Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol Page 5

by Arthur C. Danto

  The colors in Marilyn Diptych were garish—chrome yellow hair, chartreuse eye shadow, smeary red lipstick. There were two sets of twenty-five Marilyns, colored on the left, black and white on the right. The colored ones are fairly uniform, even if off register. The black-and-white ones show a certain variation. In the second row from the left, for example, the screen gets clogged with the black ink, as if a shadow had fallen over the star’s face. Then the features get paler and paler until, in the upper right corner, the face feels as if it is fading away from the world as we read across the diptych. It is like a graphic representation of Marilyn dying, without the smile leaving her face. In this respect the fifty faces of Marilyn Monroe is very different from the array of thirty-two Campbell’s Soup Cans, which are uniformly bright. There is no internal transformation. In Marilyn Diptych there is repetition, but it is a transformative repetition, in which the accidentalities of the silk-screen medium are allowed to remain, like the honks and squawks of a saxophone solo, in performances by John Coltrane.

  The one anomalous work was 129 Die. It was the front-page photograph of a jet crash in the New York Mirror for June 4, 1962. Henry Geldzahler, the curator of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum, brought it to Warhol, saying, “It’s enough life. It’s time for a little death.” He wanted Warhol to change from the celebrator of consumption to something deeper and more serious. Warhol was to spend much of the following year making Death and Disaster silk-screen paintings: car crashes, plane crashes, race riots, suicides, poisonings—the disasters we see on the evening news, or that get written about in the tabloids and then forgotten, as if violent deaths happened to others, to people we know nothing about. They are like illustrations to Marcel Duchamp’s mock epitaph—D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent—“Anyway, it’s always the others who die.” Like the batter who dreams, over and over again, of a base hit or a strikeout, the disasters are repeated and repeated in a single frame, as if to dull the horror. You cannot die more than once—“After the first death there is no other,” as the poet Dylan Thomas wrote—though Warhol did in fact die twice. But what does it mean, showing people dying the same death over and over? Warhol used decorator colors for these paintings, lavender and rose and orange and mint-green—as if he were producing wallpaper. Sometimes he would pair a disaster painting with a blank monochrome canvas in the same color. It made for a more impressive work than the disaster taken alone. But it points to a contrast as well, between the world of disaster and devastation and the void—the world emptied of incident, lavender emptiness.

  Dying in America. Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962. Synthetic polymer paint and silk-screen ink on canvas, 82 × 57 in. (205.4 × 144.8 cm). Tate, London/Art Resource, NY

  The 1962 Stable show was a huge success, critically and financially, though Warhol’s prices were unusually modest. But in a way Warhol himself was carried along with his work, as if he were inseparable from it, with his wig, his weak eyesight, his bad complexion, his loopy, ill-defined musculature. Who, unless they knew Lichtenstein or Oldenburg or Wesselman or Rosenquist personally, had any idea of what they actually looked like as men? But Andy became as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin or Mickey Mouse. He became a public personality. With the first Stable show Warhol became Andy, the Pop artist—an icon, identified with his bafflingly obvious work, and with the world in which Americans lived. He was the one that took that world and turned it into art that everyone felt they understood. Much of the publicity was negative, but there was a lot of it, and it didn’t matter what it said.

  One the best critics of the time responded to what the negativity left untouched. Michael Fried, cultivated and sophisticated as few journalistic critics, captured the great truths of the Stable shows: “Of all the painters working today in the service—or thrall—of a popular iconograph, Andy Warhol is probably the most single-minded and the most spectacular. At his strongest—and I take this to be the Marilyn Monroe paintings—Warhol has a painterly competence, a sure instinct for vulgarity (as in his choice of colors) and a feeling for what is truly human and pathetic in one of the exemplary myths of our time. That I for one find moving.”

  The tragedy of the commonplace—“beauty falls from air, queens have died young and fair”—is as true of New York and Los Angeles in the 1960s as it was of Paris and Lombardy at the time of the Renaissance. No one standing in front of Marilyn could say—how cheap, how empty. Warhol, in giving us our world transfigured into art, transfigured us and himself in the process. Even if the Death and Disaster paintings did not sell, even if Pop’s days were numbered, ours was becoming the Age of Warhol. An Age is defined in terms of its art. Art before Andy was radically different from the art that came after him, and through him.

  THREE

  The Brillo Box

  Because of the success of his first show at the Stable Gallery, Andy attained a degree of celebrity unshared by the other artists in the Pop movement: it in fact outlasted the movement itself, which was as much a cultural craze as an art movement, based on brashness and novelty. His productive career took a direction very different from that of any of his peers. It was not the typical career of the Artist in his Studio, producing a body of work to be shown at regular intervals at a gallery, harvesting critical reviews and sales to important collectors. More than any artist of comparable importance, Andy intuited the great changes that made the 1960s the “Sixties,” and helped shape the era he lived through, so that his art both became part of his times and transcended them. He invented, one might say, an entirely new kind of life for an artist to lead, involving music, style, sex, language, film, and drugs, as well as art. But beyond even that, he changed the concept of art itself, so that his work induced a transformation in art’s philosophy so deep that it was no longer possible to think of art in the same way that it had been thought of even a few years before him. He induced, one might say, a deep discontinuity into the history of art by removing from the way art was conceived most of what everyone thought belonged to its essence. Picasso, it must be said, was the most important artist of the first half of the twentieth century, inasmuch as he revolutionized painting and sculpture in deep and liberating ways. Warhol revolutionized art as such. His decisions were always surprising, and if they did not especially make his work popular, they seem, in retrospect, to have been precisely in harmony with the spirit of his era. Which makes it natural to think of ours as the Age of Warhol, to the degree that he set his stamp on what was allowable.

  This conceptual reconfiguration of art began in early 1964 with a body of work quite unlike anything done before, when he moved his place of operation from a not-entirely-functional firehouse to a new space—a former factory at 231 East Fortyseventh street in Manhattan, which indeed became known as “The Factory.” The Factory evolved into something that was far more than a place for making art. It became a place where a certain kind of Sixties person was able to live a certain kind of Sixties life. It became, to use a vision projected in the writing of Rabelais, a sort of Abbey de Thélème, the motto of which was Fais ce que tu voudras—“Do as you wish.” In Rabelais’s Abbey, beautiful couples followed the paths of sexual love wherever they led. The people who found their way to the Factory were typically beautiful but also lost, so that what they possessed was at most a kind of “piss glamour,” to use an epithet once bestowed on Edie Sedgwick, Warhol’s paradigm Superstar. In many cases they were destroyed by the Factory’s permissiveness, whether of sex or substance. At the center of it all was Warhol, himself anything but beautiful, whose personality was that of a workaholic, producing art, setting the direction, and using the misfits that found their way to the Factory as sources of inspiration in exchange for being allowed to watch them do what they wanted to do. They called him Andy to his face b
ut “Drella” behind his back—a combination of Dracula and Cinderella, until that term almost became his Factory name.

  Initially, however, the Factory was defined not only by work, but by a kind of repetitive, factory-like labor, where Andy and a few assistants produced, in large but manageable numbers, a variety of three-dimensional objects that he referred to as sculptures, but that looked like industrial products—like objects that would normally be produced only for some utilitarian purpose by machines designed to produce them: impersonal, mechanically achieved objects with no aesthetic aura. When we think of sculpture, we think of Michelangelo, Canova, Rodin, Brancusi, or Noguchi, creating unique objects of beauty and meaning. It would, before Warhol, never have occurred to someone to create, as sculpture, something that looked like a cardboard carton for shipping packages of consumer goods. Not only did Warhol produce exactly that—he did so through a process that in a way parodied mass production. His sculpture looked like the kinds of boxes, ordinarily made of corrugated cardboard, in which cans of food or cartons of cleaning supplies were shipped from the factories where they were made to the places where they were sold to consumers, such as supermarkets. Cardboard cartons, bearing brand names and logos, were entirely familiar items in everyday American life, used, once they were emptied, for storing and shipping things, and for any number of other household functions, their logos continuing to advertise the products they once contained, things that were themselves familiar parts of domestic life. But Warhol was less interested in them for their everydayness than he was in the aesthetics of the unopened shipping cartons, stacked in regimented piles, in the stockrooms of supermarkets, as far as the eye could see. He wanted, in the words of his assistant, Gerard Malanga, “to become totally mechanical in his work the way a packaging factory would normally silkscreen information onto cardboard boxes” (Malanga, Archiving Andy Warhol, 34). And for that he needed not so much a studio as a factory. Hence the name of his workplace.

  Malanga is our primary source for how these boxes were produced, and for what Andy’s vision was in organizing the Factory along industrial lines, paradoxically when one considers that the human beings who came to be parts of the Factory’s population were anything but robots. “Andy was fascinated by the shelves of foodstuffs in supermarkets and the repetitive, machine-like effect they create. . . . He wanted to duplicate the effect but soon discovered that the cardboard surface was not feasible” (Malanga, 94). Since the effect in question is usually achieved by the stacking of cardboard cartons in warehouses and storerooms, it is difficult to see what was wrong with cardboard, which Warhol could have used with far less effort simply by purchasing cardboard cartons from the companies that manufactured them, treating them as readymades. It was as though reality was not machinelike enough to accommodate his vision. Equally important, work was so central to his conception of art that the idea of using as art something that was not produced by work would have held no interest for him.

  The Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, with whom Warhol is often compared, had introduced the concept of the readymade into art in a set of works “created” in the years 1913–17. His most famous readymade was a urinal he allegedly purchased from a plumbing supply store—a white porcelain vessel manufactured by the Mott Iron Works, which he saw displayed in a plumbing supply store window. He added a signature—not his own but rather “R. Mutt,” presumably a near pun on “Mott”—and a date, and made history by attempting to enter it in an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, which was supposed to have no jury and no prizes. It was in fact rejected by the hanging committee, which argued that any piece of art would be hung as a matter of course, the problem being that this was not art. At a stroke, the question What is art? was raised in a new form. The original Dadaists, who fled World War I by settling in Zurich, had decided, in 1915, in protest against the classes responsible for the Great War, to refuse to make art that was beautiful at a time when it was widely believed that beauty was the whole point of art. That was the first skirmish in the anti-aestheticism that became such an important strand in modern art. If art did not need to be beautiful, what did it need to be in order to be art? Warhol, in my view, took the question of what was art to the next stage. If we think of the history of Modernism as a struggle on the part of art to bring to conscious awareness an understanding of what it—art—is, then Warhol’s “grocery boxes” are among the most important of all Modernist works. He in effect brought Modernism to an end by showing how the philosophical question of What is art? is to be answered.

  In an exhibition of Warhol’s work installed in 1968 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Warhol ordered five hundred cardboard Brillo cartons from the Brillo company, which were used to create the atmosphere of a stockroom, but which were in no sense considered works of art, either in their own right or in the aggregate. By 1968, the grocery boxes, and especially the Brillo Boxes, were, together with the Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, his iconic work, so there had to be some grocery boxes, and ideally some Brillo Boxes, in any true retrospective exhibition of his work. In fact, Warhol had arranged for the curator Pontus Hulten to have a large number of Brillo Boxes fabricated specifically for the Stockholm show, which he intended to then donate to the Moderna Museet when the exhibition had finished its final venue. He did that for his 1970 show at the Pasadena Art Museum in California. But for mysterious reasons, Hulten did no such thing. There may have been a few of the 1964 Brillo Boxes, but mostly there were the cardboard boxes, which were not really artworks, and which were in fact without value. But in 1990, after Warhol’s death, Hulten did have about 120 Brillo boxes fabricated, which he then certified as made in 1968, and sold them for huge amounts of money. But they were counterfeit. By contrast, the Appropriation artist Mike Bidlo also made a number of “Brillo boxes” in the 1990s, which he signed with his own name and titled Not Andy Warhol. Bidlo’s boxes, as part of the Appropriationist movement, are works of art in their own right, raising questions of their own, but they are no more counterfeit than Warhol’s boxes were. But it would be a digression to address that matter here, so I return to the narrative of the “Factory made” grocery boxes of 1964.

  Since the cardboard cartons actually used by the Brillo company—and facsimile cartons by other companies that were also created for Warhol’s 1964 show—were not capable of achieving the visual effect at which he aimed, Warhol decided that the grocery boxes had to be made of wood, and fabricated by wood craftsmen, who were trained in cutting and fitting pieces of wood together according to specifications given them. The craftwork was not part of the artistic process, any more than it was part of the art of painting that the artist should actually make the paint he or she used. Malanga located a woodworking shop on East Seventieth Street and placed an order for several hundred wooden boxes in various sizes, which were delivered to the Factory on January 28, 1964. It was becoming, in the mid-1960s, a commonplace practice to rely on craftspersons when an artist lacked the skills needed to produce desired aesthetic effects. Donald Judd, the Minimalist sculptor, for example, used the services of a machine shop to fabricate the metal boxes he used as sculptures, since he could not achieve by hand the sharp edges and corners that constitute aesthetic features of the perfectly matched metal units—that composed the “specific objects,” as he called them—that Judd became known for. In the 1990s Jeff Koons routinely sent his pieces out to artisans in ceramic or in metal, knowing that he did not have the skills required to make them himself. He was not an artisan but an artist. The artist had the ideas: there was no reason why he had to make the material objects that embodied those ideas. Robert Therrien’s sculpture consists of ordinary household items fabricated on a scale of about three-and-ahalf to one: huge pots, pans, folding chairs, folding metal bridge tables. Some of his works consist of stacks of pans or dishes. It would
be a waste of his talent, even if it were possible for him to make these objects by hand. Some artists—Damien Hirst comes specifically to mind—consign their paintings to others to paint, so that a show of Hirst’s paintings sometimes looks like a group show. Since Duchamp—certainly since Cage—chance was built into artistic production, so that it is thinkable that an artist could pick the name of a painter out of a list at random, and then exhibit the painting, whatever its style or content, as his. In any case it is no longer part of the concept of original art that it actually be made by the artist who takes credit for it. It was enough that he conceived the idea that it exemplified. Parenthetically, no one else, so far as I know, took credit for the idea of making grocery boxes the way, for example, they did for the idea of painting the soup cans or the Death and Disaster paintings. It was an idea that in its realization incorporated repetition and the effect of being machine-made, both of which were central to Warhol’s aesthetic. And their production fit perfectly with Andy’s thought that he wanted to be a machine. “I like things to be exactly the same over and over again.”

 

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