I’ve dedicated a fair amount of time to Warhol. I’ve read his books, slogged my way through his diary, forced myself to sit through several hours of his ‘anti-films’, and found myself hooked on any literature I can find to give me another view of the enigmatic icon. Every knows Andy Warhol but nobody knows him. After hours and hours dedicated, I still can’t make my mind up as to whether he was the social butterfly of the 60s scene or the ‘ambulatory black hole’ the Grateful Dead deemed him. Within a year I’ve moved from writing about the beauty of his friendship with Edie, to writing essays about his manipulation, to settling into an ongoing obsession with his multiplicity as no matter how much I read, I’m unable to pin down a personality for the icon. You can picture him so easily in your mind, pull up mental images of his works that are recreated world-wide, know the easy quotes off by heart, he feels like the easiest artist ever, but once you get into it, the image quickly blurs.
The more I started reading and watching, I got the feeling
that Andy was laughing at us all from beyond the grave, desperately trying to
find some meaning in his ‘wow yeah’ rhetoric and half-smirking answers
proclaiming himself ‘empty’. With his most famous work being so simple and
specifically made as a screen-print to be recreated as quickly and easily as
possible, the over-arching legacy of Warhol is one of thoughtless living room
prints and vapid American-dream myths, but I think his genius is in making us
fall for that.
While so much has been written about every and all artists,
it seems that none are aware and crafting of their legacy as Andy Warhol was. Though he famously said that
everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, Andy, who would’ve been 92 this
year, secured his place in immortality and worked for it. Furiously recording
his every thought through transcribed diaries, surrounding himself with
photographers to capture every glamorous factory moment, even half-joking that
after dying he’d allow his name to be used on anything that will make money,
Warhol’s fleeting fame obsession and product-frenzy are immediately complicated.
I think I’ve settled into a love for it, stopped trying to
pin him down into one thing, or characterise him as good or bad, but loving him
for the messy multiplicity of his self and the self he made. Walking around the
Tate exhibition, I forced myself to not get hooked on the sharp question mark
corners of assumptions about the figure, simple staring starry-eyed at the
scale of his work and silliness of his persona.
Even writing this is tricky, never knowing what path to take
here. I don’t envy the Tate staff that had to sit down and craft a path round
Warhol’s legacy, deciding which works to focus on and which parts to not. I had
moments of love and hate in the exhibition. I loved the immediacy of the
reminder that Warhol was once Varchola, careful to introduce the artist as an
immigrant born into poverty, and not the capitalist All-American artist that
the Make America Great Again age could morph into something sinister and wrong.
In this, his simplest works get an immediate context; the soup cans seem
brighter than ever when you’re reminded that Warhol’s early years were fed on
watered-down ketchup. I loved the companion quotation of ‘a coke is a coke is a
coke’, reframing pop-art as ‘commonism’, reminding you that American culture of
Cola and Elvis transgress class and economy.
I had questions about the narrative of Warhol as a ‘shy gay
man’, purposefully seeming to pull out his most erotic images, and choosing to
display his film Sleep, a 6 hour still shot of a man sleeping. One Google
search and you’ll find claims that Warhol was gay, bisexual, asexual, celibate
and in a relationship with pretty much every single person he did a portrait
of, meanwhile, Warhol himself said nothing about his sexuality. I was confused
by the continuous references to his queerness mixed in with the reminders that
Warhol purposefully and regularly distanced himself from the Gay Liberation movement,
known for standing for pretty much nothing and finding politics a bore.
I hated the hero-worshipping energy of it all. In a small
corridor you’re towered over by a portrait of Warhol’s scars, walking you
through the experience of his shooting with little to no context beyond one
page of the S.C.U.M manifesto, brushing over it as Warhol was shot by a radical
feminist that wanted to kill all men. The absence of Edie Sedgwick, one of
Warhol’s biggest muses and original superstar felt like an active erasure of
the more exploitative sides of Warhol as a man that didn’t pay anyone and
obsessively captures his friends' mental declines, choosing to show Sleep rather
than Beauty No.2, a film of him grilling a drugged up Sedgwick about her sexual
abuse while forcing a male model to kiss her. Instead, filling the exhibition
with the 60s soundtrack of The Velvet Underground and funny moments from his TV
appearances seemed to want to keep you in the narrative of Warhol and his friends as a group of faultless coolness and antics.
But the likes and dislikes made it perfectly messy.
While I stood in front of his 6-foot towering Elvis, my
friend stared into the face of a corpse, repeated over and over. An intense car
crash complete with splayed bodies reflected into his glossy flowers, his Brillo
boxes sat pretty next to a recreation of a newspaper that screamed ‘129 DIE IN
JET!’. The Tate, in attempting to carve a covid-friendly one-way path round
Warhol’s identity, perfectly captured the manic light changes of his work, from
his pop-culture obsession being the thinnest line away from morbid wallpapers
of disasters and suicides. My friend was shocked, looking at the repeated print
of a paused moment before a woman jumped to her death, never knowing that
Warhol was so dark. I hear him laugh again from his final resting place, he
tricked us. Writing a 2-sentence chapter on Death his The Philosophy of Andy
Warhol, the artist said simply ‘I don’t believe in it’, a complete lie from a
man that dedicated a large majority of his career to studies of electric
chairs, skeletons, dead bodies and mourning celebrities.And that sums it up perfectly. Warhol left us with a mess of
an identity that he knew we’d never decipher and settle for something chic and
simple. He made a product of himself that was so shiny and consumable that
we’re willing to brush over all the rest, showing us up to be the filthy
capitalists and consumers we all are.
Stood near enough with my nose on the glass, I stared at the mistakes. In his flowers, you can sit little patches that missed a second coat. In 129 die, you can see the tracking lines for the typography and where he went over them. In his Marilyn Diptych, some of the faces are distorted or lines duplicated. All these little details won’t make the cut in your living room print, no.1084903858 to be made of that print. Maybe Warhol knew he could get away with messiness because when you’re dealing with celebrities, or products, or the American dream, it will always be blurred or simplified into perfection. Or maybe it was all purposeful and meaningful as some critics say, that Warhol duped us all with funny statements hiding the deep artistic and poetic thought behind his repeated Monroes. Or maybe Warhol himself didn’t know, didn’t care enough to think about it, just wanted to make his pictures and have his parties and capture the things and people he liked and get paid for it.
For better or worse, the Tate exhibition serves as proof
that we’ve blown Warhol up to a god-like status, displaying his silver wigs in
a case like ancient relics. And you can see that however you wish. A statement
of our obsession with celebrity culture. A celebration of how an immigrant can
become an American icon. A sad image of societies simplification of art. Or a
shrine to our shared love for pretty, shiny things; a coke is a coke is a coke
and we all love it, stare up at the nice pictures and say simply, ‘oh yeah’,
‘wow’, ‘gee whiz yes!’.
