TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/87/87mil.hol

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 6KB | 105 lines

                                                                                March 9, 1987

A Caterer of Repetition and Glut

Andy Warhol:  1928-1987


The tabloids gave Andy Warhol a Viking funeral last week, as
well they might. At 58 he suffered cardiac arrest following
gall-bladder surgery. To the end, he remained surrounded by an
aura of popular fame such as no other American artist had every
known in his or her lifetime--a flash-card recognizability that
almost rivaled Picasso's. Millions of Americans who could not
have picked Jasper Johns or Henri Matisse from a police lineup
could identify that pale, squarish, loose-lipped face with its
acne, blinking gaze and silvery wig.

He was, after all, that weird guy who did those soup cans a
quarter of a century (was it really that long?) ago. The
working-class hero, son of an immigrant Czech coal miner named
Warhola in Pittsburgh, who for a time acquired a court that
seemed almost Habsburgian in scope if not in distinction:  the
Velazquez dwarfs of the Factory. The guy in the photo with
Madonna, Liza, Jackie O. The aesthete who said money was the
most important think in his life and in the future everyone
would be famous for 15 minutes, thus offering a tacky sort of
transcendence to every hair stylist, fledgling actor and art
student in America. The ageless child of media fame who made
scores of underground films in which often nothing happened
(Empire offered eight hours of staring at the Empire State
Building) and who published his own magazine, Interview. Andy,
the living transparency, with his face pressed to the shop
window of the AMerican dream and his head full of schemes to
titillate an aging, youth-obsessed American culture.

Warhol's early works were the ones that mattered. He began as
a commercial artist, became for a time (between about 1962 and
1968) a fine artist with something akin to genius and then
lapsed back into a barely disguised form of commercial art. His
sense of timing, his grip on how to give an image graphic clout,
and his fixation on style as an end in itself all came out of
his years of advertising and display work during the '50s for
I. Miller, Lord & Taylor, Glamour and Vogue. By the end of this
period he was rich, professionally famous and yearning for
recognition as a serious artist.

The opportunity came with the Pop movement in the early '60s.
His contribution was the image taken from advertising or
tabloid journalism:  grainy, immediate, a slice of unexplained
life half- registered over and over, full of slippages and
visual stutters. Marilyn Monroe repeated 50 times, 200
Campbell's soup cans, a canvas filled edge to edge with effigies
of Liz, Jackie, dollar bills or Elvis. Absurd though these
pictures looked at first, Warhol's fixation on repetition and
glut emerged as the most powerful statement ever made by an
American artist on the subject of a consumer economy. The
cranking out of designed objects of desire was so faithfully
mirrored in Warhol's images and so approvingly mimicked in his
sense of culture that no one, in fact, could be sure what he
thought.

He was also, from the outset, much possessed by death.
Warhol's multiple-image disasters of the early '60s based on
news photos of fatal car wrecks are suffused with dread and
compassion beneath their icily casual surface. Such works
looked amazingly raw, frank and direct when they were made.
More than 20 years later, they still do.

Then in 1968, one of Warhol's hangerson--a crazed actress named
Valeria Solanis--shot and wounded him with a .32. Neither his
health nor his talent would fully recover. There had been one
Warhol before the shooting; another would emerge after it. The
former had been the onlooker, both fascinated and wounded by
media culture and its power to dictate desire and nostalgia.
You could not look at early Warhol (Marilyn-as-virgin, in full
drag-queeny apotheosis on a gold ground; Golgotha, envisioned
in repeated views of an execution chamber with its electric
chair and its sign enjoining SILENCE) without sensing that the
pressures behind such images of abased sanctity came from a
Byzantine Catholic boyhood.

But this intensity began to leak out of his work after the
shooting, and by the end of the '70s it was gone. His energy
last flickered in the hieratic images of Mao Tsetung (1973) and
perhaps in the 1976 paintings of hammers and sickles. The rest
was mostly social portraiture, liquor endorsements and bathetic
collaborations with junior burnouts like Jean-Michel Basquiat,
along with one single- theme edition of prints after another.
But even in decline, Warhol remained indicative.

In a sense, Warhol was to the art world what his buddy of the
discos, Roy Cohn, was to law. Just as Cohn degraded the image
of the legal profession while leaving no doubt about his own
forensic brilliance, so Warhol released toxins of careerism,
facetiousness and celebrity worship into the stream of American
culture. He was the last artist whose cynicism could still
perplex the art world, which may explain why--even after he said
that art was just another job--people continued to scan his
latest efforts for signs of "subversive" credentials. In fact,
his work was no more subversive than a catering service, and as
such it fit the age of Reagan nicely. But the Warhol who will
survive, the artist of authentic inspiration, died when he was
shot 19 years ago, not last week. And that artist, in his
tragic concision and awful openness, will haunt us for some time
yet.

--By Robert Hughes