Andy Warhol

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  As if he were taking “sex lessons” again, in his late art he strained to figure out how solitudes behaved together. His 1981 paintings of crosses, a dozen crucifixes lined up in rows, seem instances of seriality (the same figure, repeated), but they actually depict plural bodies interacting, trying to socialize. Some crosses touch one another, each leaning into the next: they seem to be holding hands, or joining limbs, one arm merging with the neighbor’s. That is how Warhol defines interpersonality: objects coldly greeting each other, alliances freaked with hostility. Wanting to combine individuals, to sew them into a simulacrum of comity or civility, he stitched together groups (mostly foursomes) of identical photographs and showed them at the Robert Miller Gallery in January 1987. (The idea for the stitching was Chris Makos’s.) The thread-joined images resemble flaps of Andy’s own skin, surgically sewn after his shooting, but they also express likenesses befriending one another and congregating into a single multichambered body. When Andy amassed forms, identical or not, he let each give the adjacent image a “feel”; each cell gropes its likeness. Even his flower silkscreens, of the 1960s, grouped four flowers (sometimes called pansies) together in one frame, two of the buds furtively—clumsily—touching petals, playing footsie.

  Andy feared group death: indeed, this artist supposedly without social conscience spent the last years of his life fervently enumerating categories in danger of disappearing. Nostalgia for deceased idols fueled the enterprise, but so did his prurient urge to pinpoint the borderline between presence and obliteration (that flicker of a second when the object is still before his eyes, not yet gone), and his consciousness that anything he loved was in danger of forever evaporating. Jed, Julia, Edie, Candy—gone. Gone, too, Jon Gould, and, as the 1980s progressed, a gay multitude. Appropriately, he began the decade by honoring another threatened minority, the Jews: his silkscreen prints of Jewish geniuses, as he called them, included Stein, Einstein, and Freud. Anything that Warhol respected, or regarded as a dominating presence above his own downgraded self, paradoxically qualified as an endangered species, whose extinction he prophetically elegized. He worried about beach erosion, for, though never comfortable in the sun, he had a house—or houses—in Montauk, at the tip of Long Island’s South Fork; and he worried about star erosion. His series of myth screenprints, including himself as “The Shadow” and Greta Garbo as “The Star,” declares that the structure of identity on which he depended—the star system—was eroding, and that his studios, indiscriminately manufacturing fame, had sped up its depreciation.

  Andy seemed to care as much about animals—and bugs—as about people. Killing a roach was, for him, “a very big trauma.” Affectionate depictions of animals go back to his 1950–51 Christmas­ card designs of Chinese horses, his 1955 fashion-show backdrop of lion and giraffe, and his “Happy Bug Day” print of 1954. Later, he identified with the dead denizens of the Museum of Natural History’s reptile room, where his show of Endangered Species prints opened in 1983. Among the victim species he pictured were the African elephant, the bald eagle, the bighorn ram, and the San Francisco silverspot butterfly. (Rams are brute; butterflies, especially from San Francisco, are nelly.) Few critics have paid attention to his Endangered Species series—deeming it Warhol at his most bathetic—but, on the contrary, it gravely portrays his own bodily and emotional endangerment, as well as a sexual minority’s panic in the face of epidemic. All of his work, even before AIDS, falls under the rubric “Endangered Species”: his Chelsea Girls, or his “Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys” (a group of screen tests), or his Torso series of men unveiling their wares, or his doomed-to-be-consumed soup cans (poisoned with botulism?), or his 1963 Tunafish Disaster painting (from a news­paper article about tainted cans killing two Detroit housewives), picture entities under threat of disappearance. Among the vanishing populations he cataloged were the American Indians, in a 1986 series of prints called Cowboys and Indians; images of a Northwest Coast Indian mask and a Plains Indian shield, in this series, represent Warhol’s interests as a collector, but also his conception of art as camouflage, protecting his pale skin, his resewn interior, and his nelly tribe from the imperial crucifier.

  Andy kidded himself that he was in Christ’s position: he, too, wanted to disappear while remaining a static image, to make his eroded body an emblem. He gave grandiose form to his Christ identification in his Last Supper paintings of 1985–86, based on cheap reproductions of Leonardo. In January 1987, Warhol audaciously exhibited twenty of them in Milan—right across the street from the real McCoy. Andy’s Last Suppers are predictive accounts of his own upcoming death, as well as paranoid portraits of Factory behavior, in which Warhol as Christ is surrounded by disciples and a lurking betrayer (Valerie Solanas, and other, nonviolent defectors). Andy dared to do a flaming pink Last Supper: nelly spirituality. As crystals were compatible, he declared, with Christianity, so could he reconcile conventional images of Christ with a homoerotic iconography; in The Last Supper (The Big C), in tandem with Christ at the final Passover meal is a blue motorcycle (recalling the motorcycle in his film Bike Boy, itself an homage to Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, the definitive gay ode to the motorcycle); the words The Big C, emblazoned large in the bottom middle of the canvas, suggest that Warhol has finally moved beyond A and B (his two preoccupying letters) to a third term, C, perhaps the C of the copyright logo (Andy always eroticized trademarks), or the C of Christ, or simply the C that is the terminus beyond A and B’s stichomythia. In another Last Supper painting, he juxtaposed Christ with the image of a bodybuilder, captioned “Be a SOMEBODY with a BODY.” Jesus was a superstar—a guy with a body worth displaying; Jesus represented the ideal compromise between a mortified, failing body and a body that had the masculine fortitude to stick around forever.

  Was Christ nelly or brute? In Warhol’s eyes, both: art, like mysticism, wisely quarries the in-between. His Camouflage paintings of 1986, for example, exploit brutality’s nelliness: as camouflage allows a soldier, reptile-like, to survive by blending into the forest or the sand, so the paintings insinuate a nelly theme (soldier sexiness) under the cover of a brute style (abstraction). On the purely brute side, in 1981 he made paintings and prints of guns and knives, a sequel to the hammers and sickles. He had wanted to exhibit the guns and knives in conjunction with his dollar signs, to stress affinities between money, masculinity, and weaponry, but the dollars, to their detriment, were shown separately. On the nelly side, Andy made paintings and prints of shoes, the artifacts’ surfaces covered with a substance called diamond dust. Shoes returned him to his roots—the I. Miller ad campaign and the feet drawings of the 1950s—but overlaid the decorative homage to nelly taste with a murderous finish: for Warhol seemed amused by the fact that diamond dust was a lethal weapon. He told the diary: “Diamond dust can kill you. It’s a good way to murder somebody.” (So, Andy would have noticed, was semen.) He splayed the shoes randomly across the painting’s field, like thrown dice, or corpses post-massacre.

  The strongest case to be made for the aesthetic and ethical value of Warhol’s late work is its commitment to an arctically­ rigorous process of self-examination. Sometimes the self-portraits­ were direct: images of famous Andy’s face. The several­ most haunting, shown in London in 1986, feature the artist wearing a fright wig, strands of hair sticking straight up, as if his head were hanging in air, like a chandelier, or like John the Baptist in the Gustave Moreau painting The Apparition (Dance of Salome). Over Andy’s face lies a scrim of camouflage pattern; he’d treated the face of artist Joseph Beuys the same way in portraits, for camouflage—honor, not stigma—signified a face worth protecting.

  Other late Warhol images committed self-portraiture by veil and proxy. A 1985 series of prints and paintings of an erupting Vesuvius may seem a touristy image, but it actually depicts his own aesthetic “flow,” or the type of atomic explosiveness that he idealized in others (Ondine’s verbal torrent, for example), a disastrous eruption that thrills the remote spectator but endan
gers the locals. The image of Vesuvius shows Andy adoring disaster, marveling at the ability of comic-book-style line drawing to capture excess. The stream of lava resembles the “Puff” of air that Superman blows in the 1960 painting: Vesuvius is a Pop superhero. So were Frederick the Great, Beethoven, Lenin, and Goethe (Warhol never stinted in his praise of famous men): he made images of them in the 1980s, as well as prints of reigning queens (Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland, Queen Elizabeth II) that were conscious ventures into campy self-portraiture. The reigning queens show represented, in Warhol’s eyes, his “rock bottom”: behind his fantasy of ruling as a queen lay the reality of coup d’état and guillotine. Warhol understood that his reign was not stable, and that his monarchy demanded reiterative advertisement: he made a series of ad screen-prints in 1985, including a Paramount logo that alluded to Jon Gould, and a Blackgama-clad Judy Garland, whose Stonewall-initiating corpse he’d waited in line (with Ondine and Candy Darling) to see at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in 1969. (While waiting, they’d begun to compose—via tape recorder—a novel, b, the unfinished sequel to a.)

  Other self-portraits were more gastric, for Andy dimly knew that his internal organs were in trouble. Several paintings featured intestines—an anatomical site that, ever since his father’s “stomach poisoning” and his mother’s colostomy, unsettled the Paperbag imagination. A 1985 painting, Physiological Diagram, shows a map of the interior of a man’s body, including the intestines, rendered externally, like Mrs. Warhola’s. And when he made Rorschach paintings, the blots resembled shadowy X-rays of his body’s infrastructure: skeleton, rib cage, lungs, spine. Perhaps he engineered the symmetrical ink clouds to be camouflage, to pose as psychiatric invitations, sounding boards for the spectator; but they depict his own body’s maternally enmeshed innards, and thus are Janus-faced elegies, looking back to Julia’s death and forward to his own. Indeed, Warhol’s entire oeuvre—even the late work, which seems, except for the self-portraits, to be especially impersonal—may be interpreted as an externalization, crisply distanced and disembodied, of his abject internal circuitry.

  Warhol understood that every mind worked by surgically cutting, cropping, cleaving, copying, threading, and grafting the world’s rough evidence into comprehensible shapes; and so the late work, like the early, heuristically unpieces the whole body into its fragments—egg, lip, intestine, skull. In the 1980s he made a series of paintings called Philip’s Skull—images of Philip S. Niarchos, who’d commissioned a portrait, and asked that the X-ray of his skull be used, instead of a Polaroid of his face, as the art-work’s basis. Similarly decapitating were the pieces Warhol made from details of prior men’s paintings (Paolo Ucello, Edvard Munch, Giorgio De Chirico). Though these fragmented appropriations may represent human faces (Botticelli’s Venus, for example), their effect is ghoulish. Rather than adding a Warholian touch to past masters, resuscitating them, he seems instead to be killing them, embalming their iconographies. When he makes paintings from ads or commodities, the effect is, in contrast, humanizing: he renders the Coke bottle, for example, as if it were a living idol or his own mutant twin. In a print of a spilled Coke, executed sometime in the 1980s, Warhol seemed to be narrating Coke’s death—its mortal liability, as a liquid, to leak; as a bottle, to crack; and as a product, to flop.

  Coke is not a person, but Andy thought otherwise. His art is a bill of rights for inanimate objects, giving them suffrage and thus granting his own robotic self the liberty to pursue happiness. In the 1980s, he attempted technologically to produce an Andy Warhol robot that could give lectures and interviews, and in many of his late paintings and prints he seemed to be sweeping actual people aside, clearing space for emptiness, inanition, anhedonia. His least human work, or the work most devoted to the inhumane, is a series entitled Zeitgeist (1982), paintings of German monuments—perhaps his first public-architectural intervention since his ill-fated mural for the 1964 World’s Fair. This sequence contemplates unpeopled spaces, and, with a bleakness atypical of Warhol, suggests that bodies obliterated by totalitarianism are twice-erased—first, from the earth, and second, from the rescue of artistic rendering. Another German project, equally unpopulated and untactile, without even the horned warmth of the Endangered Species rhinoceros, was his 1986 sequence of commissioned portraits of Mercedes-Benz cars and automotive parts. We’ve come a long way from gorgeous Gerry-Pie’s torture in Vinyl: while sexual sadism at least offered a whip-and-wax mimesis of human touch, the Mercedes motor purrs at the furthest remove from the mortal organism. (Even a Brillo box implies the presence of the comestible, since a Brillo pad removes stuck traces of foodstuffs.) And the toys in the miniature paintings he made for his dealer Bruno Bischofberger in 1983 (Bruno’s son Magnus was Andy’s godchild) were unliving if not unmoving contraptions—a robot, a clockwork panda drummer, a clockwork motorcycle with sidecar, and various artificial or mechanical animals (frog, parrot, terrier, monkey, mouse). He hung the paintings at child’s-eye-level on Fish wallpaper, echoing his Cow wallpaper, and suggesting Jesuitical conversions, as well as the fetishist’s and fisherman’s pleasure. We assume the fish, like all toys, are dead. If alive, they qualify as pets.

  Andy’s pets, in the 1980s, were young artists, whose careers he advanced, even as, Drella-style, he sucked nutrients from them. These friendships—advocacies—included Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. For Basquiat, Warhol felt something nearly like love; together, they produced Ten Punching Bags, which represent interracial battle gone amorous. Boxing interested Basquiat, and boxing (in the sense of the Brillo boxes, the time capsules) was the core of Warhol’s artistic method. The logo of the punching bags, GENESPORT, pictures a white and a black figure boxing; the word GENE is in black letters, the word SPORT in white. (The bags themselves are white, with black paint.) Warhol and Basquiat might have wished to make sport of their “genes,” the word itself a cornerstone of racial categories; the purpose of the “bag” in Andy’s life, whether the colostomy bag or the moniker Andy Paperbag, was to replace the body, to hide it by wrapping or enclosing it, and also, with shy exhibitionism, to expose (or indecently “flash”) his practice of fabricating enclosures. The punching bags represent Andy’s own tendency to see himself and his art as “put down” by others—rejected, targeted, punched. Christ’s face is imprinted on the punching bag: Christ was the star whom oppressors put down but who had, like the bag, the temerity and resilience to rise again. The beauty of a punching bag is that it doesn’t feel the pain of the assault, and that it bounces back. Basquiat didn’t bounce back—he died of an overdose, despite Warhol’s efforts to get him off drugs. And Warhol himself would not bounce back, despite his multiple comebacks and his feline, nine-lived knack for self-reinvention.

  Andy had begun to rebuild his distressed body; the last years of his life were a series of attempts to make art of his failing organism. He worked with a trainer; he tried, as his weight-lifter painting advertised, to be somebody with a body. He’d never quite had one before, and even with the workouts, he remained, said Stuart Pivar, “in terrible shape.” Chris Makos took a photo of Andy getting a massage: here, for our astonished gaze, lies Andy, his flabby, pale flesh at rest, ministered to, receiving solicitude from human fingers.

  Finally he found the confidence to put his own figure forward—a futility (no one needed his torso, it served no cause) and a long-delayed gratification. In 1985, at a nightclub, Area, he created an “Invisible Sculpture” by standing on a pedestal beside the label ANDY WARHOL, and, more rambunctiously, in 1981, he posed in drag, with a series of inventive wigs and anti-naturalistic modes of maquillage, for Polaroid self-portraits; Chris Makos, too, photographed him in drag, and called it Altered Image. The drag self-portraits tour the girlie categories, though none is named; each faked, anonymous visage suggests a vocation (teacher, star, surgeon, char), and his face—camouflaged­ by womanliness—becomes a Blue Guide to the joke of gender. Andy has never seem
ed more variously himself: the drag portraits send him home to Lana, to Julia, to Judy, to Candy, to all the ladies he has been the near-miss mirror for. He vaguely worried that the drag photos would ruin his reputation, and yet for years he’d been altering his complexion with collagen and astringents; his dermatological regimens were strict, exacting, and involved dozens of products, the collection of them (of course he saved his face-repair creams) now functioning, posthumously, in their cardboard carton in the Warhol Archives, as yet another artwork. He wanted to look not like himself but like the punk-pop-group Blondie’s lead singer, Debbie Harry, the most architecturally beautiful face in the history of rock, her cheekbones high and pedimental.

  Harry was a regular on Andy’s TV shows, of which he concocted several, with the collaboration of Vincent Fremont and Don Munroe. “TV” is shorthand for “transvestite,” and transvestism always haunts Andy’s love of television, a medium that permits out-of-body travel within the private home. The highlight of Fashion (a TV series of ten segments, including episodes on male models, Halston, designer Betsey Johnson, and makeup), was a conversation between Diana Vreeland and Henry Geldzahler, in which she waxes enthusiastic about the boys who skateboard in front of the Metropolitan Museum, whose Costume Institute felt her high hand. Andy also produced the cable TV show Andy Warhol’s T.V. and, for MTV, Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes. “Good TV means a lot,” he told the diary; good TV was good reception, and open-ended receptivity was half of his TV pleasure. Making television, he could actively transmit his body, an ephemeral, wave-based sculpture to which he was devoting intense reconstructive and reinterpretive labor, trying to imagine it as beautiful, trying to wedge its bizarreness defiantly in the path of put-down.