[previous
page 1 | 2
| 3 | 4 ]
The media was crucial
to Warhol's realm.29
For him, TV and cinema were basic constitutive parts of the social world,
not mere reflections. This is evident in his assertion that 'a whole day
of life is like a whole day of television.'30
The media not only served as the basis of much of Warhol's work, but formed
an integral part of his interaction with the world. He figured his exhibitions
as media events, revealing a nuanced capacity for their resonance with
the consciousness of the general public such as his announcement of the
'Death in America' show just after the assassination of JFK.
Warhol so immersed himself
in mediated devices that he actually seemed to live out the confusion
between mediated and real experiences. He wrote, 'I always suspected
I was watching TV instead of living life,'31
and, 'their lives became part of my movies and of course the movies
became part of their lives - they couldn't tell the difference'.32
This confusion was furthered in Warhol's seeming literal embrace of
media as 'extensions of man', whereby he couched his relationship with
mediating devices in emotional terms; referring to his tape recorder
as his wife and alluding to his desire to be a machine. He even went
so far as to commission a robot that could stand in for him.33
Both Marshall McLuhan and Warhol inhabit a certain pop sensibility that
describes a world in which people live most of their lives within enclosed
spaces governed by the rule of images. In our media saturated world,
to be is to be perceived by the camera. My existence is confirmed only
at a remove from myself.
A Smile of Critical
Distance or Collusion?
Warhol's seeming
unqualified embrace of media and commodity culture highlight the inherent
ambiguity of Warhol's works and person. Dore Ashton in a key 1963 symposium
on Pop remarked: 'Far from being an art of social protest, Pop Art is an
Art of capitulation.'34
And Baudrillard wrote that 'Pop's sense of humour is not the smile of critical
distance but the smile of collusion'.35
I think we may approach Warhol as more complex than this though, and acknowledge
the impossibility of finally determining whether his work is either affirmative
or critical of the status quo when the works and indeed Warhol's statements
prove terribly elusive. Andy Warhol had his own way of seeing the world
and for him this way of seeing, what he called 'pop', had a transformative
effect so powerful that once you 'got it' you could never see a sign the
same way again. Indeed, you could never see America the same way again.36
The image that Warhol gives us to see is necessarily distorted and ambiguous.
Warhol himself resisted
the idea of representing a counter-cultural critique of mainstream culture,
saying 'I can't see how I was ever 'underground', since I've always wanted
people to notice me'.37
Despite this, Warhol's work can be seen as combining artistic and sexual
subversion of the domiant modes of representation, with the films especially
exploring the discontinuities between gender, desire and sexual roles.
Warhol's performers occupied liminal social positions - as rejects
of the entertainment business, as participants in 'deviant' urban subcultures,
or as dropouts who rejected the conventions of their class identity. His
films chronicled these marginalities and mythologies of dissent. In Andy's
domain even outcasts and those defined as non-normative could imagine themselves
stars. Steven Shaviro in The Cinematic Body goes so far as to suggest
that Warhol puts all of American society in drag; he grasps social life
on the level of the body as a simulacral and superficial product.38
Warhol was acutely
aware of the delineation between outsiders and the mainstream and the blurring
of the two. He observed: 'The way to be counterculture and have mass commercial
success was to say and do radical things in a conservative format. Like
have a well choreographed, well scored, anti-establishment 'hippie be in'
in a well ventilated, well located theatre. Or like McLuhan had done -
write a book saying books were obsolete.'39
As the mainstream began to deal with the same topics as the underground
counterculture, the liminal position Warhol occupied was confused as the
distinction between black and white became between black and grey.40
Andy Warhol actually seemed to live out the contradiction of existing within
different realms and appropriating from both. He embraces everything with
the same weirdly unreflective affirmation: 'the world fascinates me. It's
so nice, whatever it is.'41
It is a stance that reveals a transgressive effacement of boundaries and
binaries and Warhol seems to invite us to see otherwise, to find the cracks
and fissures within all communities and cultures and to take from all of
them to construct a mosaic of complicated and contradictory experience.
No easy polarisation
is possible here, since both complicity and resistance are dialectically
entwined. Warhol undercuts the possibility for a critical avant-garde to
exist outside the circuits and structures of the commodity form. As Warhol's
controversial legacy showed, critical art cannot avoid the circuits of
exchange but must find its leverage in them. Both poles, oppositional and
affirmative, can be inverted or logically extended into each other so that
they end up overlapping and penetrating one another.
[previous
page 1 | 2
| 3 | 4 ]
29
He surrounded himself with multiple TV sets, taped every thing and filmed
constantly.
30
Andy Warhol, Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again
(New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1975), 5.
31
Ibid
32
Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett. POPISM: The Warhol Sixties (New
York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1980), 180.
33
We might understand this as revealing a certain cyborgian tendency (fusion
of human and machine) explored by Donna Haraway in 'A Cyborg Manifesto'
In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, (New
York and London: Routledge, 1991), 854-866.
34
Peter Selz. (ed.) ' A Symposium on Pop Art' a Special Supplement to
Arts Magazine April 1963, 36-45.
35
Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings of the Modern Object and
its Destiny, 1968-1983. Paul Foss and Julian Pefanis (eds.) (Sydney:
Pluto Press, 1990), 87.
36
Jonathan Flatley, 'Warhol Gives Good Face' Pop Out: Queer Warhol,
101.
37
Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism, 47.
38
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 231.
39
Andy Warhol, and Pat Hackett, POPism, 250.
40
Ibid p 280.
41
Interview with Gretchen Berg, 1989, 60.
|
