by Gary Indiana
The vertiginous outpouring of serial works commencing with Warhol’s Soup Cans made “Pop” a blanket term for all kinds of art practices. The Pop artists were looking for a new approach to things, and for the things themselves—in making a stylistic break from the painterly strictures of the New York School, they were searching for subject matter that reflected the outer world rather than the artist’s interiority. The growing perception that there was no real difference between the artist’s interiority and the outer world was something Warhol had no trouble articulating:
It doesn’t matter what you do. Everybody just goes on thinking the same thing, and every year it gets more and more alike. Those who talk about individuality the most are the ones who most object to deviation, and in a few years it may be the other way around. Some day everybody will think just what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening.3
To say that the Ferus Gallery show was derisively greeted by the critical establishment would be misleading. It was scarcely noticed by the critical establishment; only later, after Warhol had shown the Soup Can pictures and other Pop paintings elsewhere in group shows of Pop Art and had done other one-artist shows of other works, did the Soup Cans become objects of critical scrutiny.
Reviewing a show at the Pasadena Art Museum called “New Paintings of Common Objects” later in 1962, Jules Langsner wrote, in the September 1962 issue of Art International: “A can of Campbell Soup by Andy Warhol . . . initially rivets the viewer’s attention . . . by removing the mundane object from its ordinary surroundings and enormously increasing its scale. The initial shock, however, wears off in a matter of seconds, leaving one as bored with the painting as with the object it presents.”4
Michael Fried, writing in the December 1962 issue of Art International, was similarly dismissive: “I am not at all sure that even the best of Warhol’s work can much outlast the journalism on which it is forced to depend.”5
Artists had mixed reactions. Donald Judd, writing in Arts in January 1963, observed that “Warhol’s work is able but general. It certainly has possibilities, but it is so far not exceptional.”6 Los Angeles-based artist John Baldessari, who saw the original Ferus Gallery show, recently told Philip Larratt-Smith in an interview: “I remember they were all in a row and as I recall they were sitting on a very narrow shelf. I liked the matter-offactness of it, that they were just like products in a supermarket, with all the cans lined up. . . . It did sort of resonate; what I liked about it was, Wow, I guess he thinks he can get away with this.”7
As Pop Art and Warhol burgeoned as phenomena, criticism likewise proliferated, as did misunderstandings about what had been shown at the Ferus Gallery in the first place. In light of Warhol’s subsequent works, many assumed that the Soup Cans had been produced with photographic silkscreens; other opinionators who knew the Soup Cans had been hand-painted regarded them as a flagrant waste of craftsmanship, a flouting not only of “taste” but of art itself—while still others found in them an implacable mystery, an almost hallucinatory heightening of everyday reality.
The Soup Cans, to many eyes, embodied the ultimate in “camp sensibility”: while the paintings emitted nothing sexually suggestive or homosexually ironic per se, those in the know about Warhol’s sexuality (just about everybody as Warhol’s public image became ubiquitous) interpreted the glorification of such aesthetically questionable objects, presented in utterly deadpan fashion, as a variant of the same “insider” hilarity as such camp objects as Tiffany lamps and chacha heels—their presentation as “art” was thought to constitute a kind of absurdist excess different from other Pop Art, something that could be construed as a form of sly, gestural homosexual signaling.
Again, it seems necessary to stress that Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can series, however crucially it represents a turning point in American culture, cannot be considered in isolation from the rapid and vast proliferation of other Warhol works that seemed to flood the American art scene in the 1960s: the silkscreen paintings of celebrities, the sculptures, the films, the phenomenon of the Factory—all embellished the Soup Cans with a retroactive mythic quality, heavily tinted by the brazen sexual “degeneracy” that the Warhol scene (no other Pop artist had “a scene”) came to exemplify.
chapter five
MASS PRODUCTION
ONE
FROM 1963 ONWARD, ANDY WARHOL BEGAN MORPHING from a professional artist whose background was based in advertising into a professional creative celebrity, one whose destiny was determined by a series of calculated risks. Like the Industrial Revolution titans who realized that mass production was the key to personal wealth, Warhol relied on mass production not only to make a name for himself as an artist, but as a means of making money and lots of it.
TWO
Immediately after the Soup Cans, Warhol began using photographic silkscreens to make his paintings, a rapid means of multiplying his output. No two silkscreen works are exactly the same. The reusable screens, ostensibly intended to generate many identical images, introduced arbitrary, painterly variations and intriguing singularities that the Soup Can period had seemingly repudiated. Such was the paradox of mechanization: individuated differences “slipped in,” revealing themselves only through almost microscopic scrutiny. Clogs, uneven pressure on the screen press, and irregularities in the canvas or the primer coat created gaps between serially contiguous images, areas of lighter and darker color, shifting degrees of legibility, and other inconsistencies. These inconsistencies were deliberate (deliberately allowed to stay in the pictures, that is), calculated, in the sense that they could be counted on to appear, and sloppy, like the slosh of one mechanical process over another, a liquid mopped over a photographic image, introduced into Warhol’s simulations for the evocation of motion picture film passing through a projector, the image flickering from nearblackness to an oversaturation that makes the image a ghostly nimbus.
He may have said that he wanted to be a machine, but with regard to his work he only acted like one in the sense that he never stopped working. He only partially ascribed to composer John Cage’s dictum to welcome the operations of chance: Warhol knew which accidents were “right” for his work and which ones wouldn’t do. He brought the idea of aesthetic choice to bear on procedures that seemed a refutation of aesthetics, and on paintings that mocked the art of painting. Mockery and mimicry were fused, and most significantly, the reproduction and the original were inextricably mixed together.
THREE
After JFK’s assassination in November 1963, the Soup Can paintings acquired a punchy and even edgier association with a full-blown social upheaval; Warhol personally, in a vertiginously short time, became associated with dark, unsavory things on the nether edge of “the counterculture.” America had always selectively repressed its own history and asserted its self-evident virtue after every self-inflicted disaster, but the JFK killing was touted as “the day America lost its innocence.” At that frozen moment, the Soup Can paintings were among the most conspicuous visible manifestations of “American culture,” evidence of a society in upheaval, and they attached themselves to an extreme turning point in American self-awareness.
In response to the assassination, Warhol immediately embalmed the iconography of collective grief and mourning in a series of silkscreens of Jackie Kennedy before and after the assassination, producing a kind of frieze of shock—the shock of the irremediable, an event recognizable by everyone as “a turning point” in our collective history.
What Warhol pictured didn’t necessarily evoke the emotional turmoil of the Kennedy assassination. His silkscreens of the First Lady in mourning, instead, recorded “the iconic moments” that had already registered powerfully with the mass public and functioned as afterimages, residue, instantly historicized phosphenes. They were directly transported from mass media into fine art, translated into art from powerful news photographs, like the suicides, car accidents, race riots, and other images of “death and
disaster” that Warhol turned to after picturing consumer products, labels, and money. None of these images “spoke” about the things they pictured; they processed the way reality had been made to look already by the camera—and someone else’s camera at that.
The dissociation of image from reality, the privileging of images over reality, symptomatic of an affectlessness invariably found in sociopaths, is a major theme in Andy Warhol’s work. (It’s also the prevailing character of American life today.) Warhol’s pictures are often conflated with an endorsement of affectlessness, partly because the self-protective public image Warhol constructed, like that of a movie star, was laconic-bordering-on-mute, recessive, not so much aloof as dazed, as if blinded by flashbulbs (which he often was). And partly because Warhol, growing up homosexual in the ’30s and ’40s, had shame and desire dueling in his psyche and had finally forced a truce between them with a Zen-like indifference clause written into it: too many emotions, too much emotion, would have been risky to his life, his art, his career.
The paintings and silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor (when she was thought to be at the brink of death from pneumonia in London) and the images of the Kennedy assassination existed to serve Andy’s absorption with celebrity, yet he sometimes wanted to memorialize the anonymous and forgotten. In a 1966 interview with Gretchen Berg in the East Village Other, commenting on the “Death and Disaster” series, Warhol said:
The death series I did was divided into two parts: the first on famous deaths and the second on people nobody ever heard of and I thought people should think about them sometimes: the girl who jumped off the Empire State Building or the ladies who ate the poisoned tuna fish and people getting killed in car crashes. It’s not that I feel sorry for them, it’s just that people go by and it doesn’t really matter to them that someone unknown was killed so I thought it would be nice for these unknown people to be remembered by those who, ordinarily, wouldn’t think of them.1
However blandly and coldly stated, for Warhol to embark on the “Death and Disaster” paintings at all reflects a scared awareness of other people’s unhappiness or bad luck and his own terror of death. The latter he dissembled with his lobster shell of emotional vacancy when other people died and with his refusal to exhibit any aggrieved or strongly negative feelings at all.
FOUR
With ascendancy came the need for continual change. Warhol realized that the best way to keep an audience interested was to keep them guessing about what would come next. The techniques might be the same, or similar, but the subject matter, invariably drawn from the iconography of commerce and mass media, changed, often capitalizing on whatever celebrity figures or sensational events the culture had fixated on. Warhol, increasingly a focus of mass media attention himself, whimsically adapted his self-presentation and responses to interviewers to “explain” his work using the fewest number of words possible. He was a master of the evasive reply, the oracular-sounding yet empty one-sentence response, and the fact that he never said anything negative about anything led people to believe he was putting them on—which, in all likelihood, he was.
Within his immense oeuvre, all sorts of internal contradictions render sweeping generalizations on such matters moot. In the books he wrote in collaboration with Pat Hackett and others, one finds strikingly altered accounts of the same events, clashing characterizations of the same people, and a multiplicity of Andy Warhols—not in the ordinary sense that everyone has different moods, changes of opinion, and more than one way of regarding the world, but rather in the sense of expressing different parts of himself at different periods, presenting the image of himself best suited to a particular moment in the culture’s rapidly shifting zeitgeist.
One can’t question Warhol’s “sincerity” in any of these incarnations, since each is a highly speculative construct carrying that ring of falsity with which Warhol imbued the truth. Often it works brilliantly. The shelf of books Warhol produced is considerable, and their oscillating quantities of revelation and withholding suggest that Warhol himself was a series of Warhols, superficially identical with himself, but on closer inspection less and less the same person from one book to the next (or one interview to the next, or one art practice to the next). He imported himself into the image world as much as he could, and his public passivity mimicked the malleability of images—again, as a sort of insulation against death and emotional suffering.
He was too intelligent to really believe in this stratagem; still, his image(s) did protect him from much of what he didn’t want in his life. The pictures he made stared down his desires, but likewise acted as purgatives. One thing he didn’t want in his life was to actually eat Campbell’s soup, since he’d had it for lunch every day throughout twenty years of grinding poverty. One of Warhol’s Factory familiars recalls that Andy hated Campbell’s soup. Making an artistic reputation and a fortune on it was both Warhol’s homage to, and revenge on, Campbell’s soup.
FIVE
Warhol’s self-control was preternatural. Eventually , people with precious little control of themselves gravitated to him as to a sort of high priest or magically endowed parent who could impart importance and a sense of direction to their inner chaos. Most were Catholics, afflicted with free-range guilt and a need to confess and receive absolution. Warhol’s films, as well as the social scene that evolved at the Factory, made instant celebrities of the people who ganged around him. His milieu became indissociable from himself, a kind of collective mask or screen projected through his films and the voyeurism of the mass media.
Warhol had the ability to bestow a public image on people the public might never otherwise have heard of. In American society, having an image was steadily becoming more rewarding than being a person; people have problems, but images just have spectators. The most adroit and clever of Warhol’s cohorts and groupies managed to make their problems into their images in a compelling way. Neuroticism became a lively asset rather than a liability.
When people think of Andy Warhol, they see a plurality, an assortment of muzzy pictures of personalities swirling around him, pictures in which Warhol himself is practically invisible—though never quite. His studio, christened “the Factory” by Billy Name (who covered the entire place in silver at Warhol’s request), became an almost public space where high and low, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, mainstream famous and underground famous, the beautiful and the bizarrely beautiful, mingled in a continuous saturnalia where all social categories became leveled, interchangeable, and irrelevant, much as class and race differences evaporated in gay bars. The Factory embodied Andy’s fascination with glamour, high style, and celebrity, especially in close proximity to the trashy, the outlandish, the faintly criminal, and the borderline psychotic. His work mirrors this fascination, but simultaneously evokes the only inescapable link between everyone who came and went and everyone he painted and filmed: the inevitable end of all tomorrow’s parties.
SIX
Remembering my own first glimpse of Andy Warhol’s image in 1964, in an art magazine photograph of Andy and Edie Sedgwick in a Philadelphia museum, mobbed on a spiral staircase by chanting fans, it’s almost impossible to believe that since that frozen moment the figure in the photograph has become, in many discourses, “the most important artist of the second half of the twentieth century,” perhaps even “the most important artist of the twentieth century,” and, quite bluntly, “the artist who changed everything.”
These phrases come tripping to the tongue, and one could trip over one’s tongue repeating them. We’ve heard them so often that we no longer question what they mean. Warhol “changed the way we perceive the world around us.” He “made us see reality in a different way.” He “completely changed American culture.” He may, for that matter, have changed all culture, for all time, through an epidemic form of alchemy.
There could hardly be a more comprehensive book on the Edie Sedgwick legend than Jean Stein’s Edie, but the image of Andy-and-Edie continues, like the Campbell’s Soup
Can paintings, to operate as visual shorthand for an unrepeatable watershed moment in American cultural history. In 1964 Warhol’s life was becoming a narrative. Edie Sedgwick, the following year’s “It Girl,” became an important episode of the narrative in which the artist appeared in public with his double. She was, in terms of social background and upbringing, his opposite, born to riches in a dysfunctional but New England aristocratic family, and indelibly beautiful, the original waif. She offered refinement, fragility, delicacy with a pedigree, which validated Warhol’s own delicacy (and reflected a type of pedigree, like moonlight, on him). They didn’t look alike, but dressed alike, wore the same hair color, and shared the quality of ambiguity, unreadableness. Edie completed Andy Warhol in a new way, which made them a new type of power couple: together, they spelled a runic inscription that was all presence, all absence. Edie’s death in 1971 (the ultimate absence) elevated the mythology that surrounded them. No other could replace Edie.
Perhaps the strain of being a perpetual implacable presence wore him down over time: Warhol once replaced himself by sending actor Allen Midgette to impersonate him at college lectures; at some juncture, he let it be known that he was having a robot of himself constructed. The idea of replacing himself with a double, or cloning himself, was utterly consistent with Warhol’s frequent assertion that anyone could do his paintings, that one could know everything about him by looking at the surfaces of his work, that there was nobody behind any of it; his famous statement that he wanted to be a machine underscored the techniques of mechanical reproduction with which he generated his art.
