Andy Warhol Reflecting What You Are
Andy Warhol saw the future.
For approximately 25 years, until his death on February 22, 1987, Andy Warhol shared his vision of the future with the world. He photographed, recorded, painted, and filmed the future, but people didn’t really seem to notice; they couldn’t get past the surface of what he was presenting. Critical reception, during the artist’s life, was largely characterized by derision and contempt, while popular reception throughout his career fluctuated between bafflement and dismissal.
Warhol, however, persevered, and his work has, somehow, proven both prophetic and ubiquitous. Society has embraced many of the concepts that Warhol heralded as far back as the early 1960s, and art collectors pay more for his work now than was ever conceivable in his lifetime. Although Warhol will always have his detractors, many of whom collaborated with him and were, subsequently, eclipsed by his fame, there is no denying that his interpretations of daily life in the 20th century changed the way that we appreciate and consider the function of art.
Warhol’s early 1960s “Pop Art” appropriations of cultural icons, such as his Day-Glo representations of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, and the Brillo box, suggested to the world that the detritus of everyday life is art. And…why not? Who convinced the public that art was some exclusive provenance of tortured, middle-aged, alcoholic men channeling their inarticulate inner child? Couldn’t art be fun, too? Colorful, splashy, and now?
From the time that Pop Art first beamed itself into the world until today, there has been debate over whether it should be considered art at all. These are things that one sees on the street, or reads about in the paper, or buys at a grocery store. How could these things seriously be considered art? At the time, nobody could answer the question, and even now some see Pop Art as some sort of hyperbolic juvenile prank.
One of the great things about Andy Warhol is that he never really responded to criticism, and he never explained anything to anyone. Even his closest associates seem to attribute all of his ideas to themselves, as in, “Oh, the cow? Yeah, that was mine,” or, “And then I told him, ‘Andy, don’t move the camera, and leave it on for 8 hours.’” All of them! Aside from offering their own personal commentaries and speculations on the meaning of Warhol’s work, none of his former associates ever seem to provide any reliable insight into Warhol’s motivation.
In fact, all of Warhol’s past associates seem to be unreliable narrators, and since he was never very forthcoming or “soul searching” to interviewers, much of his mystique and inscrutability has long been viewed as a sort of naiveté about the world. He often comes off as a passive participant in his own movie, and even his associates speak of him as if he were a helpless child. Warhol’s interviews were often monosyllabic affairs where nothing substantial about the artist or his art is ever revealed. Of course, this was the silver-wigged persona he presented to the public, and it became his professional representation for the entirety of his career, his protective Andy Warhol mask.
And, it was hilarious.
One of the few Andy Warhol collaborators who got it was Lou Reed, who recounted to MOJO magazine, not long before his death in 2013, an incident of Andy Warhol being interviewed:
Andy Warhol used to be thrilled when they got his ‘Everybody’s famous for 15 minutes’ wrong. They’d say, ‘Mr. Warhol, 10 or 15, what is it?’ He’d say, ‘Oh…10.”
Since Warhol insisted that everything everybody needed to know about him and his art could be found on the surface of his work, that’s where the public, and his critics, remained fixated for years. It wasn’t until after his death that people began to realize the depth to his work which had been hidden in plain sight the whole time. In essence, digging deeper into Warhol’s view of the future consisted of discovering only one thing, which was, ironically, death.
It was always there. It was there in his Marilyn paintings, which were begun on the day that Monroe died. It was there in the Jackie paintings, which were based on photographs of the first lady at her husband’s funeral. It was there in the Elvis Presley paintings, which, aside from his trademark sneer and movie prop cowboy outfit, features Elvis pointing a gun straight into his spectators. Death was lurking just outside the periphery of Warhol’s various sleek and shiny Car paintings of 1962, where glamorous Buicks, Pontiacs, and Cadillacs awaited to transport us into the future, only to be greeted by his Death And Disasters series of 1962 and 1963.
Death And Disasters featured such paintings as Ambulance Disaster Two Times, and White Car Crash Nineteen Times, and Green Burning Car 1, Nine Times, and Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times, and Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster). There was Suicide, and 5 Deaths on Turquoise, and Electric Chair, and Birmingham Race Riot. Of course, one can’t forget 129 Die in Jet!, complete with exclamation point. For a world that was enchanted and bewildered by Warhol’s 32 Campbell Soup paintings in 1962 (“Condensed”), Death And Disasters offered up a poisonous antidote to the safety and comfort that Campbell’s Soup promised with 1963’s Tunafish Disaster.
Even Warhol’s most seemingly innocuous works, such as his Brillo Box and the Heinz Tomato Ketchup Box, are embedded with a sense of mortality. For example, hidden within the colorful text of the Brillo box is the marketing message, “With Rust Resistor.” If we consider “rust” to represent those unbeatable, physical forces that slow down our life processes into an eventual, inevitable death, one can see a “rust resistor” as nothing more than a temporary communion with the Now. “Rust Resistor” offers a product, of some sort, that will abolish or, at least, postpone the possibility of physical decay and decomposition. However, even Neil Young can tell you that rust never sleeps. Likewise, Warhol’s Heinz Ketchup boxes include instructions to the consumer on how to prevent “Breakage.” “This Side Up,” indeed.
While Pop Art was giving people a new way to consider all of the seemingly mundane elements which comprised our modern world, Warhol was reflecting, for those who had eyes to see, that mortality was lurking just around the corner.
The Silver Factory, Andy Warhol’s headquarters from 1964 to 1968, became the center of the universe where all manner of artistic activity and inquiry took place. Most importantly, it was populated by a floating assemblage of misfits, speed freaks, and drag queens who inspired Warhol to create some of the most experimental work of his career. Although his collaborators may not have realized it at the time, here, too, Warhol was glimpsing into the future. As recreational drug use became more accepted in average American society, Warhol was documenting on film the inevitable crash that follows the initial euphoria of discovery. Warhol was watching the end of the ’60s play out before the fun part had even begun. His documentation of the early Factory era showed just how the lysergic glow of 1967’s summer of love would devolve into 1969’s amphetamine crazed and murderous Manson family and Altamont, suggesting, again, that a positive moment can always have an irreversible dark side when one looks below the surface.
When Warhol “discovered” The Velvet Underground in 1965 playing at the Café Bizarre in Greenwich Village, he knew he had found a band that, like him, represented the other side of optimism that Pop Art seemed to represent. Before The Beatles even released an album exhorting a little help from their friends, or wanting to turn you on, Lou Reed and the Velvets were singing about heroin and sadomasochism, presenting a vision of the world unlike anything given space on the popular public airwaves. They too, like Warhol, were documenting the reality associated with the loss of illusion. They were the end of the 60s just as the 60s were getting started.
Warhol was especially astute in placing German model Nico as a part-time front-person for the band, as her ice blue persona suggested an ancient soul that had communicated with the void of existence and felt nothing but contempt for the superficiality of modern life. In many ways, Warhol envisioned himself in Nico; tall, blond, supernaturally gorgeous, and completely untouchable.
However, as Warhol always predicted, all good things would have to end sometime. Warhol was shot by a Factory sycophant on June 3, 1968. He was pronounced dead at the hospital, but survived with internal wounds that would plague him for the remainder of his life. From this point on, he became the Andy Warhol brand name that most of us came to know. He eliminated the 24-hour party people from his new Factory, and became the esteemed chronicler of high society with his gossip, art, and fashion tabloid Interview. Despite his change of venue, he worked almost obsessively for the last 20 years of his life, leaving a treasure trove of “4,118 paintings, 5,103 drawings, 19,086 prints, 66,512 photographs, a large portfolio of real estate, and cupboards overflowing with antiques and junk that he hoarded over the years.”
Warhol’s estate, when he died in 1987, was valued at over $500 million dollars, and his works continually sell for unprecedented amounts. For example, 1963’s Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) sold for a record breaking $105 million in November, 2013. Essentially, while everyone was watching, Andy Warhol was doing what no one would have suspected; he was projecting his image into space and time. While he spent most of his professional career underestimated and unappreciated, he was slowly and systematically infiltrating popular culture. While people were being outraged by his adult themed experimental works, he was also, at the same time, crafting intentionally commercial works. And, at times when the world was drawn to his most commercial work, Andy was quietly and subversively crafting something conspiratorial.
But, wasn’t it always that way for Warhol? For example, while his Factory was a maelstrom of madness in the 1960s, he shared an apartment with his mother (“Andy Warhol’s Mother”). In fact, photographer William John Kennedy noted, “The two things in Andy Warhol’s life were art and his mother. And his mother came first.” In the 1970s and 80s, when Warhol was appearing at every party given, like some Polaroid camera toting Zelig, he was secretly preparing a series of Christian themed paintings that would not be discovered until after his death. Perhaps the symbolism was there from the beginning, though. Isn’t that a fleur-de-lis on the bottom of a Campbell’s soup can, and wasn’t the fleur-de-lis an ancient symbol representing the Holy Trinity gathered within the purity of the Virgin Mary?
Despite Andy Warhol’s abiding omnipresence in global popular culture, it appears that the public will never know who he really is. But, we know that wherever we go and whatever we do, he has been there already, and he is watching us.
