Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World

by Gary Indiana

  Since this procedure really only requires the artist to convincingly carry it out once to qualify as an artist, as a special kind of historical spectator, it logically follows that the gesture, or demonstration, if sufficiently powerful and commanding enough attention, has to be performed only once for the artist’s job to complete itself. Whatever the artist subsequently produces, in whatever medium, however different it seems to be from the original product, bears some seminal evidence of the same unique sensibility, or style, reflects the same unmistakable, quirky way of seeing the world, and qualifies as “valuable.”

  Warhol had the perspicacity to say that an artist really only paints one painting in his life. He did paint only one that turned the cultural world on its head.

  TWO

  Andy Warhol’s personal narrative is compelling be cause 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.

  In 1968 Warhol was shot by a Factory hanger-on, one Valerie Solanas; she was a bit player in one of his films, I, a Man; the author of the infamous SCUM Manifesto, she had given Andy a script that had gotten lost in the Factory shuffle; she arrived at the Factory with a gun after failing to locate her publisher and intended target, Maurice Girodias, settling for Andy instead. Warhol survived Valerie Solanas’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, just three days before the assassination of Robert Kennedy, which framed Andy’s plight in a small lens, 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.

  Andy got shot, he got scared, he got greedy, and he never waited for a fresh idea to slow down his production of art. And he became enamored of his evolving mutation into respectability. He had surrounded himself with colorfully marginal personalities, most of them harmless, but it only took one violent lunatic for Warhol to recognize the need to shed the crazies and cultivate the well-to-do and to tailor his career into a more buttoned-down, conventionally businesslike enterprise.

  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 of 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.

  The stories America was telling itself about itself had become unsettling and contradictory by 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been killed within a few months of each other. The expanding reach of public relations heightened a sense of nonexistence in those who 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 antiwar 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.

  THREE

  The Warhol ’70s 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 ’70s were a very good decade for Andy Warhol Enterprises in terms of profit and growing visibility. However, the rising monetary tide was mitigated by a decline in his artistic reputation; money was not able to purchase critical respect.

  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 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.

  By mid-decade at the latest, most of Warhol’s static visual work had become, in the opinion of many, static in every way. Too many of his commissioned portraits 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, such as the Shah of Iran.

  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, more bohemian following, who remained on the increasingly teeny fringes of New York City, if they lived at all.

  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 a guest at a party but the unwilling object 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 and Champagne served in gilded buckets, those who spent enough money on baubles to support several African nations.

  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 the rich and powerful 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—what he made wasn’t invariably awful, it was almost always eye-catching and droll, occasionally it still carried some charge of surprise, and scattered throughout his later production were occasional works of real brilliance—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 moneyless, 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, rebarbarizing Manhattan’s center into a playground for the ultrarich, and shoving the sources of its cultural wealth, its struggling, talented young fleeing provincial suffocation, out to the boroughs and beyond.

  FOUR

  A decade separates the revered Marilyn from Mao in the Warhol canon. The paintings of Monroe and other media stars made one kind of sense, as the secular “saints” of a culture infatuated with and shaped by celebrity worship. Warhol was depicting figures whose most widely disseminated images and backstories of personal tragedy carried all sorts of meanings for the American public who adored them; their enshrinement by Warhol had an emotional logic for the general public and a wealth of exegetical resonance for critics. 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.

  Warhol’s Pop Art “statement,” as he was wont to call it, dates from the pre-Campbell’s Soup Can comic strip panel paintings of Superman, Nancy, Dick Tracy, 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 Soup Cans 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.

  Stardom has always been 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 life span 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; and Liz because, with the exception of Faye Dunaway, Liz Taylor was the last true Hollywood movie star (and at the time she was expected to die of pneumonia in London any minute).

  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 millions 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 incarnates this: he 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 turnover of inventory. Interview magazine, which began by featuring, amid 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 catalog of show biz trash and ephemera, ready for the birdcage before it hit the stands.

  FIVE

  As the decade wore on, there was more chaff than wheat produced in Andy’s mill, and a great many discarded former familiars were eager to denigrate the artist himself and anything he exhibited. 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. Some of Warhol’s friends had always kept a distance from the vortex of the Factory.

  As people who spent several years in Andy’s orbit have observed, it’s impossible to tell the story of what went on at the Factory with any real authority, because the ever-shifting scene and its hierarchies of favor and disfavor were 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. In the period before he was shot by Valerie Solanas, Warhol collected a large, ever-shifting entourage of vividly unstable personalities who, often desperately, needed to attach themselves to a charismatic figure (some would say a father figure). Their proximity to Warhol gave them a kind of status i
n the world, membership in the media circus; appearing in front of his camera allowed many of them to play out self-destructive behavior and confuse it with the recognition of talent, success, fame; the psychologically neediest of these sometimes brilliant but seriously damaged personalities often ended their days in suicide and drug overdoses.

  SIX

  Warhol’s celebrity as an image is matched by his total disappearance, as a person, behind his work. Nobody knew him, according to many old Factory hands 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,” reflects the heightened sense of ephemerality that has accompanied successive technological interventions into everyone’s everyday life. The velocity of contemporary urban life generates an unmanageable quantity of unwelcome, distracting ephemera, of messages competing for attention that 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.