2-1-2002

ANDY WARHOL

6/8/1928 - 22/2/1987

 Earlier artists, like Monet, had painted the same motif in series in order to display minute discriminations of perception, the shift of light and color form hour to hour on a haystack, and how these could be recorded by the subtlety of eye and hand. Warhol's thirty-two soup cans are about nothing of the kind. They are about sameness (though with different labels): same brand, same size, same paint surface, same fame as product. They mimic the condition of mass advertising, out of which his sensibility had grown. They are much more deadpan than the object which may have partly inspired them, Jasper Johns's pair of bronze Ballantine ale cans. This affectlessness, this fascinated and yet indifferent take on the object, became the key to Warhol's work; it is there in the repetition of stars' faces (Liz, Jackie, Marilyn, Marlon, and the rest), and as a record of the condition of being an uninvolved spectator it speaks eloquently about the condition of image overload in a media saturated culture. Warhol extended it by using silk screen, and not bothering to clean up the imperfections of the print: those slips of the screen, uneven inkings of the roller, and general graininess. What they suggested was not the humanizing touch of the hand but the pervasiveness of routine error and of entropy..."

- From "American Visions", by Robert Hughes

Andy Warhol

By Wayne Koestenbaum

Viking Press
224 pages
Penguin Lives

From www.salon.com

The opposite of sex
Andy Warhol, ultimate icon of pop, made painting an orgy and pornography an art form. But you'll never guess what he did between the sheets.

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By Jonathon Keats

Sept. 28, 2001 | The public grade school in my neighborhood, like so many around the country, is a preposterous edifice of neoclassical posturing, with a miscellany of famous names inscribed across its facade. Neither arbitrary nor encyclopedic, the list seems to me the lasting trace of a spectacularly capricious selection process. Homer and Galileo and Comte. Pericles and Shakespeare. Pasteur and Moses and Wagner. About the only thing the names have in common is that each overshadows the accomplishments of the man it marks. They are names we know before we know why we know them, and better than we'll ever know the people for whom they once stood: Galileo and Homer are our cultural icons on account of their obliging anonymity, our idols because they embody whatever we desire. Andy Warhol also had that. He made himself a name, and vanished in our midst. That was his art. Pity anybody who undertakes his biography: Whatever one claims is questionable, and to catch him whole is less feasible, even, than dismissing him out of hand. Wayne Koestenbaum, English professor and cultural commentator, has made an arresting attempt. His new book -- part of the Penguin Lives series profiling such edifice icons as the Buddha, Mozart and Joan of Arc -- is an important study in ambivalent sexual identity. Whether "Andy Warhol" truly depicts Andy Warhol is irrelevant, a point with which I have to assume Koestenbaum would agree: Over the decade I've been entranced by Warhol, greatest artist of the late 20th century, and I've read only perhaps half the sources in Koestenbaum's eight-page bibliography, yet even I can appreciate the skill with which he's navigated contradictory accounts to find for his biography a set of facts convenient to his own vision of male sexuality.

Naturally, every kink only adds interest. As Koestenbaum's inquiry falls into the throes of sex, he finds that, "For Warhol, everything is sexual. Stillness is sexual. Looking and being looked at are sexual. Time is sexual: that is why it must be stopped. Warhol's art was the sexualized body his actual body largely refused to be."

Warhol seems to have been amenable to people thinking of him like that. Speaking to one of his '60s superstars about some of the comic book characters who were the subject of his first pop paintings, he claimed that they'd been his sex idols as a child: "My mother caught me one day playing with myself and looking at a Popeye cartoon," he confessed.

If we take him at his word, never advisable in his case, that makes those innocuous images consistent with the sexually explicit scenarios characteristic of his films (aptly titled "Blow Job" for example, or "Taylor Mead's Ass") and the paintings made late in his life by ejaculating onto canvas.

Look for erotic charge in Warhol's art, and you probably won't be disappointed. In his movies alone, there's enough variety to satisfy just about every taste. My hopelessly heterosexual appetite inclines me toward debutante manqué Edie Sedgwick, whom Koestenbaum perfectly describes as "hypnotized by her own gestural carnival," but there's also ample footage of Gerard Malanga, depicted by Koestenbaum as "a beat Beau Brummel," and even of the Puerto Rican post office worker turned drag queen Maria Montez.

Warhol also made silk-screens of subjects perhaps more physically enticing than those early pictures of Popeye. That Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley were sex idols clear across American culture goes without saying, and his images of each capture them at the prime of their glamour. The series he titled "Torsos" is more explicit, silk-screens made from Warhol's Polaroids of male and female genitalia, and pictures like "Silver Car Crash" may just qualify as pornography within the J.G. Ballard set. But Koestenbaum is after something more, something different. Perhaps taking his cue from Warhol, who liked to call sex abstract, he gives the following sexual exegesis on Andy's notorious Campbell's Soup silk-screens:

"Displacement and other metaphoric processes contributed to his choice of Campbell soup as subject, and connected the image to his erotic hungers. Indeed, cans, in Warhol's work, continue the task of [his earlier] 'cock drawings,' for cans allude to the sexual body, and to limbs iconically isolated from the whole: as a ... penis (in his 'cock drawings') is featured in relative isolation from face and torso, so the can is alienated from the act of eating that it nonetheless announces as a purchasable possibility. The can's most arresting word -- the eye ignores it for the first hundred times -- is condensed: 'Campbell's Condensed.' Condensation is a property of dreams and the unconscious; the soup-can fetish condenses Andy's unspeakable interior procedures, and gives them a shopwindow's attractiveness."

Even ignoring the obvious implausibility of Koestenbaum's claim, we must consider the more tenuous assumption from which it arises: Rather than taking Warhol's life and art as two faces of an interesting fiction, he imagines that we can understand Andy's life by deciphering his art, as if Warhol were an Enigma Machine systematically encoding some known quantity. Certainly those soup cans are loaded with metaphoric potential. So are Warhol's films, and the stories swarming his life. Yet Koestenbaum, like so many of Warhol's would-be biographers, confuses metaphor for fact, a mistake as great as assuming that an accurate nautical map spread smooth on a table proves that the world is flat.

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Echoing the estimable art critic Arthur Danto, Koestenbaum says that Warhol was a philosopher. "He used his art to think through problems of space, time, and embodiment, and the center of his metaphysical investigations was the aroused or indifferent body ..." I must disagree: Andy Warhol wasn't a philosopher. He was, and remains, a philosophy.

What I mean is that he interests us not as a commentator but as the object of ever inconclusive commentary, not as an investigator but as the scene of a perfect crime. This may seem odd, as he's popularly perceived as a voyeur, the man who routinely asked strangers to drop their pants, never went anywhere without a tape recorder (an accessory he suggestively called his wife). But all that was part of his act, facets of the life that was his art. While I don't doubt that Warhol knew what he was up to with his naïveté, by now I also know better than to quibble: Dismiss Andy's act and you've missed his art, but indulge his naïveté by emulating it, and you start truly to appreciate his work.

Koestenbaum wants to believe that Warhol explored the problems of philosophy as if his Factory were his laboratory, as if each artwork were an experiment with which he came to metaphysical conclusions presented for our edification, concealed in an iconography of Leonardo-like sophistication. What he actually did was less complicated but more difficult: In his life, he embodied ideas worthy of laboratory study.

We're told that Warhol once had another man in powdered hair impersonate him on a college lecture tour, and also that he wished he could be replaced by a robot. We're told that he had his mother sign his name to his drawings, that he had studio assistants pull his silk-screens, and acquaintances inseminate his ejaculation paintings. We're told that he routinely asked people what he should paint, and some of his best subjects, including soup cans, were suggested by others. We're told that he may have authorized Malanga, that beat Beau Brummel, to run off fraudulent Warhols in Europe. We're told that Andy authored his only novel by first pursuing his speed-freak groupies with a tape recorder for 24 hours and then insisting that his publisher print the typescript, an erratic document produced in Factory off-hours by various nameless studio squatters, without any copy-editing whatsoever.

Elsewhere we're told that same story, except that Warhol hired a professional typing service to make the transcript. I prefer the first version, not because it comes from a more credible source but because it involves more accomplices, another chancy element along the ever-unaccountable Warhol assembly line.

Chancier and chancier. I can choose the story I find more suitable, the one that opens more questions, because the Factory systematically overwrote any attempt at one official story. So we're told not only that Warhol hired an impersonator on the college lecture circuit but also that he expected anybody who answered the Factory telephone to be Andy on his behalf. That was especially important when Warhol was called by interviewers: Even the lies they were told weren't Andy's own. Astoundingly, he seems to have accelerated history: It's taken centuries for us to become as unsure about Shakespeare as we are of Warhol. He could become an icon in his own lifetime because even as we saw him with our own eyes, at a flea market, say, or at a party with Bianca Jagger and Halston, we couldn't even begin to agree with one another who he really was, couldn't be sure that anybody, even he, knew the truth.

I should confess that, like Koestenbaum, I never met Warhol. He died in 1987, which was my freshman year in high school. My serious interest didn't begin until college, brought on by conversations that wouldn't end, contradictions that couldn't be resolved. Once I started to see, there was no natural place to stop.

There is too much Warhol. He boasted that in a single year he could produce as many paintings as Picasso did in a lifetime. He shot so much footage that some of his films still haven't been screened, and others, such as his masterly eight-hour image of an absolutely stationary Empire State Building, challenge the attention span of even the most ardent fan. (Another Warhol story, absolutely unverified, tells of the time a few film students kidnapped Andy, chained him to a seat in an abandoned theater, and started "Empire" on the projector. By the time they returned to run the second reel, he'd escaped, vanished without a trace.)

Too, too much. Beyond what we ordinarily call Andy's art, there are multiple ghostwritten books, all those cookie jars that cluttered his house. There are his time capsules, boxes filled with each month's junk, now housed en masse at the colossal Andy Warhol Museum. Koestenbaum starts to catalog one, in which he finds: "porn, fashion magazines, Natalie Wood publicity photos, a newspaper with a picture of John F. Kennedy Jr., a copy of Kenneth Anger's 'Hollywood Babylon,' invitations from Warhol's 1957 Golden Pictures show at the Bodley Gallery, bills, issues of Life and The New Yorker, a piece of blank canvas, a letter from Gerard Malanga ..."

I can think of only one case of a collection that comes close in scope: The dymaxion (a word he coined made from "dynamic" and "maximum") remains of R. Buckminster Fuller now occupy some 1,500 linear feet of shelf space in a controlled-climate storage facility near Stanford University. Still, the Fuller files are the product of an opposite inclination. Bucky, who called himself Guineapig B, preserved every lecture, letter, sketch and dry cleaning receipt in perfect chronological order, indexed as meticulously as Diderot's Encyclopédie, to provide history with a single perfect record of a life lived across the 20th century.

In life he attempted to be exemplary, a renaissance everyman, that he might leave a paper trail as universal as it was comprehensive. Of course his project failed: The volume of information precluded comprehension. The range of thought blew the mind. Bucky Fuller became a cultural icon as the amount we knew about him was overwhelmed by the amount we knew we'd never know.

With Warhol, we don't even have the pretense of comprehension. No Guineapig B, he sometimes called himself Andy Paperbag. The name evokes not experience, but accumulation. As an icon, he out-Buckminstered Fuller in half the lifetime. The boxes just piled up. The parties with Bianca Jagger and Halston bloated his oral diaries. The flea market finds filled his townhouse to warehouse capacity. Ever afraid of death, Warhol buried himself ahead of his years, preserved a little like Pompeii, and now we have all the ambiguity of excavation, the wear of history, intangible antiquity.

We cannot touch Shakespeare or Joan of Arc. Their names are but a façade. We know them by degrees of separation, as hypersensitive Andy held people off with the freak show of his ugly duckling body. No matter who the man in the white wig slept with, the artist Andy Warhol, the icon that is the face of his artwork, is asexual to the degree that he is ahistorical, ahistorical to the extent that he's immortal. We shouldn't be surprised that, shackled into viewing his own moving picture, Warhol slipped right out of the theater.

He had no body, no substance to hold him still. His whole life was a vanishing act, dramatic because the ballast he appeared to add -- the fame, the paintings, the junk -- paradoxically reduced what remained of Andy Paperbag to the iconic shorthand, the laboratory purity, of a Guineapig A. The mystery, how he did it, is the impossible philosophical conundrum he created, the artwork of his lifetime that so aboundingly confounds Koestenbaum, Danto, me.

Maybe the man in the white wig was also a little curious about Andy Warhol. Maybe he was even a philosopher, a man with insight of his own. If so, I'd like to believe he left us a message: In 1985, a New York nightclub called Area briefly showed an Andy Warhol original called "Invisible Sculpture." On a pedestal against a wall, Warhol momentarily stood beside a label bearing the artist's name. Then the man in the white wig walked away.

About the writer
Jonathon Keats is the author of the novel "The Pathology of Lies." He is currently at work on a novel about a plagiarist.

Pop goes the Pop-art cliché

By SARAH MILROY

Saturday, December 8, 2001

Andy Warhol
By Wayne Koestenbaum
Viking, 224 pages, $31.99

It is perhaps due to this act of compression that the book fails to attend in a conventional way to the hills and valleys of the career. While Koestenbaum does not require that the reader have a thorough grounding in Warholia, a reader without such a grounding might, for example, come away without a sense of when Warhol's career peaked in the public eye -- with the soup cans and the Marilyns and Lizes and Jackies -- or why those images were felt to be so important. The whole question of his relationship to the media and its role in society, for example, is barely touched on.

Instead, we hear at length about the metaphorical implications of his mother's colostomy bag (which underlies, the author says, the artist's lifelong impulse to represent cultural waste products), about his Brillo boxes as surrogates for bodily orifices ("To Open: Press Down/Pull Up" read the directions on one such work), and the artist's deep-seated dread of his own physical self. "These boxes without openings," Koestenbaum writes, "seem simulacra of Andy's body -- a queer body that may want to be entered or to enter, but that offers too many feints, too many surfaces, too much braggadocio, and no real opening." It's an eccentric, but fascinating, view.

Andy Warhol is propelled by several implicit mandates. First, Koestenbaum comes out swinging on the subject of Warhol's sexuality. He asks in the first pages: How gay is Warhol? As gay as gay can be. Sex, Koestenbaum writes, lay at the root of his every inspiration. "Warhol didn't sublimate sex," he writes, "he simply extended its jurisdiction, allowing it to dominate every process and pastime. For Warhol, everything is sexual. Contemplation is sexual. Movement is sexual. Stillness is sexual. Looking and being looked at are sexual."

We are treated to several accounts of the artist in flagrante delicto,or in tenacious coital pursuit (often rebuffed) -- deep-sixing forever the notion of Warhol as asexual (a notion the author ascribes to the critics' uneasiness with homosexuality). But more often we see him watching sex, and running from the room to have "an organza" -- a delightful malapropism he coined to describe the moment of erotic abandon. True, it's hard to think of a man who lived with his mother throughout his adult life, and subsisted almost exclusively on canned soup (Campbell's of course), as a sexual maverick, but in Koestenbaum's view, Warhol was equipped with two more sexual orifices (or protrusions) than the rest of us: his eyes.

Second, the book attempts to retrieve the films from the also-ran status often afforded them in critical appraisals, taking us through them with an almost exhaustive blow-by-blow description -- if you'll pardon the expression. We learn more than we perhaps need to know about the various denizens of the Factory, and the actions that form the "plots" of Warhol's oddly hypnotic movies. So and so fellates such and such. Such and such rolls over and shoots up. Someone is watched urinating in the bathroom, while another takes a shower.

The languor of Koestenbaum's descriptions echo the hypnotic quality of the films themselves -- the most famous of which remain the Screen Tests (begun in 1964), Chelsea Girls (1966), Vinyl (1965), Sleep (1963) and Blow Job (1964) -- and he digs deep into the films' undercurrent of "torture," the consistent psychological duress visited on the participants. For all that his discussions of the films can stretch interminably, like the films themselves, his analysis without question leads us to think more deeply about the films, and helps us to recognize them for what they are: beachheads in the battle to represent male homoerotic desire, and revolutionary precursors to "reality TV."

Third, Koestenbaum makes a strong play to rescue Warhol's late work from the art-critical Elba to which it has characteristically been banished. He endorses, by turns, the late society portraits (in all their pandering proliferation), the Endangered Species series and the Queens series -- describing their continuity with Warhol's earlier work and their consistency with the themes that dominated his life. (In the case of the Endangered Species prints, he writes, we can read Warhol's sense of existential frailty following his shooting by deranged Factory groupie Valerie Solanis in 1968, as well as the looming threat of AIDS. In the Queens, we find reflected his lifelong yearning to be one.)

Yet while these works appear much more interesting contextualised by Koestenbaum in this way, their imagery alone can't make them great art. It just makes them psychologically legible. Warhol, as he made clear in his diaries, thought they were crap, and this may be a case of Andy knows best. Still, one has to admire Koestenbaum's valiant defence. Like much in this book, the position strikes one as slightly perverse, but one is much the better for following Koestenbaum in his passionate and highly informed digression from received ideas.

Sarah Milroy is The Globe and Mail's visual arts critic.

South Florida

Sun-Sentinel

Warhol: A scholarly pretension

By Steven E. Alford
Special Correspondent
Posted October 28 2001

Andy Warhol. Wayne Koestenbaum. Lipper/Viking.  224 pp.

 

Click to enlarge

Somebody should tell Michael Jackson: the King of Pop has been--and will be--Andy Warhol. Wayne Koestenbaum's biography tells the story of this "mixture of Picasso and Henry Ford," but in so doing, buries him beneath unsubstantiated interpretative speculation about the "meaning" of Warhol's work. Andrew Warhola was born in 1928, the third of three boys. The most significant event of his childhood was contracting St. Vitus' Dance, or chorea, which struck him when he was 8. At 13, his father died, and he maintained an unusually close relationship with his mother for virtually the rest of her life.

Andy attended Carnegie Tech, majoring in pictorial design. After flunking out the first year, he was readmitted as an "eccentric talent." Graduating in 1949, he moved from Pittsburgh to New York, where he found work in advertising. The link, or canyon, between art and commerce was to be a feature of his career.

He first showed his paintings in a Bonwit Teller window in 1961, and had his first gallery show in 1962.

Koestenbaum offers some valuable insights. "Warhol's game, throughout his career, was to transpose sensation from one medium into another--to turn a photograph into a painting by silkscreening it; to transform a movie into a sculpture by filming motionless objects and individuals; to transcribe tape-recorded speech into a novel."

Koestenbaum passes over the story of his painterly career, claiming that it has been often told, and concentrates for the greater part of the book on Warhol's films. For anyone who has seen a Warhol film, this decision is sure to incite uneasiness.

The reader is tipped off that there may be a problem: "Watching dozens of hours of these early Warhol films in which little or nothing happens, I couldn't take my eyes off the screen, lest I miss something important."

Koestenbaum's oracular pronouncements sometimes transcend the merely odd, aspiring to absolute zaniness. "Each canvas asks: Do you desire me? Will you destroy me? Will you participate in my ritual? Each image, while hoping to repel death, engineers its erotic arrival." Huh?

Koestenbaum comments on one of the deliberately tedious sequences from an early Warhol film, in which he describes drag queen Mario Montez's slow movements as "a tempo that a stern skeptic might call narcissistic self-absorption but that I, more charitably, if portentously, would call an investigation of the schisms that make up presence." Memo to drag queens: you're not vain; you're a Heideggerian.

My favorite Koestenbaum mot, from a film with an unprintable title: "The buttocks, seen in isolation, seem explicitly double: two cheeks, divided in the center by a dark line."

Warhol's persona was famously blank; as art historian Robert Rosenblum said, Warhol had "no human affect." Hence, scholars can feel free to paint interpretations on the banality and the silence that characterized his public presentation. But just a little of this been-inside-too-long scholarship goes a long way.

Shot by Valeria Solanas, dead at 58 from nursing incompetence after a gall-bladder operation, the highlights of Warhol's life are touched on, but given little notice by Koestenbaum relative to the space he spends on his films.

This is the kind of book that will make no one happy. It is scholarly in tone, yet displaying high-flying speculation absent any evidence. It is gossipy, but gossipy about inarticulate druggies whose expressiveness consists in allowing Andy to film them having sex. Koestenbaum repeatedly makes murky aesthetic judgments about Warhol's work, and then qualifies them out of existence. This slim volume adds little to our understanding of an artist whose personal goals were to become "vacant" and "vacuous."

Steven E. Alford is a professor of the humanities at Nova Southeastern University.

ART news ONLINE

January 2002                   

Much More Than Fifteen Minutes
Fifteen years after his death, Andy Warhol’s reputation is soaring again. Collectors are paying record prices for his works, exhibitions are touring the globe, and a commemorative postage stamp is in the works
By Tyler Maroney

At Sotheby’s contemporary-art auction in London last June, prices were high and house records were broken. Gerhard Richter set an auction record for his color charts when 180 Colors sold for $2.9 million. But the highlight of the evening was Lot 17, a pink acrylic-and-silk-screen print called Little Electric Chair by Andy Warhol. Sotheby’s main saleroom on New Bond Street was standing-room-only that evening. When the bidding for Little Electric Chair began, it was heavy and furious, but when the bids climbed above the $1.5 million mark, the room fell silent. The three remaining bidders—none present and all anonymous—relayed their bids via representatives on cell phones. The sale catalogue lists the estimate for Little Electric Chair at $430,000 to $575,000. When Henry Wyndham, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, brought down the gavel, the room broke into applause. Little Electric Chair had sold for $2.3 million.