I wish I could
invent something like blue jeans. Something to be remembered for. Something
mass.1
-Andy Warhol
Complex,
contradictory, enigmatic. There are few artists who have left as massive
a record as did Andy Warhol. And while the invention of a successor for
the ubiquitous jeans eluded him, Andy Warhol worked and lived in a realm
that fairly resonated with 'the mass'.
From his emergence
as a pop Artist in 1962, to his death in 1987, Andy Warhol's art has been
taken as a symbol of the penetration of the imagery of consumer culture
into the avant-garde. Warhol's art and practice complicated the codes that
distinguished autonomous critical art from mass culture. Further, he was
a catalyst; encouraging a certain fluidity between, and dismantling of,
previously impenetrable distinctions between art and commodity, the mass
media and the ideas of authenticity and reproduction.
In this essay, I
take Andy Warhol as a point of intersection between high art and mass culture.
Warhol made images and films in an age of a virtually unlimited capacity
for mechanical reproducibility and in a world defined by the ubiquity of
the media, mass culture and commodity production, and his work is a direct
result of that environment. Warhol worked in a variety of media and held
multivalent media interests. He was a painter and sculptor, a rock promoter
and film producer, an advertiser, a magazine owner, a star maker and a
stargazer.2
In effect, he embodied and affirmed the condition of an artist in the twentieth
century. I wish first to contextualise Warhol within an artistic trajectory,
and then go on to explore his practice of art in the age of mechanical
reproducibility, mass culture, and media.
From the 'Readymades'
to Campbell's Soup
The Pop Art movement
and the work of Andy Warhol was arguably prefigured and enabled by the
Conceptual Art of Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp observed: 'What is interesting
about Warhol is not the retinal image of the man who paints 50 soup cans,
but of the man who has the idea to paint 50 soup cans.'3
With the 'Readymades', Duchamp radically destabilised notions of what art
is and, in raising the mass produced form to the dignity of an art object,
he provided an opening for the 'low' subject matter which constituted Pop
Art. Andrew Ross observed that 'Pop arose out of the problematising of
taste itself.'4
The juxtaposition of Duchamp's artifacts such as The Fountain and
L.H.O.O.Q. with Warhol's suggests not only similarities but, I would
argue, also notable differences between the two artists' approaches to
mass culture. Duchamp's recontextaulisations of banal, anonymously manufactured
objects in gallery spaces had shown that, placed in the right frame, any
mass produced object could be regarded as art. According to this notion,
art turned out to be a relative value, a function of frame and context.
Consequently, Duchamp raised the conceptual aspects of the art work to
the level of importance occupied by the formal aspects.
For his part, Warhol
confirmed Duchamp's demystifying strategies, but his own appropriation
of mass cultural forms had a somewhat different bias. He stressed that
art was fundamentally a commodity merchandise subject to the same
publicity strategies and market fluctuations as soup cans, soap boxes
and movie stars. Moreover, if relocating the Brillo box to the gallery
was an artistic procedure, as Warhol seemed to suggest, perhaps the
'art' in the procedure stemmed neither from the materials transposed
nor from the spaces connected in the transaction, but from the process
of translation itself. The basic structural procedure in art was,
therefore, the translation or re-coding of an object's original
meaning with a new set of significations. It is suggested by Calvin
Tomkins in Duchamp: A Biography that Andy Warhol was Duchamp's
truest heir, the one artist who pushed the implications of Duchamp's
ideas to conclusions that not even Duchamp had foreseen.5
While Duchamp was ambivalent about Pop Art it is clear that publicity,
repetition, irreverence and all out commercialism; the elements on which
Warhol's art and world are based, draw on a Duchampian consciousness
and extend it by further erasing the barriers between avant-garde art
and the mass public.
At nearly every level
of his work, Warhol challenged and parodied the fantasy of artistic production
as original, unmediated expression. Brian Selsky writes in 'I Dream of
Genius' that Warhol toyed with social anxieties about reproduction but
he refused to set himself up as master or originator. He dispelled the
mystique of artistry and genius by comparing artistic and industrial production.
He called his studio 'The Factory,' and expressed a desire to be a machine,
hiring others to duplicate and even to execute his work. The images were
in series and involved reproducing images already found in popular culture.
Thus, the very way he made his work reconfigured agency. Through his very
art-making process Warhol tinkered with authorship and boasted that his
art-making was so routinised that no matter who followed the routine the
result was the production of a Warhol. He repudiated claims to artistic
invention by copying grocery labels and cartons and in this way he undermined
traditional notions of what constitutes originality in art. He questioned
and complicated the assumed uniqueness of art objects by manufacturing
virtually identical paintings and sculptures in quantity. Warhol's art-making
practice seemed to imply that he was primarily concerned with mass production,
commerce and the business of making money.6
Pop Art reconfigured
the values of the old art in favour of cartoonish characters, cheap industrial
tools, gimmicky special effects, a flattened out and exaggerated sense
of colour, repetitious imagery and factory-like production. For many commentators,
Pop endorsed the elements of television's dominant practice. Warhol himself
articulates this shift in subject matter, asserting: 'The pop artists did
images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognise in a split second
- all the great modern things that the Abstract expressionists tried so
hard not to notice at all.'7
Warhol's work thus heralded an elision of the gap between Art and contemporary
culture and as such it could be suggested that this fusing of previously
disparate realms was a forerunner of the kinds of media engagement later
taken up by activist groups such as ACT UP.
Just as Warhol reconfigured
the terms of the work of art, the same methods were later used to political
ends by Gran Fury. The influence of Andy Warhol's Pop Art is evident in
the images found in Douglas Crimp's AIDS Demographics. The parallels
are not only in the demonstration of the value of publicity, but also in
Pop's formal devices; the emphasis on faces, fame, recognisability, repetition
and reappropriation in service of a political and educational end. Warhol's
art revealed a preoccupation with the materiality of things, a preoccupation
that could perhaps be described as indicative of twentieth-century consumer
culture. This seeming embrace of the excess of contemporary culture immediately
set Warhol against the dominant voices of the avant-garde which imagines
itself as a 'resistance to the seductive lure of mass culture and abstention
from the pleasure of trying to please a larger audience'.8
The Pop artist does not create, he chooses. His choices are made from images
that have already been processed so his art was literally one of production
as consumption.
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1
Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol - From A to B and Back
Again (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1975), 13.
2
Outlined by Juan A. Suarez in Bike Boys, Drag Queens and Superstars:
Avant Garde, Mass Culture and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground
Cinema (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 217.
3
Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1996), 415.
4
In 'Uses of Camp' No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture.
(New York: Routledge, 1989), 152.
5
Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996),
460.
6
This link was made explicit in Warhol's assertion in The Philosophy
of Andy Warhol: 'I like money on the wall. Say you were going to
buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it
up and hang it on the wall.' (p133-4)
7
Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New
York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1980), 3.
8
Jennifer Doyle, 'Tricks of the Trade: PopArt/Pop Sex.' Pop Put: Queer
Warhol. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and Jose Estaban Munoz
(eds.) (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 191.
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