Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [135]
“Once you begin to see Pop,” Warhol said, “you can’t see America in the same way.” Not only did Warhol force the public to reexamine their everyday surroundings, he made a point about the loss of identity in industrial society. “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine,” he said. Warhol delighted in deadpan, outrageous statements: “I think it would be terrific if everyone looked alike,” he said, and, “I want everybody to think alike. I think everybody should be a machine.” Just when critics concluded his platinum fright wig, pale makeup, and dark glasses concealed an incisive social commentator, Warhol punctured their balloons: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
Warhol began as a very successful shoe illustrator for print ads. He lived with his mother in New York with twenty-five cats. Then in 1960 Warhol made acrylic paintings of Superman, Batman, and Dick Tracy. From 1962-65 he added the famous soup cans, Coke bottles, dollar signs, celebrity portraits, and catastrophe scenes straight out of the National Inquirer. A natural self-promoter, Warhol made himself into a media sensation. He installed his retinue at a downtown studio called The Factory.
From 1963-68 Warhol made more than sixty films which reached new depths of banality. One silent film, “Sleep,” runs six hours, capturing every non-nuance of a man sleeping. “I like boring things,” Warhol said.
Although Warhol works are instantly recognizable, he opposed the concept of art as a handmade object expressing the personality of the artist. In his multiple images, endlessly repeated as in saturation advertising, Warhol brought art to the masses by making art out of daily life. If art reflects the soul of a society, Warhol’s legacy is to make us see American life as depersonalized and repetitive. “Andy showed the horror of our time as resolutely as Goya in his time,” said contemporary painter Julian Schnabel.
THE FAME GAME
According to Warhol, he wanted nothing more than anonymity. When hired for a speaking tour, he sent a Warhol-impersonator. After 1968 he left his art totally to assistants. Yet, conversely, Warhol took infinite pains to publicize his own persona and hobnobbed frenetically with the Beautiful People. In a sense, his image was his chief work of art.
In 1968 a groupie who played a bit part in his films, calling herself sole member of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men), shot him. In grave condition, Warhol hovered between life and death. The first thing he did on emerging from intensive care was ask about his media coverage. Making a photo opportunity out of his near-extinction, Warhol displayed his scar for cameras.
“Fame is like peanuts,” Warhol said. “When you start, you can’t stop.” A media star who had it all, Warhol was asked by art dealer Ivan Karp what more he wanted. “I want more fame,” Warhol whispered. Although he predicted fifteen minutes of limelight for everyone, for Andy Warhol it lasted twenty-five years.
Warhol, “100 Cans of Campbell’s Soup,” 1962, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Best known for his serial images of consumer items in a hard-edged graphic style, Warhol wanted a machinelike art without social comment or emotion.
Oldenburg, “Soft Toilet,” 1966, Whitney, NY. By transforming commonplace objects, Oldenburg hoped to make the viewer appreciate their qualities as design objects.
OLDENBURG: METAMORPHOSIS. Involved from 1959 to 1965 with Happenings, an early form of performance art, American sculptor Claes Oldenburg (b.1929) developed three-dimensional, large-scale blowups of familiar objects. “I want people to get accustomed to recognize the power of objects,” Oldenburg said. Ordinary objects, he believes, “contain a functional contemporary magic,” but we have lost any appreciation of