ArtMonkeyWrench welcomes its first guest contributor, artist Millree Hughes
Andy Warhol
Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962
Casein, Acrylic, and Graphite on Canvas
32 panels, 20 x 16 inches
Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again
Whitney Museum of American Art
Nov 12, 2018–Mar 31, 2019
“To what extent the artist is only a preliminary stage. The world as a work of art that gives birth to itself.”
Frederick Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’.
“To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”
Susan Sontag
Andy Warhol understood that for gay men in 1960s America ‘being yourself’ was out of the question. You played straight at work and camp in the company of your friends, the simplest acts become self-conscious. In Warhol’s world everything needed to be filtered through a persona that he had manufactured to deal with ‘life’.
A short film in his current retrospective at the Whitney shows him pulling a screen-print of Marlon Brando with the help of Gerard Malanga. It’s physical work and it had me wondering: did he really wear that wig all the time?
He regarded the ‘life as art’ movement of the 1960s with suspicion – Alan Kaprow’s Happenings and the work of the Fluxus artists.
Never-the-less it appears to be the content of much of Warhol’s work:
Ordinary images taken from the newspapers and out of the supermarket tabloids.
Films of people and things often not doing anything very much.
And yet, Warhol was never willing to approach typical acts and everyday occurrences in a ‘straight’ way.
He believed that art making itself was part of the artifice and that your whole life was a creative ‘act’. In this sense he was ‘a decadent’, closer in spirit to Oscar Wilde than to a contemporary like Jasper Johns.*
Warhol would choose some terrible image from the newspaper like a car crash or electric chair. I have seen the original photograph of the electric chair; taken of the death chamber in 1923, it’s in the staff room at Sing Sing.
Very matter of fact, but in Warhol’s hands it becomes a chariot of fanciful dreams.
He loved to do this, take some brutally stark image and, by using a selection of colors with the oddest associations, almost parody it.
‘Lavender Disaster’ indeed! It comes across as a very dark gay joke.
Andy Warhol
Lavender Disaster, 1963
Acrylic, Silkscreen Ink, and Graphite on Linen
106 x 81 7/8 inches
Warhol’s parents were from the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Like them, he was a devout Byzantine Roman Catholic. Perhaps this lies behind his use of the Liturgical colors that play throughout the “Mao” series; Gethsemane green and the blue of Easter morning seen through stained glass.
Andy Warhol
Mao, 1972
Acrylic, Silkscreen Ink, and Graphite on Linen
176 1/2 x 136 1/2 inches
But Gold Marilyns and pink car crashes were more his speed: color as camp satire. It distanced him from the AbExers like De Kooning and Mitchell who took their pallet from Nature.
Choreographer/Filmmaker Yvonne Rainer was a great influence. She made ordinary life the stuff of her dance pieces, which could be: combing your hair, running on the spot, or barking like a dog.
In Warhol’s hands, too, haircuts, eating, and sleeping became movies. But they were very far from natural events. Warhol’s subjects were often high and/or self-created creatures, like the co-founder of the Judson Dance Theatre and incandescent dancer Fred Herko. Although his dances were touched with a high romantic ornature, in the Whitney screenings he brings a mannered grace to ‘Haircut’, 1963, and ‘Kiss’, 1964.
Warhol had this way of doubling back on an idea with some quality of its opposite. Ordinary life lived by extraordinary people.
Although filled with wonderful things – a room of cow wallpaper, a couple of ‘Last Suppers’ – this retrospective seems a little small, most of it on the fifth floor. Notably, the most beautiful presentation is on the third floor, a showing of Warhol’s filmed ‘Screen Tests’. Shot in 16mm, Warhol made 400 of them between 1964 and 1966, and in them light and the surface quality of the Bolex film elide with the subjects face to create something that is part performance, part sculpture. The filmed person becomes an object, although their objectification is undermined by the self-conscious aura that celebrity brings to the subject.
Andy Warhol
Edith Scull, Still from Screen Test
None of them can really just ‘be’, perhaps because they feel that History, and Warhol, is watching them.
After his appalling shooting by Valerie Solanas, there is a marked change in Warhol’s work, and what happens next – the screen print portraits on the first floor or the adverts that appear cold and bald on the third floor – appears less convincing. The work loses the quality of black farce that makes the work of the 60s so powerful. Did his studio managers, Fred Hughes and Vincent Fremont, weed out the darker elements for their own and Warhol’s safety?
But without being able to see the world through the eyes of those that are both ‘real’ and ‘not real’, the work loses a central conceit. The appropriations come to look like recapitulations rather than parodies. The portraits are promotions and the adverts are well…adverts.
It’s not until near the end of his life that the satirical edge comes back into the work. He questions Abstract painting and asks what ‘gesture’ and ‘intention’ can also mean. ‘Rorschach’, 1984, and ‘Oxidation Painting’, 1978, are jokes at the expense of Contemporary painting.
In Lou Reed and John Cale’s lit up album ‘Songs for Drella’, 1990, the lyrics paint a picture of the man behind ‘the act’; a memoriam to a slow moving giant. A man who was shocked by the self-destructive lives of some of the Factory people and a little bit horrified at being held in some way responsible for them. Alone and often in pain, waiting for ideas to occur, for real friends to call.
In time Warhol’s images will all go out of fashion because of over saturation; his foundation and his biggest collectors hastening that end. His images on socks and skateboards at the Whitney gift store are a disaster all their own, a terrible joke at the expense of their benefactor.
Andy Warhol wall paper, posters, and skate boards in the Whitney Museum Gift Shop
But the ideas will take longer to absorb.
Warhol was an intellectual, the subject of his work was media administrated images and what, in our time, has become the economy of ‘likes’. He chose whatever people were talking about: Celebrities, gangsters, and products. Then he let everything he chose be mediated by a persona, his own in the paintings, and the gay, high, or famous ones that changed the nature of the filmed activities. The final project went beyond pluralism, to a place where the self-created identity is more significant than the one designed by society, by race, culture or gender.
*who BTW has strenuously denied calling him ‘swish’, the two becoming friends soon after meeting.
Millree Hughes, March 2019
