Andy Warhol

6 Warhol’s Other Projects

After his death, when Christie’s came to value the Andy Warhol estate, they took a look at the 100,000 or so photographs he had left behind and concluded that they were worth the grand sum of $107,000. With some notable, expensive exceptions they calculated that the majority of the standard prints were worth a dollar each, and that the Polaroids were worth five cents.

Now, it is perfectly possible to believe that many of these photographs were just disposable test shots and the like, but obviously Warhol had chosen not to dispose of them, and in any case, anonymous, nondescript old photographs sell for more than that at flea markets.

Christie’s explained that they had arrived at this amazingly low figure because they considered Warhol to be only a painter, not a photographer of any repute. All the money and the art was therefore in the paintings and nowhere else. Needless to say their assessment was not allowed to go unchallenged. Exhibitions had been held of Warhol’s photographs. He had used photographs as the basis for portraits. He had published photographic books. The estate managed to find an expert witness who valued the same collection of photographs at $80 million. As I write, an Internet company is selling some of the Warhol Polaroids, apparently very successfully, for $12,500 each.

Even leaving aside the matter of the photographs, the idea that Warhol was only a painter is patently absurd. Throughout his career he worked in other media, and created a number of sometimes minor yet always distinctive works. He was, for example, responsible for two of the most striking record album covers ever designed.

The first, The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), shows a big yellow and black banana on a plain white background. In the original edition the skin of the banana peeled off to reveal the flesh beneath. A large Andy Warhol ‘signature’ appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the cover, as though that might be the name of the recording artist. The image of the banana is simultaneously provocative and silly. Yes, the banana is a crude, obvious phallic symbol, but how could anyone seriously take this bald, cartoonish image as a symbol of anything? Beck (Hanson, the musician) says of it;

“It’s so blank it says everything and nothing.” (in Vanity Fair, November 2001, p.216).

Far more ‘something’ is the cover of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers (1971) featuring a close-up of a man’s bulging, be-jeaned crotch complete with an actual zipper that opens. The result is funny, sexy, very faintly shocking, somewhat in bad taste: everything that rock music is supposed to be. It is extraordinarily original, yet so completely obvious that you can’t quite believe somebody hadn’t thought of it before.

These album covers are perfect pieces of commercial art. They draw attention to themselves and to the product within. Here, Warhol’s art is satisfyingly functional. He did a similarly successful job on the poster he designed for George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972. It is very hard to think of Warhol as a political animal, but this poster was a wonderful piece of agitprop*.

≡ Literally a political strategy involving techniques of agitation and propaganda to influence public opinion. Originally used by the Marxist theorist Plekhano and then by Lenin.

It simply shows a Warhol-style portrait of the rival candidate, Richard Nixon, looking sour, surly, jowly, shifty, green-faced, very much the sort of man you wouldn’t by a used car from let alone choose as president; and underneath it is the simple caption, ‘Vote McGovern’.

The poster caused considerable outrage at the time, at least from members of the Republican Party, having supposedly crossed the line of what was acceptable as political debate. Warhol always claimed that Nixon was sufficiently offended that after he had won the election he turned the Inland Revenue Service on Warhol, having them go through his finances with a fine-tooth comb, looking for evidence of tax fraud.

Warhol also created a variety of what might be called sculptural objects. The best known of these are the Brillo and Campbell’s soup boxes, but he also did boxes of Del Monte peaches, Heinz Tomato Ketchup and Kellogg’s Cornflakes. These are not quite Duchampian ready-mades since Warhol didn’t simply sign existing cardboard boxes, rather he went to the trouble of creating heavy wooden replicas instead. At other times he worked with helium-filled silver balloons, and huge inflatable versions of wrapped Baby Ruth chocolate bars.

Warhol made a few appearances in other people’s movies, sometimes in quirky independent productions such as Cocaine Cowboys or Blank Generation, but he also appeared in something as mainstream as Tootsie. It will come as no surprise that he almost always played himself. Having perfected the Andy Warhol act he was hardly going to start playing other parts.

He never had a successful television show, although he did have a couple of unsuccessful ones. Andy Warhol’s TV and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes. There have certainly been shorter, more ignominious television careers.

The reasons for television success and failure are mysterious at the best of times, but for all of Warhol’s instinctive understanding of the media, and for all his ability to manipulate them, we might have guessed that he would not be a big hit on his own chat show. Yes, he is iconic, and yes his connoisseurship of banality would not seem to be out of place on TV, but there are other qualities that television demands that Warhol did not possess and did not have any interest in. Warhol is not warm, and he is never ingratiating, and warmth and ingratiation are at the very heart of television.

Print was an area where he was far more likely to be successful, and Interview, still in business today, must surely be the longest-lived magazine ever founded by an artist. It would be hard to make any great claims for Interview as a work of art, although it did contain a lot of material created by Warhol. He supposedly set up the magazine in order to get tickets to movie premieres.

Interview’s speciality was the unmediated, unedited, tape-recorded interview. Occasionally these might be with a literary figure or a politician, but they were far more likely to be with rather vacuous media figures — Sean Cassidy, Cher and Lorna Luft spring immediately to mind. One might argue that the magazine was giving these people enough rope to hang themselves, but all too often it seemed that the vacuity was part of the magazine’s personality as well as the celebrity’s.

One could also argue that in this uncritical acceptance of celebrity, Warhol was once again ahead of the curve, anticipating the endless expansion of celebrity culture. And yet one might have to wonder whether Interview was the symptom or the disease.

Some people are under the impression that Andy Warhol was inarticulate, non-verbal, at best monosyllabic. It is not an entirely incomprehensible belief given an exchange like this with Henry Geldzahler of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

GELDZAHLER:

Do you know what you’re doing?

WARHOL:

No.

GELDZAHLER:

Do you know what a painting is going to look like before you do it?

WARHOL:

Yes.

GELDZAHLER:

Does it end up looking like you expect?

WARHOL:

No.

GELDZAHLER:

Are you surprised?

WARHOL:

No.

(in Painters Painting)

This is undoubtedly monosyllabic, but it is certainly not inarticulate. Warhol is describing the way most artists work: head down, mostly in the dark, hoping for the best, with expectations and aspirations that are never quite fulfilled. He conveys this in precisely four words. So, let’s not make the mistake of thinking that Warhol was ever non-verbal.

In fact there is considerable evidence that his utterances became deliberately more enigmatic as he went along. In an interview with Gene Swanson in Art News in 1963, he sounds very articulate and talks about art in a way that surely would have been acceptable to any art student or critic. He says;

“I think painting is essentially the same as it has always been. It confuses me that people expect Pop Art to make a comment or say that its adherents merely accept their environment. I’ve viewed most of the paintings I’ve loved — Mondrians, Matisses, Pollocks — as being rather deadpan in that sense. All painting is fact and that is enough; the paintings are charged with their very presence. The situation, physical ideas, physical presence — I feel that is the comment.”

It is hard to imagine the later, fully-fledged Andy talking about paintings being ‘charged’ or even using the word ‘adherents’. In that same interview he does talk about sameness and wanting to be like a machine — but he also relates it to Brechtian alienation*.

≡ German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) employed what he called the Verfremdungseffekt, usually translated as ‘alienation effect’ but more correctly it means something that is ‘made strange’, i.e. a way of presenting things on stage in a non-naturalistic way to enable us to see them with fresh eyes.

For a visual artist, Andy Warhol wrote (or at least published) a great number of words. He was responsible for a book of his philosophy, a memoir of the 1960^s, a novel of sorts, and a published diary that runs to over 800 pages (distilled from 20,000). His books of photographs also contain lengthy and rather droll ruminations.

There is, admittedly, some room for debate about the ‘authorship’ of these works. Popism is attributed to Warhol and Pat Hackett, but Bob Colacello claims to have been ghost writer on the project, and the work is copyright Andy Warhol. The title page of Exposures declares text by Warhol ‘with Bob Colacello’ and it is copyright ‘Andy Warhol Books’. According to Victor Bockris From A to B and Back Again was;

“…culled from taped telephone conversations Warhol had with Brigid Polk and Pat Hackett, transcribed by Pat and shaped into final form by Bob (Colacello).” (Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, p.390).

It too is simply ‘copyright Andy Warhol’.

Regardless of how the resulting texts were actually created, the final product sounds like the authentic voice of Andy Warhol, and the Diary may be the most authentic of all. It contains a good deal of banality about which parties Warhol has been to, how much he spent on cab fares, some waspish remarks about the people he met, but then there will be some profoundly telling and well thought-out observation, such as this one from 12 August 1978:

“The Pope died and Brigid was calling, wanting me to watch the funeral on TV with her. When they brought the Pope’s body out, everybody standing around there in Rome clapped, all these people, because it was such a good production.”

This is the sort of observation that someone like Baudrillard would turn into a dreary 20-page analysis. Warhol pins it down with an apparent lack of effort. His genius manifests itself through a highly attractive lightness.

Lighter still is his way with the quote and the soundbite:

“In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”

“I think everybody should be a machine.”

“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.”

“My mind is like a tape recorder with one button — Erase.”.

The best of these have already entered the culture and the language.

Warhol also created wallpaper, he was involved with 1960^s ‘happenings’ via the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and towards the end of his life he did some experiments with computer art.

Not all of these subsidiary projects were great art (though I think claims could be made for Warhol as one of the best diarists of the twentieth century, a latter-day Goncourt). However, his willingness to try new forms, to work in many media, and the prolificness, ease and playfulness with which he did them are typical of his genius, and made him an enduring model of what an artist could and should be at this time in history.

Summary

Warhol worked in many media besides painting and film.

His work as a designer of sculptural objects, album covers, and even a political poster, is of a piece with his more serious work.

Warhol was much more verbal than is generally supposed. His Diary is a classic, and he perfected the use of the soundbite.