An artist with the celebrity status of the late Andy Warhol poses certain problems for the viewer. Can one look at his work without thinking of his party going, his gossipy Interview magazine, his alleged friendships with the Shah of Iran and Imelda Marcos, or his own carefully cultivated media image, complete with silver wig and blank stare?
Is it folly to consider this serious art? After all, Warhol was known to crank out paintings like this almost on an assembly line. He even named his studio “the Factory.” There are stories about assistants doing his silk-screening, and his technique, say many critics, was poor to nonexistent. He chose for his subject whatever brightly colored object attracted his attention, or whichever wealthy businessman would pay $50,000 to have Warhol “paint” his portrait. He even said of his art, “Just look at the surface, there I am,” and explained his love of machine-made images (most of his later canvases were silk-screened) by saying they removed his humanness from the work–“I want to be like a machine.” How can this be a respectable artist? How can anyone take seriously a character whose films include a six-hour epic of a man sleeping?
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As for the “six-hour sleep movie,” which along with Empire, an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building, helped cement Warhol’s reputation for outrageousness, the story of how it came to be made, as told by its “star,” is instructive. The sleeper, John Giorno, was Warhol’s lover. Giorno went to a party with Warhol, got drunk, and went to sleep. He awoke a number of times that night and the next morning, always to find Warhol in bed beside him, staring at him. In all, Giorno estimates that Warhol watched him sleep for eight continuous hours. This incident occurred a week after Warhol purchased his first movie camera, and production of Sleep soon commenced. This is a film whose public image, among those who have never seen it (almost all of us), has been of an absurd provocation, an outre gesture–an image reinforced by the story that critic and filmmaker Jonas Mekas could not force Warhol to sit through a complete screening of it. But in fact Warhol’s choice of subject was anything but random, and the film can be seen as the product of his interest in the gaze, the stare, the way in which looking steadily at anything long enough can alter its meaning. The story about Warhol’s all-night stare (his version, presumably, of preproduction planning) suggests that the film’s extraordinary length proceeds not from a desire to be outrageous, but from the particular and personal nature of Warhol’s own eyesight, vision, and way of attending to the external world. Real attention to his paintings and his films will reveal an artist as deeply personal, and as articulate in the meanings he produces, as any in our age.
The key to understanding Warhol and the complexity of effects that his art produces is to see that there is a series of dualities at work here. Warhol manages to combine in a single painting his peculiarly fetishistic erotic interests–his fixation on objects, on their colors, on their surface appearances–with his self-awareness that the fetishist ultimately is himself disembodied. The fetishist is often motivated by a sense of inadequacy; his fixation appears to him to be necessary to fill a deep inner void. The object or body part that he fixates on becomes the entire world; he worships it to the exclusion of all else, or even fuses with it. But the object cannot return the fetishist’s attention; when the dream ends, as it must, the dreamer finds himself once again inside his own body, no less needy or alone than he was when he began. Warhol compresses this whole process onto a single canvas; his paintings invite the viewer to reexperience, in the time of viewing, the transition from sensual pleasure to fixation to alienation. Rather than being the inconsequential decorative objects his detractors describe, Warhol’s best works see through to the true consequences of our culture’s fixation on objects and appearances.
Death is present most explicitly in Warhol’s famous “Disaster” paintings of the mid-60s. Photographs of car crashes and an electric chair are silk-screened onto canvas, usually in multiple repetitions, often in various colors. Warhol’s own comments on repetition are both instructive and incomplete: “The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.” Once again, a kind of dialectic is at work. Repeating the image of a car crash 2 times, or 20, cannot help but intensify the horror of it. Still, Warhol’s use of repetition and color tends to create a patterned, almost decorative design. He places his repeated electric chairs in relation to the design they make on the canvas as a whole. One can see the only partially realized impulse, in these works, to look beyond meaning to fetishized surface, which of course is a kind of meaning in itself.
My favorites of all the Warhol paintings I have seen are the four “Camouflage” paintings included in this show. In this series, a pattern derived from the military camouflage design is superimposed on images of Warhol’s face, of the artist Joseph Beuys, and of the Statue of Liberty. The camouflage pattern carries at least three different associations: war and death; fashion (as kids periodically take to wearing such clothing); and, most literally, the desire to conceal, to hide. In the Camouflage Self-Portrait pictures, Warhol tries to hide himself behind a surface. Though one’s eyes try to focus selectively on the multicolored pattern and then on the human face, it becomes impossible to see one without the other. If Two Hundred Campbell’s Soup Cans has a rapid rhythm, these self-portraits appear to be vibrating just beyond the limits of human perception. In the fusion of their two elements, the artist acknowledges himself as a shaman, a spinner of illusions behind which he wishes to hide but cannot. These paintings acknowledge that all images that we make are merely temporary illusions, the shadow play of magicians.
The Chelsea Girls is in a different category from all the other films in the Film Center’s series. It is the most ambitious and, in a certain surprisingly human way, the most moving. Almost four hours in length, it displays two images side by side on the screen, utilizing two projectors at once. Each image has a sound track, but only one plays at a time, and which one it is is left to chance or the projectionist’s whim; I had to see the film three or four times before I had heard all the sound tracks. The film purports to consist of different scenes of life in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, long a home to artists and eccentrics. The double image pattern makes the viewer acutely aware of film viewing as a voyeuristic activity–one can select one scene or the other or try to view both at once–and the camera itself functions voyeuristically. The combination of bizarre costumes and settings, strange and colorful characters, reels in both color and black and white, and Warhol’s highly idiosyncratic use of the zoom make it sensually spectacular.
