Selected Biography. Andrew Warhola was born on August 6, 1928 to working-class immigrant parents in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Warholas had changed their name from Varchola when they emigrated from Slovakia. The family was Byzantine Catholic and they remained religious people..
Andy’s father worked in the coalmines. His mother often sold craft items. During the depression she sold soup cans that she cut with scissors into decorative pieces. As a child Andy was afflicted with St. Vitus’ Dance or chorea. This viral infection caused Andy to shake convulsively and left him with jig-saw puzzle shaped blotches on his skin, including his face until he was in his 30’s.
Andy studied commercial art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He moved to New York and began a successful career in commercial art in 1949. He invented both the name and the personality of “Andy Warhol” as part of his artistic vision. By the late 50’s Warhol was devoting more and more time to his painting and personal art career, rather than his commercial art.
A series of painting based on advertisements and comics in 1961 (See Roy Lichtenstein) and a series on Campbell Soup Cans in 1962 launched Warhol into celebrity status as a Pop Artist.
In 1963 Warhol leased a studio on the upper east side of Manhattan he called the “Factory”. The factory was not only a place where Warhol produced his artwork, but also a place where other artists, often on the way down from their career peak would hangout. The regulars at the Factory became the stars of Warhol’s movies, which he started producing during this time. Warhol started with a silent 16 m.m. camera. Initially he would slow the film down to the speed of older silent movies. Some have said that this was done to conserve money and make the film last, but it also had the effect of presenting in a documentary and almost archival way that suited Warhol’s artistic vision.
On June 3, 1968 Warhol was shot in the chest by Valerie Solanas a factory regular and writer who thought that Warhol was suppressing her own film career. Warhol was taken to the hospital but the doctors in the emergency room were unable to keep him alive. He was pronounced dead. Warhol was resurrected when a cardiac surgeon recognized Warhol and took it upon himself to save the life of America’s Pop Artist. The surgeon cut open Warhol’s chest and manually massaged his heart until Warhol’s vital signs were restored. For the rest of his life Warhol had to wear a girdle or belt in order to keep himself together.
After the shooting Warhol decreased the access he had given to the strange ménage of characters that had been hanging around the factory. Warhol relocated his studio and begin devoting himself to commissioned pieces he called “Business Art”. This was a period in which Warhol was often found socializing with the celebrities he found so interesting. In the mid-80’s Warhol begin producing television shows and music video’s.
For several years Warhol, who had a fear of hospitals, put off going in for needed gall bladder surgery. On February 21, 1987 he finally went in for the scheduled procedure. Unfortunately for Warhol the attending nurse that night was so consumed in reading her bible that she failed to notice Warhol suffering post-operative stress. He died alone and unattended the night following his surgery. The hospital ended up paying three million dollars in a malpractice settlement for negligent post-operative care. Warhol’s estate was auctioned off for over twenty million dollars. A portion of the estate funds was used to set up the Andy Warhol Museum and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Warhol’s Art in Context. The history of Western art may be viewed as a succession of steps toward the portrayal of a subjective reality.
Classical - Portrayal of the formal or idealized objective form.
Romanticism – Portrayal of the ideological reality where objective truth is combined with the emotive response of the artist.
Impressionism – Portrayal of a scene as it appears to the artist at a particular time and place.
Expressionism – Portrayal of the emotional truth concerning some subject.
Abstract Expressionism – Portrayal of the interior subjective reality of the artist without reference to an objective subject.
At the time Warhol was inventing his approach, both Jackson Pollock, with his action paintings and Mark Rothko were in the public eye.
By the mid 50’s the art-world had reached the point where artists and
their art were expected to plumb the depths of their existence and to offer the
viewer a naked, unadorned glimpse of the most profound interior scenes of human
experience. And then along came
Andy...... Instead of
attempting to focus the momentum of the art-world in a new direction, Warhol
simply chose to reinvent art in his own terms.
One way to view Warhol’s work is to compare it to the Abstract
Expressionists (at least an admittedly simplified version of Abstract
Expressionism ) who were his contemporaries.
Subject
Matter. While the subject
matter for abstract expressionists was the deepest current of human experience,
Warhol depicted the surface of human culture.
Celebrities fascinated Warhol, but he was fascinated by all of the images
that gained cultural popularity. Not
only did he create portraits of Marilyn
Monroe and Elvis
Presley, he also produced series depicting an electric chair, the most
wanted fugitives and fatal car crashes. And,
of course there was sex.
Multiplicity.
For the Abstract Expressionist each painting represents the singular
artistic vision of the painter. In
contrast, Warhol collects images from popular culture and in the same way that
these “pop” images are pervasive in the culture; he routinely presents his
paintings as multiple versions, often identical.
At the same time Warhol’s work should not be viewed as multi-perspectival. He worked with the “common” or cultural perspective,
which while a plurality was still essentially unified.
Connectivity.
Whereas there is an implied promise in Abstract Expressionism that
somewhere, encoded in the image, there is some universal truth with which the
viewer is capable of communion, Warhol’s art is not universal.
Warhol loved America. He
claimed his favorite food was “Airport Food”.
(It should be noted that Warhol frequently lied to interviewers and there
is always a “credibility issue” when dealing with his claims.)
Due to the tight contextual nexus between his work and the American Pop
Culture, his work is not fully universal. Warhol
was an American artist, creating for American (and to some extent “Western”)
viewers.
Justification. There is a sense in which the paintings of Abstract Expressionists demand justification. If the paintings offered from this movement represent the profound, then, it seems, the art-world is entitled to honesty, insight and at some level a struggle on the part of the artist. Without warranties to these features in the artistic process, the very authenticity of these works cannot be justified. On the other hand, for Warhol, its surface all the way down. Warhol once said, “You see, I think every painting should be the same size and the same color so they’re all interchangeable and nobody thinks they have a better painting or a worse painting. And if the one ‘master painting’ is good, they’re all good. Besides, even when the subject is different, people always paint the same painting.” (Philosophy, p 149) Although he was very intentional about promoting his art he was also dismissive about his painting, saying things like, “Well, it’s just something I do.” He always wanted a TV program entitled “Nothing Special.”
Impersonality.
With Abstract Expressionism one expects the artist to be intimately
involved. The painting is designed
to communicate a deep truth accessible only by an individual artist engaged in a
unique struggle towards authenticity. Warhol’s
role as an artist shifted from the hands-on to more of a conceptual role.
Warhol loved to work and even kept himself at least slightly hopped on
amphetamines to keep himself going. Nonetheless,
the name “factory” aptly describes his studio.
For instance, when he was manufacturing his Brillo
Boxes, the factory floor appeared to be a factory assembly line with Warhol
supervising several young attractive men all laboring under his supervision to
construct and silkscreen each box. Allowing
assistants to work on a “Masters” artwork has a long-standing tradition, but
Warhol goes further than most with his openness to the irregularities, oddities
and unanticipated contributions of his assistants as they added “interest”
to his work.
Meaning.
While it is common to approach Abstract Expressionistic paintings as if
on some heuristic mission, Warhol eschews the very notion of meaning.
Warhol said, “An artist is somebody who produces things that people
don’t need to have but that he – for some reason – thinks it would be a
good idea to give them…. So on the one hand I really believe in empty spaces,
but on the other hand, because I’m still making some art, I’m still making
junk for people to put in their spaces that I believe should be empty: i.e.,
I’m helping people waste their space, when what I really want to do is help
them empty their space.” (Philosophy,
p. 144) He believed that each time
a person saw an image there was a little less meaning in it.
Thus his motif of repetition and seriality can be seen as techniques to
reduce and/or eliminate meaning. Similarly
many of his films such as Empire State Building, Sleep
and the Kiss stretch the temporal dimension to the point where the film simply
outlasts any attempt to draw meaning from it.
The audience left at the end of the showing has no option other than to
accept the images at face value.
In Popism: The Warhol ’60s, Warhol said, “I’ve been quoted a lot saying, ‘I like boring things.’ Well, I said it and I meant it. But that doesn’t mean I’m not bored by them. Of course, what I think is boring must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they’re essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different. But I’m just the opposite: if I’m gong to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don’t want it to be essentially the same – I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the exact same thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel....” (365 Takes, p. 365) Warhol does not offer us meaning. His works are purposefully designed to strip away meaning and leave us with empty abstractions of the images of popular culture. Unlike Abstract Expressionism, his art is not created for the sake of profundity, but simply because the image is “interesting”.
One of my favorite “Andyisms” occurs when Andy is being interviewed and is asked what a particular series of paintings mean. Andy replies, in affect, “Oh, I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me and I will just repeat what you say.” The interviewer says that he can’t do that, he wants to know what Warhol believes. But, Warhol keeps insisting that he doesn’t have anything to say and keeps offering to repeat what the interviewer tells him.
Emptiness: Warhol said, “When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it’s lost space when there’s something in it.” (Koestenbaum, p. 165) Warhol was a brilliant artist. He had an uncanny sense of artistic design. In artistic design, the area that surrounds the subject of an image is called “negative space”. In the quote above, Warhol is telling us that he perceives the world in an abstract relationship between positive (subject) and negative (contextual or background) shapes and spaces.
With Warhol the idea of abstract positive and negative space goes beyond two-dimensional art design. In addition to the name, the “Andy Warhol” personality, complete with its trademark “deadpan” response to his own celebrity status was created as a contrasting negative space to what he considered the stupidity of those who interviewed him. He turned what someone watching would expect to be a positive action into emptiness.
Indeed, Warhol’s eschatology is to return to emptiness. He said, “I never understood why when you died, you didn’t just vanish, and everything could just keep going the way it was only you just wouldn’t be there. I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I’d like it to say ‘figment’.” (365 Takes, p. 99)
Gay,
but not Queer Art.
Warhol was a gay man, but he is not generally associated with “Queer
Art”. There are homoerotic images
in Warhol’s work, but he never seems to have bought into the liberation agenda
of Queer Art. Warhol considered politics, like sex to be “so abstraaact”.
Warhol’s purpose was to document, not change the world.
The term “gay” is insufficient to describe Warhol’s sexuality.
While he was sexually active and had a small number of long-term partners
he was described more than once as “asexual”.
He did not like to be touched. Warhol
would rather watch than participate. He definitely had a solid streak of voyeurism.
(Given that he was often behind a camera filming sex acts, he was open
about his voyeuristic leanings.)
Perhaps the clearest divergence between Warhol and the Queer Art scene is
Warhol’s assessment of his own sexuality.
Warhol remained an active member of religious faith throughout his life.
This is a faith that condemned homosexuality. Warhol surmises that he was a “mamma’s boy” because he
lacked (was deficient in) some normal chemical in his body. He referred to his chemical deficiency as the lacking of
“responsibility chemical”. (Philosophy,
p. 111). Given that Warhol saw his
own sexual orientation as condemnable and deficient, he just didn’t fit in
with the Queer Art crowd. But, then
Warhol claimed that he really never “fit in” anywhere.
What is “Art” after Warhol? The notion of “art”
had already been destabilized by others, including Marcel
DuChamp, before Warhol started painting.
However, Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, which were seemingly identical
to their commercial referents, sparked two new revisions of the term “art”.
George Dickie, in a move
some will see as elitist, posited that an object is “art” when that label is
conferred by the “art world”. This
is know as the Institutional
Theory of Art. The critic Arthur
Danto, also responding to the Brillo Boxes advanced a relational view
of art suggesting that something is art when the cultural context in which the
object is presented enables the artist and the viewer to mutually grasp
the object as being a work of art. One
can analyze such works as the Brillo Boxes and the Campbell Soup cans as sitting
in the tradition of the Still Life, yet it is a disquieting stillness.
An Overview.
Andy Warhol’s oeuvre lays over the pond of American culture like a thin
transparent film highlighting and abstracting those images, which float to the
surface of the cultural consciousness. Warhol
scrubs these iconic images free of meaning and then allows them to drift away,
like his silver
pillows, as a tribute to the beauty of popular culture.
Viewing Thomas
Moran, we must contemplate a safari to search out beauty in the world.
With Warhol, all we need to do is click on the T.V or better yet, go
shopping! Warhol insisted that
there was nothing special about his art; it was just something he liked to do.
Yet, when I allow the images of his varied and vast work to parade before
me, I can’t help but believe that the “nothing” he gave us is indeed quite
special.
Everett, Washington
October 28, 2006
Andy Warhol Museum, Andy Warhol 365 Takes, (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2004)
Cynthia Freeland, But is it art? (Oxford University Press, 2001)
Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, (Viking, 2001)
Public Broadcasting Service, American Masters: Andy Warhol, September 20, 2006.
Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again, (Harcourt, 1975)
