by Gary Indiana
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 followed his own ukase of silence, his art might well have achieved an aura of mystery that would have rendered it more expressive, more moving, more emotive, more beautiful, more disruptive.
The reality, however, is that this sphinx 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.
Almost all of Warhol’s books are entertainments, literary vaudevilles. The voice is never quite the same voice, and it 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 are neither trash nor literature. They’re a sort of verbal Pop Art.
The magnum opus is The Andy Warhol Diaries, a day-to-day account, delivered via telephone to Pat Hackett, of Warhol’s activities the day and night before. Originally it had been conceived as a way 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.)
The Diaries is markedly unlike Warhol’s other books. Although it became an immediate best-seller and on every page drops embarrassing disclosures about the secret lives of the people Warhol hung around with between November 1976 and February 1987, 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—ingests in near-lethal quantities, behind the movie stars giving blow jobs 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 doughnut.
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 invented by Borges that grows large enough to physically coincide with the entire territory it charts.
SEVEN
Warhol may have sometimes entertained the wish to be a private person, but few Americans have ever been less so. During 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, antiintellectualism and the closely related aversion to value judgments, 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.
chapter seven
PORTRAIT OF THE IMAGE AS “IMPORTANT” ARTIST
ONE
WARHOL CHANGED AMERICAN CULTURE PROfoundly . He brought its underlying nature into stark visibility. The paradox is that we were, and are, reluctant to look at the culture we have, its imperialist presumptions, its incredible ugliness, the direction it’s taken, and where it’s leading us, and to recognize Warhol as the weather vane of its condition, the prophet of its inevitable endgame.
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 leveling of its contents and a celebration of its “democratic” offering of the same things to everybody. Warhol liked to remark that a movie star could drink a Coke, and so could you. He also said that the Queen of England couldn’t get a better hot dog at Yankee Stadium than anyone else.
There was something disingenuous about Andy Warhol’s notion of democracy, which he defined as access to consumer goods of identical quality. However, this consistently fails to acknowledge the disparity of wealth distribution that sharply separates “access” from purchasing power. Instead, it extols 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 that 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 usurp
ation 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.” Mimesis, in Warhol’s itinerary, ultimately achieved parity with what it depicted. The Warhol Diaries records 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’s soup can became Warhol. Marilyn Monroe became Warhol. Or more correctly, an image of Marilyn Monroe became inextricably linked with Warhol, and a Campbell’s 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, from 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 grist for the mill of technological reproduction and superficial “beautification” and consumption.
Warhol beatified the ordinary and rendered the sensational banal through serial repetition of its imagery. He didn’t simply level the playing field of art; he flattened it, rendering the work of art as a pricey commodity.
TWO
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. 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 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 his lifetime, as Warhol did between 1962 and 1964.
When Warhol painted the Soup Cans, the culture was in 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’s Soup Cans 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’ 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. In the globalized art market, the aesthetic blandishments of any works of art seem less significant than their exchange value: we may well love what something looks like, agree with, puzzle over, or dispute what a work of art seems to “say” (if it seems to “say” anything), yet we’re more than likely, first and foremost, to be interested in what its monetary value is purported to be, in some cases how much it cost to construct and exhibit it, and how its producer, a celebrity manufactured by the corporate machinery of the art world, is faring in the circuitry of capitalism.
THREE
It’s often said that Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol were the two most important artists of the twentieth century. The status of “important” is usually thought to confer exalted significance on an artist or on his or her work, though it does no such thing. “Important” 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 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 life changed what Americans consider important. Important, that is to say, in an obviously limited sphere. Warhol’s achievements and failures belong to the realm of artistic culture, or, if one wants to conflate them, “culture,” period—and it would be absurd to claim that a series of paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, in and of themselves, transformed our world. Nowhere in this little book have I attempted to make this claim; it’s simply my belief that, among the myriad works of art produced in America before and after (including other seminal works of Pop Art), the Soup Cans have a pivotal importance in the transformation of artistic culture from a somewhat hermetic and highly elitist microcosm to a more populist and accessible territory.
Even this is disputable, of course; minus the Soup Cans, even minus Warhol, in America and other advanced societies, given the metastatic spread of mass communications and the evolution of public relations into a globalized phenomenon, “movements” and trends, artists-as-celebrities, and art, of whatever kind, as a global commodity would undoubtedly have produced the “art economy” as it currently exists.
On the other hand, retrospectively, the Soup Can series and the Warhol phenomenon look historically inevitable. (The past always does.) They clarified in a powerful way what the true underpinnings of American culture were: commodity, consumption, and celebrity worship. To take a purely negative view, one could add velocity, vicariousness, and instant obsolescence, the erasure of historical memory, and the three-second attention span induced by mass media, but one has to go way beyond Andy Warhol to identify the multiple causes of these baleful phenomena.
A more neutral and arguably more positive way of thinking about Warhol is this: at least in that hyperproductive period of great works that began with the Soup Cans and concluded, in many assessments, in 1968, the year when he was almost fatally shot by Valerie Solanas, Warhol created a body of work, a milieu, and a mythology so resonant and alluring that many of the world’s finest artists, of all kinds, who’ve emerged in subsequent decades would readily acknowledge that Warhol’s multifaceted enterprise “gave permission” for them to exploit new technologies, to push into otherwise unimaginable aesthetic terrain, to create invaluable critique and observation of the society around them. Indeed, a list of such artists would be impossibly long to compile and would hardly be limited to Americans. In this sense, yes, Andy Warhol and his Soup Cans have had incalculable influence throughout the world—the world of art and aesthetics, the world of ideas about what ought to be preserved for posterity.
The world itself is a
different story.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the staff of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh for their generous help in supplying me with research materials and with space to work on the initial version of this book, and Dena Santoro for advice and assistance on streamlining the final text.
NOTES
CHAPTER ONE
1 Simon Callow, Orson Welles, vol. 1, The Road to Xanadu (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), pp. 420-421.
2 Jamie Warhola, private letter to the author, June 17, 2007.
CHAPTER TWO
1 Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg (Boston: MFA Publications, 2006), p. 96.
2 Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999), p. 253.
3 Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Freedom in the Arts,” Museum of Modern Art twenty-fifth anniversary address, October 19, 1954, reprinted in Museum of Modern Art Bulletin (1954), quoted in Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, p. 272.
4 Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, p. 263.
5 Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), pp. 95-96.
6 Simon Watney, “Queer Andy,” in Pop Out/Queer Warhol, edited by Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 29.