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Gagosian Quarterly

Spring 2019 Issue

Andy Warhol:Everything is Good

Against the backdrop of a major retrospective, Richard Hell writes about the “transcendentally camp” Pop artist, portraitist of daily life.

Andy Warhol, Green Car Crash, 1963 (detail), acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 90 × 80 inches (228.6 × 203.3 cm). Private collection. Photo: Rob McKeever

Andy Warhol, Green Car Crash, 1963 (detail), acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 90 × 80 inches (228.6 × 203.3 cm). Private collection. Photo: Rob McKeever

Richard Hell

Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ 1977 LP Blank Generation was rereleased in 2018 by Sire/Warner in a remastered facsimile edition. Hell’s books include two novels, Go Now and Godlike; his autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp; and the 2015 essay collection Massive Pissed Love. He lives in New York and is at work on a new novel.

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It was three separate personal Andy Warhol incidents in recent years that made me want to write about him to figure that out. (I’d started making notes last year before I got the good news that a Whitney show was due.) A few years ago I saw some unfamiliar, mostly later paintings of Warhol’s in a show in Europe and was surprised that some of them looked weak and tired; last year I saw Chelsea Girls (1966) for the third time across the years and this time the people it celebrated, or at least proposed as interesting, seemed insufferable (except immortal Mary Woronov); and, finally, I reread Bob Colacello’s book about Warhol, Holy Terror, and was reminded that 98 percent of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), a favorite book of mine, was written by Colacello, Pat Hackett, and Brigid Berlin—which astounds me and seems impossible: that Warhol’s ineffably intelligent, funny, and inspiring philosophical self-portrait could be assigned to assistants to write and still end up genius. How could that be?

He starts The Philosophy with an observation about daily life, made over the phone to B:

“I wake up every morning. I open my eyes and think: here we go again.”

[B:] “I get up because I have to pee.”

“I never fall back to sleep,” I said. “It seems like a dangerous thing to do. A whole day of life is like a whole day of television. TV never goes off the air once it starts for the day and I don’t either. At the end of the day the whole day will be a movie. A movie made for TV.”

Right away we’re in a work of art. Or a comedy routine. Or both.

Let me interject here a mention of the oddness that I find it hard to say Warhol’s name in company. I can’t think of another person of whom that’s true. It’s because the name is so well known while also signifying so variously and extremely that you know your meaning in speaking it will be received in a way you can’t predict or control. It’s as if you need a three-hundred-word footnote on your position regarding “Andy Warhol” in order to allude to him at all. He represents that much.

The name matter is a little different when speaking to painters, at least the sophisticated ones. To them “Warhol” means something consistent: genius, readjuster of artmaking in the second half of the twentieth century, archetypal artiste. Maybe the “artiste” tag is the best way of putting it for how it takes into account both his unpretentiousness and the performance aspect of what he did. The very first words I wrote in my notes toward this article were “When will Andy Warhol stop being fascinating?” Then I thought, “It’s actually his art form: creating fascination. He wanted to be talked about and he succeeded.” In fact he said that himself, more or less, about his movies, in an interview just before he died: “They’re better talked about than seen.” And in connection with the “artiste” concept, he also said in that final interview, “I think an artist is anybody who does something well, like if you cook well.” Compare this Oxford English Dictionary definition of “artiste”: “A public performer who appeals to the aesthetic faculties, also one who makes a ‘fine art’ of his employment.”

Over and over, Warhol said not just that everything is nothing but that everything is good. The idea that everything is good is the essence of Pop as conceived by Warhol. It’s quite zen.

Andy Warhol: Everything Is Good

Andy Warhol, Otto Fenn, c. 1952, ink on paper, 11 × 8 ½ inches (27.9 × 21.6 cm). Collection of Joe Donnelly

Andy Warhol: Everything Is Good

Andy Warhol, Foot with Dollar Bills, c. 1955–57, ballpoint pen on paper, 17 × 13 ¾ inches (43.2 × 34.9 cm). Collection of James Warhola

Since Warhol’s death in 1987 a lot of attention has been given to his pre-Pop work—his late-1940s student paintings, his ’50s commercial art (book jackets, advertising drawings), and the personal work he made for friends and to charm art directors (handmade books, handbill calling cards). It’s unusual for an artist’s juvenilia to get so much attention; presumably it’s both because Warhol’s major work has been so thoroughly covered and because he’s so mysterious that every clue matters. The Whitney show follows the pattern. That early work is fey, whimsical, tending to exquisite, and campy, featuring ornate, rococo, highly stylized painting, collage, and drawing—of shoes, often—with shiny metal foil and gold leaf frequently pasted on, and spare Cocteau-esque portrait line drawings that are usually traced from photographs. A lot of the drawings are a bit lewd, in a whimsical way—as a student Warhol would draw people picking their noses and sitting on the toilet, and the ’50s drawings include such things as a penis with a bow around it. At first, little seems to connect all this work to Warhol’s ’60s Pop, but the more one sees of it the more one sees links, both conceptual and technical. Conceptually there’s the humor. The ’50s art is usually teasing and jokey (a handmade picture book is called 25 Cats Name [sic] Sam and One Blue Pussy), which you could also say of his famous grid of thirty-two paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, each a different flavor, from 1962. It’s just that the Soup Cans are dry and enigmatic, as befits “high” art. Also the hero worship—Warhol was obsessed with Truman Capote in the ’50s—and the fascination with celebrities, especially dramatic women, lounge-lizard artistes, and sultry pretty boys. The ’50s line-drawing portraits are traced from photos, a technique obviously antecedent to the silk screens, and their cosmetically improved contour lines foreshadow the same in the post-’60s portraits.

But the most significant way the ’50s work anticipates the famous art is its overall campiness. In that state of aesthetic and philosophical consciousness, all artists are artistes, charm and glamour matter most, and everything is funny. Of course camp is associated with male homosexuality, at least the “effeminate”-behaving segment of it, and with seeing life as a performance; nothing is real, everything is theater.

The original great analysis of and salute to camp is Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp,’” first published in 1964. It’s dedicated to Oscar Wilde and he is quoted in it a lot, for good reason—Wilde’s art and thought may be the work prior to Warhol that best exemplifies or codifies conscious camp. Two quotes of Wilde from the essay: “It’s absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious,” and “Life is too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.”

Andy Warhol: Everything Is Good

Andy Warhol, Before and After [4], 1962, acrylic and graphite on linen, 72 ⅛ × 99 ¾ inches (183.2 x 253.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, purchase with funds from Charles Simon, 71.226

Sontag divides “the great creative sensibilities” into three categories: “high-culture,” truth-and-beauty, morally serious art—Rembrandt, say; then the often fragmentary work of extreme feelings in which there’s a tension between morality and aesthetics—Hieronymus Bosch, she proposes, along with writers such as Antonin Artaud, Alfred Jarry, and Franz Kafka (I might add for twentieth-century artists, say, Hans Bellmer or Egon Schiele); and, next, a third class, camp, which is purely aesthetic. (One could dispute this division of taste or artistic identity into three categories, but it makes enough sense for my purposes here.)

Warhol synthesizes Sontag’s high-art and camp categories, and this, it seems to me, is the key to the difficult mix of his qualities, methods, and intentions. He’s consciously camp, as everyone has known forever, but transcendentally so, as opposed to, say, the consciously camp Aubrey Beardsley. Warhol can’t be reduced to camp; he has elevated camp to high art. Maybe that’s the wave of the future, a future that may be short-lived for humans, and one in which consciousness of morality becomes meaningless because nothing is real. Everyone does what he or she must do in the mechanistic and random universe (“I want to be a machine,” Warhol said), and reality is a show since we can only perceive what our limited faculties permit, eliminating the possibility of knowing “reality” except as show. (Sontag writes that camp sees everything in quotation marks.)

Andy Warhol: Everything Is Good

Installation view, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, November 12, 2018–March 31, 2019. Left to right: Silver Marlon, 1963; Triple Elvis [Ferus Type], 1963; Single Elvis [Ferus Type], 1963; Large Sleep, 1965; Marilyn Diptych, 1962. Photo: Ron Amstutz

Here I should acknowledge a distinction between what Sontag means by “high,” “moralistic” art and another common use of the term “high art,” which is simply to distinguish fully ambitious art—art profoundly concerned with how things are—from commercial or decorative or otherwise more practical art. (The category-two artists Bosch, Bellmer, and Schiele are certainly high artists in that sense.) And the point is that Warhol’s camp achievement fits this second “high” definition too—he made commercial, decorative art into high art.

I have to admit that I’m among the majority who feel like Warhol’s first period of Pop painting, from 1962 to 1966, is his peak, though he stayed inventive to the end. The next most interesting thing about his work is the sheer range of mediums he improved—books, movies, magazines, sculpture, fashion, even rock ’n’ roll—and the third simply his fame and consequent cultural impact. When I walked into the room of his earliest Pop paintings at the Whitney, my heart skipped a beat; it was eerie, uncanny. We assume that those images are so familiar we already know them completely, but seeing countless reproductions of the various Soup Cans over the decades did not prepare me for the magnificence of the grid—eight across, four high—of the originals in person. The outrageousness: he proposes soup cans and they take your breath away. They are glorious, and on levels and in areas pretty much unknown in art before Warhol, at least in their diversity, being at the same time: seemingly exact, unadorned reproductions of existing, anonymous, commercial art; semimechanically produced high-art paintings; grid Minimalism; Conceptualism; the humor of high banality . . . and history painting: it’s the “American century” on the wall. Wilde is amusing but his pearls are talk, quips, not poetry. Andy’s are objects, and they are poetry that enlightens and stimulates along with, as ultimately handmade objects, having their own aura; they’re like something in nature made new to our eyes by a person, a godlike person: the pope of Pop.

Andy Warhol: Everything Is Good

Installation view of Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, November 12, 2018–March 31, 2019. Left and center walls, all works: Flowers, 1964; right wall: Flowers [Large Flowers], 1964–65. Photo: Ron Amstutz

Same goes for the 1964–65 Flowers, Warhol’s version of art history’s “nature,” I suppose. Part of camp is its too-muchness, as Sontag pointed out, and the Whitney’s hang of aggressively colored flower paintings on top of Warhol’s fuchsia-and-acid-yellow cow wallpaper from 1966 sure qualifies. The way that wall subverts your expectations of art while making jokes and deliriously confounding your eyes is like a final declaration of indomitable whimsicality that’s simultaneously a kind of alarm, a call to attention, a theatrical gesture that you can only savor and salute, as you smile. It’s not quite in the class of the Soup Cans or the Disasters (mostly 1963), but the pure beauty of the Flowers on their own equals the Soup Cans in their adamantine splendor.

Andy Warhol: Everything Is Good

Andy Warhol, Flowers, 1964, fluorescent paint and silkscreen ink on linen, 24 × 24 inches (61 × 61 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Edlis/Neeson Collection, 2015.123

The Disaster paintings bring me to another point: the way Warhol seemed to want to make everything about his daily life into art. He aestheticized—again a camp impulse—his whole life, mundane or dramatic: his lunch (soup), his continuous magazine-page flipping (celebrity silk screens) and newspaper thumbing (the news-photo Disasters), his cohort and entourage (the movies), even his mail (the time capsules) and his corporeal being (the wigs and shades, cosmetic surgery). At all times, though, he was both being funny and seeking to profit from publicity, whether or not a viewer might also feel other emotions and intentions. Even the Disasters, which can feel chilling and are often thought of as personally revealing—since it’s well known that Warhol was wildly skittish about any reminder of death—are also funny. Tunafish Disaster—four women die from eating bad tunafish??? There are eyewitness stories about him laughing about it while silk-screening. In Ambulance Disaster, ambulance passengers are crushed when it crashes (think about it); Suicide (Fallen Body) is from a news photo of a woman whose leap from the observation deck of the Empire State Building ended with her looking like Sleeping Beauty, sweetly wrapped, face up, in the roof of a car—these are jokes. It’s all camp, no matter that it’s also powerful art.

Andy Warhol: Everything Is Good

Andy Warhol, The Chelsea Girls, 1966 (still), 16mm film, black and white, color, silent, sound, 204 minutes in double screen © 2018 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum

I’ve seen Chelsea Girls projected three times—once in the ’60s or ’70s, then six or seven years ago, then 2018. I don’t well remember the first time; the second time I came away awed by how Warhol had managed to reinvent film the way he had so many other mediums; and this most recent time I was so repelled and bored by the people in it I could hardly sit through it. This brings up the moral-v.-camp sensibility again. By “moral” I just mean an artist’s taking life seriously, thinking that in life there’s some kind of meaningful purpose, including compassionate values about how people treat each other; honor and the golden rule. In a way an artwork is simply an artist saying, “I propose this as interesting,” and the assumption is that that inevitably has moral implications. Camp sidesteps the moral part.

Sontag makes one brief parenthetic reference to Pop in her essay:* having described camp as “a tender feeling” (her italics), she contrasts it with much of camp in Pop art, which she calls “ultimately nihilistic,” the implication being that the nihilism disqualifies the work as camp. It’s true there’s not much tenderness in Chelsea Girls; rather, the material is deeply cold and bitchy. For me the cruelty and hysteria are hard to swallow, and make me uncomfortable and depressed, but I think that’s my problem rather than Warhol’s, because: 1) you can call the meanness tender in that the people involved all seem to accept it, as if ultimately it were a fun game played by people who appreciated each other; but also, 2), a nihilistic reading of camp, contrary to Sontag, can be legitimate. Over and over Warhol said that everything is just nothing, but he is exhibit one for how that idea is consistent with camp. In Chelsea Girls he’s simply capturing the theatrical behavior, often enacted by pretty people, that he both participated in and voyeuristically relished in the hard-drug-driven underworld he hosted for the first years of his fame. That world of junkies and camping speed freaks deserves its portraitist as much as any other world, and, like sensationalist news stories and Hollywood glamour, it was just raw material for Warhol to turn into high art in his innovative ways.

Andy Warhol: Everything Is Good

Andy Warhol, Big Electric Chair, 1967–68, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 54 ¼ × 73 ¼ inches (137.5 × 186.1 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Edlis/Neeson Collection, 2015.128

He did falter when he narrowed his intentions down to “business art.” The corporate logos, dollar signs, and pulpy signage (“Repent and sin no more!”) he painted in his final years are not in a class with the Soup Cans. Their typical emphatic, hand-painted look doesn’t have the power of the original, more remote, impassive appropriations in the ’60s. The pictures get shrill and desperate feeling, or just soft. The colors aren’t as interesting. Images are just scattered across white canvas. The early grids worked better. The countless perfunctory-feeling commissioned portraits—maybe he just got tired. It feels like he’s simply staying on brand, albeit dilutedly. And sometimes even appearing to try to keep up stylishly with the ’80s youth boom in painting—such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Salle and David Wojnarowicz—which artists had inevitably been influenced by him. Of course, the profit motive was always present. Something I hadn’t realized, and that was noted in the Whitney show, is how he timed his first movie-star silk-screens to sensational news stories—Marilyn Monroe’s overdose death, Liz Taylor’s affair with Richard Burton—so that they would have built-in public interest. Whether consciously deliberated or not, this is true of painters since the cave people, who presumably painted wild game because that’s where their attention was.

But modernism had been pretty contemptuous of the aim to satisfy taste, much less popular taste, and Warhol was the first modern high artist to contradict that contempt—while of course realizing that almost everybody would laugh at the Soup Cans as ridiculous, but that they’d also talk about them, which would force dealers to recognize them and collectors to buy them. Over and over, Warhol said not just that everything is nothing but that everything is good. The idea that everything is good is the essence of Pop as conceived by Warhol. It’s quite Zen. But when Warhol starts doing it all to order—explicitly in the society portraits and commissioned portfolios (Endangered Species, Cowboys and Indians) or exploitively in commemoration (Moonwalk)—the work often suffers, feels rote. There is still great painting after the ’60s—the Skulls, the piss paintings, the Shadows, the Rorschachs, and more—and even some of the portraits and portfolio prints are very fine, with their Juan Gris interlocking geometrical patches in brilliantly unpredictable color combinations, patches of painterly brushstrokes here and there, and elegant cosmetic lines massaging the mix. But overall the level falls off.

Andy Warhol: Everything Is Good

Richard Hell, Legs McNeil, and Andy Warhol, 1976. Photo: Roberta Bayley/Redferns/Getty Images

Andy Warhol: Everything Is Good

Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, 1979, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 40 × 40 inches (101.6 × 101.6 cm). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Founding Collection, contribution Dia Center for the Arts 1997.1.11b

When I attended the press preview for the Whitney show in early November, I happened to recognize Bob Colacello standing with another Factory mainstay, Vincent Fremont, in the museum lobby. I introduced myself to ask a couple of questions; they were both very gracious. In Holy Terror Colacello had written that, of the sixteen sections of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Hackett wrote nine, he himself wrote four, Berlin wrote one, and one, the prologue, was by the three of them. That would leave one chapter by, supposedly, Warhol himself. I asked him how he could explain that, when the philosophy was so eccentric and personal. He conceded that Warhol had read and tuned up the ms., had signed off on every page, and that much of the material came from recollections and sometimes recordings of Andy’s conversation, but he insisted that 95 percent of the book was written by the ghostwriters. I don’t know quite what to make of it. I guess it isn’t quite as dramatic as it seemed at first, when I could only figure that Warhol was so pithy and comprehensive and indelible, not to mention faithful to his readjustment of the concept of originality, that he could confidently assign to others the labor of detailing, in the first person, his worldview across a whole 241-page book. It still seemed like a unique achievement. What precedents are there? The Bible, I guess.**

* It’s funny that Warhol’s and Pat Hackett’s book Popism: The Warhol Sixties (1980) briefly mentions Sontag’s essay, but rather than saying it contrasts camp with her two other categories—“high” moral art and fragmentary art of extreme feeling—Andy says the essay is about “the differences between high, middle, and low ‘camp’”!

** As I continued to wonder about this, it occurred to me that plenty of books recount the conversation of notable people—books of “table talk” by such as Samuel Coleridge or Orson Welles. I suppose The Philosophy is a Warholian twist on this tradition.

Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, November 12, 2018–March 31, 2019; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, May 19–September 2, 2019; artwork © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photos: courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, unless otherwise noted

Christopher Makos, Andy Warhol at Paris Apartment Window, 1981

In Conversation
Christopher Makos and Jessica Beck

Andy Warhol’s Insiders at the Gagosian Shop in London’s historic Burlington Arcade is a group exhibition and shop takeover that feature works by Warhol and portraits of the artist by friends and collaborators including photographers Ronnie Cutrone, Michael Halsband, Christopher Makos, and Billy Name. To celebrate the occasion, Makos met with Gagosian director Jessica Beck to speak about his friendship with Warhol and the joy of the unexpected.

Jessica Beck

Andy Warhol: Silver Screen

In this video, Jessica Beck, director at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, sits down to discuss the three early paintings by Andy Warhol from 1963 featured in the exhibition Andy Warhol: Silver Screen, at Gagosian in Paris.

Alexander Calder poster for McGovern, 1972, lithograph

The Art History of Presidential Campaign Posters

Against the backdrop of the 2020 US presidential election, historian Hal Wert takes us through the artistic and political evolution of American campaign posters, from their origin in 1844 to the present. In an interview with Quarterly editor Gillian Jakab, Wert highlights an array of landmark posters and the artists who made them.

Allen Midgette in front of the Chelsea Hotel, New York, 2000. Photo: Rita Barros

I’ll Be Your Mirror: Allen Midgette

Raymond Foye speaks with the actor who impersonated Andy Warhol during the great Warhol lecture hoax in the late 1960s. The two also discuss Midgette’s earlier film career in Italy and the difficulty of performing in a Warhol film.

Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait with Skull, 1977, Polaroid Polacolor Type 108, 4 ¼ × 3 ⅜ inches (10.8 × 8.6 cm). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Andy Warhol: From the Polaroid and Back Again

Jessica Beck, the Milton Fine Curator of Art at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, considers the artist’s career-spanning use of Polaroid photography as part of his more expansive practice.

Andy Warhol catalogue. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1965.

Book Corner
On Collecting with Norman Diekman

Rare-book expert Douglas Flamm speaks with designer Norman Diekman about his unique collection of books on art and architecture. Diekman describes his first plunge into book collecting, the history behind it, and the way his passion for collecting grew.

Andy Warhol cover design for the magazine Aspen 1, no. 3.

Artists’ Magazines

Gwen Allen recounts her discovery of cutting-edge artists’ magazines from the 1960s and 1970s and explores the roots and implications of these singular publications.

Anselm Kiefer, Volkszählung (Census), 1991, steel, lead, glass, peas, and photographs, 163 ⅜ × 224 ½ × 315 inches (4.1 × 5.7 × 8 m)/

Cast of Characters

James Lawrence explores how contemporary artists have grappled with the subject of the library.

Cover of the Winter 2019 Gagosian Quarterly, featuring a selection from a black-and-white Christopher Wool photograph

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2019

The Winter 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a selection from Christopher Wool’s Westtexaspsychosculpture series on its cover.

Still from video Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt

Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt

Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.

Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2019

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2019

The Spring 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Red Pot with Lute Player #2 by Jonas Wood on its cover.

Claude Picasso and John Richardson

In Conversation
Claude Picasso and John Richardson

Picasso biographer Sir John Richardson sits down with Claude Picasso to discuss Claude’s photography, his enjoyment of vintage car racing, and the future of scholarship related to his father, Pablo Picasso.