The Sphynx without the Riddle
Truman Capote
Truman Capote
In undestanding Warhol, it is necessary to map the context that gave birth to his style. As the US economy raced forward in the late 40’s and 50s, the political divide between left and right narrowed. The success of U.S. enterprise created little taste for social revisionism. In this new dynamic society, there was a hunger in the elite for a culture that reflected the triumphant forces of commerce and consumer technology. This was not a new historical dream.
Melding “the modern” and “mechanical” to art had long been an uneasy marriage even in the early 20th century. Many works fused their "progressive" ideas to the disastrous experiments of Communism and Fascism. Numerous compositions were (as seen now) rather over romanticised depictions of industrialism typified by Leger, Tatlin and Malovitch on the left or quixotic fascist Huxleyanism typified by the futurists. Marinetti’s dream of “metallizing the human body" bore the common aesthetically alluring dislocations of cubism which he failed to see was a consequence “of ” rather than a influencer “to” the emergence of imperial industrialism that eventually became today’s globalism.
Just as Turner and Millet were curious interlopers from the agrarian to the modern age (by painting fast modern transport and advertising respectively) so Abstract Expressionism spanned a brief interlude between a U.S. Empire keen to sell the idea of unfettered individualism (over the dogged centrality of communism) before (it may be argued) a post-modern age where institutional corporate monopolies, through complex patronage, codified the self as being "inseparable" from "product".
Unknown until recently, the charitable foundations promoting “Abstract Expressionism” were funded by the CIA . Even as this art was sold as quintessentially American, much of it still retained strong European influences, most notably the shunning of mechanical processes. Pollock was, if nothing else, a man conversing with the human condition and Rothko and Newman’s colour fields; with the spiritual.
Through this milieu however, a few artists were beginning to address America’s new post war media influences.
Eduardo-Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton’s collages as well as Jasper John’s waxy US flags were clunky propositions towards the “idea” of Pop Art but their works were still material and their narratives descriptive.
What the new consumer world needed from art was a propagandist fashionista entirely informed by the present. It needed an art that was intellectually de-historicised, powerful and above all, meaningless. What they found was an egotistical kleptomaniac Catholic illustrator from Pittsburgh called Andy Warhola.
Warhol had one big idea, to make his subject about consumer culture and manufacture it in the same manner and have the world believe, like Coke or Pepsi, that it could be branded as added value wholly independent of content. He turned out to be right.
Warhol spent an entire lifetime reproducing ad nauseam the flat TV and Magazine images of American manufacturing and celebrity culture. This was not the Renaissance flat picture plane of self-effacement and humility depicting the divine but the surface of the self illustrating money.
Warhol spent an entire lifetime reproducing ad nauseam the flat TV and Magazine images of American manufacturing and celebrity culture. This was not the Renaissance flat picture plane of self-effacement and humility depicting the divine but the surface of the self illustrating money.
His “studious” plasticity was promoted as intelligent irony. Heavyweight critics of Warhol like Robert Hughes were buried beneath the media storm of adulation. Hughes remarked: “Warhol left this strange legacy that artists who came after should engage obsessively in the production of serial novelties.”
We have in a short time reached the nub of Warhol. One side believes he was the astute social commentator of his age, the other that he was a modern Pandora of banality, opening up an entire nightmare that has become the Post Modern high art bandwagon. Evidence suggests the latter, as it is hard not to see that Warhol accelerated an already declining cultural map by rigorously promoting:
We have in a short time reached the nub of Warhol. One side believes he was the astute social commentator of his age, the other that he was a modern Pandora of banality, opening up an entire nightmare that has become the Post Modern high art bandwagon. Evidence suggests the latter, as it is hard not to see that Warhol accelerated an already declining cultural map by rigorously promoting:
- Vacuity as a symbol of genius
- Silence as a symbol of genius
- The corporate bureaucratisation of opportunity.
- Brand novelty as high culture.
- The objectification and ridicule of history.
Unfortunately, it’s not only a few obscure art critics who back Warhol’s world view of culture but a giant edifice. Courtiers in the media continue to back inflated prices to serve the auction houses and speculative oligarchs, whose rash of private museums around the world demand a slice of his prodigious pie. Their mechanisms are ironically, not unlike the methods by which finance and stock values have de-coupled from the material economy. Warhol’s methods, as outlined above, have spurred three continuing trends; art as a fabricated factory product, material grandiosity and the artist as a media celebrity. The artists Takashi Murakami, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons are all modern examples of Warhol's consumer largesse, each with their own factories and distinctive brand of beautifully fabricated infantilism.
If TV and the internet have become the new Roman Coliseums or Cathedrals for modern propaganda, then Warhol was (and remains) the first major cultural exponent of neo-conservative capitalism. It is ironic that in attempting to erase or trivialise history, Warhol (and present day artists influenced by him) merely illuminate their dark imprisonment to it because their empty forms perfectly mirror the promotional art of past imperialist regimes. To look at Warhol's John Kennedy is to look back at the boasting Roman Statue of Augustus Caesar, their branded falsehoods of continuity showing the obvious self-referential signs of a democratic empire coming to an end in what Sir John Glubb remarked as The Age of Decadence in his essay The Fate of Empires.
Quite unwittingly, Warhol completed the dark truth posed by Duchamp’s Urinal in 1917: “It’s art if I say it is” by declaring “Making money is art……..and good business is the best art”. Warhol's central theme was a powerful idea, but matching Duchamp's unitary satisfaction in posing a great and frightening cultural concept about the omnipotent self became, through his endless repetition, a banality only to be surpassed in horror by the wide clawing admiration for him in society as a whole. For in that populism resides the promise that we are all feckless Gods like Narcissus staring at our own ever-present reflections oblivious to the stalking figure of Nemesis who sent us to this enclosed pool of self-destruction. In this then, Warhol converted Duchamp's irony of a single urinal as art to all Art as a urinal.
Here we see Warhol’s attraction, since it is capital and its gatekeepers rather than intellect or skill that drives the “Warhol” inspired artist. In today’s hypercompetitive art world (much of it directed by screen pixels and algorithms) flat and loud has become more important than quiet and sensual. That is not to say Warhol was not a good and amusing social commentator. His book From A to B and Back again was a very witty and chillingly rational observation on the decadent disassociations of celebrity.
“My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person,” is one of my favourite examples, along with: “Art is what you can get away with.”
In the latter one is reminded of the famous quote by Groucho Marx
"Sincerity is the key to success. Once you can fake that you've got it made."
As an addendum to another related activity, Warhol’s management of The Velvet Underground, arguably the greatest rock band of 1960’s New York, a band rich in nuance, innovation and meaning had little to do with Warhol and everything to do with John Cale and Lou Reed.
In the latter one is reminded of the famous quote by Groucho Marx
"Sincerity is the key to success. Once you can fake that you've got it made."
As an addendum to another related activity, Warhol’s management of The Velvet Underground, arguably the greatest rock band of 1960’s New York, a band rich in nuance, innovation and meaning had little to do with Warhol and everything to do with John Cale and Lou Reed.
To conclude; perhaps in watching the Catholic rituals of his upbringing, Warhol understood that the priest, despite his appearance as a powerful individual, needed little more than to be the limited disseminator of a dominant faith. Perhaps also, Warhol was in some perverse way, sublimating Capitalism for Catholicism and his blond wig for a vestment that worshiped money instead of God. Warhol’s silence was likewise also that of a Trappist monk receiving alms, for what need is plural intellectualism when the unchallenged edict of consumerism is accepted as a self-evident, eternal religion?
Andy Price: MMXIX