in 1940, had been president of the CIA's Fairfield Foundation. It would take an entire chapter to cite the names and resumes of MoMA trustees, consultants, committee chairmen and others employed by MoMA while engaged in propaganda and intelligence work for the government, and a whole book to chart the connections between the State Department, the CIA, and clandestine funding of anti-Communist Left publications such as Encounter.
Questions inevitably arise when "unpolitical art" is made to serve political ends, or when the success or failure of artists depends on their complicity with the use of their work as propaganda. Considering that many of the Abstract Expressionists and other artists chosen for deluxe exposure in lavish foreign exhibitions during the '50s had been intensely involved in the politics of the 1930s, whether as communists, fellow-travellers, Trotskyites, Stalinists, socialists, or anti-Communist Leftists, it seems improbable that none of them suspected what he or she was being used for, and it may be revealing that nobody rejected the blandishments of celebrity, however questionable the vectors of that celebrity happened to be.
If some, like Robert Motherwell, had second thoughts about the methods used to establish American hegemony in the cultural sphere, these reconsiderations occurred long after the artists's careers and inscription in art history were consolidated. By then the art work had become valuable merchandise, a product, a brand of something. After twelve years away from New York, Peggy Guggenheim was aghast to discover that "the entire art movement had become an enormous business venture."









12


Roughly a quarter way into the vasty depths of Norman Mailer's novel Harlot's Ghost, a junior CIA officer, Herrick "Harry" Hubbard, his boss, Hugh Tremont Montague (modelled after the CIA chief, James Jesus Angleton), and his boss's wife, Hadley Kittredge Gardiner--names one might find engraved on plaques below John Singer Sargent portraits, or attached to characters in a Henry James novel--attend a nightclub performance by Lenny Bruce.
The year is 1957. Harry is about to be posted to Uruguay; within a few months, the Soviet Union will launch Sputnik I into outer space, sending fresh Cold War paranoia shuddering through what Robert McNamara once described in a policy paper as "the complex ganglia" of American foreign policy.
As the three CIA agents (Kittredge, soon to become Harry's mistress, also works for the Company) sit through Bruce's scatological, sexually saturated, anti-authoritarian act, Mailer orchestrates the psychic collision of two cultures, radically alien to each other, inhabiting the same country.
Here is Hugh Montague's reaction to the comic fated to become one of the counterculture's first celebrated martyrs:

"Newspaper men," said Hugh, "are swine. I think I saw
a few of them in the place paying homage to your comic genius."
"How do you know they were press?" Kittredge asked.
"Some people offer that look. I tell you, there's an abom-
inable culture breeding away in God knows what sort of filthy
dish. And Mr. Lenny Bruce is their little microbe."

Norman Mailer, Harlot's Ghost, p 439

Since Mailer himself played a prominent role in overturning American pieties and precipitating a revolution in social mores during the '50s and '60s, his ability to convincingly excavate the mentality of the CIA and its personnel attests to his novelistic virtuosity. Mailer was only one of myriad microbes festering in Montague's sordid Petrie dish, part of an accelerating revolt against the stale dishwater flavor of middle-class American life.
The Beats had been active throughout the 1940s and '50s, below the radar of mainstream culture. Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," Jack Kerouac's "On The Road," and the writings of William S. Burroughs carried on an ever-expanding, contemptuous literary battle against the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and everything he represented, as did San Francisco's North Beach poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Harold Norse and Michael McClure, and New York counterparts Frank O'Hara, LeRoi Jones, Ed Saunders, John Weiners, Diane DiPrima, and Kenneth Koch.
Protest music, avant-garde theater and dance, and the intense criticality of even mainstream American literature, as well as experimental film (notably Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's Pull My Daisy, narrated by Kerouac and featuring Beat poets Ginsberg and Corso, painters Larry Rivers and Alice Neel, future art dealer Richard Bellamy, and the great French actress Delphine Seyrig, then married to sculptor Jack Youngerman), in addition to everything mentioned above, reacted against numerous harsh realities of American society.
A growing preference for marijuana use over alcohol prefaced the spread of psychedelic drugs through American youth culture--LSD, liberated by Timothy Leary from the Harvard laboratory and its deployment in CIA mind-control experiments, psilocybin, magic mushrooms, mescaline, and other "mind-expanding" substances. This category of drugs caught on before they became illegal, and had the effect of intense sensory awareness of what the world really looked, heard, smelled, and felt like without the editing of normal consciousness, awakening unknown numbers of young people to what Burroughs called "the crackle of the universe."
Art changed because the times changed, and the times changed, to an unusual degree, because the art changed. Inevitably, the AbEx assortment of living legends became America's "official" artists, and their works became accepted by a formerly indifferent or hostile public. The meditative pull of a Rothko painting hanging in a museum cathedral took on a sacred aura, a "love me or I'll kill you" kind of authority.
The New York School had deep roots in the Noble Savagery and primal wilderness themes of sublimity of earlier American painters like Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, and Homer Dodge Martin; AbEx shared something of the same provincialism and the conflation of white male heterosexual subjectivity with "universal" values and emotions.
The violent antipathy of the Abstract Expressionist painters to younger artists doing different kinds of work made many of the older artists look small, mean, petty and bitter--which, in many instances, they were, as members of a men's club, headquartered at the Cedar Tavern, that disparaged all but a handful of female artists, expressed real hatred of homosexuals, bathed in a sea of booze every night, and considered the only place for blacks in the arts was a jazz club.
There is naturally more to this story than a few paragraphs can tell. The artists themselves didn't necessarily view themselves as members of any movement or school; each had his or her quiddities and ideas, individual techniques and formal goals. Many thought Greenberg ridiculous and a deleterious presence in the art world, but could never risk saying so.
The short version of the Abstract Expressionist finale runs that transitional artists like Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, sensitive to the atmospheric changes in American society, stressed figurative content at a time when the strategies of AbEx were losing their purchase on public attention. It's perilous to use the word "public", since the public for art has always been relatively small, even when publicity promoting art has been big. By "public," here, I mean a rarefied sector of the population. This word will accrue several different connotations as our story proceeds.
Jasper Johns's 1964 sculpmetal work The Critic Sees, in which human mouths appear behind a pair of eyeglass lenses, can be read as a commentary on the dominating role of formalist critics in the art-making of the previous generation. Still, Greenberg, Rosenberg and other critics weren't theorizing in a vacuum. The artists they celebrated were besotted by their own importance and vigilant as raptors about maintaining their status. If the audacious, contemplative, iconographic, outward-looking but still very painterly work of Johns and Rauschenberg achieved some respectful acknowledgement from the Abstract Expressionists (de Kooning gave his consent to Rauschenberg's erasure of a de Kooning drawing as a conceptual foray, akin to Rauschenberg's telegram in response Iris Clerc's attempt to commission a portrait: "THIS IS A PORTAIT OF IRIS CLERC IF I SAY SO"), the superannuating wave that swept over these eminences before the end of the '50s couldn't have been more demoralizing to the macho mandarins of the Cedar Tavern. To say that Pop Art represented everything they hated would be a gross understatement. And, for many years, no Pop artist was more hated by the men's club than Andy Warhol.













12

"On my way over here I saw this good-looking
young guy in a tight shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He
was kind of posing against that wall at Central Park
and Fifty-ninth. His hips were thrust forward; anyone
passing would have to notice the big lump of his
crotch…"
"Larry. Are you trying to tell me how attracted
you are to young men? Come off it! You're not gay."
Andy was accusing me of trying to make myself
interesting!
Larry Rivers, What Did I Do? (The Unauthorized
Autobiography, with Arnold Weinstein)

One artist who injected an important, jazz-inflected dissonance into the strictures of the New York School and its polemics has been somewhat discounted in histories of the era: Larry Rivers. Rivers was once dubbed by Viva Auder (Susan Hoffman) as "the gag man of modern art," and, besides being a virtuoso painter, he was: in the Cedar Tavern bust-up-the-bar crowd, Rivers was the least swaggery and least didactic of artists, with broad interests in far-out departures from established artistic practices. If the formerly nonobjective painters looked to a refurbished figurative painting to continue the surface tropes of AbEx, Rivers's "history paintings," among them Washington Crossing the Delaware, Friendship of America and France (Kennedy and deGaulle), The History of the Russian Revolution, and Dutch Masters were probably not what they had in mind.
Rivers's canvases used all the gestural, painterly techniques of The New York School, while broadly parodying the "history paintings" of the academic past, and treated the solemnity of The New York School as an irresistible target for deflating visual jokes, saturated with uninhibited Jewish humor--Lenny Bruce humor--more expansive and less drily ironic than the unorthodox, "serious" productions of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
While Johns and Rauschenberg were the prime movers of the shift away from AbEx, Rivers was the only talent who comfortably navigated the yawning gap between The New York School and the realm of Pop, socially as well as aesthetically. His antic personality and his finesse at avoiding pitched arguments over other people's hobbyhorses made him welcome everywhere. While de Kooning once screamed into Warhol's face that Andy had "destroyed art," Rivers partied with Warhol and paid appreciative attention to his work.
Rivers was candidly perverse, radically open-minded. His background as a jazz musician, his service in the army, his exposure to whole realms of New York's social strata alien to the Cedar Tavern crowd, and his polymorphic openness to new experiences gave him something of Duchamp's amused detachment from what came and went in art fashion; regardless of Rivers's skills as draftsman, painter, and sculptor of objects, he never took himself too seriously, and when Pop Art began sprouting on the scene, Rivers had already "gotten the joke" well ahead of the art establishment.
The mythos of Pop Art runs that numerous isolated, disparately spread-about artists in New York, working in hermetic isolation from each other, suddenly began producing recognizably related works, and that Pop "just sort of happened," almost all at once, and almost out of nowhere. Johns and Rauschenberg "paved the way," or made the world safe for Pop, by incorporating mass media images, bits of stray effluvia from the American junk heap. The intellectually astute but subversive depictions of targets, maps, flags, sculpted body parts, a goat with an auto tire around its midsection, and other "combine" paintings including silkscreened repros from magazines and newspapers blended with emphatic "evidence of the hand" in the application of paint and encaustic provided an essential transitional phase between abstraction and Pop.
This is both true and false. Johns and Rauschenberg were indisputably forerunners of Pop Art in New York, and some histories refer to them as Pop artists. They made much of the work of The New York School appear stale, self-important, humorless, and boring. While Johns's encaustic surfaces and painted brushwork looked the way AbEx painting surfaces were supposed to look, their actual execution was entirely unspontaneous, a calculated mimesis, and subtly produced the opposite effect from the projection of an inner world: Johns's paintings were an inventory of the outer world, what the eye encountered "out there," including the surfaces of nonobjective paintings.
Rauschenberg used the techniques of Abstract Expressionism as a mannerism among many available mannerisms, operating against the credo of expressive authenticity, transforming the overheated rhetorical visuals of AbEx into visual pastiche and assemblage that was cool, distanced from the emotional associations of its imagery, and droll. Nevertheless, the couple (they were a couple) paid enough obesiance to their predecessors to be assimilated into the canonical hierarchy--more quickly than Larry Rivers was, though several early Rivers works were purchased by museums.
An explanation for this can be found in scattered writings of the visionary underground artist and filmmaker Jack Smith, whose almost secret public performances and pioneering film Flaming Creatures had a powerful influence on Robert Wilson, Andy Warhol, The Theater of the Ridiculous, and innumerable other theatrical and visual innovators. Smith frequently noted that Americans expected art to be "heavy," ponderous, and solemn, arguing that, on the contrary, the most delightful and profound art was, to Smith's way of thinking, "light," capricious, improvisational, saturated with dreamlike illogic, chaos, and humor, and freely employed the most flambuoyant kitsch pop culture had to offer.
Further to another point, Pop Art didn't spring from the brow of anyone and splash down as ceiling leaks in scattered cold-water studios all over Manhattan. Pop had its own extensive pedigree, dating as far back as Cubist collages and Dada. It had first-hand cousinage to Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Morton Livingston Schamberg, John Heartfield, Sophie Taeuber, Emmy Hemmings, Hugo Ball, Marcel Janco, and Viking Eggeling--a lineage into which Johns and Rauschenberg, Pop or not, can be plausibly fitted. Like the Dadaists, Pop artists appropriated familiar bits of "found reality," including advertisements, commercial lettering, product logos, newspaper headlines, train tickets, and other flotsam and jetsam of mass culture.
Pop as a specific type of new art probably acquired its name from writings of Lawrence Alloway, but much of its point was first made by a 1956 collage by British artist Richard Hamilton, entitled Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? Hamilton's zany, overstuffed travesty depicts a basement apartment living room, its interior replete with a woman in pearls on a TV screen chatting on the phone, while a "real" woman in nipple pasties and a lampshade on her head strikes a semi-recumbent pose on a sofa; another woman, culled from an ad, in a red dress, vacuum-cleans the upper reaches of a gold-carpeted entrance staircase. Another lampshade incorporates the hood emblem of a Ford automobile. A canned ham stands totemlike on a coffee table. A black and white, reel-to-reel tape recorder rests on the floor. A Formica sheet that resembles a black-and-white Jackson Pollock leans at a precarious angle against one wall, mysteriously supporting the legs of a second sofa and an end-table. The framed cover of a Young Romance comic hangs on the wall; through what look like sliding glass windows revealing the street above, a Warners' Theater features Al Jolson's "The Jazz Singer."
The most instantly attention-grabbing image in Hamilton's collage is that of a Mr. Universe type bodybuilder in a jock strap, his right hand gripping an enormous, phallic Tootsie Pop stick, the round candy end enclosed in red and yellow wrapping. The word POP on the candy wrapper pops out from the center of the picture.
Regardless of the vacuum cleaner, Hamilton's Just what is it… has the jumbled quality of horror vacuui, presenting an impressively representative assortment of the kinds of iconography Pop Artists would adopt as singular, hyperinflated subjects: comics, including dialogue balloons, candies and sweets, parodistic use of the nude, evocations of early Hollywood, Abstract Expressionist devices detached from their "sincere" contexts, ad design, and aleatory juxtapositions of disparate sign systems.
This scarcely covers the Pop waterfront. Rauschenberg, Rivers, Edward Keinholtz, and Jim Dine mined much of the same territory that Hamilton and other British artists (Eduardo Paolozzi, R.J. Kitaj, David Hockney, Peter Blake) did at roughly the same time. If Hamilton's collage seems originary, it's because so many of Pop Art's subjects are crammed into it, and because of the strategic placement of the Tootsie Pop wrapper, as it seems to protrude from the bodybuilder's groin. The latter feature recalls the embrace of many art movements of negatively aimed words and phrases hostile critics used to dismiss them, so it seems natural, if not factual, that Hamilton's outrageous positioning of POP in Just what is it… decided the new art's lasting appellation.




























13

He [Jean Tinguely] had an icebox that had
been stolen from an alley outside Marcel
Duchamp's secret studio, and when you opened
it, a very noisy siren went off and red lights
flashed. This icebox really had nothing to do
with Pop Art, but it set the noise and tone that
was to continue all the way through the Sixties.
Walter Hopps, quoted in Edie, by Jean Stein



Pop Art in New York did materialize as if it were something in the air, summoned out of various lairs by the phenomenal impact of Johns and Rauschenberg. Johns's work was austere in its self-control, Rauschenberg's baroque in its combinatory audacity, and both were cerebral, aloof, and reluctant to prescribe or endorse any particular method of reading their works. But both were forthcoming about their unwillingness to get "lost in the painting" or to relinquish control of its elements, and their use of the "look" of spontaneity and gestural accident was simply a visual ingredient in a work rather than the unplanned discoveries produced by the act of painting itself.
It happened that many artists whose works had obvious affinities were discovered by art dealers at roughly the same time, among them Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Kienholz, Tom Wesselmann, Ray Johnson, Mel Ramos, Ed Ruscha, Marisol, Joe Goode, Robert Indiana, John Chamberlain, George Segal, and Roy Lichtenstein; moreover, these artists could be readily linked to new developments in European painting and sculpture, to work by Martial Rayesse, Arman, Alain Jacquet, Wolf Vostell, Michaelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter, and Joseph Beuys, as well as the British Pop artists cited earlier.
By "roughly the same time," I mean the period from, approximately, 1955 to 1965: from about 1955 on, the critical support structures of the New York School became increasingly irrelevant to what was going on in the art world. Even AbEx's champions conceded that its thematic concerns, if not its technical strategies themselves, had had their day. Fluxus, Funk Art, "happenings," performance art, hybrid combinations of painting, sculpture, body art, music, dance, so-called "underground" film and theater steadily erased the rigid boundaries between popular and elitist art. The influence of rock and roll, African-American blues and jazz, and electronic music had a direct impact on the other arts: if you were listening to Robert Johnson or John Coltrane or Elvis Presley, or Stockhausen or Lucio Berio, what "higher" pleasure did a Barnett Newman zip painting give you?
The rationale that supported a hierarchy of aesthetic pleasures was contingent on the idea that some kinds of art were ennobling and others coarsening, and the designation of sensuously immediate art as "kitsch" was the kind of distinction that invited its own obsolescence in a culture increasingly dominated by young people, a culture indifferent to the academic, stuffy categorization of some art as "serious" and other art as frivolous or ephemeral or "commercial." (The ephemeral, seemingly insignificant moment can persist in memory long after a full performance of Wagner's Gottterdammerung has erased itself from recollection, in any case, such is the capricious wiring of our individual brains.)
The affluent society that followed the Second World War and depended on social repression as its guiding principle spawned a generation that took affluence for granted and Dionysian hedonism as a ideal. The ideologically gridlocked world of the 1950s fairly begged for a thorough-going cultural high colonic. The new generation had a far-reaching agenda of pleasures and criticalities, its constellation of culture heroes, and in the universities, its own self-critique, as the Society of the Spectacle and commodity-centered capitalism produced a bedazzling richness of contradictions.
What was commonly called "the generation gap" was a yawning chasm between the security of methodical advancement in mainstream society and the risky experimentation with strategies for social change. The serious study of Marxism and sympathetic interest in Third World liberation movements revealed the Commie-phobia of the '50s as a species of brainwashing; at the same time, some of the earliest landmarks of student activism, such as the 1962 Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society, explicitly rejected any Communist model for societal reorganization.
Susan Sontag's advocacy of "an erotics of art" in Against Interpretation endorsed the far-reaching social experimentation of the youth movement and provided an appealing counter-strategy for the reception of art, an openness to the new opposite in spirit to the institution-bound heirs of Clement Greenberg and like-minded arbiters of taste. Sontag's aesthetic enthusiasms didn't preclude a serious commitment to the Civil Rights Movement and mobilization against the Vietnam War; these were, in a sense, contiguous exercises of moral conscience unfolding along the same continuum throughout the decade of the 1960s. Pop Art was "political" mainly by inference, monumentalizing the most banal and ridiculous features of everyday American life with a mixture of satire and irreproachable "artness." But Pop Art "gave permission" to explicitly political statements in art that fit under Pop's umbrella--one example being Paul Thek's Death of a Hippy, and the insertion of one of his "meat sculptures" into the open side of a Warhol Brillo box.
Skipping momentarily beyond Warhol's static images to his films (which, considered in their entirety, are often claimed to recapitulate the history of movies, from the monochrome tableaux vivantes of the early nickelodeons to the scripted, color talkies of studio cinema, though this is arguable on many grounds) a contemporary viewer of the series beginning with The Chelsea Girls and ending with Blue Movie (the last film Warhol directed himself) may be struck by their frequent allusions to the Vietnam War, reminding us that the war and its reverberations in America formed the psychic backdrop against which the films were made--from Mary Woronov's character "Hanoi Hannah" in Chelsea Girls to Viva's epic monologue in Nude Restaurant, in which she likens a hairdressing mishap prior to a modelling assignment to "the scorched earth policy" in Vietnam. (One of Nude Restaurant's cast includes a draft avoider on his way to Canada.) Warhol declared that Blue Movie (also known as Fuck)--the only Warhol film that shows sexual intercourse (in a nonpornographic manner) rather than frustrates its completion, or thwarts the viewer's anticipation of its occurrence--was "about the Vietnam War," and it is. The dialogues between Viva and Louis Waldon running through the whole film reflect the sodden domestic atmosphere of a violent, convulsive time, deflected by ruminative, rambling conversations, eating, and mellow lovemaking. It is a uniquely quiet, plangent, even tender Warhol film, and probably his most cinematically shapely one, free of any frenzied histrionics, chemically-induced aggression, and instead suffused with authenticity and feeling.

























14

Everybody was feeling the acceleration.
Andy Warhol & Pat Hackett,
POPISM The Warhol Sixties




The youth culture of the 1960s was an amalgam of desires, utopian wishes, and schemes of self-liberation. Its avatars militated, in an anarchic way, for more dramatic forms of dissent and/or personal escape from the prescriptive life itinerary of their class--overwhelmingly, the middle class. It was a class completely alien to Andy Warhol's experience, as the writer Dave Hickey has pointed out; for Andy, the extremes of American life, and the extremes of what could qualify as art, were the natural subjects of his work and the sources of his sensibility.
The triumph of Pop Art coincided with the materialization of a New Left, contemptuous of the Old Left's stale polemics and its failure to affect the country's domestic and foreign policies. Incincerated draft cards, mass marches and demonstrations, race riots and love-ins soon erased the dead calm and mellow acquiescence of the Eisenhower years from popular memory. Some only understood retrospectively that they lived as much in fear as affluence during the eight year tenure of the Great Golfer. Yet the high hopes for progressive change that blew in with the Kennedy Administration were quickly deflated; if anything, JFK's brief government ratcheted up existing threats of annihilation or an endless Cold War against the Soviet Union, using brinksmanship tactics in response to crises--the airlifts into divided Berlin, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs Invasion. JFK was his father's son in many ways, not least vis-à-vis the Civil Rights Movement: every concession to it was made grudgingly and for politically expedient reasons.
A White House that invited Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer to dinner was simultaneously prepared to blast humanity into nonexistence to ensure "American supremacy." The physical attactiveness of the First Family transmitted an opposite message of reformist energy and steadfast efforts towards a safer world. John and Jackie Kennedy were, as many knew at the time, "with it" in ways no earlier American ruling couple had ever been. Jackie's chic made Mamie Eisenhower look like an expanse of vintage wallpaper. Jack, worldly, stricken with satyrisis, actually read the new books and was hip enough to wiggle his ass in front of Tennessee Williams.
In a bizarre way, insiders found it comforting that while the world lurched from one potentially apocalyptic crisis to another, many of the country's key decision makers were cavorting with call girls and heaving dinner into the Potomac over the sides of eighty foot yachts. It was no secret among a substantial subculture that both the President and the First Lady got regular amphetamine injections from Dr. Max Jacobson, one of three "Dr. Feelgoods" who provided speed laced with B12 to Andy Warhol's "Superstars" and countless political and entertainment figures.
The Kennedys had taste, wit, and an appealing touch of hedonism. They also practiced the same moral hypocrisy as America's traditional ruling class.
At this historical juncture, often referred to as the New Frontier, Warhol's soup cans, as someone once observed, were "a brilliant slap in the face of America." They were insouciant, defiant, impeccably unembellished examples of "the naked lunch at the end of the newspaper fork," ascerbic "no comment" comments on the previous decade's unbearable conformism--and, equally, emblems of social and political heterodoxy spreading through American society. They were banal. They were visionary. They were works of obdurate stupidity radiating the insight of genius. They have never lost their iconic punch, perhaps because they transmuted the banality of a specific, familiar object into a wink of nonconformity--precisely the kind of dissonance and contradiction in which ever-growing masses of people, immersed in an environment dominated by advertising, now live.
Warhol was a protean maker of meaningful images resonant and powerful for their apparent meaninglessness. Their neutrality made the viewer's reaction the true subject of the work. When you looked at a Warhol painting, the painting stared back; Warhol rewired your perception of the world around you. He forced your attention on the elaborately constructed nature of that world, its labor-intensive artifice, the complex design of images and objects that were taken for granted as "natural." Other Warhol works may have had greater effect on aesthetic perception than the soup cans. But no Warhol pictures are "perfect" in the same sense that the Campbell Soup Can paintings are perfect. Everything else Warhol painted, filmed, tape-recorded, videotaped, photographed, or simply attached his name to carries a vestige of personal idiosyncracy and "differentness."
Immediately after the Soup Cans, Warhol began using silkscreens to make his paintings, a rapid means of multipying his output. Yet no two silkscreen works are exactly the same. The re-usable screens, ostensibly intended to generate many identical images, introduced the equivalent of painterly variations and intriguing singularities that the Soup Can period had seemingly--but only seemingly--repudiated. Clogs, uneven pressure on the screen press, and irregularities in the canvas or the primer coat created gaps between serially contiguous images, areas of lighter and darker color, shifting degrees of legibility, and other inconsistencies. These inconsistencies were deliberate, calculated, and introduced into Warhol's pictures for their evocation of the effect of motion picture film passing through a projector, the image flickering from near-blackness to an oversaturation that makes the image a ghostly nimbus. These effects were vigilantly overseen by Warhol even when someone else was manipulating the screen press.
He may have said that he wanted to be a machine, but with regard to his work only acted like one in the sense that he never stopped working. He only partially ascribed to the advice of one of his mentors, the composer John Cage, to welcome the operations of chance: Warhol knew which accidents--and he left much less room for accident than is generally imagined--were "right" for his work, and which ones wouldn't do.









15

The spectacle is a permanent opium war
waged to make it impossible to distinguish
goods from commodities, or true satisfaction
from a survival that increases according to
its own logic. Consumable survival must
increase, in fact, because it continues to
enshrine deprivation.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle p. 30



The Soup Can paintings acquired an edgier, punchy association with a full-blown social upheaval--Warhol personally, in a vertiginously short time, became associated with dark, unsavory things on the nether edge of "the counterculture"--after JFK's assassination in November, 1963. While America had always selectively repressed its own history and asserted its self-evident virtue after every self-inflicted disaster, the JFK killing was touted as "the day America lost its innocence." Warhol almost immediately embalmed the iconography of collective grief and mourning, in a series of silkscreens of Jackie Kennedy before and after the assassination, producing a kind of freize of shock--the shock of the irremediable, an event recognizable by everyone as "a turning point" in the way of the world. How Warhol himself reacted to the event has been recorded differently by different people.
It was one of the few times when America's loss of innocence was followed by an unusually long aftermath of collective trauma, but an incident that occurred the following year was probably more symptomatic of what America and Americans were quickly becoming, and each new wrinkle in the developments it presaged were captured with uncanny prescience in Andy Warhol's art. Although the event's immediate impact was more local than the Kennedy Assassination, its implications were, in terms of collective psychopathology, broader and even more disturbing.
At 3:15 a.m. on March 13, 1964, a 28-year-old woman named Catherine "Kitty" Genovese, returning from work as a bar manager in the Hollis section of Queens, parked her car in the Long Island Railroad lot 20 feet from her apartment at 82-70 Austin Street in Kew Gardens. A stranger driving a white Corvair had begun following her; after parking and locking her car, she ran for her apartment house door. The man from the Corvair chased her, jumped on her back, and stabbed her repeatedly.
Kitty Genovese screamed for help many times during the assault. Several apartment lights came on in nearby buildings. One man on the seventh floor of 82-68 Austin Street later claimed to have opened his window and shouted for the attacker to "let that girl alone." The assailant walked away. Bleeding profusely, the victim staggered to the side of her building, headed for the rear entrance, but encountered a locked door.
Five minutes later, the man returned and resumed stabbing her. Kitty Genovese screamed that she was dying. Again lights went on in many apartments. The attacker ran to his car and appeared to drive off. Kitty crawled to a vestibule at 82-62 Austin and collapsed on the floor. The Corvair reappeared, the man got out, and found his victim by following a trail of blood. He again stabbed her several times, cutting off her bra and panties. He raped her as she died. Her ordeal went on for over half an hour.
Kitty Genovese's murder got little attention in the press, until two weeks later, when The New York Times reported that no fewer than 37 neighbors had witnessed the killing from their windows and heard Kitty Genovese's repeated screams. None of them telephoned the police or attempted to intervene.
All the witnesses later offered feeble, selfish excuses for doing nothing. Various psychologists blamed the incident on "the urban environment," "which makes closeness very difficult and leads to the alienation of the individual to the group." Attempts were made to justify the grotesque apathy of Kitty Genovese's neighbors. But the worldwide publicity that followed the revelation of the silent witnesses clearly struck a chord in communities of every size all over the country. Americans everywhere must have recognized themselves in the bald statement of one witness: "I didn't want to get involved." (John F. Kennedy had exhorted Americans "to get involved," and look what happened to him.)
For the Kew Gardens neighbors, witnessing a person's murder, in real life, for more than a half hour, was like watching television. Spellbound and completely passive, devoid of empathy but addicted to spectacle, Kitty Genovese's Queens neighbors were in no way different than Americans in rural Iowa or a small town in Michigan or a less crowded city than New York. Every conceivable theory was concocted to account for the witnesses's indifference by psychiatrists and "experts" in academia, but the simple truth of the matter was that none of them cared enough about another person's suffering to pick up a telephone and call the police.
No doubt these same witnesses had been roused to very powerful emotional reactions when they learned of the Kennedy Assassination (even Albert deSalvo, the Boston Strangler, shed some tears over it)--in all likelihood, while watching television. The image of an event happening far away had more "reality" than one they saw and heard directly below their apartment windows.
The dissociation of image from reality, the privileging of images over reality, symptomatic of an affectlessness invariably found in sociopaths, is a major theme in Andy Warhol's work. It is often conflated with an endorsement of affectlessness, partly because the self-protective public image Warhol constructed as his fame as an artist expanded into instant, physical recognizability, like that of a movie star, was laconic-bordering-on-mutism, recessive, not so much aloof as dazed, as if blinded by flashbulbs (which he often was). And partly because Warhol, growing up homosexual in the '30s and '40s, had shame and desire duelling in his psyche, and had finally forced a truce between them with a Zen-like indifference clause written into it: too many emotions, too much emotion, would have been deleterious to his life, his art, and his career. Warhol's self-control was preternatural. Eventually, people with precious little control of themselves gravitated to him as if to a father who could bestow a feeling of importance and a sense of direction to their inner chaos. Most were Catholics, afflicted with free-ranging guilt and a need to confess and receive absolution.
What Warhol had the ability to confer on his ever-expanding entourage was not a sense of self but individual public images of their own. To be seen, Norman O. Brown writes in Love's Body, is the ambition of ghosts; to be remembered is the ambition of the dead. But having an image, in American society at large, was steadily becoming more rewarding than being a person; people have problems, images just have an audience. The most adroit and clever of Warhol's familiars managed to make their problems into their images in a compelling way. Neuroticism became a lively asset rather than a liability.
What many people wanted from Warhol was what Valerie Solanis accused him of having: "control" over their lives. This desire brought people swarming to The Factory, and to the back room at Max's Kansas City, where sitting at Andy's table confirmed one's status in the pecking order. The table itself served as Andrea Feldman's stage of choice where, at some strategic moment of the evening, she routinely ripped open her blouse to "show her melons" and announced, "It's showtime!"
When people think of Andy Warhol, they often conjure a plurality, muzzy pictures of the vivid personalities swirling around him, pictures in which Warhol himself is practically invisible--though never quite. It's well known that Warhol "gave up painting" for several years to make films, and that his studio, christened "The Factory" by Billy Name (who covered the entire place in silver at Warhol's request), became an almost public space where high and low, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, mainstream famous and underground famous, the beautiful and the beautiful mingled in a continuous saturnalia where all social categories became levelled, interchangeable, and irrelevant, much as class and race differences evaporated in a gay bar. The Factory embodied Andy's fascination with glamour, high style, and celebrity, especially in close proximity to the trashy, the outlandish, the faintly criminal and the borderline psychotic. His work mirrors this fascination, but simultaneously evokes the only inescapable link between everyone who came and went and everyone he painted and filmed: the inevitable end of all tomorrow's parties.
If Kitty Genovese comes to mind as readily as the Kennedy Assassination in thinking about Warhol's work, the reasons are obvious: in a 1966 interview with Gretchen Berg in the East Village Other, commenting on the "Death and Disaster" series, Warhol said, "The death series I did was divided into two parts: the first on famous deaths and the second on people nobody ever heard of and I thought people should think about them sometimes: the girl who jumped off the Empire State Building or the ladies who ate the poisoned tuna fish and people getting killed in car crashes. It's not that I feel sorry for them, it's just that people go by and it doesn't really matter to them that someone unknown was killed so I thought it would be nice for these unknown people to be remembered by those who, ordinarily, wouldn't think of them." (I'll Be Your Mirror, p. 94)
However blandly and coldly stated, for Warhol to embark on the "Death and Disaster" paintings at all reflects a more than honorary awareness of other people's unhappiness or bad luck, and his own terror of death. The latter he dissembled with his lobster shell of emotional vacancy when other people died, with his refusal to exhibit any overly aggrieved or strongly negative feelings at all.
Within his immense, adventurously variegated oeuvre, all sorts of internal contradictions render sweeping generalizations on such matters moot. In the books he wrote in collaboration with Pat Hackett, one finds strikingly altered accounts of the same events, clashing characterizations of the same people, and, most interestingly of all, a multiplicity of Andy Warhols. Not in the ordinary sense that everyone has different moods, changes of opinion, and more than one way of regarding the world, but rather in the sense of expressing different parts of himself at different periods, presenting the image of himself best suited to a particular moment in the culture's rapidly shifting zeitgeist.
One can't question Warhol's "sincerity" in any of these incarnations, since each is a construct--sometimes a highly speculative construct that doesn't have that ring of falsity with which Warhol imbued the truth. More often it works brilliantly. The shelf of books Warhol produced is not an inconsiderable one, and their oscillating quantities of revelation and withholding suggest that Warhol himself was a series of Warhols, superficially identical with himself, but on closer inspection, less and less the same person from one book to the next (or one interview to the next, or one art practice to the next). He imported himself into the image world as much as he could, and his public passivity mimicked the malleability of images--again as a sort of insulation against death and emotional suffering.
He was too intelligent to really believe in this stratagem; still, his image(s) did protect him from much of what he didn't want in his life. The pictures he made stared down his desires, but likewise acted as purgatives. One thing he didn't want in his life was to actually eat Campbell's Soup, since he'd had it for lunch every day throughout twenty years of grinding poverty. At least one of Warhol's Factory familiars recalls that Andy hated Campbell's Soup. It's conceivable that making an artistic reputation and a fortune on it was both Warhol's homage to, and revenge on, Campbell's Soup.


















16


The great rule: If the little bit you have
is nothing special in itself, at least find
a way of saying it that is a little bit
special.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books



This discursive account of Andy Warhol and the society in which he came of age has, to some extent, dispensed with too precise a chronology, in part to avoid the tanglesome fact that Warhol not only returned to the same subjects repeatedly throughout his career, but usually made print editions of the same images that appear in his paintings; more complicating still, many Warhol objects classified as prints are in fact unique variations within editions customarily produced in identical numbered series.
Aside from the confusing discrepancies that appear from one book to the next about the technical methods Warhol used in making a particular work--the original Soup Cans, for example, are often referred to as "silkscreen on canvas," when in fact they were hand-painted, using hand-cut stencils for the lettering (the stencils are meticulously preserved in the archives of the Warhol Museum), while later versions were produced with silkscreens--anecdotal material also appears in confusing variations. From Klaus Honnef's Taschen book, Pop Art, for example, we learn with considerable surprise that Warhol "studied sociology" (Honnef apparently means this in the academic sense of study); the episode in which Warhol is said to have presented Emile de Antonio with two different paintings of a Coke bottle, one with Abstract Expressionist hash marks, the other without, has been recounted to include the presence of Ivan Karp (Leo Castelli's gallery manager at the time), and, in a recent PBS documentary, was expanded to a sort of "jury" of four people invited in for their opinions.
Warhol's own writings (how much of these writings are attributable to Pat Hackett's superb editing/translation rather than Warhol's own words is a matter of speculation) state that he often asked people what he should paint; Warhol writes, quite reasonably, that he sees no difference between asking friends for ideas and finding them by looking at magazines. But which people he asked, why he asked which specific person, and who actually suggested a particular idea are reported differently throughout the Warhol literature. A consensus of agreement awards Muriel Latow credit for advising Warhol to paint money, "or something people see every day, like a Campbell Soup can." The attribution of Warhol's ideas to other people seems, in many cases, inconsistent with Warhol's personality. Whether he asked one person or ten people what he should do, Warhol probably listened to everybody and then did what he'd wanted to do in the first place.
It's impossible to avoid every thrice- and forty-times told tale about Warhol. Anyone interested in Warhol probably knows that Leo Castelli initially chose not to represent him because Warhol's comic strip paintings covered the same subject matter as those Castelli's latest acquisition, Roy Lichtenstein (though Castelli's discomfort when Ivan Karp dragged him to Warhol's cramped working space, where visitors were required to wear carnival masks while a single, continuously repeating rock and roll song blasted at deafening volume, probably had something to do with it too). Ivan Karp's and Henry Geldzahler's unflagging early support for Warhol's work, including Geldzahler's five-hour-a-day phone conversations with Warhol, were among the earliest recorded details of Warhol's Pop Art career.
Irving Blum's offer to show the Campbell Soup paintings in Los Angeles, and his later proposal to keep them together as a set--one of the most lucrative decisions in the history of contemporary art--obliged Blum to buy several canvases back from collectors who'd paid $100 for each; Blum, whom Warhol charged $1000, in monthly installments, for the entire series, eventually sold the original set of 32 to MoMA for $15 million, while a single can, not part of the series, went at auction not long ago for $11 million. This sequence of horse trading lore is too well-known to bear repeating (though I've just repeated it).
To return to Pop Art at the time of its emergence, we know that "Pop" became a blanket term for all kinds of art practices. The Pop artists were looking for a fresh approach to things, and for the things themselves--a stylistic break from the painterly strictures of the New York School, and subject matter reflecting the outer world rather than the artist's interiority. Beyond that, the psychic perception that there was no real difference between the artist's interiority and the outer world was something Warhol had no trouble articulating: "It doesn't matter what you do. Everybody just goes on thinking the same thing, and every year it gets more and more alike. Those who talk about individuality the most are the ones who most object to deviation, and in a few years it may be the other way around. Some day everybody will think just what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening." (AW, quoted p. 58, Andy Warhol, MOCA catalogue by Heiner Bastian)
There were overlaps between the artists: Ray Johnson did Elvis Presley before Warhol, using the same publicity still, and everybody did some version of Marilyn Monroe; Warhol's own practice legitimized Raymond Pettibone's later, exact copy of Warhol's Marilyn.
Warhol's early career as a highly visible commercial artist provided some established artists with one of several flimsy excuses to dismiss his "fine art" efforts. (The other Pop Artists readily accepted Warhol.) It was and still is common for unknown artists to seek employment doing commercial art. The demand for Warhol's work in this field actually facilitated his speed of production and his efficient use of assistants. He had had at least one paid assistant for years, and his mother also helped get the work done, executing the lettering on Warhol's privately printed books in the '50s, sometimes providing her loopy, charming calligraphy for illustrations. Julia won a design prize of her own, for the hand-written sleeve of a Moondog album.
Warhol re-legitimized and expanded the Renaissance practice of leaving parts of a work, or the whole thing, in the hands of others; to "make" a work could mean simply to conceive it and approve its execution by assistants. In reality, the atelier system of painting continued after the Renaissance right up into the present day. Warhol merely made it familiar to the general public, which had never had any close knowledge of how it worked. (Given the traffic in and out of The Factory, Warhol never signed anything until it was sold; unless it was signed, he hadn't officially made it.)
Warhol didn't really take his cue from the Renaissance, but from Hollywood. He was the Irving Thalberg of art, involved in decisive ways in the products issued with his name attached (though Thalberg often left his producer's credit off the films he supervised), leaving the fabrication, the filming, the magazine editing or whatever the physical job was in other people's hands, to a varying extent. In 1967, he hired Bertolucci actor Alan Midgette to impersonate him on a college lecture tour; Midgette could "um," "wow," "gee," and "I don't know" as well as Andy could, and had a stiff wind at the airport not blown all the baby powder out of Midgette's hair, Warhol's lecture tour would be a neglible footnote in Warhol's biography. Instead, as with many things Warhol, it became an antically brilliant prank that "scandalized" no one except art bureaucrats and the college accountants who cut the checks.
That Warhol would be inspired to hire an impersonator indicates both how recognizably famous he had become by the late 1960s, as well as how iconically effective his thoroughly contrived, strange appearance was. His look, assembled from a few simple, unchanging elements--fright wig, black turtle-neck, leather pants or jeans, and sunglasses--simplified "Andy Warhol" into an instantly recognizable sign system that also obliterated his detailed features. Everyone recognized him and nobody knew what he actually looked like.
Warhol started shooting films during the same period when he produced most of his greatest paintings. He purchased a Bolex 8mm in July, 1963, and shot Sleep, a film of poet John Giorno sleeping, that summer; in the fall, during a spell in Los Angeles for his second Ferus Gallery show--of Silver Elvis paintings and part of his Liz Taylor series--he shot Tarzan and Jane, Regained Sort Of with underground actor and poet Taylor Mead and filmmaker Naomi Levine, with Dennis Hopper acting as stunt man when Mead's Tarzan had to climb a coconut palm.
By this time, Warhol had established his credentials as a Pop Artist, if not yet the Pop Artist. The most familiar names in the Pop cosmos had all, like Warhol, arrived at their defining subject matter by considered study of the American scene and its contents. Claes Oldenberg had devised his "soft" sculptures of objects like typewriters, and his "hard," jumbo-scaled versions of office erasers, plaster-and-enamel simulacra of huge hamburgers and coffee shop deserts encased in cake-savers; James Rosenquist had adapted his experience as a billboard painter to works that juxtaposed jet fighters with salon-style hair dryers, atomic blasts with coiled spaghetti and rowing oars; Tom Wesselmann had embarked on his Great American Nudes, George Segal on his plaster figures in tableaux, Jim Dine on his "painting objects" of bathrobes, shirts and neckties embedded in thick skins of uniformly colored paint; Warhol's "Pop statement" played out in a sequence of hard-edged, black and white paintings of bakelite telephones, Coke bottles, storm window ads, and similarly "naked" subjects, culminating in the supremely cryptic obviousness of the Campbell's Soup cans.
Warhol had worried that the stripped-down look of his first important Pop works wouldn't look like art without some slather of assertive brushwork in them. The unexhibited, "arty" early versions of these pictures still exist, and are probably worth millions. But the strong suit of the blunt, completely impersonal Coke bottles and soup cans was, precisely, that they didn't look like art. They presented themselves as art, without any apologetic or meaching obesiance to the practices of the New York School. They claimed their own space as art, and successfully determined what art would look like now.


























17


I made a mistake. I should have just done the
Campbell Soups and just kept on doing them.
Andy Warhol, in an interview with
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh



Warhol used the Campbell's Soup can in a suite of early drawings of men's feet, feet resting on tables, touching, or almost touching, or cradling objects, but the soup can in resplendantly stark isolation was a swift change of direction from the Dick Tracey, Superman, and other comic book-inspired paintings Warhol had been working on, a change triggered by his encounter, on a visit to Castelli Gallery, with one of Roy Lichtenstein's comic book paintings.
Andy knew before Castelli visited his studio that there would not be room for two Pop Artists working on comic book imagery or, if there were, too much room for both to
"make the world safe for Andy Warhol," as Dave Hickey drolly characterizes "Andy's chief concern in life" in Rick Burns's PBS documentary on Warhol. In fact, Warhol had already stopped painting the comic book images when Castelli visited, but these were all he had of recent work to show him.
As Billy Name observes in the PBS documentary, Andy wanted "to throw lightning": the artist recognized the need to stake out territory that hadn't been colonized, and this wasn't only a matter of choosing a subject, but arriving at something so powerful in its inanity and aptness, its mute thereness that it could, by its obdurate silence, reroute any discussion of it onto the society that produced it.
The choice of the soup can was neither artibrary nor inevitable. It was someone else's idea, and Warhol's decision to use the idea was a stroke of luck that provided the single missing part of a stroke of genius.
Warhol knew what kind of object he needed to use for a painting that would never age and never stop withholding the same indecipherable secret. It had to be something that people saw everywhere, something that existed but was also nothing. He knew that virtually anything that was everywhere was nothing. Furthermore, he knew that everything that exists is nothing: chimeral images that emerge from nothingness and return to it in less than an eyeblink of eternity.
Warhol might be ideally understood as a Catholic Existentialist and Zen Catholic.
One of Robbe-Grillet's novels continually returns the reader's attention to a squashed centipede on a wall. It's not a symbol of anything. It's a squashed centipede. It's there. Warhol couldn't avoid, had he wanted to, a universally familiar commodity, whether coke bottle or movie star, that could do double service as an icon and an image. The strategies of differentiation artists have always used to give a personal signature to their work had become far less enshrouded in mystification by the late 1950s and early 60s than previously: with Pop, "what to paint" became a legitimately objective question, as did "how to paint it". The same dilemma is faced by any kind of artist. A second dilemma arises when an artist's work is so well-established that he or she is faced with an expectation of "continuity" with his or her earlier practice. Warhol resolved this in two ways: by working in series, and by abruptly changing the subject or the medium of his production. He often revisited earlier imagery and continually explored outside it. Actually, he resolved it in three ways. Instead of making his art a reflection of himself, he made himself a reflection of his art.
Pop was something to be read with the instantaneous comprehension demanded by a billboard or a magazine advertisement, but something that changed whatever meaning was projected onto it when its context shifted. (Later, even the contextual change became, in practice, unnecessary, as art and advertising merged in myriad juxtapositions: Absolut vodka ads, Beatles music in TV commercials for sportswear and SUVs, multiple prints distributed like publicity flyers in galleries, etc.)
It's understandable that the hand-painted Ferus-style Campbell Soups are often misidentified as "silkscreen prints," because Warhol's work was beginning to engage photography in "fine art" in a confoundingly new way, and though the Ferus examples, closely examined, are clearly not products of a screen press, they can easily appear so in reproduction--and how something looked in reproduction was an essential consideration in the way Pop Artists designed their work. They were dealing, after all, with a society in which images no longer appeared singly or uniquely, but were disseminated in serial repetition: corporate logos, product packaging, the images of film stars and disasters in newspapers and magazines, the transmission of images into millions of locations through television.
The serial nature of Warhol's Pop image-making arose organically, if the word can be used to describe a reproductive technology, from his "blotted line" technique, notably influenced by Ben Shahn's linear stacatto, in commercial illustration. The simple process Warhol used by inking an "original" on water-resistant paper, then applied to absorbent paper to produce an indeterminate number of copies, each slightly different, "mechanized" the hand-made, as the limitless reproducibility of the photograph was "mechanical."
The Campbell Soup paintings, as already noted, are roughly contemporaneous with other serial works that were done with silkscreen inks: Front and Back Dollar Bills, Eighty Two-Dollar Bills, One Dollar Bills; many of his first serial pictures, like Handle with Care--Glass--Thank You were drawn, then carved into a rubber template, coated with ink and manually applied to the canvas. A large number of such works dating between 1961 and 1962 experiment with slightly uneven grids and gaps that indicate the non-mechanical means by which they were produced.
Warhol varied the treatment of the Soup Cans; some have been formally designated as "Ferus-type" cans, others as "Wallowich type." The Ferus show soup cans derived from a reproduction of a tomato soup can that appeared on the left side of the Campbell Company's business envelopes; Edward Wallowich, a photographer, produced 35mm photographs of Campbell Soup cans for Warhol, including the "distressed" versions that feature torn and peeling labels, crushed and dented cans, and cans in stacked combinations. A well-known variant shows a soup can with its lid punctured by an old-fashioned, knife-edged can opener suspended at an upward diagonal.
In the 1950s, Warhol produced a number of "private" drawings derived from photographs done for him by the fashion photographer Otto Fenn, some using thickish lines, of men of various ages, many in drag, or semi-drag. During the pre-silkscreen period, Warhol often had photographic images thrown onto paper with an opaque projector and traced their details from the projection.
Many compositional and reprentational details differentiate Warhol's Campbell Soups: the fleur-de-lis border at the bottom of the label, the angle at which the can's lid is presented, the treatment of the gold Exposition medallion centered between the upper red and lower white basic color scheme, vary from painting to painting, and within individual paintings containing multiple cans. The non-identicality of Warhol's serial images obtains more obviously in his depictions of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, Troy Donaghue, Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando, Tuesday Weld, Jackie Kennedy and Elvis Presley.
The affinity of Warhol's practice with zen suggests itself when considering the qualitative differences between the glance, the look, and the stare.
The bombardment of images experienced in modern urban environments typically reduce our distracted visual perception to rapid glances, the minimal attention required for orientation in space and generic identification of objects. As the visual density of the environment continually thickens, visual messages are designed less and less to "arrest our attention," and increasingly appear in the widest possible spread of serial display: we decipher what they are, and what they signify, incrementally, and "recognize" them when our hyperactive glances repeatedly encounter them.
Looking at something requires us to consciously see it, to pause long enough to register some of its overall appearance. A look distinguishes the general difference between one thing and another, provides a cursory sense of spatial distance between objects; in the case of an image, a look tells us what it's an image of. How much information a single image communicates to someone looking at it is usually proportionate to scale.
Staring mobilizes markedly different modes of consciousness. We seldom deliberately stare at anything. Staring requires a duration that feels unnatural to most people, as well as immobility, narrowing of focus, and a drastic slowing-down of habitually restless visual movement, as well as the filtering-out of extraneous sensory data. Staring reveals the object of our attention in an overwhelming, often disorienting plenum of close detail, but to stare at a thing isn't necessarily to see it with unbroken clarity. The act of staring alters the object itself. It gives its constituent parts a kind of autonomy. It induces an hypnotic state in which something familiar becomes alien, decomposing and recomposing, often dissolving from visibility entirely; the mind forms hallucinatory images from contours, light and dark areas, lines and colors, superimposing pictures drawn from the unconscious onto the object.
Staring is a revelatory action, as it reveals much more than what we see. It makes us aware of the operations of our minds in a state of meditative stillness.
Warhol's art accommodates all three of these ways of seeing. He first sifted from many photographs of the same thing the single most effective one, then had silkscreens made from it in several sizes, from the monumental to something that would fit in a briefcase. For his first museum retrospective, in Stockholm, Warhol fabricated gigantic versions of the Electric Chair images, scaled at the precise dimensions of the film screen on which his movies were projected in the same room. His exhibition of the Flowers at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris deployed several sizes of the work; the smallest had the effect produced by the repetitive glance--the simple recognition that they depicted flowers; larger ones compelled the look, in which their individual color schemes became more conspicuous; the largest versions invited the prolonged contemplation of the stare.


The novelty of Warhol's synthesis of painting with photography was matched by his emphatic openness about how his work got done, his assembly-line collaboration with Gerard Malanga and other assistants, and the usurpation of the original by the copy. The original became source material. (When we're speaking of publicity shots and tabloid cover photos, a work of art made from them is, arguably, intrinsically more valuable than the original, anyway.) Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Warhol worked with music playing, a television or two running, some kind of perceptual feed-in from the outside world. They both had many people around them all day, and at night a coterie, a media bath, or a bare mirror.
Warhol's serial images are slightly or greatly different from each other, either within the same painting or across a spectrum of similar works. The placement, cropping, and image variation, or simply the image's status as a publicity still for a film, bring the element of time into looking. As a unified field, the painting is an arrangement of colors in grids or oval patterns. Individual images, however, have to be viewed as a succession of moments, different states of the same thing, many suggestive of decay--the variants on Bela Lugosi's Dracula biting into a woman's neck, and James Cagney in Scarface, include some with white areas suggesting a ripped white quadrant of a damaged photo, for instance, and the progressive blackening or variegated registration of "the same image" as it's repeated can be redolent of gaudy presence beside fading-out-to-near-absence.
Blue Liz as Cleopatra (1963) marks one among many Warhols that simulate the serial imagery of the film strip. The diminuendo from two lighter rows of four Lizes to a slightly compressed, darker one, down to three much darker Lizes, may evoke the ultimate movie star in eclipse, in the role of her biggest commercial flop, but its immediate suggestion is "lost leader," or, rather, footage snipped off a length of film by an editor. Aside from the easy identification of Liz Taylor, the painting indexes Hollywood, a legendary ancient queen, and the decay of glamor, or glamor as an idea.
A significant feature of camp, as a sensibility shared by culturally sophisticated gays in the '40s and '50s, but especially as the presiding spirit of Jack Smith's performance work and his film Flaming Creatures (Warhol collaborated with Smith on a silent Dracula movie), was the perception that imitation glamor, zircon and gaudy makeup glamor, could be more alluring, and more revealing, than real glamor--as compelling in its strangeness as beauty produced by industrial-strength cosmetology. Warhol's portraits of Marilyn Monroe have, in many of their incarnations, the gaudy exuberance of a drag queen impersonating Marilyn Monroe, and when we consider that the image of Marilyn Monroe is itself a manufactured construction, the difference between a drag queen "doing" Monroe and Monroe herself becomes less pronounced. They become, in a sense, the same thing.











18


Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses
it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the
second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The
truth is, nobody really possesses it.
Simone Weil, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force



"Making the world safe for Andy Warhol" was a project that expanded as it absorbed territory: the Soup Can paintings can be seen as the first substantial foray in Warhol's conquest of America, an emptying-out and levelling of its contents and a celebration of its "democratic" offering of the same things to everybody. Warhol liked to remark that a movie star can drink a Coke, and so can you. He also said that the Queen of England can't get a better hot dog at Yankee Stadium than you can (though I'm sure she could). Warhol's notion of "democracy" as access to consumer goods of identical quality consistently fails to acknowledge the disparity of wealth distribution that sharply separates "access" from purchasing power.
It does indicate the accelerated technological production of "choices" between essentially identical objects--specifically, aside from "personal products," cybernetic devices that surface first as novelties, and quickly acquire a ubiquity and psycho-social necessity, the universal modifications in the fabric of daily life that transform novelty items into utilitarian objects which we then have no choice about owning: computers, cell phones, answering machines, DVD players, television sets, and a gamut of other things that alter the temporal dimension in radical ways, bringing us ever closer to the usurpation of consciousness by our incremental transformation into automata.
Warhol anticipated this equalization of people by their dependence on the same habits of consumption: of goods, information, and modes of transpersonal exchange. He drastically changed the content and meaning of celebrity, and revealed its transience and redundancy, as well as its appeal to the mass unconscious Walter Benjamin identifies in his discussion of cinema and photography in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." The best passages in Warhol's writings are those where the famous, the rich, the lavishly favored encounter the same ridiculous, inescapable irritants and importunities that ordinary people experience every day.
Mimesis, in Warhol's itinerary, ultimately achieved parity with what it depicted. The Warhol Diaries record nonstop social encounters with Jackie Kennedy, Liz Taylor, and other people Warhol painted when they were unattainably distant signifiers of celebrity.
Warhol changed the meaning of the recognizable. To say he became what he beheld isn't quite accurate. Often what he beheld became him. The Campbell Soup can became Warhol. Marilyn became Warhol. Or more correctly, an image of Marilyn became inxtricably linked with Warhol, a Campbell Soup can became foremost a signifier of Warhol, and only secondarily a soup can.
In Warhol's work, mimesis operates like a value-neutral virus, leaping boundaries between a bloody car crash to oversaturated flowers on wallpaper patterns of a cow, selected from an elaborate photographic selection of cows (each originary image annotated with a written description) for its quintessence of bovinity; from the Mona Lisa to Mao; from cocks and asses to skulls and shadows: it's all material, it's all the same, and it's all part of the same temporal and existential continuum.
Warhol's cinema begins with a sleeping man easily mistaken for a still image, a famous building filmed in a fixed shot over 24 hours, vast numbers of "screen tests," a body of silent films enacting the reinvention of the earliest motion pictures. The "static" films were intended to be shown at fewer frames per second than normal speed. In one instance a well-known experimental filmmaker walked out of a screening in disgust, having seen a Warhol projected at 24 fps rather than 16. When persuaded to watch it again at the slower speed he proclaimed it a work of genius.
Warhol's initial breakthrough as a painter and sculptor, marked by the rapid assimilation and exhaustion of a broad inventory of images, was followed by the announcement that he was abandoning painting: by the time he launched his 1966 Silver Clouds, helium pillows (designed in tandem with Billy Kluver's technological expertise) floating at shifting altitudes in the Castelli Gallery, and the flowers on cow wallpaper at Sonnabend Gallery, as farewell gestures, Warhol was famous enough to announce his retirement in the time-honored fashion of his idols when they rested up for a comeback.
He became intensely involved in filmmaking, or intensely uninvolved in it--his studio became The Factory, implicitly the dream factory, at 231 East 47th Street, and it quickly became, in Victor Bockris's words, "a cultural mecca, part atelier, part film studio, part experimental theater, part literary workshop, and a Salvation Army for all the artists and would-be artists who couldn't find shelter elsewhere."
Beginning in 1964, The Factory became the magnetic site where the Warhol enterprise broadened into the sponsorship of rock bands, discotheques, theater plays, movies, television shows, and, most lastingly, myths.
Warhol wanted "to throw lightning," as Billy Name put it. Not simply to be a celebrity, but someone who could confer celebrity on other people by paying attention to them. As Irving Thalberg conferred "quality" on M-G-M product by green-lighting prestigious literary properties, Andy began to make media stars of selected proteges, beginning with beauties like Ivy Nicholson and Baby Jane Holzer, the latter proclaimed "Girl of the Year" in 1964, followed by Edie Sedgwick, a waif-like, stunning-looking heiress who became for a time Andy's twinlike companion and star of his early, Ron Tavel-scripted "talkies."
There could hardly be a more comprehensive book on the Edie Sedgwick legend than Jean Stein's Edie, but the image of Andy-and-Edie continues, like the Campbell Soup paintings, to operate as visual shorthand for an unrepeatable, watershed moment in American cultural history. Warhol's life was becoming a narrative. Edie Sedgwick, the following year's girl, became an imporant episode of the narrative in which the artist appeared in public with his double. She was, in terms of social background and upbringing, his opposite, born to riches in a dysfunctional but New England-aristocratic family, and indelibly beautiful. They didn't look alike, but dressed alike, wore the same hair color, and shared the quality of ambiguity, unreadableness. Together, they comprised a runic inscription that was all presence, all absence.
Warhol later doubled himself by sending Allan Midgette to impersonate him at college lectures; at some juncture, he let it be known that he was having a robot of himself constructed. In a ludic passage of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, the artist reels off to his wake-up telephone interlocutor, Brigid Berlin, an inventory of his characteristics as noted in press clippings:

"The bored languor, the wasted pallor…"
"The what?"
"The chic freakiness, the basically passive astonishment, the enthralling secret knowledge…"
"WHAT??"
"The chintzy joy, the revelatory tropisms, the chalky,
puckish mask, the slightly Slavic look…"
"Slightly…"
"The childlike, gum-chewing naivete, the glamour rooted in despair, the self-admiring carelessness, the perfected otherness, the wispiness, the shadowy, voyeuristic, vaguely sinister aura, the pale, soft-spoken magical presence, the skin and bones…"
"Hold it, wait a minute, I have to take a pee."

Pof AW, p. 10


As the Warhol apparatus expanded, Warhol himself was, publicly, increasingly spectral and indefinable, and the desperate-sounding torrent of adjectives journalists used to describe him was matched by the desperation of others to get his attention. With The Factory, Warhol animated a situation that took on its own aleatory life, a shifting aggregate of volatile and garrulous personalities (by which I don't mean violent personalities, but naturally and/or chemically unbuttoned performers) which attracted celebrities of all sripes and classes, curators, art dealers, artists--a "democratically" elite crowd, some merely browsing, others performing, all of it swirling around Andy (even if he happened not to be there) but not something he could plausibly control. Billy Name and others, at various times, "directed traffic," kept some people out, let others in, but the general impression of The Factory is one of the best party and the biggest bummer anyone can remember.
Every long-running party has its attrition level, and some eyewitnesses to this one offer a less than enthralled recollection of The Factory:
"Aware that the rap of a speed freak had been known to completely dissolve even the polish off silverware, we confined these raps to our books. Some people thought of their trip books as art--they weren't. They were reams of useless energy, complete with dizzying diagrams of intricate nothing--except when Andy Warhol happened to be doing the drawing.
"That night Andy was drawing noses, before and after nose jobs. When he asked me if I liked it, I didn't answer. Why bother? I knew that the stupid drawing would appear in its silkscreen mode later, worth a fortune." (Mary Woronov, Swimming Underground, p. 152)
Others, like Woronov, have written far more knowing accounts of The Factory than I could ever cull from its surviving regulars, or want to: even Wikipedia provides a fairly legible chronology of Superstars and their filmographies, the procession of films that segue from the brilliantly improvised "talkies" from Chelsea Girls, Loves of Ondine, My Hustler, I, A Man, Nude Restaurant, Bike Boy, Imitation of Christ, Lonesome Cowboys, and Blue Movie, among countless others, into the more scripted and premise-driven films directed by Paul Morrissey that Warhol produced, Trash, Flesh, Heat, Andy Warhol's Dracula and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein.
The Thalberg analogy seems to apply to Morrissey's later movies. With the exception of Forty-Deuce, one of Morrissey's first non-Warholian directing efforts, which innovatively refined the split-screen techniques of The Chelsea Girls, Morrissey's subsequent films haven't acquired the cachet or cultic status of the films he directed "under Warhol's signature," so to speak. I don't know whether this is the fault of his films or simply the fallout of "leaving Warhol," or both. Some of the late Warhol films like L'Amour and Women in Revolt seem to have been partly shot by Warhol, partly by others; I suppose the definitively final Warhol film has to be Andy Warhol's Bad, scripted by Pat Hackett and directed by Jed Johnson.
One of the fairly Promethean tasks facing the curators and custodians of Warhol's artistic legacy is sorting out who did what in the production of Warhol's work, especially as it spreads out across numerous collaborative media, including the magazine Warhol founded, Interview, still in operation today. Warhol had a strong proprietary interest in what he attached his name to, and the endless-seeming abundance of what he produced will take at least a generation or two to catalogue, as already noted.
If Warhol is undetachable from the competing mythologies generated by the people around him, his work can be separated from the immediate social context and considered in its present-day implications and its influence on society, or society's influence on it. The claim that Warhol "changed the way people see reality" is not a hyperbolic one, though it could also be said that any artist's work may change the way someone sees reality. This latter point has to do with the quiddity of reception, and why the designations of "major" and "minor" only apply within certain hierarchical, bureaucratic arrangements for categorizing art works. Your way of seeing reality can be changed by a cheap detective novel or The Raft of the Medusa, or a 3 a.m. TV screening of Where The Sidewalk Ends.
Andy Warhol's personal narrative is compelling because it contains elements of cherished American fantasies, the rags-to-riches, meritocratic payoff for unremitting hard work and obduracy--and because, at the apex of this dream come true, the dreamer gets shot several times with a handgun by someone on the far periphery of his realm. This part of the narrative has the more contemporary flavor of the official version of the Kennedy Assassination: world's most important person killed by world's most insignificant person.
The stories America was telling itself about itself had become unsettling and contradictory by 1968: the Lee Harvey Oswald story and the Kitty Genovese story had their telling inflections of abjection and apathy. The expanding reach of public relations heightened a sense of nonexistence in those were weren't "known" to masses of strangers; the fate of strangers, and nameless people, was much at issue during the Vietnam War, but at least part of the momentum of the anti-war movement derived from the participation of media celebrities and famous writers.
The single most devastating lesson of the 1960s and early 1970s was that progressive institutional change in American society would not be permitted to happen. It took a long time for the lesson to sink in everywhere, and whether or not it has bearing on Warhol's eventual embrace of "Business Art," his work became the mirror of an unameliorated capitalist ethos, at ease with portrait commissions from the Shah of Iran and taped reflections of Imelda Marcos; making the world safe for Andy Warhol involved making Andy Warhol safe for the world. A new perception of Warhol, as a different genus of artist than originally thought, began in the later 1970s to emit from reviews of his shows and serious essays on his work.
Warhol survived Valerie Solanis's gunshot attack, and went on producing things, even during his protracted recovery. Accounts of that time are typically ambiguous, insofar as he's said to have continued things he was working on and made no immediate changes in his living habits except as dictated by his medical condition; the shooting, however, is also cited as the event that changed everything in the Warhol cosmos, the moment when the party stopped, when The Factory became a conventional office and Warhol's artmaking became entirely about business; the shooting occurred on June 3, 1968, but the perception of Warhol's artistic activity, from outside, at least, remained for several years more or less what it had been. The novel a appeared, Blue Movie was filmed; if the studio, relocated to Union Square, was no longer open house but a more recognizably conventional business setting, this facilitated procurement of advertising for Interview and the portrait commissions Warhol relied on during much of the 1970s to keep his shop running.
Some people once associated with Warhol felt betrayed by him, financially cheated, lied to, deceived, ripped off. Others expected the celebrity he conferred on them to transform their lives, and in most cases it didn't wreak much improvement on their original situations. Others still moved on and put The Factory days, or years, behind them, and some of Warhol's friends had always kept a distance from the vortex of The Factory.
As one person who spent several years in Andy's orbit said, "It's impossible to tell that story because it was all about ambiguity and everybody has a different version of it." The most an outsider can say is that Warhol contrived a social sphere in which a lot of viciousness got played out, where a high mortality rate came with the circles he exploited in his films and incorporated into his entourage. Survivors of the Age of Silver tend to express ambiguous feelings about Warhol, love and hatred in varying quantities.
Warhol could confer celebrity. He could not endow anyone with a durable sense of self, and it may be that those who confused celebrity with identity were the most vulnerable and likely to crash and burn. It wasn't an unparalleled confusion in the society at large.
The Warholian makeover of American culture is almost easier to illuminate than the artist's life. Warhol's celebrity as an image is matched by his total disappearance, as a person, behind his work. "Nobody knew him," says an old Factory hand who saw him every day for years. The unavoidable conclusion is that Warhol didn't want to be known. He wanted to be seen, which isn't at all the same thing. Being seen was an important part of his job.
Warhol's transcription of all the data of the everyday, his preservation of junk mail, invitations, and all manner of things that strayed into his ken as "time capsules," reflect the heightened sense of ephemerality that has accompanied successive technological interventions into everyone's everyday life. The velocity of contemporary urban life generates an umanageable quantity of unwelcome, distracting ephemera, of messages that competing for attention which can never be deciphered, much less answered: Warhol's time capsules are an archaeology of surplus information, and their ongoing "excavation" is both revelatory and absurd, arguably making the artist both more palpable and more elusively absent.
Warhol's novel, a, is almost as challenging to read as Finnegan's Wake, but its transcription, mistakes and all, from tape-recordings of Ondine and others over a 24 hour period gives a remarkably accurate insight into the quality of distractedness that dominated urban existence in 1968, a condition that has magnified in subsequent decades into the normative state of things, along with the flattening-out of public commitment to self-rule, reduction of complex political and social problems to sound bites, the conflation of sensational, unimportant crimes and scandals with vastly more important things. a touches on a bit of everything that passes through the mind as we negotiate an ever-thickening informational field. It also suggests what becoming the focus of constant surveillance might be like. a incorporates into its record of a day's peregrinations and encounters in the city what Juan A. Suarez characterizes, in Pop Modernism, as the ambient sensory noise of contemporary life: "because through their nondiscriminatory receptivity, technologies of electronic reproduction register the autonomism of the world. They capture sense and nonsense and mix signifying matter with opaque traces and textures--an involuntary gesture, the distracting fold of a fabric, the grain of the voice. In this manner they convey not only information but also the stochastic disorder of bodies and things." (p 9)
By insisting that transcription errors remain uncorrected in his novel along with its absolute fidelity to the fragmented, incomplete, and abruptly discursive flows and stoppages in verbal exchanges, as well as the impenetrable referentiality of private conversation, Warhol produced one of the most radically innovative novels of the technological age--and, like the cut-up texts of William S. Burroughs, a has mainly been characterized as an interesting experiment at best. Like the work of Burroughs and Gertude Stein, Warhol's a is inimitable in the strict sense of the word, which subtracts nothing from its significance, but tends to be more talked about than actually read.





































19


I recognize only what is, and in my view any
description and pictorialization of what we
do not know is meaningless.
Gerhard Richter, Notes, 1984



After Warhol's "retirement" from painting to make films, he continued to make silkscreens, prints, and sculptures. Many series of works after his Mao portraits, begun in 1972, were overlooked, or overshadowed, by the commissioned portraits he produced throughout the 1970s: Warhol's avidity about rousting up portrait commissions from anyone with the $25,000 to buy a portrait, and the realms of wealth and privilege in which Warhol more and more exclusively spent his time, were viewed by many critics, and former members of Warhol's circle, as a betrayal of a subversive practice, even a Marxist one; Warhol's harshest critics portrayed him as a sort of lapdog to the rich.
Warhol's near-death experience in 1968 and the ongoing toll it took on his body magnified his need for security. He grew up queer and impoverished, and the fear and insecurity he'd brazened his way through to become an icon in the world of images were suddenly manifested in physical violence that may have looked like a movie but certainly didn't feel like one. Almost all Warhol's internal organs had been punctured or grazed by bullets, and he would have to hold his torso together with a corset for the rest of his life.
In the gay underground of the '50s and '60s and into the '70s, homosexuals gathered in places where class and race distinctions dissolved, where a certain craziness was taken for granted, and where, through contact with other minoritized people, one acquired a structural understanding of American society, and often a refusal to take its strictures, especially its psychological ones, seriously: a camp sensibility was one that could see through the surface of an M-G-M musical or a Walt Disney epic to the unconsciously lubricious subtext underneath.
Warhol brought the normative understandings acquired by gays in the course of negotiating a homophobic society into spotlit explicitness throughout the 1960s. What he sometimes called, retrospectively, his "Pop statement" was the revelation of the icon's double performance as an image of perfection and a memento mori, and the desublimation of homosexual subtexts in, among other things, popular film narratives. Gays had no problem understanding Warhol's work from the beginning. They were trained in looking at the contents of consumer culture as an endless flow of diverted libido, objects of desire rather than pleasure.
Warhol's "Pop statement" was de facto liberatory, reverberating in subsequent art practices and movements--Minimalism, Conceptualism, "New Image" postmodernism, appropriation--and in cinema as well; although Warhol's films generally capitalize on the frustration or incompletion of voyeuristic gratification, simply showing two men in an explicitly sexual situation demolished all sorts of boundaries.
The volume and variety of work Warhol produced during the early years of Pop Art, and his lesser-known work from the 1950s, would be enough to make a case for Warhol's seminal impact on American culture. The vicissitudes of the art market, on the other hand, raised and lowered the financial value of Warhol's art, along with that of most artists. Warhol's celebrity never went into eclipse, but his status as an artist passed through a fairly long, dark period, much of which coincides with the period covered by The Warhol Diaries, a day-to-day account, delivered via telephone to Pat Hackett, of Warhol's activities the day and night before, originally to track expenses, as Warhol had been audited by the IRS every year after donating a poster to George McGovern's presidential campaign. (It featured a ghoulishly colored picture of Richard Nixon, with "Vote McGovern" scrawled below it.)
By the mid-1970s, the subterranean realm of the gay world and the auxilliary "borderline personalities" that Warhol brought into visibility had moved above-ground, as sexual variety became visible and talked about on television (and hence became an acceptable subject in everyday conversation), and the social juxtapositions pioneered by The Factory had become commonplace. The disco and the underground sex club were patronized by arbiters of taste and fashion, and an archipelago of nightclubs catered to the revised definition of celebrity as the condition of being recognized or discovered by a door person behind a velvet rope.
Warhol's art once again bifurcates, between commissioned work and subjects that "made a statement." In the 1970s, however, both kinds of work spelled Warhol, and a commissioned portrait, its subject reprocessed and cosmeticized into an idealization, became a Warhol painting, a lipstick trace of the person whose Polaroid image it was extracted from.




























19


Something that I look for in an associate
is a certain amount of misunderstading of
what I'm trying to do.
Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
P 99


Warhol's movies had an event quality as they appeared, in rapid succession. The early silents bear close relation to Warhol's paintings: static images, they prescribe their own viewing time, and, if watched at their intended length and speed of projection, reveal themselves as non-static. An analogy can be made to the flaws, strike-overs, and variegated surfaces of Warhol paintings of identical multiple objects, which only look uniformly fabricated at a superficial glance.
The crypto-narrative talkies, including 1965's My Hustler, the following year's The Chelsea Girls, 1967's Imitation of Christ, I, A Man, The Loves of Ondine, Bike Boy, and Nude Restaurant, and 1968's Lonesome Cowboys, San Diego Surf, Flesh, and Blue Movie, whatever else might be said about them, are among the most audaciously, emphatically spellbinding displays of polymorphic sexuality and verbal frankness in film history, in part because of the camera's, or the director's, disregard for continuity or narrative construction, the inclusion of unintelligible stretches of sound track, pockets of total silence, use of stuttering zooms, and, confuting their deliberately amateur qualities, a mixture of innovative and classical framing, the inclusion of synechdotal figures and evocative objects at frame edges, and the improvisatory brilliance of actors provided with the sketchiest story premises to work within (when they remember to).
While all these films fastidiously observed the outer edge of legally permissible content and introduced more explicitness in sync with successive liberalizations of the censorship code, their combinations of nudity, sex talk, absurdly contrived situations, and unmistakably homosexual sensibility were indeed liberatory, for those fortunate enough to see them.
The films of this period, and many earlier ones, replicate in avant-garde terms the conventions of physique posing loops and other soft gay erotica of the era: the films build the expectation of fully revealed sexual acts, but every act of congress, so to speak, is either elided by flash cutting or foiled by some kind of dysfunction or distraction--only Blue Movie "shows" intercourse between Louis Waldon and Viva, and if you look at it carefully, you see that it actually doesn't.
These films follow the same paradigm as Warhol's "no comment" Pop paintings, with many technical decisions left open to chance, and in them, Warhol's invisible presence is weirdly palpable. As one Superstar told me, "It didn't matter who shot it or who 'directed' it, if Andy was in the room, it was Andy's film." The same actor told me that Andy's only direction to him, ever, was to whisper in his ear: "Too much plot."



























PART TWO

FIGMENT




























20


The achievements and failures of
this society invalidate its higher culture.
The celebration of the autonomous
personality, of humanism, of tragic
and romantic love appears to be the
ideal of a backward stage of the
development. Wht is happening now is
not the deterioration of higher culture into
mass culture but the refutation of this
culture by the reality. The reality surpasses
its culture.
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man





The cult of the proper name has a strong, transformative effect on human psychology. It can, in fact, drastically alter reception of a thing, and therefore the meaning of that thing. A Raphael painting accepted as authentic for centuries, if suddenly discovered to be the work of a "minor" artist, mistakenly attributed to Raphael, once stripped of the aura of Raphael becomes something else.
Andy Warhol is one of the few artists of the past hundred years who was able to create a franchise, recognizable by his signature--Walt Disney was another--sufficiently authoritative that regardless of the artist's degree of direct involvement in a work, its appearance under his name turned it into a work by Andy Warhol, infused it with the artist's sensibility, and subtly influenced its manner of creation and presentation.
With Warhol, we confront a mystery of a different order than that of the Raphael painting before and after its attribution changes. For it is possible to identify the extent of other people's contributions to Warhol's art, and in some cases to assign complete "authorship" of works to other people, yet even in the latter circumstances Warhol's name, attached for example as "producer" of something he had little or nothing definite to do with, feels like a work by Andy Warhol. One could, perhaps, say the same about the Raphael, but what if we knew Raphael didn't paint the picture in the first place?
The heavy element of creative vampirism that Warhol's practice involved is not unique. There have long been artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and other wildly talented people with no aptitude or desire to commodify what they make, romantics who repine for the vie boheme and a select community in which they participate both as artists and audiences; likewise, there have always been those, often of lesser talent and greater willfulness, with an eye for the main chance, who cull from the works of others the method, the material, the quiddity of what is "squandered" by a lack of savvy packaging, and make it theirs.
The distinction isn't necessarily a simple divide between haplessly self-sabotaging "creators" and opportunistic larcenists. It reflects two opposing philosophical and, if you like, moral viewpoints. The bohemian may crave recognition, and his or her supporters may routinely deplore the exploitation of the bohemian's ideas by commercially successful talents. Behind this lies a utopian wish that artistic endeavors were exempted from the brutal reality of capitalism. In the bohemian artist, both desire and contempt for popularity and material reward produce an ambivalence seldom resolved and usually self-defeating.
Capitalism in its current, all-pervasive form exacerbates the preextant desire for fame and money, and ratifies egregious opportunism. Becoming an artist remains a gut imperative for many, but being an artist is as firmly fixed today as "a profession" as any other, and, given the potential rewards, often becomes a career choice for people whose real talents may lie entirely elsewhere. Which is not to imply that highly gifted artists can't also be liars and thieves, to put it crudely; an argument can be made that no work of art is made without some model in mind, however sketchy, and the aporias of bohemia, practically speaking, may have purist beauty, but the modicum of survival mechanisms once available to artists on the permanent fringe have evaporated from the very cities to which bohemian artists once gravitated.
Warhol's name, in certain company, instantly activates rueful accusations that "he got this from X," "he stole that from Y," and I personally have no doubt that at least half such charges are true. Whether they are pertinent or not is a different question. Certainly many of Warhol's "distressed" soup can drawings were traced directly over Ed Wallowich's photographs, though it was Wallowich's brother who complained about it rather than the photographer. Warhol used fashion photographer Otto Fenn's photographs as the basis for many delightful drawings of men in drag and semi-drag soon after Warhol's arrival in New York, but, again, with Fenn's enthusiastic approval.
Warhol "took a lot from Jack Smith." As did Robert Wilson. As did everybody. (The late Jack Smith, if offered a million dollars for a single outtake frame of Flaming Creatures, would have instantly claimed it was the most important shot in the movie, and that he'd taken it out "for safekeeping": no deal.) The late Diamond Dust pictures used the "diamond dust" as a direct steal from an artist whose work Warhol had recently seen. Like many less important artists in our time, Warhol regarded his art as a business. Business and poaching have never been strangers in American life. "Timing is everything," he told a friend as he commenced his Marilyn paintings immediately after the actress's death. Timing has never been the bohemian artist's strong suit.
Of less concern here than the credit-where-credit-is-due obsessiveness of many former Warhol associates (though one may sympathize with their complaints) is the strange power of the franchise, and the proper name. But there is this to be said, first: Warhol functioned as one of the progenitors of a corporate monoculture, and greatly assisted the liquidation of the double culture of below/above, bohemian obscurity/celebrity, the dignity of "failure"/the importance of "success." Even the young artists Warhol cultivated near the end of his life served less as generative collaborators than people whose celebrity was magnified by their association with Andy, and from whose association Andy extracted a "youthful" cachet he had long ceased to radiate himself.
Cycling back to the films, in recent years Paul Morrissey has claimed near-total credit for almost all of Warhol's movies. And virtually all Warhol's actors have expressed distaste and resentment of Paul Morrissey's role in the making of the films they appeared in. Warhol's presence on the set, it seems, provided them with a sense of protectedness and security, regardless of what outrageous things he encouraged them to do on camera, and if Andy were there, as one of his Superstars said, "it was Andy's film." The kindest thing any Warhol film alumnus has ever told me about Paul Morrissey has been, "He directed too much."
The same films to which Stephen Koch, in his book Stargazer, has grouped into the category "Degradation," namely Loves of Ondine, Nude Restaurant, and Lonesome Cowboys (Koch omits from his degradation chapter the roughly contemporaneous Blue Movie and Bike Boy, for some reason) are, in my view, the most significant "storytelling" Warhol films. They are claimed to be formless, boring, "degraded" by the unpredictable and unplanned verbiage and behavior of the actors.
These films aren't formless. They create their own forms, out of interactions between two or more characters, as people create form out of real conversations and shared activities. If they contain boring moments, these are few, longeurs between monologues or dialogues. Sometimes an actor asks if the camera is still running. Bike Boy, notably, is clasically episodic, in a less pedantic way than the "Morrissey trilogy"--Flesh, Trash, and Heat are episodic, with Joe D'Allesandro as a hipper version of Bike Boy's Joe Spenser, encountering a sequence of sexually desirous characters.
Nude Restaurant is not an exercise in degradation, nor are the other films Koch places in this punitive category. Nude Restaurant is a tour de force monologue by Viva (Susan Hoffman), a highly gifted painter, novelist, and actress (she has appeared in films by Agnes Varda, Woody Allen, Mel Gibson, and Wim Wenders, among other directors), all-but-mutely observed by Taylor Mead, a poet and actor whose theatrical and film credits include works by John Cassavettes, John Schlesinger, Jim Jarmusch, and Robert Frank. Others in the cast include Allan Midgette, who appears in Bertolucci's 1900 and The Spider's Stratagem, as well as Jean-Luc Godard's Wind from the East.
This may be the place for a long parenthetical debunking of the myth that Warhol's stars were not actors, or artists, or persons of any substance, but "human wreckage" who washed up at The Factory: Jackie Curtis was a gifted playwrite/director, in one of whose plays Robert di Nero made his acting debut; Charles Rydell, who declined the "starring" role in Blow Job but gives an Oscar-worthy performance in the Warhol-produced, Vincent Freemont-directed video Fight, was a legitimate stage actor for many years; numerous Warhol stars had substantial acting resumes before appearing in a Warhol film, and many others achieved acting careers after Warhol.
I mention this because the whole concept of "the crazies" and their "degradation," or the supposedly degrading nature of the films Warhol made with them, adopts the bourgeois view of the eccentric individual as an insane person. (While I have tried to keep myself out of this as much as possible, I must interject that I have acted in several films with former Warhol stars, and directed them onstage, and found them to be models of professionalism and discipline.)
Viva's long opening monologue in Nude Restaurant is a hypnotic, partially invented, chokingly funny narrative of a rich family's patriarch's attempt to marry off his daughters to a succession of elderly, disabled, and sexually perverted wealthy friends; Viva's gift for mimicry is in full flower, and Mead's abstemious interjections act as propulsive foils to the possibility of boredom. Viva describes degradation: she doesn't incarnate it.
Similarly, Lonesome Cowboys makes deliberate hash of the conventions of the Western film by turning it into an overtly homoerotic excuse for men on horses to bunk up together in sleeping bags. The imperious local ranch-owner Ramona, again played by Viva, with Mead, playing her nurse, acting again as her "sidekick", skirmish with a posse of cowpokes headed by Louis Waldon. Eric Emerson may have been crazy, but he certainly could act, as he proved in The Chelsea Girls and, later, in Heat--here, he teaches some basic ballet exercises to Joe D'Allesandro, whom, at the risk of belaboring a point, has acted in films by Louis Malle, Jacques Rivette, Steven Soderburgh, Francis Ford Coppola, John Waters, and Giorgio Ferrara, and had a recurring role in several TV series, including Wiseguy and Miami Vice.
Lonesome Cowboy wittingly and pointedly degrades the tradition of the Western a la John Ford, revealing the homosexual subtext contained in almost every example of the genre. The actors aren't degraded by their participation.
Koch's description of Loves of Ondine doesn't tally with my own quite distant memory: I'll take his synopsis on faith, and concede that as far as I can recall, the film does "degenerate" into a protracted food fight.
The films Koch doesn't include under "degradation" made in the same period, Bike Boy and Blue Movie, are, bending the phrase slightly, companion pieces: Bike Boy chronicles a series of encounters between a motorcyclist visiting New York and a series of women who react to him in different ways. One finds him boring and prefers to sniff amphetamine off a paintbrush as he sits around awkwardly trying to make conversation. Another, perched on a kitchen counter, too shy to seduce him, instead recites an endless recipe as the bike boy kneads an empty Coke bottle between his hands. Finally Viva offers to make love with him, but first recites an inventory of everything she finds tiresome about him, including a death's head tattoo on his bicep. "Maybe if you'd get off death and onto life you'd feel a lot better," she tells him. Here, degradation is almost the opposite intention of the film: it is a work of pedagogy, or altruism. A succession of Warhol veterans take a somewhat raggy "innocent" and try to enlighten him, especially vis-à-vis his primitive understanding of women.
Blue Movie, as already discussed, is a non-pornographic pornographic film: Viva and Louis Waldon, with Warhol behind the camera, achieve what generations of pornographers had been unable to do: make a legitimately artistic film that includes an act of sexual intercourse. Decades after Blue Movie, Patrice Chereau accomplished the same thing in Intimacy, with an explicitness Warhol's camera avoids by framing what probably was actual penetration from an obscuring angle. Contra Koch, Blue Movie is only degrading if the act of love is degrading; its dialogue, with its many references to authoritarian abuses and the Vietnam War, makes the unambiguous point of the Sixties slogan, "Make Love, Not War."
The "signature" characteristic of Warhol's "talkies" and his work in video is easily identified: unassuageable antagonism between characters who are either total strangers or complicitly "bonded" by a priori familiarity, at varying levels of intensity. (As far as I know, Blue Movie is the sole Warhol movie of this period that is not premised on sustained antagonism.) To the degree that the people on film are "acting"--and it can be legitimately argued that even professional actors, in Warhol films, "play themselves," only loosely wrapped in a sketchily devised character--one can say they occasionally drop the theatrical illusion, at a loss for what to do or say next, or because the "narrative" is intentionally slackened, as if to reveal that this non-acting is a form of acting.
L'Amour, which can't be wholly attributed to Warhol, Morrissey, or the invaluable Jed Johnson, nevertheless has the absurdist, improvisational quality of Warhol's guiding, or unguiding, eye; the opening scene, in which Donna Jordan and Jane Forth attempt to enter a tiny Parisian apartment house elevator encumbered with vertiginous backpacks self-consciously evokes the slapstick clumsiness of Warhol's comedic high points; the last scene of San Diego Surf, in which Taylor Mead, lying on a surfboard, receives a copious golden shower from Tom Hompertz is another unmistakable example of Warhol's unique comic overload.
Morrissey, in some interviews, seems uncharacteristically happy to credit or blame Warhol for Women in Revolt, one of the funniest movies of the 1970s, in which three transvestites--Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and Holly Woodlawn--play members of Politically Involved Girls, a/k/a PIGS, another highly episodic farce, though Morrissey ostensibly "directed" most of it. (Directing Warhol stars in a confusingly scripted movie had to have been like herding cats regardless who was behind the camera.) Morrissey apparently wanted to deflect quite predictable protests and outrage from feminists onto Warhol.
Women in Revolt has nothing to do with real feminists or the feminist movement, in fact: as Morrissey has said, neither he nor Warhol had the slightest comprehension of either. The film is Warhol's obvious revenge on Valerie Solanis, the schizophrenic author of The SCUM Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men, a movement comprised exclusively of Valerie Solanis), and its protagonists' declamations on behalf of women's rights have the same garbled, disorganized, manic-depressive qualities as Solanis's manifesto.
The incorporation of Warhol's name into the titles of Morrissey's two Italian-made "horror farces," Andy Warhol's Frankenstein and Andy Warhol's Dracula, certainly bestowed cult status on two well-crafted, extremely well-scripted, absurdist and grisly films, and their completion marked Morrissey's departure from the Warhol orbit, ended his managerial control of The Factory, and terminated his involvement in Warhol's films. Warhol's sensibility is palpable throughout, though Morrissey's far more shapely concept of cinematic construction and fastidiousness of detail are likewise very much in evidence.























21



Every tragedy could really start with the
words: "Nothing would have happened had
it not been that…"
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value p 12e



The Warhol Seventies began on a high, bright note. With the launching of Andy Warhol's Interview late in 1969, and the artist's prodigious portrait commission work, as Bob Colacello reports in Holy Terror, the Seventies were a very good decade for Andy Warhol Enterprises in terms of profit and growing visibility. (It's an unfortunate fact that the same decade was an economic disaster for the United States, following Nixon's abandonment, in 1971, of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreements stabilizing world currencies, and a catastrophe for New York City's finances.) Interview began as a delightfully innovative, winningly amateurish, and basically intelligent publication, and stayed that way for a long time. After Andy's name came off the cover, and its entertainment value gradually shrank to Fran Leibowitz's back-page column, "I Cover The Waterfront," Colacello's "OUT," and Richard Bernstein's sumptuous covers, Interview became a venture in decline, in terms of its cultural influence, even if its revenues continued to climb. The areas of the culture it did reach, and pandered to, contained an abundance of shallow-minded, fashion-obsessed, and dangerously silly people of a growingly familiar ilk, the budding Gordon Geckos of the impending Reagan Morning in America, who happened to live on the lucky side of a widening disparity between the insanely rich and the desperately, increasingly invisible poor.

By mid-decade at the latest, most of Warhol's static visual work became, in the opinion of many, static in every way. His commissioned portraits, in too many instances, had a slapped-together and rebarbative ugliness, uncharacteristically lifeless blocks of color and thick smears of arbitrary brushwork, and the dazzling exceptions sometimes depicted subjects of widespread public odium: the Empress Fara Diba, conspicuous case in point. The endless portraits of Mick Jagger, for that matter, have the ghastly look of a soured aesthetic experiment that hasn't even slightly improved with the passage of time.
Moreover, the international peregrinations of Warhol, Fred Hughes, and Bob Colacello, the nightly revels at Studio 54, and the reverentially recounted antics, in Warhol's Diaries, of Liza, Truman, Halston, Diana Vreeland, Bianca, Victor Hugo, and the second- and third-string heiresses, princes, arms dealers, sons and daughters of military dictators, millionettes and debutantes, alienated Warhol's earlier following.
There were glamorous parties and happenings every night where Andy Warhol's appearance was the ne plus ultra of chic. There were many others where the entrance of Andy Warhol made a room fall practically silent and his presence killed whatever spontaneous good time the other guests had been having. People became uneasily conscious of the Warhol stare, which intruded the sensation of no longer being at a party, but unwilling objects of hostile scrutiny in a morgue.
Not everyone loves the rich and privileged and, as Punk became the reigning spirit of anarchy in a New York City teetering on fiscal collapse, Warhol's ubiquity at places like the Iranian embassy endeared him only to those who lived on caviar served in gilded buckets and champagne, spent enough money on baubles to support several African nations, and couldn't possibly find anything funny about Dorothy Parker's brilliant aperçu: "If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people he gives it to."
The Warhol embrace of the ruling class was natural to him: having never been middle-class, he'd gone directly from penury to affluence and fame. But Warhol's transition from profound superficiality and transgression to the cultivation of vapid, piss-elegant, powerful bores sanded the edges off his charisma and, for many, turned him into a self-parody and an ambulatory corpse. At the end of the 70s, Interview's drooling adoration of the Reagans, the Warhol clique's infatuation with "the return of style and elegance" to the White House, and the implicit endorsement of the cutthroat economics and further disparities between rich and poor the Reagan Revolution represented didn't help matters.
This is not an entirely fair or justified appraisal of Warhol's work during the era in question, but a reflection on how a substantial segment of New York's fermenting new cultural mixtures and many earlier, approving critical eyes now saw him. And, as the city became much more gruesomely divided between the monied and the money-less, struggling artists and lavishly rewarded ones, Warhol was implemental in demolishing what remained of sustainable marginality. The movers and shakers whose fiestas he ornamented were the same people gutting ethnically mixed neighborhoods, eradicating affordable housing, suburbanizing New York into a bland expanse of generic malls, and rebarbarizing Manhattan's center into a playground for the ultra-rich, shoving the sources of its cultural wealth, its struggling, talented young fleeing provincial suffocation, out to the boroughs and beyond.


























22


The lesson of history so she says is that
he will do it again but will he we hope not.
Gertude Stein, History or Messages
From History


Warhol produced an abundance of paintings, prints, and other pictures, many aesthetic catnip, certain others artistic stinkweed, throughout the years when his reputation hit its nadir among other artists and much of his earlier public. What isn't instantaneously arresting, intriguing, beautiful, or deeply resonant right now may become so. For extra-cultural reasons as well as structures embedded in the art business, it is, if not equally plausible, fully within the sphere of comparable historical changes observed from a long view, for much of Warhol's work to sink below the bubbles in market value--along with that of most artists. The current art market reflects an opposite hyperinflation of Warhol's valuation.
There is no painting in the world worth $137.5 million dollars, the figure allegedly paid by Steven A. Cohen to David Geffin for de Kooning's Woman III, or the $104.2 million fetched at Sotheby's for Picasso's Garçon à la pipe, or the $53.9 million for which the Whitney family sold Alan Bond Van Gogh's Irises. The superrich who pass these costliest of commodities back and forth among each other like baseball cards, in all likelihood, have moved beyond speculation into the most cynical reaches of primitive capitalism, business-for-business's-sake, enabling themselves to attach arbitrary "value" to luxury goods as if adjusting the exchange rates of currency within a closed loop of perpetually circulating capital.
Such contemptuously hyper-priced works of art represent the hubristic exercise of devaluing art as part of our collective cultural wealth into the regressive privatization of spiritually emptied, decorative trinkets exchanged between billionaire barbarians. A Jackson Pollock, a Tintoretto, a Vermeer or a Picabia has the same intrinsic financial value as any work of art--which is to say, none whatever. In the Gilded Age, at least the handful of eminent pirates for whom profit-making trumped any vestige of social responsibility or non-posthumous contribution to the greater public good were likely to get a railroad trunk line or partial control of mercantile transport, market outlets, shipping lanes or industrial manufacturing bases for the millions they sank into these acquisitions, above what they spent on bribing judges, purchasing legislators, manipulating stock prices, and dumping artfully looted banks, worthless securities kept afloat at their former peak rates until after their disposal to outwitted or simply witless fellow freebooters.
The sale price of Van Gogh's Irises, though far from the record figures paid for other works in private deals and seasonal auctions, is as useful an example of an unregulated market as another, and of the function of art in our era. Irises has long ceased to be a painting of flowers; it now functions as a symbolic parking spot for surplus capital. Its imagery is completely unimportant and a high quality reproduction provides a more satisfying view of the irises Van Gogh painted than the original canvas--which, hanging in a private mansion, becomes a mere advertisement for how much its owner of the moment paid for it, and, since some contemporary artist's digitally "painted" transfer to pigment on canvas of a blown-up photograph of horse manure, hustled through the market to a seven-figure price tag, could equally serve the same purpose, the art on the wall is effectively severed from its association with cultural capital and absorbed into the system of digital wealth that shuttles around the planet without any intelligible or real relationship to the import and export of manufactured goods, resource management, agricultural crop yields, mortgage rates, lending rates, oil depletion, impact of habitat destruction on species diversity, effects of global warming on regional weather patterns--the virtual money that orbits the world's stock investment centers occupies an autonomous world of frenetic, twenty-four hour profit extraction from hypervigilant exploitation of miniscule fluctuations in stock prices.
The only notable difference between this world and that of casino gambling is the inattention to clock time prevailing in casinos. Otherwise, both stock speculation and a craps table liberate money from exchange value and from economic reality.
This world is incognizant of, and indifferent to, the actual physical world of shrinking snowfall densities, deglacification, consequent diminishment of snowmelt, subsequent desertification of unreplenishable rivers, which, finally, receive less and less water replenishment, portending the eventual impossibility of hydrological diversion for irrigation, long-distance refrigeration for shipped goods, air conditioning, electricity generation, and supplies of drinking water.
The best-known example among hundreds one could cite, the Colorado River, is diverted along its entire length to provide water to Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and all of Southern California: all essentially desert regions dependent on diverted water for the continued operation of electrical plants, refrigeration, air conditioning, drinking water, and myriad less obvious water-dependent essential services. All the Southwestern United States have either exhausted their indigenous aquifer or never had any in the first place: they have, in other words, no water of their own anywhere beneath their artificially sustained agricultural regions. When the Colorado River becomes the Colorado Wading Pond, every city in this vast area will shut down overnight, the bulk of America's produce from the Central Valley of California will disappear, and the Southwest will rapidly revert to uninhabitable desert.
If we factor in the immanent, catastrophic slide down the dark side of the peak oil bell curve, it becomes indisputable that an infrastructural catastrophe of irremediable dimensions is already well underway.
The above is a description of the real world, today, this minute, tomorrow: in such a world, the acquisition of a painted image on a canvas for $140 million by a private individual, or for that matter by a public institution, deserves the appellation "obscenity" far more than anything normally labelled obscene.
As I've already indicated, Warhol's most venturesome work of the late 70s and 80s was obscured by its meager exposure in the United States, the emergence of new artists and art practices (many of them strongly influenced by Warhol).
He never slowed down, but he no longer needed to produce seismic tremors in a culture that had, in some measure, become a simulacrum of The World of Andy Warhol. Surprise, sparkle, beauty: provocation was seldom on the menu any more. I may have the line wrong, but in Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band, someone, I seem to recall, remarks: "It takes a faggot to make something pretty." With the exception of many of those commissioned portraits, Warhol never lost that touch.
Warhol's Pop Art "statement," as he was wont to call it, dates from the pre-Campbell Soup comic panel paintings of Superman, Nancy, Dick Tracey, et al.--all of which have inspired a wealth of fascinating interpretations--to the decisive "slap in America's face" of the soup cans and other commonplace supermarket products, through the movie star icons, the "death period," the flowers, and the Mao series.
With the Campbell Soups in mind as the paintings that broke down the barriers and "made the world safe for Andy Warhol," the Pop meditation on celebrity, as distinct from Warhol's later depictions of the celebrated, might be bracketed with Marilyn Monroe at one end and Mao Tse-Tung at the other.
Monroe epitomizes, incarnates, embodies "stardom": likewise, the Monroe paintings return us to Warhol's childhood fascination with movie magazines, studio stills, the autographed fan pix he sent away for and treasured, as well as his fixé on the received image, the preextant photograph.
Warhol eschewed originality at the outset of his career. The technique of his commercial drawings was the making of variegated copies from a discardable template of wet ink; as if the virtuosity of his free-hand drawing represented a facility he gradually found limiting, he began tracing drawings from projected photographs. Walter Benjamin's argument in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" that the reproducibility of works of art drains the originals of "aura" is confirmed and refuted in Warhol's work. Warhol paintings do not have the aura of unique objects, though none is truly identical with another. They carry the auratic nimbus of their subjects, and the colors, or lack of colors, Warhol adds to them.
The fastidious reproduction of "the real" depended on photography's faithful recording of "what is." Warhol's aesthetic coup consisted in his fidelity to "what is," the additive of color, the associative and emotional shifts achieved by composition, saturation, and installation. Again, the effectiveness of Warhol's silkscreens owes a great deal to the blunt--one wants to say 'merciless'--authority of the hand-crafted Campbell Soup cans. Aside from their different varieties, the works exhibited at Ferus Gallery look more mechanically identical than any of Warhol's subsequent work; their frequent misidentification as screen prints, very possibly, made Warhol's actual silkscreened works look "more identical" than they are.
Paradoxically, the hand-made appeared more like photographic copies than Warhol's photographic copies.
We know Warhol combed through the photo archives of the New York Public Library for material, culling most of the "Death and Disaster" images from them. Virtually every important Warhol painting and print originates from a photograph. Among his last works shown in New York during his lifetime were photographs stitched together into grids. It took, perhaps, these sutures of the camera-produced paper artifacts by fastidious hand-stitching to make the art world conscious of Warhol's enormous talent as a photographer.
Stardom was, is, disseminated through photography: motion photography, news photographs, publicity stills, "mechanical reproduction" in all its forms. The concept of stardom assumes a plurality of stars, an assembly line of camera-perfected faces, a Hindu multiplicity of gods or idols. Stars are unique; stars are interchangeable. They age. They wear out their welcome. As with all technological commodities, the accelerated velocity of product redundancy has shortened the lifespan and lessened the iconic resonance of stardom: anyone who watches movies made now can name at least three or more almost indistinguishable actors and actresses, or more than likely cannot name them correctly. To compound the problem, most of them are very good actors, though we wouldn't call them "stars."
The stardom of Old Hollywood had far more staying power and infinitely fewer actors who closely resembled each other. Warhol chose Marilyn Monroe because she was, unmistakably, Marilyn Monroe (and, she had just died, becoming "forever Marilyn", in an unfortunate sense, as she looked in 1953), Elvis because no other Elvis existed, Liz because, with the exception of Faye Dunaway, Liz Taylor was the last true Hollywood movie star (and she was expected to die of pneumonia in London any minute).
A decade separates Marilyn from Mao in the Warhol canon. It's difficult to recall the impact of Warhol's Maos, and to say with certainty how most people reacted to them. It was a convulsive era, the nasty end of "the counterculture" and a kind of slash-and-burn political frenzy had set in: Maoism, at many universities, had become a last-ditch ideological extremity that proposed simple, absolute answers to impossibly complicated questions, and perhaps much of its appeal was that it was doomed from the start. In France, the situation was quite different: Maoism served to taunt the established Communist Party, and the gibberish of the Little Red Book was given Biblical authority. In the U.S., its appeal belatedly stemmed from the release, in the '60s, of the Red Guards and the cultural revolution throughout China, a disaster of incalculable proportions--designed, among other things, to "purify" the arts of heretical political tendencies and reactionary sentiments. Something of this fervor informed the brief and happily miniscule wave of Maoism on college campuses, but it received far more publicity than it merited.
What the Warhol Maos seem to say, at least to the radically-minded in 1972, was that stardom in the American sense was rapidly losing iconographic resonance--that celebrities were, for that matter, interchangeable by nature, and that it was plausible, maybe even expeditious, for a nation of billions to have one single identifiable celebrity. "Out of many, one." The famous Warhol combine photograph Crowd (1963) evokes the horror of a world packed like a sardine can with anonymous individuals. But given Warhol's unswerving predilection for "what is," Crowd also prompts the question, "What else is there?"
Celebrity, even individuation, may be a chimera; Zen teaches that there is no me, no you, no "self." One absurdist response to this nothingness could be the secular monotheism of a single figure as the representative ideal of the entire human species. Warhol's Mao proposes this: Warhol constantly sought the simplest solution to any aesthetic problem, and there, in Mao, he found it. But like many Warhol solutions, this one was comic, deflationary, and monumentally cheeky.
In many of the painting's variants Mao looks like the madame of a seedy brothel in Shanghai, in others a transvestite waitress in regulation Mao jacket. And the phrase "warts and all" has been literally applied. Both the problem and the solution of "celebrity" were as illusory as the "self," and Warhol's Marilyn-into-Mao conveyed the insouciance of a globally significant goof. Capitalism's supreme enemy became a capitalist collectible. Still, the Warhol Mao is somehow the last vestige of celebrity worship in the old sense, the last icon that could represent all icons.
Celebrity worship was no longer an epiphanic experience for Warhol: it was a business, and a business contingent on rapid turn-over of inventory: Interview magazine, which began by featuring, amidst a certain amount of dross, long interviews with the truly famous, devolved into a fanzine for the three-minute attention span: one month's Interman and Viewgirl became next month's birdcage liner, and after Warhol's death it became a catalogue of show biz trash and ephemera, ready for the birdcage before it hit the stands.













23


The intention of the work of art explains how it
is in no way meant to be a natural product and
to possess natural life, whether a natural product
is to be ranked higher or lower than a mere work
of art, as it is often called in a deprecatory sense.
G.W.F. Hegel, "The Conception of Artistic
Beauty"

To consider again the mystique of the franchise, if only to question its importance: at least two ostensibly Warholian works from the 1970s, in which Warhol's role was, in one case, that of executive producer--a title that can mean almost anything, really-- and, in the other, "conceptual" in the least detailed sense, could easily stand on their own, without the Warhol imprimatur, as significant works of cinematic art. While each contains abundant Warholian humor and its use of shifting layers of interpersonal antagonism, this seems an osmotic rather than imposing influence.
The first, apparently intended as the initial episode of a video series, copyrighted 1975 (although probably made in 1971 or 1972), was taped by Vincent Freemont. It records a sequence of improvisations between Charles Rydell and Brigid Berlin. Fight, shot on one of the early, bulky, black and white Sony portapacks, uses the limitations of that technology effectively, restraining the pace and frequency of camera movements and confining the action to a single living room and its adjoining kitchen.
Early users of the Portapack often misunderstood its non-photographic method of absorbing light and handled it as if it were a film camera; rapid panning created "burns," which could ruin the image, especially when the light source appeared in a shot. Avoiding this problem often created a different one: since stable image quality required slower camera movements than film, Portapack users almost invariably began panning shots and other camera movements prematurely, confusing the pauses of normal speech with the conclusion of an actor's lines, then attempted to rescue the situation by quickly panning back to the speaker, who by then had really finished speaking. The camera would then try to "catch up" with another actor who'd already begun delivering dialogue.
Such problems were never entirely avoidable with the Portapack's primitive state of development, but in Freemont's Fight, they're unusually scarce. Moreover, Freemont perfectly understood that reel-to-reel video was useless for filmic techniques such as jump-cuts or even for conventional re-angling of the frame within a scene; tape could not yet be edited electronically, and "cutting" it involved egregious guesswork and endless rewinds, fast-forwards, etc., while relighting a location to reposition the camera was much more trouble than it was worth. The Portapack's numbering rotor could only provide an approximate guide to the location of a specific point within an image. Given these and other first-generation Portapack nightmares, Freemont presciently worked with the camera's primitive capacities instead of against them, understanding that fixed, long and medium shots and episodic rather than continuous action made optimal use of the technology.
Only 48 minutes in length, Fight, in eight episodes, presents a consistently absorbing procession of verbal skirmishes between two powerfully witty personalities, who taunt and torture each other but are inextricably bonded by their shared boredom and contempt for the exigencies of their separate yet shared lives, their uncontrollable love of eating, and, though its indications are momentary and scattered, the underlying affection of two people who greatly amuse each other, quite possibly because they get on each other's nerves.
Sometimes staccato, sometimes stereophonically abrasive, occasionally broody, and even, here and there, moderato cantabile, Fight belongs in the canon of the Cinema of Shock that includes Bunuel's L'Age d'Or and Las Hurdes, Franju's Le Sang des Betes, Rouch's Les Maitres Fous, Resnais's Night and Fog, Merhige's Begotten, Fassbinder's episode in the compendium film Deutschland im Herbst, the "Marseilles" segment of Ozon's Truth or Dare--that rarefied species of film (albeit, in this case, a videotape), usually much shorter than feature length, which reveals something previously unseen and unsuspected, usually located at hidden extremes of human possibility, often violent and stunningly funny--"stunning" in the sense of getting goosed with a stun gun--and expands the viewer's apprehension of the chaos lurking under the forms we construct to keep this chaos out of view. Whether fictional or documentary or a combination of the two, works in this mode--there are numerically few--strip reality straight through the bone without any preamble and proceed to fling the marrow in the viewer's face. No example of the Cinema of Shock offers comforting illusions, moralizing exegesis, or escape from life's essential horror--even examples that provoke uncontrollable laughter offer the audience no quarter, since the source of their humor is precisely their relentlessness their spectacular elaboration of ineradicable fears and insecurities. They refuse to let us look away from our reflections on the screen, and when we're shown too much of what we really are, we laugh--the alternative is to run screaming from the theater.
Fight oscillates between screaming matches in which dialogue cross-hatches without becoming incoherent, seemingly normal conversations that escalate into sniping insults and criticisms, abrupt shifts of atmosphere into something resembling amiability (which quickly generates further hostility), and scenes in which Berlin's passive silences and moments of exasperated resignation drive Rydell into escalating arias of hysteria.
Rydell plays a writer whose efforts apparently extend no further than scrawling isolated paragraphs on envelopes. He complains that Berlin's daily visits to his apartment interfere with his work; when she idly snatches a sample of writing from his roll-top desk, she discovers that he's written out a standard typing exercise, "Today is when all good dogs come to their end." This sends her into uncontrollable laughter, which in turn prompts a verbal explosion from him. When Rydell feels pushed to his limit, he compulsively swings a metal baton he calls his "bullworker" violently back and forth: "I do this so I don't kill people," he informs Owen, an alarmed young man sitting silently on a couch during two scenes.
Rydell, a handsome former Marine whose powerful build suggests the possibility of real violence, is repeatedly foiled by Berlin's sly, strategic silences as he rants at her, and though she has plenty to say herself, when she doesn't talk Rydell berates her for her facial expressions. Fight opens on Berlin as she bitches at Rydell about a birthday present he gave her brother, claiming that on her birthday nothing happened--this plaint leads into an intricate argument, but when Berlin concedes the point Rydell makes, he tells her disgustedly, "Well, that's your business."
Rydell ceaselessly carps at Berlin and lectures her--about poking her finger in a small hole in an imported sofa, her low opinion of her portrait by Gerhard Richter hanging over Rydell's desk, her "barging in everywhere"--she's just had her foot clobbered by an errant security bar on the apartment door; Berlin's weapon is an insidious reasonableness that only sporadically fails her, an apparent calm that she knows will drive Rydell crazy. When, lying on a sofa in her nightgown, she informs him that she isn't going to a dinner party they've been invited to, Rydell delivers a tirade so ferocious it reduces him to spluttering.
"I'm not a plant," Berlin shouts, "would you please stop misting me?"
"What was that?"
"What I said."
Rydell proceeds to loudly spray her with more spluttering.
"Now GROW, you big fat elephant fern!"
It may sound from this description as if Berlin is the victim of Rydell's inexhaustible anger. That would be far too simple. This couple, friends who are playing themselves and acting at the same time--exaggerating, at any rate, the pointed teasing and arguing they normally engage in--have an intimate psychological symbiosis and know exactly how to get under each other's skin. Berlin knows precisely what to do, and what not to do, to shatter whatever shaky equilibrium Rydell's character can be said to have. His rages are uncalculated and uncontrollably set off by real and imaginary frustrations; Berlin, more deviously, refuses to make a single placatory comment unless it's tinged with sarcasm, and plants her incendiary provocations--not always, but sometimes--deliberatively, for maximum irritation.
When she brings lunch in for both of them--hoagies and Vernors ginger ale--Rydell laments that he doesn't want food brought in during the day, but grabs the sandwich bag when she reaches for it. The dialogue in this scene, combined with the visual of two fairly large people gobbling down food--with passionate abandon on Berlin's part, while Rydell fussily picks gobs of meat from his hoagie--exemplifies the eccentric love-hate, push-pull, habit-hating and habit-forming tone of their relationship:




Berlin: Can I have a Vernor?

Rydell: Go get one. Go get one. You ask for one when
I'm up there, I bring it. Go get one. I'm not your
servant.

Berlin: Okay, give me the hoagie back, I'll take it home.

Rydell: Lookit. You bring the hoagie, you know that I can't resist eating food. I try, that's
why my refrigerator's empty, then you go and bring this stuff down. I'm not going to the movies tonight. I'm not going to have a hoagie at the movies.

Berlin: By six o'clock you'll want one.

Rydell: I don't even want this.

Berlin: Well, don't throw it out!

…..

Rydell: Lookit, no more. During the daylight hours, I want no food in here.

Berlin: Oh, one minute you're yelling where's the Sarge's menu, you feel like a little bit of tunafish salad…

Rydell: The only way I'm gonna be able to save myself
now is not eat the roll. I'll just eat the meat.

Berlin: That bread's all the way from Philadelphia!

Rydell: …causes heart attacks, the combination of starch
and meat is lethal.

Berlin: I'll eat it, you don't have to MAUL it!

In the course of this short video movie, the viewer experiences in a particularly visceral way the truth of Sartre's No Exit: "Hell is other people." Rydell's character, who has given up alcohol, tries to elicit a simple acknowledgment of the fact (if it is one) from Berlin, who obdurately refuses to state that she knows if he has or not: "As far as I know," she says. "CAN'T YOU SAY YES???" "I said as far as I know…" "Did I have a drink last night?" "How do I know, was I there?" "WILL YOU SAY YES?" "You want me to lie, I'll say yes. I said as far as I know. I mean really, Charles."
In the final episode of Fight, we're given a fairly generous picture of how Rydell and Berlin interact when they aren't fighting: Berlin relates a pricelessly antic scene with her mother: "I walked in there, and Mother was sitting in her room, under that domed chair, with a pink nightgown, 11 o'clock this morning, a white top, and a diamond bracelet THAT wide across her arm, around her arm, her wig on…I mean really, the makeup all on, and a diamond bracelet this wide…Charles, I freaked, she walked across her room, you, I--got down on her knees, and underneath the couch, she started to drag out these long velvet boxes…the diamond bracelet, marquis diamonds, the whole thing diamonds, THIS big…there's one ruby bracelet, straight, long, nothing but rubies, marquis diamonds, more emerald-cut diamonds…and a pin, that…it couldn't be a pin, it's a FUCKING BREASTPLATE…and she's saying that she was screwed in her mother's will. Well, my God…"
Rydell tries to distract her with interjected questions, but finds Berlin's story much too funny to seriously attempt its derailment. An over-prolonged truce, however, is the last thing either of them wants, and after this interlude Rydell initiates a fresh round of mutual mental pummelling, abbreviated into a kind of epilogue. Its brevity is artistically canny. By this time, we need only a taste of resumed hostilities to understand that Fight depicts a circular, never-ending argument the protagonists are really having with themselves rather than each other: each is engaged in a running war with his/her habitual frustrations and shortcomings, the other serving as a mirrored punching bag.


Andy Warhol's Bad, directed by Jed Johnson, with a screenplay by Pat Hackett and George Abagnalo, is another flukey masterpiece that crops up in the seemingly fallow field of Warholian production in the mid-70s. Released in 1977, Bad stars Carroll Baker, the baby doll ingenue of yesteryear, Perry King, and Susan Tyrrell, who missed winning the Best Actress Oscar by a hair, for John Huston's 1971 Fat City. (Baker, too, was a Best Actress nominee, for Baby Doll, but had been making fairly hideous movies in Italy for ten years before she was offered Bad. She was not the first actress offered the part: Warhol and Johnson tried to get Vivian Vance, who said she would love doing it, but would never get booked into dinner theater again if she did.)
Baker plays Hazel Aiken, a Queens beautician specializing in electrolysis who operates her own Murder, Inc. as a cottage industry. She only employs women--primarily as assassins, though occasionally Hazel's clients just want to throw a little terror into lives of people who've annoyed them. When the film begins, Nick Bloomfield's propulsive, Hawaiian-guitar inflected theme music meshes beautifully with Cyrinda Foxe ("R.C."), shown energetically trashing a drugstore rest room, splattering the walls with ketchup and plugging up the toilet with everything she can grab until the muck she's stuffed into it comes slithering back out on cascades of filthy water.



Hazel makes her entrance in the kitchen of her home-cum-beauty parlor in a beautician's smock, her hair in a white net over green hair curlers. Her emaciated, ever-coughing mother watchfully sits in a rocking chair, while Susan Tyrrell's Mary, Hazel's daughter-in-law, fusses over her surpassingly ugly, wailing infant and peppers Hazel with carping questions about R.C.'s assignment of the night before. Mary does as much whining and snivelling as the baby, horrified by the perkily homicidal young women shuttling in and out of the house, depressed and bewildered over her abandonment by Hazel's son.
Warhol's theater of perpetual antagonism widens its scope, continually introducing new exemplars of an onrushing wave of demonically self-obsessed, morally blank urbanites, obsessed with revenge on anybody or anything that gets in their way, untroubled by having their burdensome children murdered, loaded with rage over insults and injustices they've suffered, yet positively gleeful about inflicting the same kind of misery on others.
Bad achieves the rare illusion of a fully realized, fictional world, its humor and its horror instigated by the same thing: a social order predicated on the absence of positive human feelings, a cosmos where ethical sense and empathy have long disappeared, and human beings possess nothing besides preoccupation with personal comfort, the worship of money, obsession with cosmetic improvement. They're glazed by bottomless apathy and reciprocal disdain.
As in the claustrophobia of Walt Disney's movies and Francis Bacon's paintings John Berger has attributed to the same monstrous self-sufficiency of these artists's versions of reality, Bad excludes whatever doesn't fit inside its compressed universe of malice, asperity, betrayal, disgust, and moments of ludicrously overt insincerity; as per Berger's trope of being trapped inside an unbearable vision--Disney's saccharine insipidities, Bacon's scenarios of men pleasurelessly coupling like instinct-driven dogs, recumbent figures with syringes planted in their arms, and satanic-looking, screaming popes--Bad conjures a circle of hostile, resentfully interdependent personalities, outside of which there is nothing else.
This film's ghoulishly comedic tone infects the viewer with the moral vacuity of its inhabitants, enlists our complicity with the depraved indifference to human life that Hazel, her stable of assassins, and their clients share as the defining feature of contemporary existence. Murder means nothing except a well-paying job, an appointment book entry as flatly businesslike as Hazel's jotted schedule book of hair removal clients.
The young women Hazel hires for their imperturbable criminality and their pleasure in causing death and injury are young, beautiful, and eager for excitement, which ranges from an ultimately failed effort to kill an ex-policeman's dog (Brigid Polk/Estelle's retaliation for the retired cop's nasty remarks about her in a local bar--"You have to kill a dog, and you have to kill it viciously. It can't be something painless, or ouchless."), torching a movie theater and incinerating much of its audience to relieve the tedium of the film being screened; dismembering a garage mechanic who pushed a customer's subsequently one-armed boyfriend in front of an oncoming subway car.
Bad's antic peaks include Susan Blond as a housewife who tosses her screaming infant out the window of her high-rise apartment, and Brigid Polk's inspired tirade against "O'Reilly-O'Crapface," an ex-cop whose dog she wants killed. Polk's reversion to baby talk while fondling her own cherished dogs, her burp-and-fart punctuated recital of her health problems ("My doctor says I'm an air swallower," Estelle tells the wacky "sister act" she's hired for the dogicide).
After the sisters manage only to wound the intended canine victim, Estelle phones Hazel, screeching hysterically, then scrambles into the street, where she assaults O'Reilley O'Crapface, hurling garbage cans at him while spewing a volcanic lava flow of enraged insults ("You welfare recipient!" is the angriest, funniest one, recalling her earlier mimicry of a pushy black woman she'd recently clashed with over a supermarket shopping cart). Berlin's uninhibited, sourly misathropic ramblings comprise one of American cinema's transcendent comic performances, each of her appearances a miracle of timing that graces her absurdly overfixated frustration with a smear of sublimity.
Incompetent dog killers Glenda and Marcia Montemorano, played by sisters Geraldine and Maria Smith, indulge their nihilistic sense of fun by luring the chronically housebound Mary out to see a movie, supposedly to lessen her unpleasantly lachrymose depression; after an inattentive half hour of glancing at a film in Spanish and telling a shushing customer behind them to fuck off, Glenda slips upstairs to the projection booth and sets fire to a piled-up trash bucket, then insists that they all leave.
As Mary fidgets in confusion, struggling to open a rear door of the stolen car Marcia's driving, the sisters zoom off down the street, ditching Mary in a senseless killing type of ghetto neighborhood, where she's immediately mugged by a very tall, black junkie.
Now miles from the perpetually scowling and sobbing Mary, Glenda, unassuaged by what later proves to be a major conflagration at the movie theater, tosses lighted matches into the back seat. Some papers finally catch fire, flames lick ever-closer to a can of emergency gasoline. Moments before the car explodes, Marcia yanks the fire-enraptured Glenda out the driver side door.
Bad is flawlessly well-cast and probably the most convincingly acted of the final suite of movies Warhol's name is attached to. Many of the same supporting actors appeared in the Morrissey era movies in Warhol's filmography. In Jed Johnson's directorial hands, however, they deliver performances of a formidable polish, nuance and skill which nothing Morrissey gave them to perform would remotely suggest they were capable of. The movies Warhol directed himself belong to a special category. Their sources of inspiration and Warhol's defiant formal violations of monotonous Hollywood structures were fundamentally at odds with Morrissey's commercial orientation, and occupy a separate body of work.
Morrissey wanted the Factory films to resemble the California product in its heyday of elegantly studio-invented gods and goddesses, with plots modelled from the narrative conventions of classics from the 1940s, updated to offer modern audiences "a little extra" they couldn't find in the conventional, studio-financed films of the 60s and 70s--special little extras like Joe D'Allesandro's formidably large penis in full erection, or Geri Miller dancing topless in a miniature strip joint her husband has installed for her in their living room.
Morrissey, with better luck, might have developed his own elaborately plot-pointed movies, replete with "three acts," arcs of Aristotelian classical structure--triumph followed by defeat, then resolved by a second and more conclusive triumph, and the rest of what ancient Greece found aesthetically rewarding. This prehistoric concept of theatrical symmetry, which informed Western dramatic art for a millenium, frankly seems like a still-undulating water bed discovered in the ruins of Herculaneum and grossly irrelevant to a vastly altered, industrially and technologically transmogrified world.
To obliquely revisit the Kitty Genovese case and its implications, the Iphigenia of 2007 would undoubtedly leave her brother's corpse where she found it and leave it for crows to gobble, then phone the king on her cell phone and suggest they meet for cocktails in a karaoke bar. Oedipus would simply have a son of his own by his mother and put someone else's eyes out. The women in Lysistrata would arm themselves with AK-47s and insist on joining their men in combat.
Warhol maintained an alliance with Morrissey while courting Hollywood on a regular basis, and he, too, undoubtedly, dreamed of one day finally taking the right meeting while armed with a bullet-proof, three-act script containing enough arcs to make a Richard Serra sculpture out of them, "bringing home the bacon" with the revenues of movies that scored high on Variety's listings of weekly theater receipts--or, as a friend of mine always characterizes hugely successful, atrociously lousy Hollywood movies, "big B.O."
Neither Warhol nor Morrissey ever came anywhere close to that kind of commercial altitude in the movie business, though Hollywood liberally aped their techniques in newish mainstream films, borrowed, stole, and "adapted"--in most instances quite witlessly--innumerable tropes, plots, and the styles of individual Factory stars, folding Warhol's originality (an iffy word, vis-à-vis most of Warhol's work, but appropriate to his films) into Hollywood's time-honored practice of betting the studio on extravagantly budgeted, lavishly promoted, emotionally phoney, psychologically ludicrous, and, to summarize, spectacularly vulgar, crudely conceived and mediocre epics.


































24


A calls Gloria.
"We've got fifty thousand dollars to
make a movie in Venice with you. A remake of
Summertime. But instead of the Italians
only being interested in sex, we're going to
have YOU the one who's only interested in
sex. The Italians are looking for love. They
rebel against you and throw you in a canal."
"In the middle of winter?"
"Yeah."
"You know those canals are pretty polluted."
"Yeah."
"How much money?"
"Two thousand dollars."
"Not enough. Call my agent."

Viva (Susan Hoffman), Superstar


The negative impression Warhol's work of the 1970s left on American art mavens and many other people is partly deserved, for the same reason Bob Colacello cites for the artist's abandonment of the Silver Factory lifestyle: he got older. Great works of art don't come pouring out of anyone incessantly over the course of a career; an artist is blessedly lucky if he hits a long winning streak once or twice in lifetime, as Warhol did between 1962-64.
Many things have been written about Warhol's late works. It isn't necessary to repeat or to qualify them here, though it's worth mentioning that an important aesthetic distance separates most of his commissioned portraits from portraits of friends and other people Warhol knew, or sought out, whom he had a positive desire to make portraits of, not simply to collect a check but because he knew he could do something interesting with their faces.
It would also be a waste of the reader's time to learn my personal opinions about late Warhol paintings. As an ever-popular quip has it, opinions are like assholes, everybody has one.
Or as Charles Rydell remarks in Fight, "That's the trouble with these people over here, everybody's a goddam critic." It's enough to remark that Warhol fell in love again with drawing and painting in the last decade of his life, and applied his preternatural energy to making work, as always.
For or against? Up or down? I couldn't say exactly when American television began offering gladatorial shouting matches between "commentators" representing supposedly opposite political positions, "on the Right, X, and speaking for the left, Y". This money-saving effluvia, requiring nothing more than a studio, a photographic backdrop, and talking heads, produced, for equally repugnant mediocrities, not simply a forum for binary thinking about political issues but permanent job placement. The job of "commentator" requires, in the absence of any burning political issue on a particular day, the pretense of deeply informed expertise on virtually anything from celebrity murder cases to the active ingredients of a favorite shampoo.
Years before this development, Alexander Kluge produced a show on German television where intellectual adversaries really lashed out at each other, really had fights, albeit verbal ones, took the gloves off--twenty-some years ago, Kluge believed shows of this kind would perform a salubrious public service, raise people's level of intellectual curiosity, and be hugely entertaining at the same time.
While it's true that Germany has a vastly higher standard of education than the U.S., and a much more diverse and sophisticated cultural environment, it seems doubtful that Kluge's experiment wrought anything more improving there than its submental versions offer on American cable television.
There is this about infinitely flexible "commentary," about an abundance of "experts" who are, by and large, less informed about the world and far better insulated from reality than the average K-Mart cashier: if distractedness was a conspicuous feature of urban life in 1968, the subsequent social and political history of the United States between then and now has metastasized that condition into one of obliviousness.
It would have been highly unusual, in 1968, to find a university student incapable of locating Vietnam on a world map. In 2006, a National Geographic survey conducted among 18-24 year old American college students revealed that 87% couldn't locate Iraq or Saudi Arabia on a map; 75% couldn't find Israel or Iran; 88% had no idea where Afghanistan was; 33% could not tell north from south. The breathtaking kicker: 11% couldn't find the United States.
What has this to do with Andy Warhol? Admittedly, a trick question. Certainly it doesn't have everything to do with Andy Warhol. But it hasn't nothing to do with him, either.
Warhol described his artistic trajectory roughly this way: he started in commercial art, and ended up in business art.
Along the way, he made a considerable amount of real art. Semantically, anything that exists qualifies as real. If life were nothing more than semantics, anything could be anything, and everything could be anything, according to what one happens to name the everything or anything in question.
That anything and everything may in fact be nothing is a concept Warhol articulated often and illustrated in his work. Recall that he said that he painted the Campbell Soup cans because he wanted to paint something that was nothing, and that was as close to nothing as he could get.
It seems reasonable to assert that when Warhol painted the soup cans, our culture was in dire need of works of art that weren't intended to "say" anything, to "represent" anything. Warhol's paintings were simply what they were. The Campbell Soups weren't the "manifest content" of some "latent content" behind them. They didn't need, and clearly Warhol didn't wish for them, to be parsed in the way Freud analyzed his patients's dreams. In 1962, Warhol's work had the singular virtue of resisting the kind of otiose, convoluted readings that Clement Greenberg and other critics injected into Abstract Expressionism. There was nothing to read into Warhol's works. Indeed, as Warhol correctly thought, they were as close to nothing as a picture of something could be.
They startled, they shocked, they pissed people off. They also refreshed the sense of surprise and unmediated pleasure of looking at beautiful visual objects without requiring them to "mean" anything. All they revealed, really, was that a soup can grabbed off a supermarket shelf could be beautiful exactly as it was, in all its monumentalized banality.
In the many years that have passed since Warhol's Soup Cans appeared in the Ferus Gallery, American culture has undergone drastic changes. The paintings themselves still look fresh, still jump out at the viewer and leave a tactile afterimage on the eyes. But the context in which we are likely to encounter them today is different.

To repeat an earlier cited remark, still more or less commonly heard, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol were the two most important artists of the 20th century.
"Important" is an ambiguous word choice. Art writers routinely use the word as if it automatically confers exalted significance on an artist or on his or her work, though it does no such thing. "Important" isn't a value-neutral word, but a word that can connote either the baleful or the salubrious, describe a disastrous event as well as a fortuitous one. The word itself doesn't distinguish a bankruptcy from a windfall. Moreover, it can describe opposite values or effects at the same time.
An important artist can be a good or a bad one, or sometimes a good one, sometimes a bad one, or good for a time and bad later on, and vice-versa. In this regard, in this specific context of culture and what kind of culture a society has, and what kind of art that culture generates in that society, whether an "important" work of art is good, bad, or indifferent may very well be an irrelevance. If we substitute "influential" for "important," we come closer to understanding why Andy Warhol remains a living presence in world culture, and how Andy Warhol changed the culture of the United States. "Influential," too, can denote two opposite things simultaneously.

At the risk of mystifying Warhol instead of rendering him transparent, it's possible that his importance was, and is, that his art and his life changed what Americans consider important.
One connundrum that studying this subject presents is that time--the altered sense of which Warhol introduced into every art-making practice he engaged in--is, like a human personality, a different thing and a different experience for every individual. Andy Warhol was born eighty-nine years ago. Fifty-five years have passed since Warhol showed the Campbell Soup paintings at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Twenty years separate Warhol's death from the date of this writing.
It seems to people of a certain age fantastic and impossible to meet younger people whose first exposure to art was a painting by Andy Warhol. It's usually a surprise when someone's memory is considerably shorter than one's own, especially now, when curiosity about the past is among the positive qualities common in my generation which seem to have atrophied in young people today.
What surprises me even more, strange to say, is the fact that Andy Warhol was the first artist whose career I followed from its outset. Warhol was certainly not my first experience of seeing works of art, but he was the first artist I felt compelled to pay attention to. Not from the very outset of his professional life--Warhol's career as a professional illustrator began the year before I was born. Like most people snagged by Warhol's Pop Art paintings when they began appearing everywhere, I knew almost nothing of what he'd done before that. It's certain, however, that the art he made during the first eleven years of my life, emerging rapidly from its former obscurity, will, sooner than later, become as familiar as his Pop Art and everything that followed it.
This isn't offered as prediction but as absolute certainty.
It wouldn't be inaccurate to say that Warhol's work from the 1950s will reveal more and more affinities with his later work as time passes. New connections will be made, more continuities drawn, and eventually time will dissolve the dramatic schism usually perceived between Warhol's decade as a highly respected, highly paid, and, in a circumscribed realm, famous commercial artist, and his later status as a world famous "real" artist--whatever the less ambiguous term for that might be.
One measure of Warhol's importance--hopefully a point that won't convolute itself in the process of pinning it down--is the kind of thematic continuity of early with later Warhol numerous writers have already examined in depth, the scrutiny critics have recently given the Warhol Fifties, and the diminished use of euphemisms, deliberate obscurantisms, and reductive focus on formalist questions that once made Warhol an extremely well-known artist of an altogether different kind than he actually was. Crypto-philosophical lucubrations, published for years in academic art journals, have imputed the most innocuous and irrelevant "meanings" to Warhol's production, ignoring its manifest content or avoiding the language that would most accurately describe it. This practice of handling-with-tongs what any viewer who isn't a critic immediately understands about Warhol's paintings may reflect nothing more than the well-sedimented inability of straight critics to write anything about homosexuality without making asses of themselves, though Warhol's most virulent detractor isn't only homophobic, but a misogynist and racist as well. (It takes an extremely small person, however physically large the critic I'm thinking of happens to be, to trash an artist's entire existence in an obituary.)
Warhol's work has acted as a belatedly efficacious antidote to the diversionary critical practices that insistently constructed a closet around an uncloseted homosexual, rebuilding it every time he tore it down. Warhol's one-word responses to the questions of certain interviewers, his dissembled but easily perceived contempt for most of the journalists who tried to grill him about "art," were Andy's technique for dismissing the entire claque of smarmy thumbs-up-or-down magazine writers, who kept asking him for over a decade why he'd painted Campbell Soup cans or why he'd painted Marilyn Monroe or why he'd painted a car wreck, but never remotely approached asking him why his work was so overtly celebratory of the male body, or what relation he saw, if any, between a painted soup can or Coke bottle and a well-known predilection for shoe-licking and fellatio--only obtusity, deliberate or endemic, could suggest that all these journalists, all these interviewers, all these mavens of interpretion honestly believed the explicit content of a painting or a movie necessarily had a completely different subject slyly concealed by the picture itself. Or as someone asked Freud, if a cigar is a phallic symbol, what's a penis a symbol of?
Consistent though it would be with the current era's unrelieved dreariness if art criticism proved to be one of the last venues where the printed word relinquished the "breathless hush" of the 1950s, one progressive effect of Warhol's influence has been its rendering of such coy, closety, fifth-rate verbosity into a mirth-provoking relic of art-as-religion. Of course, the refusal to state the obvious about Warhol is one among myriad examples of how mass media have corrupted language. A culture with only a hiccup of history in the first place hasn't all that far to regress before shooting backwards past barbarism into savagery. What is there to say about a place where 11% of its consumers of higher education can't locate their own country on a map?


Unfortunately, every silver lining has its cloud, and silver clouds don't always produce a happier place when they run out of helium. What people hang on their walls is their business, but the sensibilities that influential people inculcate in other people has a powerful ripple effect in a world of mind-altering media.
Warhol may have sometimes entertained the wish to be a private person, but few Americans have ever been less so. In the time when he incarnated the ne plus ultra of cool, the aphorisms and observations he coined, the books he published, the magazine with his John Hancock over the title conveyed a richly whimsical way of seeing things, but these things were also given weight and taken seriously by successive waves of fans/followers/devotees and too many people trying to dredge a role model out of a Dumpster. Part sphinx, part Svengali, with a bit of Simon Legree and Uriah Heep thrown into the mix, Warhol, his writings, his movies, his paintings, and Interview magazine held a surprisingly widespread, nervous-making sway over how Americans felt about the country they lived in, how they reacted to new technologies, how they thought about themselves and how they treated other people.
Whether the result of inattention, passivity, a virulent resurgence of fears instilled in his childhood, anti-intellectualism and the closely related aversion to value judgements, intoxicating proximity to power, creative exhaustion, a late-developing failure to effectively control things within his realm, disorientingly rapid revisions of the culture's structural mechanisms--which he'd formerly grasped, in every particular, with something close to omniscience--or the convergence of all these elements within a brief span, Andy Warhol, who'd become "Andy Warhol" years earlier, was increasingly perceived, after the mid-1970s, as "the former Andy Warhol".
If he had always looked spectral and pallid, and strategically exaggerated his natural reticence and played up his own absurdity and unlikelihood, in the period covered by his Diaries, Warhol's celebrity had already outlasted his fame; in the new world evolving around him, the significant difference between the two was something Americans were becoming mentally and morally unequipped to recognize.
Warhol's tactic of pretending to like everything, of never expressing strong emotions, of sustaining an artifice for two decades without suspecting that it came with an unpayable hidden price tag, forced his complicity with retrograde and ruinous forces in ascendancy.
Warhol's celebrity worship had lost its artistic facetedness even before he attached himself to the gang of cokeheads and exhibitionists whose preoccupations, faithfully recounted every morning by Warhol on the phone with Pat Hackett, were vapid and petty. Warhol's audience no longer consisted of erudite and thoughtful art lovers, bohemians, hipsters, poets, and inspired eccentrics, but rather the same generic fashion freaks, bracelet designers, opportunistic pretty boys, debutantes still shedding their baby fat, and "employers" who commissioned portaits from him. Whatever their professional achievements, Andy's gang--Halston, Liza, Bianca, the irrepressibly loathesome Victor Hugo, et al.--were objects of contempt rather than adoration, their only ardent fans being the kinds of nouveau homosexuals who had never read a book, believed that "brunch" was an event instead of breakfast, and experienced the same breathless thrill every time they went shopping, even though they went shopping every day.
Ordinary people--by which I don't mean mediocre people, but simply people with their heads screwed on properly--regarded Warhol's new band of revelers as trash in tuxedos and $4000 cocktail dresses, if only because Warhol himself pimped their images in Interview incessantly, whether or not they'd actually done anything in a given season except cocaine and anal sex in the basement of Studio 54.
Out of this tiresome array of strung-out thrill-seekers, only Bianca Jagger escaped from recreational self-display, or evidenced any social conscience or genuine altruism while still attending the endless party. She eventually devoted her energies and time to human rights activism, opposition to capital punishment, and social justice, and became an articulate, thoroughly informed advocate for the victims of an increasingly heartless and morally depraved system of inequality and exploitation: the same system Andy Warhol was starting to symbolize.
As the Reagan imperium set about destroying organized labor, incinerating any vestiges of Roosevelt's New Deal and Johnson's War on Poverty, Warhol used Interview to pay fawning tribute to the First Couple and their retinue of think tank barricudas, xenophobes, and henchpersons, many of whom would find themselves under indictment soon after their elevation to Superstardom. Warhol, a lifelong Democrat, was welcomed to realms of criminal enterprise government as a honorary fascist fellow-traveller.
He helped promote many ideas that have done irreparable damage to the society he cherished for its egalitarian distribution of Coca Cola and ballpark hot dogs fit for a Queen, but the democracy he so often extolled had turned into a continuously running ad for democracy, a truly Warholian substitution of image for substance. His art and his magazine implicitly endorsed social changes disastrous for American life and American culture, and facilitated the passive acceptance of corporate feudalism.
Many observers have blamed Fred Hughes or Bob Colacello or even Vincent Freemont--anybody who worked for him rather than Andy himself--for his reinvention, in what turned out to be his last, as an artist whose inner secret lost its charge, his put-on disengagement and visage of blank indifference morphing into the real thing. Accusations aimed at his employees are unfair and misdirected. Warhol habitually blamed everybody else for his own mistakes, broken promises, betrayal of confidences, and financial cheating. He lied as a bird flies, incapable of taking responsibility for his own actions. Rarely confronted, he reverted to infantile whining and self-contradictory excuses. He would deny things he'd said or done five minutes earlier, treating reality as a big lump of Silly Putty he could shape however he wished. It never bothered him to behave horribly in front of witnesses and moments later tell the same witnesses that somebody else had done whatever it was. He treated responsibilities to his employees like a three-card-monte game while they labored like galley slaves to make money for him. His cheapness was awesome, epic, sadistically petty, and as blatant as the Washington Monument. Nobody forced Andy to behave like a monster of greed and callousness. No one ever made Andy do anything he didn't want to do.





















25



Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation"


It shouldn't be said too often that Warhol accomplished many fine things in the last decade of his life, regardless of the impression, confirmed by reading his posthumously published Diaries, that somewhere in the middle to late 1970s he began squandering his cultural capital by churning out portraits of the vulgar rich of the provinces, cropping away their double chins, erasing the bird nests of wrinkles around their eyes and creases in the corners of their mouths, in effect working as a plastic surgeon who fixes images of faces instead of faces, images of Mr. and Mrs. Nobody from Nowhere who made their pile from an improved design for septic tank ball cocks.
When Warhol commenced his portrait franchise, his market was in a slump and he was overwhelmed by the overhead on his various enterprises. But after Fred Hughes's management made Warhol very rich indeed, he continued accepting commissions he didn't need, including a visually delightful but altogether gratuitous assortment of glorified ads for Mercedes Benz: 35 paintings and 12 enormous drawings, weirdly identified as "portraits" of Mercedes models dating from 1886 to 1987. Warhol died before finishing the full commission for 80 pictures; by happenstance, these car portraits are the last series of works he produced.
There is nothing objectionable about these pictures per se, aside from their function as visual manifestos for corporatism. Nor is there anything of real art in them, at least as Susan Sontag describes the effects of real art. One could easily pass over this pointless expenditure of Warhol's talents if it didn't verify his abandonment of real art (which engages in a dialogue with beauty even when it is willfully ugly) in favor of the merely pretty. As if repining for his first years in New York, when his magazine and newspaper illustrations were assigned and sent back for revision, sometimes several times, by a select coven of editors who served as maternal substitutes--elegant, articulate, graceful, highly sophisticated surrogates of Julia Warhola. These editors are all younger, prettier, and smarter than Julia Warhola, from whom he thinks he's finally escaped. He grew up with peasants and Julia Warhola is a peasant and Andy Warhol not only doesn't want to finish up a peasant, he never wants to see one again. He wants to put the peasant inside him outside: not outside on a canvas, outside his life. He wants, in fact, to take everything inside him and empty it outside him. Everything inside him smells like a festering bedpan. Inside him desire for other men feels like a malignant tumor. The men he wants to have sex with don't want to have sex with him. The only people who've ever desired him were men he didn't desire. He hates desire. He understands perfectly well that desire is the opposite of pleasure. Desire is need and hunger and abjection. If he puts the desire inside him outside him it will no longer be a feeling, but an object. Objects can be bought and sold and you don't need to feel anything about them. They can't make you suffer. They can't withhold themselves from you. You can make them and sell them to people or buy them and own and control them.
Warhol's Business Art is essentially the same thing as the shoe drawings he made for I. Magnin in the '50s, though Mercedes, no doubt, paid him higher fees. When he names commercial illustration that's been commissioned as fine art instead of advertising Business Art, this underscores, in an unfortunately literal manner, how closely Warhol's work traces the contours of the ever-changing zeitgeist. That it sometimes does so by embodying the very things one would like to imagine the artist deplores reflects the characteristic ambivalence Warhol maintained throughout his career by letting every visual artifact he produced "speak for itself"--a legitimate practice, one that many consider the ideal. Unlike Charlie McCarthy, a work of art that speaks for itself doesn't require a ventriloquist.
Warhol's best works speak for themselves, or rather don't speak for anything, since theirs is the language of silence the artist cultivated and arguably perfected. If Warhol had honored his own ukase of silence, his art might well have achieved an aura of mystery which would have rendered it more expressive, more moving, more emotive, more beautiful, more disruptive.
The reality, however, is that this avatar of silence and cunning never shut up about himself, his work, his memories, his reflections, his skin problems, his sex problems, his eating habits, his techniques for figuring out other people, his refusal to check his shopping bags when he entered a supermarket, his infatuation with money, his admiration of Diana Vreeland, his actors, his publicity, his triumphs and failures. If Warhol wasn't crazy about talking (though he was, you only had to hear him on the phone to realize he was a champion blabbermouth), he had an authentic mania for writing and publishing everything he wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation, or even on the phone.
He needed plenty of help with his literary effusions, though Paul Morrissey's claim that "Andy couldn't read," and the assertion that Warhol was dyslexic, are baseless. Warhol was a compulsive reader, and the imputation of illiteracy is one myth about himself that Warhol didn't start.
It's possible, of course, that although he could read, Warhol couldn't write--that is, write as writers write. His handwritten residua contains many misspellings and syntactical gaffes, and the extreme brevity typical of Warhol's notes, letters, and postcards indicates difficulty with penning his thoughts or expressing his sentiments in handwritten form.
His speech was usually grammatically correct, and he sometimes revealed a capacity for well-organized logical thought, which he verbalized with completely un-Warhol-like eloquence. He had the capacity, but lacked the habit. So it has to be assumed that all Warhol's books were "co-written," usually extracted from tape recordings and phone conversations and manicured into written English by Pat Hackett, Bob Colacello, and Steven M.L. Aaronson, with each of whom he collaborated, sometimes crediting his co-authors, sometimes not.
Almost all Warhol's books are entertainments, literary vaudevilles. The voice is never quite the same voice, and never sounds entirely like Andy's voice; like everything about him, the books produce an ambiguity that heightens interest while undermining any certainty about what's true, what's a put-on, and who exactly wrote which parts of it. When one book rakes over the same story told in another book, each relates it differently, shifts the emphasis or alters details; one book uses pseudonyms, another the real names of the characters, and Warhol claims different thoughts and opinions about the same people; some extended passages are partially fictionalized, whereas others attempt to adhere closely to the facts. They can be read many times without turning stale, even though second or third readings tell us nothing new. Warhol's books aren't trash, neither are they literature. They're a sort of verbal Pop Art.
The magnum opus, or octopus, is The Andy Warhol Diaries, and it's markedly unlike Warhol's other titles. Although it became an immediate best-seller, and drops embarrassing disclosures about the secret lives of the people Warhol hung around with between November, 1976 and February, 1987 on every page, it's unpleasant reading from page 1, and rather quickly becomes nauseating and almost unbearable. Warhol brings his usually hidden opinions about people, and what seems an unintentionally fullish exposure of his own personality, into the open.
The Andy Warhol Diaries, unlike the revved-up, slapstick spirit and absurdist humor of his books of memoirs, is lively with proper names and lifeless in its overdetailed accounts of Warhol's travels and his variegated activities in New York during the period it covers. It tells you everything you never wanted to know about the people Warhol regularly saw and partied with in those years--which is more or less anything.
Warhol condenses the noteworthy moments of a fast-motion circuit of parties, openings, celebrity visits to The Factory, and what feels like an eon of nightly carousing at Studio 54. Behind all this frenetic activity, behind all the compulsive shopping Warhol does walking partway from his uptown home to Union Square, behind the jokes, behind the drugs everybody--except Andy, of course (and really, on this topic of drugs everybody else took while he sipped a mineral water, who on earth did he think he was fooling?)--ingests in near-lethal quantities, behind the movie stars giving blowjobs to waiters in the balcony at 54, behind the telegraphically concise background histories of numerous recurring characters, and behind the encyclopedic coverage of the artful strategies Fred and Bob and the others devised to secure portrait commissions--the book is surely as long as Moby Dick, or only fractionally shorter--behind all of this the reader sees, a little too clearly, an ambulatory wig whose wow, gee whiz, and golly act has gone stale as a month-old donut.
Warhol seems not to notice it, but his vision of the world has almost entirely replaced the world that existed before he began indicting boredom, apathy, emotional emptiness, partial autism and ugliness by exhibiting these negative qualities in his own persona. Since Warhol's death, that vision has accelerated its spread over all of America and much of the developed world, like the map Borges invents, that grows large enough to physically coincide with the entire territory it charts.