The
Many Deaths Of Andy Warhol
published in Art & Australia, Spring
1987, Sydney
"It's best to be born fast, because it hurts, and it's best
to die fast, because it hurts, but I think if you were born
and died within that minute, that would be the best life."
1
Warhol
died on Sunday February 22nd 1987 at New York Hospital's
Cornell Medical Centre after gallbladder surgery. A few
days later, art dealer Ronald Feldman reflects on Warhol's
recent works, completed (a large reworking of DaVinci's
Last Supper, a set of Lenin portraits, a portfolio of prints
continuing his hommage to the late Joseph Beuys) and unfinished
(a commission by a Danish publishing group on Hans Christian
Anderson and his fairy tales) : "Andy was on a roll this
year, and he must be very angry that he died." 2
Perhaps not. A certain or particular Warhol died - that
of the silver hair and black skivee ; that of whom we inscribe
the 'real person' named Warhol. But other Warhols live -
those that deny art ; those that speak 'the death of the
artist' 3 ; those that have already died. Warhol
is dead - long live Warhol.
One
wonders in fact if Warhol's death is an event, a point to
render historic. If the Warhol we have pronounced 'artist'
dies, we can romanticize his past through mourning his death,
in that our mourning would be the condition of our belief
in the living person as creator of art, as the one we can
pronounce 'artist'. This Warhol's death would then become
an event because it will cause change due to its future
inability to change : the artist dies - no more art. But
this romantic death is a paradox : on the one hand, the
artist is para-human, above and beyond fellow humans ; on
the other hand this paranormality, this genius, is extinguished
in the death of the human. The paradox is covered, though,
by the historicized 'life-after-death' of the artistic genius
: the human dies - the artist lives.
This
of course is overly simplistic. The true values of the dead
artist are mythical (created by the writings of history
and criticism) and economic (determined by a state of collectability).
Both values are mutually exclusive and live in a harmony
peculiar to the cultural status of the artist at that point
in time. It also follows that a dead Warhol does not project
the same combination of values as a dead Van Gough or a
dead Rothko. Or, for that matter, a dead Arthur Cravan (who?)
4 or a dead Chris Burden (is he dead?) 5
. The romanticization of the artist's death is often itself
the very process used to both cite the artist's life as
source of its genius and prepare the death-event for history.
(In Egypt they called it mumification.) But as many counter-histories
have so salaciously pointed out, most artists' life-before-death
is at the other extreme to their mythical life-after-death
: their twilight is the definitive Hollywood Babylon 6
where those mummies are monsters.
If
the monstrous is the result of mega-mythicism, Elvis
(not Godzilla) is King Of The Monsters. Tales of the
great hedonist hermit in his twilight mansion (part
Egyptian tomb, part Baptist shrine, eerily named Gracelands)
coloured his life even while he lived. Like Warhol,
Elvis had died many authorial and artistic deaths before
August 16th, 1977, both through offering himself up
to a society for repeatable consumption and through
a series of developments that signalled a draining of
his consumerable energy : his conscription in 1958, the
Hollywood musicals that followed, his 'live' return
to Burbank (via television), Hawaii (via satellite)
and Las Vegas (via film). Elvis' death - like that of
the romantic paradox - was mythicised as much as his
life, branded as he was with, as and by the birth of
Rock'N'Roll. Warhol's portraits of Elvis are first degree
eulogies, especially the more famous serialization (from
1963 onwards) of a still from Flaming Star (a telling
title for all concerned). Those works celebrate not
Pop music icons and their stardom (as most disposable
histories of Pop would have us believe) but the nature
and type of death effected by that cultural process
we call fame.
Art
historicism has remained ignorant of the profound irony
of what the Elvis series represents : a Rock'N'Roll cowboy
whose hips signal death and sex ; a gunslinger, poised
and ready to shoot, to give us the erotic of death
; a refugee from the Western - a cinematic genre dying
a classical death by the 60s ; a superimposition of
a body on a void of colour, rendered in monochrone
or with garish colour-overlays, carefully illustrated
or carelessly executed by the silkscreen process. Warhol
- out of perversity - simply titled these works Elvis,
having us assume that we were directly experiencing
his picturing of Elvis, when in reality he was serializing
a publicity still from a film which was a promotional
vehicle for communicating the productivity of the Elvis
'phenomenon' to fuel the commodification of the Elvis
'identity'. Most Art histories have documented the
simplicity without revealing its perversity.
The
ironies and perverisites are culturally perpetuated : in
1973 the Australian National Gallery purchased a Single
Elvis from 1963 in a typical museographic gesture that celebrated
the death of Pop Art as another mummy in the great halls
of Modernism. The Gallery purchased the print for $25,000
at a Sotheby auction in London - by proxy, via a cable which
stipulated how high they could bid 7 . Ten years
later in 1983, director James Mollison would mention that
Single Elvis is one of their most popular exhibits with
'the family'. One suspects that such a work most clearly
communicates to 'the family' the precise function of the
museum in its mummification of art, artists and all their
icons. The logic flows mercilessly - true artists are dead
artists ; real art depicts dead art. The Australian National
Gallery's presentation of Warhol's Single Elvis gives the
Elvis public everything they didn't get with the infamous
shrine in the Melbourne Cemetery. And in the end (or for
the time being) Single Elvis perversely does function as
'simply' Warhol's picturing of Elvis Presley.
A
similar functioning of fame-by-death and death-by-fame enlivens
various other stars Warhol serialized in the sixties (fan
magazine shots of Taylor, Monroe and Donahue, plus stills
of Brando from The Wild One, Lugosi from Dracula, Cagney
from Public Enemy, and Taylor from Cleopatra). In particular,
the more famous Liz and Marilyn serializations evidence
death in their very surfaces - do their faces not resemble
the grotesque work of a mortician who lavishes over a creation
of beauty to signify the end of beauty for and to the cadaver's
loved ones? This effect of beauty, of marking beauty and
the thin line that separates it from the monstrous, reminds
us of the articulation of beauty through make-up, and of
how make-up in fact signifies a lack of beauty in the same
way that the beautified cadaver signifies the lack of life
that generates beauty. It is further interesting to note
here that the visual persona of Warhol - his image - has
always been that of a cadaver, of a lack of life, of an
absence of beauty. It is an image that speaks of the death
that he - as creator, producer and manufacturer of absent
beauty in art - both covers and imparts in his work.
The
greater bulk of Warhol's silkscreens from the sixties
are directly concerned with death - the series and serializations
of Jackie Kennedy at her husband's funeral ; suicides
by jumping from building tops ; fatal car crashes 8 ;
newspaper headlines of disasters ; and the infamous
Ten Most Wanted Men commission for the New York World's
Fair of 1964. Concurrent with the hyper-production
of these works from 1962 to 1967, Warhol experimented
with picturing his own image in the Self Portrait
serializations, which (along with portraits of Ethel
Scull, Holly Solomon, Sidney Janis and Watson Powell
Sr.) prefigured what is generally referred to as his
Portraits Of The Seventies 9
. Of course, the gap between 1967 and 1970 was caused by
Valarie Solanis' attempted assassination of Warhol, giving
the artist what would amount to a memorable death-experience.
Healing from the multiple bullet wounds, Warhol said :
"I
don't know whether or not I'm really alive or whether I
died. And having been dead once, I shouldn't feel fear.
But I am afraid. I don't understand why." 10
Warhol's
Portraits Of The Seventies are intensely concerned with
death - not that I want to base this observation on the
fraility of the above quote, but more because of the relationship
he entertains with living subjects, those who willingly
sit for their portraits. As has been well documented, Warhol
used the Polaroid camera in the preparation for his photographic
screen production because of its intrinsic capability to
obliterate all but the facial contours of the subject. Warhol
saw this as a 'ready-made' form of beautification, cancelling
out the flesh's capacity for signifying age through its
texture. But consider the following :
"I
stand three feet away. When the flash cube goes off the
people can't see a thing, so they blink. I wait 60 seconds
and do another." 11
Warhol
is now involved in the act of death, in capturing it in
the process of portraiture and the presence of painterliness.
That "flash" (an after-image of Soanis' gun blasts?) works
as an erotic aroused by the state of passing into death,
as a dimensional punctuation of spheres of existence. The
graphic, pictorial rendering of the death act through representation
(of stardom, of photography, of history, of media) in his
60s work is replaced by what in essence are snuff portraits,
with Warhol as actor-murderer and cameraman-murderer. As
if in a perpetual recall of both his multiple wounds (life)
and his multiple absences (art), Warhol grants his subjects
the experience of immortality - an experience which they
can replay for themselves simply by gazing upon their death-masks,
Warhol's portraits. These portraits (i) present the act
of death in the event of portraiture, and (ii) represent
this layering of death over life (and vice versa) by the
high-contrast transparency of the photographic screenprint
(the presence/absence of the subject) overlaying the opaque,
painterly terrain underneath (the presence/absence of the
artist). Moreover, this layering is blurred and blended
by a clash of surfaces, creating the illusion of each lying
within one another.
In
a way, this textual trompe l'oeil replicates the strange
simultaneity of birth and death that Warhol talks of in
the initial quote above, that which he describes as "the
best life". It appears to be a time where one is not even
aware of the difference between life and death - a difference
whose lack and gain are displayed, demarcated and dissolved
in virtually all of Warhol's work in one way or another.
A great part of the Warhol myth deals with his removal,
his absence, his negation of material and mechanical involvement
with the production of his work, usually circulated around
his infamous denial of humanism : "I want to be a machine".
However, it could be more likely that these various absences
and absentings propel the desire of death through a carthartic
release in the act of being absent.
In
1967 (the year of his 'brush with death') Warhol hired Allen
Midgette to impersonate Warhol on a college lecture tour
- where Midgette had to perform the typical Warhol by not
answering questions and letting other 'super stars' like
Gerard Malanga field the questions. In 1969 (almost as a
warm-up event for the Portraits Of The Seventies) Warhol
posed for Richard Avedon, the result being that portrait
of Warhol baring his scared torso, providing photographic
proof of his life-after-death. Sometime in the early seventies,
Warhol - as part of his retirement from painting - exhibited
some of his 'super stars' (among them : Brigid Polk, Gerard
Malanga and Candy Darling) in person, having them tied by
a lease to the gallery wall. After being exhibited, they
were available to be rented from $4000 to $5000 a week :
"People
only want art so they can talk about it. This way they can
take the art home, have a party for it, show it to their
friends, take Polaroids of it (which I will sign), make
tape recordings. And after the week is over, they'll still
have anecdotes." 12
No
doubt the process of portraiture was more economical and
more sellable, but still one can see links between the Portraits
and the 'people art' - the objectification of the body ;
the commodification of the act of possession ; the replaying
of the experience ; etc.. Warhol's self-declared retirement
from painting was most likely a pause wherein he came to
terms with how he should deal with death in art and the
death of art now that he himself was living a life-after
death.
On
the economic plane, the artist Warhol (the person to
whom we attrribute the culutrual origination of value)
died in an everyday ocurrence in capitalist society :
incorporation. Surely this must be the greatest fear
of the romantic ethos of art and artists - replacing
the artist's decisions (the proof of his life force)
by hegemonic manoeuvres determined by monetary growth.
Warhol's first fundamental death in this direction was
neither his repetition of pre-designed graphics (soup
labels, stamps, adhesive labels, dollar bills, drink
bottles, dance diagrams) nor his selection of the silkscreen
process - but the stamp he ordered made to function as
his signature. By this decision and process, Warhol inverted
Duchamp's gestural signing of the toilet basin (as "Mr.
R. Mutt") and transformed the gesture into a manoeuvre
: he replaced the alter-ego with a logo.
Warhol
incorporated himself through a series of moves which followed
the pattern of his cultural exchanges : from the production
of the Velvet Underground's first album to the promotion
of The Erupting (later Exploding) Plastic Inevitable tours
to Morrisey's early films to the publishing of Interview
magazine to the franchising of his name for the Andymat
fast food restaurants 13 to the executive production
of the Andy Warhol's TV cable show to the guiding of the
ever-present Factory. In legal terms, the act of incorporation
is not only the forming of a buisness body, but also the
disappearing of the human body, of the person(s) to whom
decisions can be singularly traced. Warhol's life as a true
Pop artist has always been assured and insured through his
death by incorporation.
In
summation, Warhol's artistic life can be divided into two
death phases, separated by Solanis' gun blasts : (i) death
by painting, by the signification of his artistic and authorial
absence, and (ii) death by the painter, by the materialization
of his artistic and authorial presence. In this sense, the
screen-prints from 1962 to 1967 are deathly ; those from
1967 to 1987 are ghostly. Not only the Portraits, but also
series like Myths, Skulls, Shadows and Endangered Species,
and especially the Reversal Series, where all his now-incorporated
icons from the sixties are rendered as apparitions in negative.
(All these latter works await further analysis along such
lines.)
This
article is too brief to fully discern, analyze and propose
all that has yet to (and should already have been) written
about Warhol outside of the banal voices of certain art
histories' obsession with formalism and imperception of
mass media. As suggested by his death, I have picked on
one of many possible thematic effects which run through
Warhol's work - that of the notion, act, event and dimension
of death - and to introduce it as such. Most importantly,
it is in death that we find an integral link with Duchamp
through a shared dandyism : Duchamp spoke of the death of
Art ; Warhol speaks of how Art is death.
NOTES
1
Taken from an issue of the drug culture magazine HIGH TIMES
from around 1979, in which Warhol wrote a celebrity one-off
column about his then-chosen favourite topic, fast life,
titled Why I Love To Live Fast.
2
As reported by Grace Glueck in THE NEW YORK TIMES Arts &
Entertainment section on Thursday February 26th, 1987.
(TEXT
MISSING HERE FROM FILE CORRUPTION - awaiting data re-entry)
...
Barthes' article titled The Death Of The Author, which clearly
and simply lays some fundamental groundwork in how one can
begin to discern the multiple modalities, layers, acts,
performances and events of writing within a given text in
relation to our conceptualization of its author. (The article
itself is not as important as the general area of linguistic
discourse and its relation to cultural production.) More
specifically, I relate this notion of death to Warhol following
Robbe-Grillet's comments on Lichtenstein as reprinted in
Roy Lichtenstein, edited by John Coplans (Praeger Publishers
Inc. 1972).
4
Arthur Cravan : boxer, poet, sailor, Dadaist. He apparently
disappeared one day in 1918 sailing in an absurdly small
boat in the Gulf of Mexico to meet his wife as part of what
was presumed to be his ultimate Dada gesture.
5
No - but what would the market value of Burden's body be
if those bullets did kill him, or if those cars on the L.A.
Freeway had killed him?
6
The title of Kenneth Anger's volumes which detail the underside
of Hollywood's many and varied tragic deaths.
7
As reported by Ken Davis in the Melbourne SUN, July 7th
1973.
8
I shall never forget as a teenager being chided by an adult
for admiring Warhol's Saturday Disaster series because of
my ignorance of the fact that Warhol would get ambulance
drivers to phone him up to rendezvous at the scene of a
horror smash where the drivers would wait around for Warhol
to snap his pics while innocent people died. An extreme
and hysterical example of the confusion of image with reality.
9
The title of the Whitney Museum exhibition of Warhol portraits
in 1979. The Random House book serves as the show's catalogue.
In many articles, the Mao serialization of 1972 is cited
as the first '70s portrait' (coinciding with his publicized
'return to painting') although portraits like that of Dennis
Hopper and some of the later Self Portraits appear to cover
the 1969-1970 period. One should also note the commissions
for album covers (The Rolling Stones, Dion, Diana Ross,
Julien Lennon and Aretha Franklin) and book jackets (James
Dean and The Beatles) Warhol recieved throughout the seventies
and into the eighties.
10
Quoted in Carter Ratcliff's Warhol (Abbeville Modern Masters
series, 1983) from Peter Gidal's Andy Warhol, Films &
Paintings.
11
As quoted by Kathleen Brady in THE AUSTRALIAN WOMEN'S WEEKLY,
January 25th 1978.
12
As quoted in an obscure article (torn from a second-hand
magazine and passed onto me) on 'contemporary art' from
what could be ESQUIRE from around 1970.
13
As reported by 'Dick Tracy' in THE NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS sometime
in Summer, 1978. The article cites Araldo Cossuta as the
restaurant's architect and quotes a spokesman saying that
the Andymat's aim is "to recapture the gracious format of
a varied menu served in comfortable surroundings". The Andymat
(due to have opened in Autumn 78 - did it actually open?)
serves 75 different dishes of frozen food.
