September is Andy Warhol Month. By coincidence, cultural collusion or hand of God, (we cannot say), Andy is in the air, shining brightly like a silver floating pillow. The month began with a two-week engagement of Ric Burns’ Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, which is showing for free at the Film Forum until September 14th. On September 8th, Perry Rubenstein’s 24th Street space opens with an exhibit Warhol’s Skulls & Hammer and Sickles, a show originally scheduled to open in Italy in the late 1970s, but then cancelled due to political anxieties triggered by Red Brigades activities. Both POPism: The Warhol Sixties and The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again are in reprint, and at 9 p.m. on September 20th and 21st, the documentary will unfurl itself on PBS.
It isn’t that Andy Warhol ever went away. The Warhol vision and the versions that followed are so integral to our culture that he is, as Dave Hickey states mystically in the documentary “almost invisible to us.” And if the reissue effort seems somewhat pronounced (it’s bound to become only more so) we can’t blame Andy for this, though he may have anticipated it as he was already a superstar when he made the coy “cult figure” remark in the ’60s.
Andy Warhol didn’t invent Pop, he super-charged it. Pop began in London in 1956 with an exhibition called This Is Tomorrow, a quasi-anthropological, semi-ironic, but wholly enthusiastic look at the mass imagery of advertising, comic books and television. In the show, Richard Hamilton’s collage “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different?” So Appealing? not only has the look of mass marketing, but also the winking, rhetorical tone of a middlebrow talk-show host. Hamilton described English Pop as “popular, transient, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous and big business”—a list that could describe Warhol’s approach even though it pre-dated it by a few years.
Warhol was one among several prominent Pop artists, and the last to receive critical acclaim. In the late ’50s, despite the triumphalist prating, Americans were, as today, oddly defensive about the American Flag. Johns was perhaps the most elegantly subversive artist when he tampered with the usual representation of the stars and stripes. His encaustic and collaged flags are cool, elusive and more iconic—ridgid and static as anything ever done by Warhol. Roy Lichtenstein put the bubblegum in Pop and had flat, eye-catching images that somehow seduced famed art dealer Leo Castelli. James Rosenquist’s atomic-age multi-paneled masterpiece “F-111” was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 1964 Robert Rauschenberg, our cultural dumpster-diver, was given the grand prize for his silk-screen paintings at the Venice Biennale. So how did Andy Warhol manage to outmaneuver this cache of art stars so clearly on their way to join the grand pantheon of post-war artists? Warhol took on the sheer mind-numbing overload of American media-driven culture and became a conduit for it, reproducing its icons in hopped-up hues at high speeds fueled by a driving hunger for stratospheric success. “Fame, and its representations, were Warhol’s meat,” critic Sanford Schwartz quipped admiringly in his book Artists And Writers (1990).
The new documentary casts Warhol in almost every role under the sun, but seldom in an unfavorable light. Ric Burns states that “In the course of the incredible Horatio Alger arc of his life story, [Warhol] challenged every conventional idea of what a work of art can be, in half a dozen media,” and I was happy to revisit these works, especially his Disaster Series from 1962, and the beautifully rendered 1963 film “Haircut” which brought to mind genre paintings by Velasquez. What is harder to handle is some of the commentary, the clipped mechanical voice-overs by Laurie Anderson and the particularly gushy adoration by Wayne Kostenbaum who sees Warhol as Savior and Redeemer and makes a far-flung reference to “the Jesus Narrative.”
“We were not seeking ‘balance’ in our on-camera commentators;” Mr. Burns informed me, “Our ambition in the film was to document the power of Warhol’s art and to provide some explanation for where that power came from in the circumstances of his life.”
This is certainly achieved, though I maintain my circumspection when it comes to shape shifting by artist Jeff Koons in the film, who two decades ago was the most obvious inheritor of Warhol’s commercial legacy. Koons’ 1985 conceptual sculpture, “Two Ball 50/50 Tank” prompted the kind venom-charged criticism Warhol had enjoyed during the first part of his career. No longer a purveyor of cynical kitsch, Koons traded in plastic porn figures a while back for a colossal flower-power puppy. Nevertheless, the documentary presents a kinder gentler Koons as the voice of Warhol, who also speaks for himself. “I love the generosity of Andy’s work, and when I look at it I think it’s about playing God. It’s about creating life. That spark. I think it’s about finding grace and sharing acceptance, sharing where we are.” This may be true, in part. It’s hard to take because it seems like too much idol worship by others who express their feelings for Warhol in holy terms. He gave us depth where once there was shallowness. Artistically anointed, Warhol’s achievements also lie in the sociology of art as he, more than any other artist in history, turned the art world into the art business.
This is a fact that has inspired the likes of Mark Kostabi and Damien Hirst. And while the Warhol legacy, his own or the one some blame him for, has encouraged contemporary cultural charlatanism, this does not negate the validity of Warhol’s work, or in anyway subvert power of his images. He was neither cynical nor naive, and when I look at his work I don’t feel bamboozled. Talking heads not withstanding, we can thank Mr. Burns for putting his paintings on the screen.
But what of Warhol’s paintings seldom seen? The riveting exhibition at Perry Rubenstein Skulls & Hammer and Sickles, acts as a posthumous premier that will set you straight on the Pop-meister’s power. Even before contemplating the charged imagery, the color, contour and surface are electric. The Hammer and Sickles are as much about how the shadow slips around and how the impasto bubbles up into these classic still-lifes as any political meaning you wish to consider. These items were purchased on Canal Street, Kathy Grayson, the author of the catalogue’s essays, tells us.
Grayson also cautions us not to entangle Warhol in imagined political intent. “What was and remains shockingly new is the way Warhol mastered not only the interplay of technique and symbol, line and color, but also his role in the mythology surrounding his artwork.” The skulls are a compelling portrait of every one, from starlet to drag queen and are presented with a gravitas we can’t get to when we have to dance around the personality/star associations of Warhol’s celebrity pictures. These pictures are small, most measuring 15 x 19 inches, but their presence moves beyond their own symbolism because Warhol was a master of how things looked on the surface, deftly manipulating his materials and making the pictures breathe. In this case, it’s absurd to view the work through the prism of irony because the symbols themselves are instantaneous and unfussy, even though the surfaces are worked. It’s exciting to stand before these pictures. So help me, they are beautiful and they feel genuine, a term seldom connected
with Warhol.
It is doubly amazing to stand before Skulls & Hammer and Sickles given our own political climate. There is no dearth of characters for Andy Warhol to represent, from philistine to sacred cow, but this exhibition shows us Warhol imagery that remains powerful and relevant. “They transcend their subject and address universal themes. That’s the true definition of a great artist and great art,” said Perry Rubenstein. Which begs the question: Who is doing the undermining of art and culture? Is Warhol really to blame, or is he the convenient repository for our own ennui and lack of imagination? He worked without stopping, with no evidence of boredom on his part. Pop is “about liking things” and while Warhol changed styles, perhaps he didn’t disengage from the art as much as from
the society.
In the new exhibit’s catalogue, Hal Foster is quoted as saying, “We each get the Warhol we need and deserve,” and this seems particularly true right now. We need Andy Warhol because he was here when America was great and New York still had its original grit. Andy Warhol was here when there was new art on the edge, but not so much so as to be overwhelming. Because he made no huge pronouncements about who he thought he was, he remains a reflection of whichever Andy, whatever art movement and whatever era we like to think was the best. He’ll be any mirror you want. His claim to be tabula rasa, of having no ideas of his own, no edges or elitism—made him easy for most Americans to digest. Warhol took it all in accepting mass media as both theatre of desire and shaper of culture. He embraced without embarrassment America’s own scared feelings for celebrity and gave us totems to worship, and we love him for it.
