Andy Warhol: 1928-1987
Andy Warhol liked to watch. Anything: flowers, cows, stacked-up soup cans. Pop stars, comic strips, tabloid corpses. Society girls shooting up, drag queens flipping out, young hustlers engaged in fellation. His gaze was relentless, and awesome in its detachment. “A whole day of life,” he said, “is like a whole day of television.” Warhol demonstrated the seductive anesthetic effect of the image – of reality at one manageable remove. Secondhand life could be reviewed and savored, or simply switched off. All things really were equal. Andy looked at life and shrugged. “Gee,” he said.
In the Sixties, we watched with him, of course. There was no choice: Andy was everywhere. Who among us has not stared in wonder or befuddlement at his deadpan Campbell’s soup cans, his silk-screened Marilyns, his endlessly unreeling underground movies and thought, “Who is this guy?” Warhol, of course, had no comment.
“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” he said, “just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, Andy Warhol and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
He positioned himself as an emotional void around which all manner of bizarre events flapped and fluttered. He was merely the ticket taker. And yet, when all the Warhol “superstars” are forgotten, when the shock of even his most shocking work has long receded, it is Warhol himself –— the ultimate introvert –— who will perhaps be remembered as the crucial figure in that most extrovert of eras.
Andy casually brought previously forbidden “underground” material into the cultural mainstream, desensitizing both it and us (even the most scabrous image becomes boring if stared at long enough). With his mixed-media shows and his unflagging penchant for the new and the experimental, he helped invent the Sixties. As an indefatigable party archivist, he practically defined the celebrity-addled Seventies. And by the end, he’d become the grand old man of the American avant-garde, at home at last in a world he’d largely refurbished.
“He was the person who created Attitude,” said Tom Wolfe a few days after Andy’s death on February 22nd. “Before Warhol, in artistic circles, there was Ideology –— you took a stance against the crassness of American life. Andy Warhol turned that on its head, and created an attitude. And the attitude was ‘It’s so awful, it’s wonderful. It’s so tacky, let’s wallow in it.’ That still put you above it, because it was so knowing. It placed you above the crassness of American life, but at the same time you could enjoy it.”
Before Warhol, art in New York was a capital-A affair, a largely inscrutable ritual carried out among iron-browed god-artists, the critics who lauded them in little art magazines and a carefully cultivated circle of key dealers and well-heeled collectors. The public –— the “sloboisie,” as it were —– played no part in this rarefied minuet. The public, corrupted by the hateful consumerism of popular culture, was thought to be incapable of Taste. People would stand and look at this stuff —– a Barnett Newman canvas, say: totally blue, save for a single fat stripe of darker blue running down one side –— and they wouldn’t get it. Or, for that matter, want it.
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