Warhol set up a continuous camera at an old, large, lumpy, dark cloth Couch in his Factory studio - people ate on it, talked, gyrated nakedly, made love, fixed motorcycles. They knew they were being filmed but the unblinking eye watching them became unfetishized, ordinary. They played to it, but without response, so they became outrageous before it. It recorded them in black and white in the frame. And now Gallery goers can watch a group, dated in the late '50s/early 60s, slowly peeling and eating bananas with a pronounced sexual tone, a nude woman, whose large breasts are particularly caught by the lighting, gyrating unendingly trying to seduce a man who's more interested in polishing his motorcycle, two men lost in a naked embrace, one lying lengthwise on top of the other, humping for hours while others move obliviously around them, the motorcycle guy, a cleaner.
The eye that doesn't weep, the unblinking eye is a dangerous eye. Warhol made it art, though, and so gave it an entrance into the pathos of living, and thus an ethos. The unblinking eye doesn't have an ethic. Perhaps only the eye that weeps does. And do we find ourselves weeping before the accident victims who he emblazoned from newspaper images into wall-sized silkscreen repetitive images that fade out? Who are these anonymous dead people, are they the future of us?
The film of the man sleeping was nearly unbearable. It was Edgar Allen Poe's tell-tale heart, beating. The camera is angled on his chest and part of his face. We see his diaphragm move up and down with his breath, which is not always even, depending on his inner state, his dreams, and we see his chest pounding with his heart beat. That heart beat eventually pounds in our ears. It is visceral, the core of the pulse, the central ventricle, where the blood gushes in and out of, hundreds of litres an hour. We find ourselves dreaming with the man who's sleeping and whose heart we witness beneath his chest with the black hairs that we can almost feel under our fingertips. We become voyeurs, watching the minutiae of the vulnerability of sleep.
Warhol was a voyeur, no doubt about it. He chose moments in the continuum of images to still, to repeat spatially. Moments that compose us in a moment in time, a moment in history.
If I seek to integrate the critic with the poet, Warhol did not help in that quest. When we arrived, my friend and I, we were given a large black phone with numbers to press. Then we heard recordings, Cronenburg, actors, critics, memories of those who knew him, visited his studio, were part of his crowd or had a portrait done by him. The rooms at the AGO devoted to the show held people standing before large silkscreens or screens of moving images with a big black phone to their ears. It was eery. We were in a wired world that he perhaps prophesied. But we could not fully 'read' Warhol without the 'critical' accompaniment.
Warhol impartially recorded the effects of passion: the most wanted criminals; photographs of horrendous accidents, suicides; and sex, a man's face only while he receives a blow job; and the terror of narcissism as the 3 minute film records an unmoving, unblinking subject who dissembles before it, showing the stark soul in the unwavering eyes and the retreat into blinking, self-consciousness, an attempt to veil while being instructed not to before the artist left the room. As he impartially took snap-shots in the recording of us, in stance perhaps like Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, 'paring his fingernails,' Warhol was, for me, cerebral. You cannot view his work without knowledge of its background, what he was doing, how it came about, what it means, its critical context; without this information, you are lost. Everything is a 'found image.' Nothing is original. It is the unblinking eye, a constant surveillance, even if Warhol's "eye" is a configured eye and pointed like a spotlight. His work is a comment on culture, almost a footnote on it, and we need to be guided through the specifics of that culture was before we can begin to understand it. Warhol has not become fetishized by our culture, become a cliche, though shows like this may help, as well as productions like the 4-hour PBS documentary, to the point where we fully understand the message of his medium without explanation.
tags: Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol: Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disaster, 1962-1964, Art Gallery of Ontario.
Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
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Like all great artists Warhol allowed us to see humanity in a way we had not considered before. That doesn't mean that we like looking at it all, but he added possibilities to human understanding. Few of us could ever hope to achieve something that significant, though we keep trying.
ReplyDeleteNarrator, I'm still grappling with whether I think Warhol a "great artist"; though I'm sure his work will be remembered in Art History. Everything in the show was a 'found image' - all relayed images, configured through his aesthetic admittedly, but not created by him. The voyeurism of his art occurs on many levels, his own in Art History notwithstanding. He just did it so well, is the greatest representative of his era's Pop Art, has such a far-reaching comment on our culture, that's he's in the Annals of the Greats. But my own jury's out on whether I think him a 'great artist.' A great showman, certainly.
ReplyDeleteIra, I re-read your comment, and I'm still having problems with elevating Warhol to the Hall of Greats... perhaps it comes down to that ultimate test, do I like his work? It's interesting, I'm neutral on the liking/not liking thing. More crucially, though, is there poetry in it that speaks to me? Does it haunt me? The answer is no.
ReplyDeleteThere are no speaking subjects in Andy Warhol's work (as it is represented in this show). They are images into which we read meaning, and for me are utterly dependent on this act of meaning-making by the viewer. I couldn't quite call them empty husks, but almost.
It was an interesting show on a master showman (an executive director of what commercial art images to use/focus on) who I balk at calling an artist.
It's still 'commercial art' to me; not 'fine art.' But there's the rub...
What gives this whole review its' brilliance, is that it helps one, notably myself in this instance, a more complete understanding of his purpose. It is true that one needs the critical information or one is lost within the context of his Art. My daughter seems to understand his Art, but her mind works in the direction of total Artistic comment on culture.
ReplyDeleteI stand with you on the showman aspect. If showmanship is an Art, then perhaps he was great in this respect. I view him as tragic as his concepts and equally as tragic as his immediate followers became.
I look to Art to elevate something within the spirit. Warhol's Art does not do this for me either, but understanding it on the level which you have presented helps to at least appreciate it, something I've never really done except for the 15 minutes of fame prophesy.
I hope I make some sense. I'm still not quite with it.
Many Blessings, my Friend~
Interesting thoughts, Brenda, thank you. It's always seemed to me that Warhol's art (what I know of it) was about alienation and disconnection at the same time that he was using the vehicle of relentless looking, creating a paradox which does seem to be a very direct comment on our current culture, but also makes the experience both uncomfortable and shallow-seeming. Soulless, perhaps. And for those of us who look to art to nurture the soul, that is discomfiting at least.
ReplyDeleteBrenda -
ReplyDeleteIt is an interesting question. One that crosses many fields. Was Kinsey more showman the scientist? I think, surely, at the end of his career, and that is - I suppose - the society that Warhol's "art" comes out of. There are images I enjoy, and ones that I do not. But yes, very little, if anything, "haunts" - except in retrospect, or in watching the responses of other viewers. In this I think he challenged the concept of "fine art." Not that he was the first to create crude imagery, or the first to consider the way new media were altering cultural vision, but that he did elevate the art of the visual assault. And I don't think we can really consider his art without considering how it was viewed and when it was viewed and what it did to the world.
It is an interesting issue - showman v artist, pathbreaker v great. Eduard Manet was not a great painter, nor is his work obviously groundbreaking as we view it today, but Le dejeuner sur l'herbe and the way he chose to market it as an assault on Paris's accepted worldview, changed the art world dramatically, springing open doors that allowed better "artists" to rush through.
Perhaps we need a new category for these "art changers."
What an interesting discussion here. Thanks so much for this information, Brenda. I must see this!
ReplyDeleteI agree with so many points made. Warhol's great contribution and lasting legacy, certainly not in fine art, seems to me to be his sociological documentation. His passion for keen observation serves us all. He was equally invested in titillating and shocking his public.
His diaries are chock full of interesting commentary on life as he knew it. Many of these entries are written with a biting tongue and spiced with humor as they detail entertainment, tragedy, celebrity and their intersection with important events of the times.
After seeing this show, and I really did want my views of his work turned upside down, I was open to radical change in my perspective, I'd say he was an innovator. And his effect on modern art is crucial; he inserted a fractal of "us" that shifted the scene of modern art, which makes him very important. But are his 3 minute clips 'art'? Or are they fodder for an artist to create out of? Cronenberg, who curated this show, says he owes much to Warhol, and yet Cronenberg's film far exceeds Warhol's.
ReplyDeleteWarhol, I still maintain, was more of a director of a commercial art enterprise than a 'fine artist.' From David Moos' introduction:
In 1963 he moved his studio into a large space and called it the Factory, implying that art oculd be fabricated in a manner simlar to commercial products rolling off assembly lines. "I think everybody should be a machine," the artist famously remarked.
I've always been attracted to the notational art on the sidelines than in Great Artists, but I see I carry a repertoire that informs my aesthetic sense. The Lascioux Cave Paintings do it for me; Byzantine art does; Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Van Gogh; they all do. Something about such impassioned work that it pulls the ground from under you, rewires your neuronal pathways, and keeps doing this every time you revisit, that not only shifts its era but continues to do so. For me, it is Olitski, in Warhol's time period, with his colour field painting, which does that fractal thing, which buckles and reorders my perception, shifting it in almost scary but exhilirating ways. To witness a work of art is dangerous - it is so fragile and so powerful, like love. And it isn't the subject matter, Goya's death does this in a way that Warhol's doesn't, though the Kierkegaardian emotions of 'fear and trembling' are there with both. Goya's death makes something in my stomach lurch up into my mouth; Warhol, in contrast, seems an intellectual exercise...
Laurieglynn, Warhol was in love with fame, "celebrity-obsessed," says the program. To this end, he courted celebrity, and made himself into a celebrity too. His reputation, however, for this viewer, exceeds the power of his actual work. I think we both understand what we're trying to get at with Warhol...
ReplyDeleteMB, Warhol isn't uncomfortable in the way that Munch is, Warhol's alienation seems more to come from the distinct sense of a man who was using images to manipulate the viewer into buying a certain product, his 'art,' which itself was composed of people who were 'larger than life.' I came out of the show feeling I was richer in knowledge about an innovator, but that he cultivated an 'image,' a 'pose,' that is not borne out in his work. One doesn't get the sense that his soul was on fire. Rather, the cold rationality of the conman, piggybacking. I can hear him laugh at us.
Narrator, it's what Warhol opened up, and, yes, he did "elevate the art of the visual assault" of the media. I agree fully with what you've said, "springing open doors that allowed better "artists" to rush through"... but not on Warhol himself. He's not an icon to me - though I wanted him to be.
Sky, I am in agreement with your astute assessment: "Warhol's great contribution and lasting legacy, certainly not in fine art, seems to be his sociological documentation."
The show took me by surprise: I thought I'd come away on bended knees, and didn't, and why/why not is a question to ponder.
I don't know where the show is headed next, but if it's in your vicinity, I would recommend seeing it!
A thoughtful and enlightening post, Brenda. One of those I make a mental note to myself to return and read, perhaps just before going to see an exhibition of his work myself.
ReplyDeleteI have found what I have seen of his work both fascinating and chilling. But perhaps I bring to this my perceptions of what I have read of the man and I agree with what you say above about Image and Pose. He was good at it though ...
What an interesting discussion with great points. I agree with Sky, the Lascaux paintings for a good example, take my breath away in a way Warhol absolutely never has. And the notion of Warhol laughing at us... hm, hadn't thought of it that way, but I can imagine it, too.
ReplyDeleteLaughing, in that silver wig of his, that he wore every day, MB.
ReplyDeleteA famous hairstylist put a Hendrix wig overtop and began to cut it, but snipped away at his silver wig to make it fit; afterwards she was told it was okay - he had 12 more silver wigs at home. She was later invited to come and snip them all too.
There is a photograph of Warhol at the beginning of the show. One eye is balanced, bright, clear, intelligent, approachable; the other eye, slightly in shadows, looks crazed, ambitious, unfocused in the dilated light, insane. It is the other eye looking at us from which the laughter that I hear issues forth.
Mary, fascinating and chilling is exactly it.
ReplyDeleteBut more in a cerebral way. The charisma of Jackie lies flat in his silk screened images; without knowing who she was, she doesn't lift off the canvas.
Am I being unfair?
I hope some of you manage to see the show and offer your reflections too.
In the midst of a wild 48 hours (more about that another time) I did see some of a doc on Andy on PBS last night. It reinforced a lot of what's been said here. Surely the impressario, sometimes (especially "earlier") the serious artist, but always the wildest mix of voyeurism and a very controlled exhibitionism. But yes Brenda, so much is so flat. That might have been effective in ones or twos or even threes - Mao, or Jackie, or Marilyn - but all isn't a "haystacks" series, its just the same idea repeated. And it ends up being good illustration (Seymour Chwast) but it is difficult to say any individual piece is any more than that.
ReplyDeleteStill, I don't know. I do want to love Andy Warhol. It seems anti-20th Century to not love him. But I know what you mean.
Those silk screen paintings look way better smaller, too. The dots are large in the big scale originals and the celebrity decomposes in them, the charisma mostly absent. Jackie barely looks like herself; or Liz Taylor. Elvis, oh what a hunk, really, he was high up, and in performance, and was given a full body, and we heard him singing "Flaming Star" in the big, black phone, so he seemed to retain his 'star quality,' while the others didn't.
ReplyDeleteI'm so disappointed that I wasn't left with stars in my eyes, oohing with Andy Worship. Oh, go ahead, don't be anti-20th century, love him.
P.T. Barnum said there was a sucker born every minute, and Warhol capitalized on that.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing i've seen that he's ever done that was artistic was his work with the Velvet Underground.
For me, A. Warhol both represents and extolls alienation and desensitization-- the numbing of our critical faculties.
ReplyDeleteAs much performer-artist as artist,
social phenomenon as social icon,
neo-dadaist as anything truly inspired, he seems exemplary of the dispirited deconstructionist current: an icon of malaise and mediocrity-- nevertheless, a phenomenon.
I have thoroughly enjoyed this post and comments, Brenda! :)
ReplyDeleteEminemsRevenge, but Warhol was the manager of the Velvet Underground for a bit, that director role again, even Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable with The Velvet Underground, was filmed, directed, edited by Nameth. So I wouldn't call Warhol's contribution to the Velvet Underground art, not in itself. Though I do have "The Banana" on a t-shirt!
ReplyDeleteTwoberry! I love your reminiscences of seeing Warhol's work, and then with those you know (and love) who love what he did. I think that's what we're left with - he had an effect on other artists, and this was his genius.
Chuck, I agree with you. Despite the hoopla at the Supernova show, despite the interesting angles on our lives, how underground it all was, how outrageous, how "Pop Art," the malaise and mediocrity, yes, and, oh, I was, truly was, disappointed. Barnum & Bailey's Circus without the Ringmaster...is much flatter than you'd expect.
Fascinating discussion, and one that gives me a new perspective on Warhol. I never responded to him much one way or the other, but that's probably due mainly to my relative lack of exposure to his work.
ReplyDelete