Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World

by Gary Indiana

  SEVEN

  The sheer volume of work that Warhol intended to produce created the need to build a framework of pseudo-industrial processes.

  Warhol often asked people what he should paint; he wrote that he saw 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. 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 in the first place.

  The studio assistant system flourished at the Factory as Warhol relegitimized 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, however, 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.

  Warhol’s meshing of mechanical reproduction with “the original” generated vast quantities of artwork of varying quality. This became a nightmare for his dealers. His repudiation of the “handmade” also made for a commercially detrimental surplus of saleable works.

  His fusion of painting with printmaking and photography, the droll indifference to emerging conventions within Pop Art and other practices, in effect, his unencumbered approach to subject matter and materials, guaranteed ubiquity and cast a shadow on his reputation.

  One of the daunting 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 catalog.

  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 that attracted celebrities of all stripes 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, as Mary Woronov recounts:

  Aware that the rap of a speed freak had been known to completely dissolve even the polish off silver-ware, 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.2

  The souped-up Factory as an ever-reconfigured site of outrageous happenings and obligatory drop-in center where authentic celebrities mixed with an array of human wreckage bore little resemblance to Warhol’s earlier studios, which were often located in his own cramped residences—the Soup Can paintings, for instance, were painted in Andy’s townhouse at 1342 Lexington Avenue. In the early days Warhol had worked with one or more assistants, undistracted by the radios, TVs, and record players he kept running while he worked. The Factory, as the separate studio he rented in 1963 at 231 East Forty-seventh Street quickly became dubbed, was a vaudeville hall or circus, crammed with ever-changing acts, from whose “performers” Warhol frequently extracted material for his work, though much of his time was spent “behind the curtain,” back-stage, workaholically churning out silkscreens, emerging at times to greet celebrities dropping in or to arrange performers in front of his movie camera, switch it on, and disappear again.

  EIGHT

  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.

  By 1965, Warhol had become intensely involved—or uninvolved—in filmmaking. Warhol wanted “to throw lightning,” as Billy Name put it—to be someone who was not simply 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 protégés, beginning with beauties like Ivy Nicholson and Baby Jane Holzer, the latter proclaimed “Girl of the Year” in 1964, followed by Edie Sedgwick, the star of his early, Ron Tavel-scripted “talkies.”

  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 nonstatic. 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, the pockets of total silence, the 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).

  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 anonymous 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.”


  NINE

  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, becomes something else once stripped of the aura of Raphael.

  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, even to assign complete “authorship” of some works to other people, yet Warhol’s name attached, for example, as “producer” of a piece he had little or nothing definite to do with makes that piece feel 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 bohème and a select community in which they participate as both 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 functioned as one of the progenitors of a corporate monoculture and greatly assisted the liquidation of the double culture of below versus above, bohemian obscurity versus celebrity, the dignity of “failure” versus the importance of “success.” Even the young artists Warhol cultivated near the end of his life served less as generative collaborators than as people whose celebrity was magnified by their association with Warhol, and from whose association he extracted a “youthful” cachet he had long ceased to radiate himself.

  chapter six

  THAT ONE PAINTING

  ONE

  “I SHOULD HAVE JUST KEPT PAINTING THE SOUP CANS,” Warhol asseverated many times, knowing he would be remembered for 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 microscope, but by the media-dazzled public that consumed soup cans, Coca-Cola, Elizabeth Taylor, and Warhol’s mere signature. In that, Warhol could exercise no control at all.

  If there is one artist who bears comparison, who made it possible for Warhol to become Warhol, it is Dada’s art star, Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp not only paved the way but drew a concise road map.

  Duchamp dispensed with painting and invented the “readymade,” the object plucked from the realm of mass-produced objects, presenting it as art by adding his signature to it. A snow shovel, a urinal, a bicycle wheel mounted on a four-legged stool—these objects became “art” because Duchamp selected them, sometimes provided them with a witty title, and presented them as his work.

  He met Warhol many times, and Duchamp’s conceptual gestures undoubtedly influenced Warhol’s practice of presenting reproductions of the manufactured, preexisting image or object as his “work,” though there’s nothing to suggest that Warhol influenced Duchamp in any way: Duchamp’s stock-in-trade was to produce less and less as an artist, and he placidly and no doubt amusedly watched as the objects he’d exhibited many decades earlier, and the thinking behind them, acquired a prophetic cachet for the artists who became important in the 1960s. Warhol simply adapted the idea of the readymade to the hyperproduction of paintings, prints, sculptures, and films that required no editing and no direction.

  Marcel Duchamp is said to have “revolutionized art,” for those concerned with art. Yet he didn’t even call his own activity art, except when applying its Sanskrit meaning “to make.” Duchamp made eminent sense: no false modesty, no hubris, only a dry irony applied to an exquisitely limited output.

  He neither embraced nor rejected the world as he found it. Like the writer Georges Perec, he played certain games, indulged a kind of artmaking at once transparent and opaque, imposing gamelike limitations on his production. He transformed the accidental and the readymade into concepts that acquired the qualities of repudiation of and finality to art, or to art as it had always been practiced before him.

  The only artist Duchamp competed with was Duchamp. His world had room for other artists, with whom he could maintain a generative dialogue. If he struck a pose, it was not that of a celebrity. He simply altered the conceptual terms in which art might be understood—and the word “might” itself places this notion in a provisional realm.

  Warhol shares Duchamp’s indifference to aesthetic strictures. Warhol’s need to control, his cultivation of personal publicity, on the other hand, runs counter to Duchamp’s reclusiveness and willingness to relinquish control to accidents of matter and to welcome chance.

  Claims for Warhol may be more sweeping, more widely embraced, because, unlike Duchamp, Warhol was infatuated with celebrity and with 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 circumscribed output, followed instead Warhol’s dictum, “Always leave them wanting less.”

  Duchamp signed cigars that his artist friends then smoked. Warhol would have had them encased in a vitrine.

  Duchamp and Warhol are 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, left art to its own devices and, more as a hobby than an all-summarizing statement, fussed with the same single, secret tableau to be viewed through a keyhole, when the spirit moved him, during twenty years of apparent indolence.

  Despite the radical differences in their personalities and their backgrounds, they understood each other. Duchamp hadn’t any anxious memories of poverty. He had been consistently undaunted, even amused, by rejection. Warhol, a passive-aggressive personality par excellence, regressed to
infantile petulance when excluded from a group show, when he felt slighted or short-changed of the attention he demanded.

  Warhol’s capacious intellect was tweaked by the emotional affect of an eight-year-old. His insight and cunning deserve acknowledgment; so does his awesome immaturity. His knowingness about people matched his inability to sustain mature relationships. He encouraged the “inner children” of his entourage to act out their infantility on film.

  His underlying kinship with Duchamp is the conceptual thread of art-as-idea that extends from the first through the second halves of the twentieth century. With both artists, the desire to “finish off art” is palpable. Yet neither could finish with art, for, as Duchamp noted, half the work of art is its reception, and the receivers invariably want more.

  One may argue that Duchamp was, in his own term, “anti-retinal,” whereas Warhol was all retinal. Warhol’s retinal dimension, however, was a conceptual mystification of images, a kind of philosophic proof, demonstrated through seriality and repetition, a belief that all things can be made to resemble the same thing, not because of an artist’s so-called signature style, but because a coherent attitude permeates his or her presentation of any subject.

  Finally, it is their refusal to be “known,” albeit in very different ways, that unites them. They both refined the idea of an impersonal art that reveals nothing about the person who made it, an art of detachment, a kind of industrial product much like any other. What the artist “felt” about his or her subject matter is irrelevant; the important thing is that the artist selected something in the world outside him/herself and isolated it from everything else, declared that it was “art” and therefore worthy of closer attention than other things. At the same time, this method of “art production” implicitly ratifies the idea than an artist is someone whose quality of attention exceeds that of other people, that anything such a person decides is worth examining qualifies as art—in effect, a quality control expert monitoring the ceaseless assembly line of objects and images in the world, not for the defective, but for the exceptionally resonant and meaningful.