Andy Warhol

by Arthur C. Danto

  Somehow, everything about the show seemed to reflect the fact that it was a corporate endeavor. Cutrone, who installed the show, alternated the Dollar Signs with images that Warhol had done of knives and revolvers—the same pistol, according to his account, that Solanas had shot him with. Fred Hughes said that this display looked too European, that the show should just be of Dollar Signs. He was correct, as no one was interested in this part of the show. The handgun is somehow too charged an emblem for someone to say, as Emile de Antonio said of Coca-Cola, that it is who we are—even if the Second Amendment is a hot political issue, and despite the fact that the Saturday night special is part of the American scene. Everyone can understand why Warhol might have painted what is, after all, associated with the most traumatic episode of his life. But for just this reason, it seems to me, it does not belong with his vision of the world. People would feel uncomfortable with it. It would not be part of what gives meaning to our lives as Americans. Its meaning would be too private and too autobiographical for someone who was so public an artist—so much the artist laureate of the American soul, for which Warhol in his prebusiness phase seemed to have such perfect pitch. That is something he seems to have lost, or to have found only intermittently in the 1970s. That is why the Feldman show was so successful—the symbols belonged to everyone. Somehow, it seems to me, the Dollar Signs are too decorative and too playful. They would make good designs for sophisticated shower curtains, or even wallpaper, but for something that verges on a national symbol, they seem too shallow.

  A work that seems far too personal to have been business art is an installation of paintings of shadows that Warhol and Cutrone executed in 1978. As with the Hammer and Sickle paintings of the previous year, they seem to belong to an impulse that Warhol should do something that would have a purity as art—something that really meant something—the way shadow implies substance without being substantial in its own right. They are abstract while at the same time representational, though what they represent remains a central question in Warhol interpretation. Shadows play a certain role in mythological accounts of the origin of drawing. A Corinthian girl is said to have drawn around the edge of her lover’s shadow cast by firelight on the wall, creating a silhouette of his profile. Warhol’s shadows are more abstract. They are cast by objects that have no obvious specific identity, though Bob Colacello claims that they are shadows of erect penises—erect uncircumcised penises, one would want to specify, to account for the blip at the tip. That would be consistent, certainly, with Warhol’s irrepressible prurience, but somehow inconsistent with what one takes to be the aesthetic agenda of the space he must have visualized for them. But they could as easily be of eggplants or cucumbers, or, as someone has proposed, the Empire State Building. Or they could be of outcroppings of rock in a desert—or lunar—landscape.

  The likelihood of some identifiable object to which the shadows in these paintings refer is probably slight. Andy wanted to make some abstract paintings, according to Cutrone’ s recollection, mainly because he came from a generation of artists who resisted abstraction when the general view was that real painting must now be abstract, that abstraction’s time had come in a revolutionary way, and resisting the revolution was inconsistent with the true impulse of art history. Artists in my generation, as in Warhol’s, felt a twinge of guilt in doing figurative art. Jackson Pollock castigated de Kooning as reactionary for painting women in 1952 in his landmark exhibition at the Janis Gallery. Cutrone said to Warhol, according to his recollection, that he was from a later generation and had no such hang-ups. It was he who proposed painting shadows of forms that were not forms of anything—whose resemblances to anything would be purely coincidental, unlike one’s lover’s profile.

  The Shadow paintings do have the somewhat mysterious look of twilit abstract landscapes, with what one might call “decorator colors”—aubergine, Klein blue, chartreuse. The Dia Foundation purchased eighty of them, which are today installed in a large dedicated room as a single integral environment, one abutting another, and all hung very close to the floor, at the Foundation’s space in Beacon, New York. So placed, Warhol’s Shadow paintings fit the identifiable spirit of Dia, which has favored art of a marked spirituality, such as the nearby monument by Blinky Palermo To the People of New York City, made up of several components in the colors of the German flag. Or, for that matter, of the general feelings one imagines the Foundation aspires to achieve through the work of Fred Sandbeck, Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, or Donald Judd—a kind of elevating mystical abstraction that lifts the spirit onto a plane of communion with higher forces. It is, as I say, not what one would think of as business art. But nor is it what one thinks of as Warholian art. There is nothing brash about it, nothing that presses against the envelope in ways one expects from Warhol. It is like a wish come true for someone who respects and admired Warhol as a serious artist, but who longs to see him produce a piece of art of high spirituality. Far closer to Warhol would be the roomful of silk-screened Last Suppers, based on a cheap color reproduction, with double Jesuses and price tags, that he did in his last years.

  The art produced by Andy Warhol Enterprises consists of the portraits, and then, mainly, the suites of prints dreamt up as commercial propositions, like the athletes, or the endangered animals. The Shadow paintings brought in $1.6 million—something of a steal, everything considered, in a class with the sale of all the original Campbell’s Soup Can paintings for $1,000.

  SEVEN

  Religion and Common Experience

  Andy had, by nature, a philosophical mind. Many of his most important works are like answers to philosophical questions, or solutions to philosophical puzzles. Much of this is lost on many viewers of his work, since philosophy itself is not widely cultivated outside universities, but in truth most of the philosophical knowledge needed to appreciate Warhol’s stunning contributions did not exist until he made the art in question. Much of modern aesthetics is more or less a response to Warhol’s challenges, so in an important sense he really was doing philosophy by doing the art that made him famous. In other words, most of the philosophy written about art before Warhol was of scant value in dealing with his work: philosophical writings could not have been written with art like his in mind, as such work simply did not exist before he created it. Warhol demonstrated by means of his Brillo Box the possibility that two things may appear outwardly the same and yet be not only different but momentously different. Its significance for the philosophy of art was that we can be in the presence of art without realizing it, wrongly expecting that its being art must make some immense visual difference. How many visitors to his second show at the Stable Gallery wondered if they had not mistaken the address and walked into a supermarket stockroom? How many, walking into a theater in which the film Empire was being shown, thought that they were looking at a still image from a film that had yet to begin its showing?

  Something similar can be true as well of certain religious objects, which we expect to look momentously different from ordinary things but which are disguised, one might say, by their ordinariness. Of the four vessels today claimed to be the Holy Grail, for example, the one that most persuades me that it might be genuine is an ordinary-looking vessel, drably colored, rather like an individual salad bowl, in a vitrine in the cathedral of Valencia in Spain. It really looks like something Jesus could have used at the table, given that he affected the life of the simple persons he lived among—carpenters and fishermen and the like. Of course, as befits so venerated an object, the Sacra Cáliz, as it is called, is supported by an ornate and gilded stand embellished with pearls and emeralds, but if one saw it by itself, it would be unprepossessingly plain, though it is carved out of a piece of stone. The Grail would not have been on so ornate and precious a stand at the Last Supper itself, where it was actually used for whatever was eaten on that tremendous occasion, touched with
the lips or the fingers of who those present were certain was the Messiah. Jesus himself was like that bowl, if indeed, the claim is true that he was God in human form. Imagine that there was a man just his age in Jerusalem, who looked enough like Jesus that the two were often confused for one another, even by those who knew them well. The difference could not have been more momentous than that! Confusing a god with a mere human being is, toutes proportions gardées, like confusing a work of art with a mere real thing—a thing defined through its meaning with a thing defined through its use. Imagine a student who has followed a program of institutional critique whose thesis consists of substituting in a museum display an ordinary Brillo box for one of Andy’s—a work worth $2 million at Christie’s in exchange for a mere cardboard box of no greater value than that of the material of which it is made.

  Relics are typically presented the way the Sacra Cáliz is in Valencia today—a fragment of bone is placed in a golden housing, set with priceless stones and perhaps images of the saint to whom the bone is believed to have belonged. One has to take it on faith that the bone is the bearer of special powers, but in the nature of the case it must look like a mere human remnant, and be able to pass all the obvious tests, like DNA assay. It is felt that the Grail must have extraordinary powers, given the belief that it was touched by God incarnate, but the history ascribed to the Grail, if it really still exists, has left no traces on its surfaces. That it was touched by Christ’s lips, that it held Christ’s blood, cannot be deduced from anything the eye now sees. Its plainness alone testifies to the possibility that it was present at the last meal Christ shared with his disciples, where it looked like an ordinary dish, maybe a little special given the special character of he who used it. But the test for whether Jesus was God embodied is not part of the forensic repertoire. The Transfiguration described in the Synoptic Gospels was intended to show selected disciples that Jesus transcended the merely human, for example, by his radiance. But the so-called Messianic Secret was meant to be kept quiet—Jesus preferred not to be trooped after by groupies thirsting for miracles. For anyone other than witnesses to the Transfiguration, Jesus was out and out human.

  Andy’s last studio, just as he left it, 1987. Photograph by Evelyn Hofer, New York

  I respond deeply to a description of Christ’s humanity by the great art critic Roger Fry in regards to a painting by Mantegna, now in Berlin: “The wizened face, the creased and crumpled flesh of a newborn babe . . . all the penalty, the humiliation, almost the squalor attendant upon being ‘made flesh’ are marked.” To paint God incarnate, the Christian artist need paint only a human being. Of course there were eternal indications, like halos, that represented the other aspect. But these would be mere symbols, the way gold frames symbolize that they protect works of art. Bleeding is evidence of being human, but there is no such simple evidence of divinity.

  I have plunged into certain religious matters because of a thought of the philosopher Hegel, who said that philosophy, art, and religion are what he called the “moments” of Absolute Spirit. I offer this because it suggests that art, philosophy, and religion are forms through which human beings represent what it means to be human. One of the things that is distinctive of human beings is that the question of what it is to be human arises for us in a way that it doesn’t for other animals. There is, in that respect at least, an analogy between artworks and religious objects, and that may be a way to approach the question of whether and in what way Warhol’s art actually is religious. What is undeniable, of course, is that he was a Catholic, whose mother was quite pious, and that he and his mother prayed together, at home and in church. After her death he continued to attend Mass. In truth, most of those who frequented the Silver Factory were born and raised Catholics, including most of the Mole people. The critic Eleanor Heartney, herself Catholic, has written a very searching study, Postmodern Heretics, in which she describes “The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art,” to use her subtitle. A great deal of the content of contemporary art in America involves aspects of the human body that imply Catholic attitudes, but these aspects at the same time are offensive to a conservative Catholic morality. A good example is Andres Serrano’s incendiary Piss Christ, in which a plastic crucifix is displayed in a container of the artist’s urine. This caused an immense uproar when it was exhibited in the Richmond, Virginia, Museum of Art. Serrano is Catholic, and it is not difficult to see that he was vividly depicting the way in which Christ was “despised and rejected,” to quote Handel’s Messiah—jeered, spat upon, hit. Pissing on someone is conspicuously humiliating and degrading. Urine and spit are heavily laden with contempt, as feces or vomit would be, or menses. In my view, Serrano was seeking to restore the way Jesus was humiliated as he carried the cross to Golgotha. To be sure, it was a plastic effigy—but what difference does that make? Is the crucifix not an object of worship as much so as the person crucified? When Barnett Newman, a Jew, painted the Stations of the Cross, he did so in a very abstract and what one might call interior way. It is about unendurable pain, fainting, and giving up the ghost. But it offends no one, the way Serrano’s piece certainly does. Years ago, I quoted one of Yeats’s “Crazy Jane” poems to a member of the so-called Moral Majority when we were both on a panel charged to discuss the National Endowment for the Arts and the highly sexual work of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe: “Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement.” He replied that it was hardly Yeats’s finest line, and I asked him to quote me a finer one. Crazy Jane was one of Yeats’s inspired inventions for addressing the sexed body and the physical basis of human love.

  Warhol did not particularly like to be touched, especially by women, according to Viva, but he certainly had a kind of gleeful curiosity about sex and sexual parts, and made a point of showing it in his art, especially in his movies. Whether this can be explained by his Catholicism is hard to say. But nothing more sharply distinguishes the art of the 1950s from that of the 1960s in New York than the difference in how death and sex are represented in the two decades. Robert Motherwell—a Protestant—painted the great series of abstract canvases under the title Elegy for the Spanish Republic. Serrano showed cadavers in a morgue. De Kooning’s great paintings of women in 1952 were daringly misogynist, with their heavy breasts and bared teeth. Mapplethorpe photographed huge penises, or fists pushed into assholes. The fact that painting gave way to photography in the 1970s has to be crucial in how the same subject would be addressed. Andy tried to exhibit drawings of nude boys at the Tanager Gallery on Third Street, where they were rejected on principle, though Andy’s drawings were never as robust as his silk screens. Abstraction can, as easily as not, be understood as a form of repression, which can then make Pop seem itself a form of liberation. But the sexual revolution of the 1960s was bound to show up in art as well as life, without this necessarily meaning that the artists whose work took on sexual content were especially catholic. It was a change in the culture. Most of the facts affecting Andy’s religiousness belong to his biography. But none of this shows that Warhol was especially religious in his art.

  Let us consider his last substantial body of paintings, based on Leonardo’s The Last Supper, which are thought by some to be evidence of Andy Warhol’s religiousness. As so often happened in Warhol’s work, the idea came from elsewhere, in this case from the dealer Alexandre Iolas, who had a gallery in Milan. Andy was one of five painters he selected to do paintings based on Leonardo’s The Last Supper. His idea was that a show of Last Suppers by contemporary artists would generate interest, since the gallery was across the piazza from where Leonardo’s masterpiece was undergoing its latest restorations, and there would have been an incentive for visitors to take in both it and versions of it by painters of our day. Warhol specialists have observed that he found the reproductions of The Las
t Supper in art books too dark, explaining why he used cheap copies of the old painting instead. But in my view, what is important about the fact that the original is Leonardo is that everyone knows Leonardo’s painting—it belongs to the common consciousness of the culture that Warhol shared with everyone who knew his work, and which he took as his artistic mission to raise to self-awareness—to show our inner life to ourselves. Leonardo’s The Last Supper is one of the few paintings that enjoys this status—Warhol’s can of Campbell’s tomato soup is another—though few of those who know The Last Supper ever actually saw it in Milan; it is better known through its many reproductions. To show The Last Supper as commonplace is to show it as it appears on a postcard, the way Duchamp showed the Mona Lisa, or in a calendar of masterpieces. Ask people to name ten paintings, they will inevitably name The Last Supper— not La Conversation of Matisse, let alone The Last Sacrament of Saint Jerome by Domenichino or one of the Mont Sainte-Victoire landscapes by Cézanne.

  Andy treated the Last Supper as he treated many of his subjects. He did versions that showed series of Last Suppers, much like his serial paintings of soup cans or dollar bills. He doubled Jesus, the way he doubled Marilyn, or Elvis. Repetition was a sign of significance. He filled it with logos from contemporary products, like Dove soap, to represent the Holy Spirit, or the Wise owl from the familiar potato chip package, emblematizing wisdom. Or he used the General Electric logo to emblematize light. All these came from the commercial world in which he and the rest of us are at home, though it is fair to say that none of them held religious significance as such. Warhol’s great artistic project began with the images in the Bonwit Teller window and evolved on two levels—the level of fears and agonies, and the level of beauties. The level of plane crashes, suicides, accidents, executions; and the level of Marilyn, Liz, Jackie, Elvis, Jesus, radiant with glamour and celebrity. A dark world with radiant beings, whose presence among us is redemptive, and into whose company Warhol sought to insinuate his own ungainly presence, and to make stars of us all. His mission was to externalize the interiority of our shared world. The Last Supper has penetrated the common consciousness with the momentousness of its message. In making it his, he too has become part of what we are. And by making it his he shows us that it is ours, part of life, rather than something one has to travel to Italy to see—in this respect it is like the dish sometimes held to be the Grail, commonplace rather than rare, a dish like any other rather than something crusted with jewels and made of precious metals. Or, like his own early prints, something that one could buy for a few dollars at the receptionist’s counter at Castelli’s, where they were displayed in stacks. A genuine work of art for five bucks! No wonder he stenciled low price tags—like $6.99—on pictures of masterpieces.