by Gary Indiana
chapter four
INSIDE ANARCHY’S RISING TIDE
ONE
SIXTIES YOUTH CULTURE WAS AN AMALGAM OF DESIRES, utopian wishes, and schemes of self-liberation. The tide that washed Pop Art onto America’s shore also brought with it anarchy and militant avatars. These avatars advocated for drastic forms of dissent and personal escape from the prescriptive life itinerary of their class—overwhelmingly, the up-to-then-complacent middle class. The comfortable middle was a class that was completely alien to Andy Warhol’s experience; for Andy, the extremes of American life, and the extremes of art, were the natural subjects of his work as well as the sources of his sensibility.
Pop Art coincided with the materialization of a New Left that was contemptuous of the Old Left’s polemics and its failure to affect the country’s domestic and foreign policies. Incinerated draft cards, mass marches and demonstrations, race riots and love-ins youthquaked the mellow acquiescence of the Eisenhower years. Some understood only retrospectively that they had lived as much in fear of nuclear annihilation as of sudden affluence during the Eisenhower years. Yet the high hopes for progressive change that blew in with the Kennedy administration swiftly blew back out. JFK’s brief government ratcheted up existing threats of annihilation and an endless Cold War against the Soviet Union, using brinksmanship tactics in response to crises—the airlifts into divided Berlin, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs Invasion. JFK was his father’s son in many ways besides satyriasis—for example, vis-à-vis the civil rights movement: every concession to it was made grudgingly, for politically expedient reasons.
A White House that invited Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer to dinner was simultaneously prepared to blast humanity into nonexistence to ensure “American supremacy.” The physical attractiveness of the First Family transmitted an opposite message of reformist energy and steadfast efforts toward a safer world. John and Jackie Kennedy were, as many knew at the time, “with it” in ways no earlier American ruling couple had ever been.
At this historical juncture, often referred to as the New Frontier, Warhol’s Soup Cans insinuated themselves into the cultural mix like deftly placed time bombs.
TWO
The emerging Pop artists all arrived at their defining subject matter by considering the American scene and its contents. Claes Oldenberg had devised his “soft” sculptures of objects like typewriters and “hard,” jumbo-scaled office erasers; James Rosenquist adapted his experience as a billboard painter to works juxtaposing jet fighters with salon-style hair dryers, atomic blasts with coiled spaghetti and rowing oars; Tom Wesselmann embarked on his Great American Nudes, George Segal on his plaster figures in tableaux, Jim Dine on his “painting objects” of bathrobes, shirts, and neckties embedded in thick skins of uniformly colored paint.
Warhol’s “Pop statement” began with a sequence of hard-edged, black-and-white paintings of bakelite telephones, Coke bottles, storm window ads, and similarly “naked” subjects—culminating in the supreme, cryptic obviousness of the Campbell’s Soup Cans.
The genesis of these works is complicated. Warhol initially worried that the stripped-down look of his first important Pop paintings wouldn’t look like art without some slather of assertive brushwork in them. The un-exhibited, “arty” early versions of these pictures still exist and are probably worth millions. But the strong suit of the blunt, completely impersonal Coke bottle was, precisely, that it didn’t look like art. It presented itself as art, without any apologetics to the New York School. They claimed their own space as art and successfully determined what art would look like now.
These transitional works were themselves a dramatic break with the ornate whimsy of Warhol’s commercial and noncommercial drawings; the emergence of Pop Art in the work of post-Abstract Expressionist artists revived Warhol’s determination to break through into “fine art.” He feared missing his moment. He was virtually the last major Pop artist to be “discovered.”
Warhol had never abandoned his ambition: it had waited in abeyance. He’d lacked a way into the established gallery system of the 1950s, although he had been involved with the underground poetry and performance scene in downtown Manhattan, an excited witness to the largely unpublicized realm of little art and poetry magazines, beatnik readings, and experimental theater.
The hard-edged paintings were not what Warhol showed Leo Castelli, however, when Ivan Karp, Castelli’s assistant at the time, dragged the dealer to Warhol’s studio in 1962: what Warhol had on hand were comic strip paintings, with drools and slathery brushwork, and Castelli initially chose not to represent him because they covered essentially the same territory as Roy Lichtenstein, already a client.
The Soup Cans are generally credited to the suggestion of Muriel Latow, an art dealer and decorator, who in late 1961 told Warhol he should paint money “or something people see every day, like a Campbell’s Soup can.” According to Victor Bockris’s biography, Andy sent Julia to the supermarket the following day to buy “each of the thirty-two varieties” of the soup and began by making a series of drawings.
The paintings were produced by hand, using stencils and projected slides, and their handmade quality can be seen in the sometimes wobbly lettering and the blank gold medallion in the center of the can’s design. Bockris refers to the paintings as “portraits,” and this seems exactly right: Warhol’s technique invested the cheap manufactured object with the solemn dignity of portraiture.
The appearance of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can paintings at Ivan Karp’s Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles on July 9, 1962, ranged evenly along the walls like supermarket merchandise, drew more derision than enthusiasm. A nearby gallery filled its windows with Campbell’s soup and offered “the real thing for only 33 cents a can.” As biographer Bob Colacello noted, however, “Andy turned ridicule to his advantage. He took a photographer to the supermarket and got his picture taken signing the real thing. The photo was picked up by the Associated Press and wired around the world.”1 (In Colacello’s account, the “real” soup cans were displayed in the windows of a supermarket; in several others, they appeared in the windows of the David Stuart Gallery, which was next door to Ferus. Warhol’s career is so much a matter of mythology that even simple matters of fact such as this have become muddled from book to book.)
The Soup Cans acquired lasting, retroactive notoriety via Warhol’s subsequent elephantine output. They were, and still are, confused with the serial silkscreen works Warhol began producing later in industrial quantities. It took many more Warhol products, differently manufactured, for the artist’s standout achievement to acquire its symbolic cachet. And Warhol himself crafted an indelible public image that became synonymous with the Soup Cans.
The Soup Can series condensed, like canned soup, what Pop Art had been seeking. It reflected the unanticipated effects of technological changes on the ways Americans lived after World War II—changes in mores and values created by accelerated consumerism.
THREE
As displayed at the Ferus Gallery, the Soup Cans, measuring twenty-by-sixteen inches, executed in synthetic polymer paint on an even white ground, may have resembled a hyper-enlarged supermarket display, but they suggested too a serial montage, like that of the film strip. If you think of the Soup Cans as a succession of flavors, they naturally evoke the passage of time best captured on film—the time of consumption, the filmic element of time embedded in everyday life. It is a monotonous element marked by small differences, suggestive of mass production, mass consumption, and waste. The ensemble is, or was, an inventory: Warhol fastidiously obtained a complete list of Campbell’s existing varieties from the manufacturer, checking each one off as a painting of it was completed.
The painstaking production of the Soup Cans and their release into the world as works of art represented a watershed experience for Warhol and, in time, for American culture. Warhol created a pertly designed window into the abyss, in a sense, erasing the sense of spirituality that earlier generations had associated with art.
The viewer was obliged to confront glut: a ceaseless proliferation of objects for sale, objects that defined modern lives as quanta.
In a 1962 statement about an earlier, black-and-white painting, Storm Door (1960), Warhol explicitly commented on the imagery best epitomized by the Soup Cans: “My image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us.”2
Warhol found in the soup can a particularly useful symbology, drawing and painting it in a multiplicity of sizes and conditions: in other serial paintings, such as 100 Cans, in which all the cans are labeled Beef Noodle; in the painting 200 Cans, depicting mixed flavors; singly and in groups, with open lids attached like hinges; as crushed cans, dented cans, and cans in small groups arranged in clumplike formations; as cans with the labels sliding off, revealing the mottled tin cylinder beneath; as flattened cans; and as an open can of chicken noodle soup, with the red parts of the label colored in and partly obscured by the can opener, the manual kind that includes a corkscrew. Working from projected photographs, Warhol considered the can as thoroughly as he would the human face.
By portraying this iconic item in both its intact, market-going state and its varying stages of distress from being used and discarded, Warhol in effect charted the life span of a commodity, showing both its utilitarian ubiquity and its “death.” Warhol used a broad range of materials—oil paint, watercolor, pencil, press-type, acrylic, silkscreen ink—in his exploration of all the artisanal possibilities at hand to depict essentially the same thing. When Warhol found a subject, he worked it to exhaustion—at times revisiting it when he hit upon a new technique, such as the “Negative” versions of his early work in which the photographic reverse of the image appears—and saved any auxiliary materials used in the process, creating an almost infinite archive of his own activity. In his depiction of the disposable, he accrued an archaeological residue of the objects of his gaze.
Warhol presents us with the container, never the contents: the Campbell’s Soup Cans “refer” to nourishment, food, the elemental necessity of the life process, but invariably they show the form in which this manna is packaged for consumption, contained within a system of mass production, “drained,” in effect, of gratification, presented in a masked and dissembled state that has no emotional affect but rather an optical histrionics.
Warhol’s cans demonstrate that modern reality is mediated through the symbolic. They indicate desire (hunger) and the absence of substance (eating), and the mechanized stimulation of desire is arguably their “theme.” The inconsequential variations on the container and unrelenting emphasis on monotony and repetition do indeed stress “the practical and impermanent” as the mode of life in a mass society—an idea that can be extended to Warhol’s depictions of human faces and bodies, plants and animals, materiality and emotion.
FOUR
There is nothing ambiguous about a soup can. But a painting of a soup can, in 1962, bristled with suggestiveness. It represented, some thought, an indictment of quantity over quality. It could be related to widespread uneasiness with American materialism, its sexual repressiveness, its racism, the ugliness of its cities and towns. It could say: “This is what we eat, and this is what we are.”
From a different perspective, the unembellished, flat commercial image, inserted into the “sacred space” of art, was as fresh as a brisk wind, blowing away old ideas about how images affect people and what images compel their attention.
Pop could mean “populist” or “popular,” as you preferred.
The equalizing effect of Warhol’s technique on the imagery of American popular culture emphasized the omnipresence of media images. The naked, isolated soup cans repudiated the idea of “subjectivity.” Everything “outside” became the same thing, in a sense, as a soup can.
Warhol found the perfect metaphor for what was happening in the middle-class world of the affluent society. The Soup Cans were insouciant, defiant, impeccably unembellished examples of what novelist William Burroughs had termed “the naked lunch at the end of the newspaper fork,” acerbic “no comment” comments on the previous decade’s unbearable conformism, emblems of the social and political heterodoxy spreading through American society. They were banal. They were visionary. They were works of obdurate stupidity radiating the aptness of genius. They have never lost their iconic punch, perhaps because they transmuted the banality of a specific, familiar object into a wink of nonconformity—the kind of dissonance and contradiction in which ever-growing masses of people, immersed in an environment indistinguishable from advertising, now live.
Warhol was a protean maker of meaningful images remarkable for their apparent meaninglessness. Their neutrality made the viewer’s reaction the true subject of the work. When you looked at a Warhol painting, the painting blankly stared back. Warhol rewired your perception of what you already knew. He forced your attention on the elaborately constructed nature of society, its labor-intensive artifice, the complex design of images and objects that were taken for granted as “natural.” Other Warhol works may have had a greater effect on aesthetic perception than the Soup Cans. But no Warhol pictures are “perfect” in the same sense that the Campbell’s Soup Cans are perfect. Everything else Warhol painted, filmed, tape-recorded, videotaped, photographed, or simply attached his name to carries a vestige of personal idiosyncrasy and “differentness.”
The Soup Can paintings mocked the importance placed on art by timeless criteria of aesthetics. They scrambled the categories of “major” and “minor,” “commercial art” and “fine art.” They moved the work of art into the realm of objects previously unperceived as “commodities.” The art gallery and the supermarket drew closer together.
The Soup Can effect was not to rescue American banalities from banality, but to give banality itself value. After some initial hesitance about what he was doing, Warhol never wavered.
The Soup Cans were of their time, and about their time. Perhaps their most salient quality is that, unlike other Pop Art paintings, they are “mute,” stark, and factual, deriving whatever irony they possess from a receptive viewer, expressive of nothing and nobody in a way that no previous paintings ever were.
FIVE
Early resistance to Warhol’s brand of Pop Art un doubtedly owed much to the air of effeminate blankness he presented to the art press and the public. Even before launching himself into filmmaking of a provocatively static, then blatantly joke-pornographic type, he had become synonymous with an “underground” of rampant drug use and sexual polymorphism; his flair for self-promotion guaranteed that this spilled beyond the pages of art magazines into those of tabloid newspapers.
All the same, Warhol could not be avoided as a key practitioner of Pop Art and, as such, the subject of a great deal of formalist art criticism that avoided any mention of the louche, faggoty associations that were rife in his production. The saturnalian aspects of his films, once they became “talkies,” were said to be exemplary of a kind of voyeurism assimilable to art history, a mirror of society’s underbelly that implicitly distanced the already calculatedly distanced Warhol from what he was recording.
In recent years a lot of polemical energy has gone into “reclaiming” Warhol as a homosexual artist, as if he had ever pretended to be anything else. This kind of polemic is unobjectionable—indeed, it is valuable in an era when gay issues might be considered the last frontier in the struggle for civil rights. At times this kind of critical writing can itself become reductive—for example, in the case of Warhol’s installation, on the facade of the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, of Thirteen Most Wanted Men, twenty-five uniformly sized, silkscreen-on-masonite panels bearing mug shots of criminals.
Warhol probably intended the title of this work as a double entendre—the men depicted may have been “wanted” by the law, but were also wanted, at least in some cases, as objects of sexual interest
. But it seems to me that the work was primarily intended as a subversion of everything a World’s Fair is designed to showcase: the most positive and “advanced” features of participating nations.
The mural was banned, either by commissioning architect Philip Johnson or on orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Warhol offered to replace the panels with an equal number of identical portraits of planning commissioner Robert Moses, whom Warhol drolly affected to admire; the idea was promptly rejected. Warhol then had the mural painted over with aluminum house paint. An interesting statement in itself: a shiny nothing.
Perhaps the political subversiveness of Thirteen Most Wanted Men is inextricably tied to its sexual sub-text; in the early 1960s, Warhol was flaunting his interest in gay subject matter without inhibition. In his later career, the confrontative expression of alternative sexuality outlived its usefulness. It no longer carried any shock value and reaped no particular rewards in terms of publicity—in other words, it had performed its function for Warhol’s idiosyncratic advancement as a media star and lucrative artist. In the ’70s, when transvestites and underground sex clubs were objects of interest for the monied elite, Warhol produced plenty of works depicting drag queens, male genitalia, and sex; by then, however, his bread and butter consisted of portrait commissions from the ultrawealthy, specialized print editions of endangered animal species or “Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century,” and the kind of subject matter he’d broken into Pop Art with: consumer products. In the 1980s, when the Campbell Soup Company introduced a line of its product in boxes, Warhol created a whole new series of silkscreen paintings immortalizing them.
SIX
Irving Blum’s offer to show the seminal thirty-two Campbell’s Soup Can paintings at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and his later determination to keep them together as a set—one of the most lucrative decisions in the history of contemporary art—obliged Blum to buy several canvases back from collectors who’d paid $100 for each; Blum, whom Warhol charged $1,000 in monthly installments, for the entire series, eventually sold the original set to MoMA for $15 million, while a single Soup Can, not part of the series, went at auction not long ago for $11 million.
