Andy Warhol (2 page)

The commonplace world of everyday industrial objects has of course been looked down upon, aesthetically, by those who cherish good taste. And the commonplace imagery on billboards and in comic books and pulp magazines has been considered aesthetically irredeemable by the same arbiters of aesthetic judgment. Fast foods pollute the body the way the comics, not long ago, were felt to corrupt the mind. When I was a student in Paris, Coca-Cola was held to cause cancer. America was, to cite a title by the expatriate Henry Miller, an “air conditioned nightmare.” In the nineteenth century, the Art and Crafts Movement condemned industrially manufactured furniture. Art, until 1960, stood implacably against the common culture in this sense. All at once in the early 1960s there were real artists who took the contrary position, celebrating the vernacular in paintings that appropriated the flat colors and heavy outlines of commercial art. The tastes and values of ordinary persons all at once were inseparable from advanced art. That art, from my perspective, showed the way to bring to the muddles of aesthetics the clarities of high analytical philosophy. Without Warhol, I could never
have written
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.
This book accordingly is the acknowledgment of a debt.

I never met Andy Warhol, though I stood next to him at the opening of an exhibition of a body of prints—Myths—at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in Soho, while he autographed an announcement of the show for my new wife, Barbara Westman. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of him at a party, or at a show. We lived very different lives. Philosophy was so distant from the downtown New York life he lived that when, in “The Art World,” I wrote that “Mr. Andy Warhol, the Pop artist, displays facsimiles of Brillo cartons, piled high, in neat stacks, as in the stockroom of the supermarket,” I was reasonably certain that no reader of the
Journal of Philosophy
, where this was published in 1964, had a clue whom I was talking about. Few philosophers were likely to haunt the Stable Gallery, the Green Gallery, or even the Janis Gallery, where Pop was on view. Years later, after I had become an art critic as well as a philosopher, my wife and I attended the auction of Andy's estate and marveled at the exquisiteness of his taste in French Art Deco furniture, as well as in art. In this, as in everything, he was ahead of his time, even if he knew nothing better to do with his extraordinary swag than pile it up, as in a treasure chamber, in his East Side town house.

I am particularly grateful to Professor Bertrand Rougé of the University of Pau for his objections to my view of Andy Warhol's installation at his second exhibition at the Stable Gallery in Manhattan, in April 1964. These appear in
The Philosophy of Arthur Danto
, in the series
The Library of Living Philosophers
(The Open Court Press, 2009). My current view of that show owes a great deal to having had to deal with Rougé's perception. The features of the individual grocery boxes have to be explained with reference to how they should look in supermarket stacks. That concession leaves intact the ontological character of how to account for the differences between the actual boxes of the
Lebenswelt—
the world of common experience—and the somewhat Futuristic, somewhat design-y, style of the Warhol cartons. Art historically speaking, they are late examples of
Arte Metafisica.

Few of the corrections I owe to others have required this degree of rethinking: mostly they have been accepted as gifts, as has their readiness to read my work. I owe an inexpressibly rich debt to David Carrier for a long and searching correspondence. My gratitude to my wonderful colleague, Lydia Goehr, is existential. Alison McDonald has brought a vast art world knowledge to her reading of the text. Noel Carroll has been a constant source of philosophical knowledge and artistic understanding. Richard Kuhns is the indispensable friend of a lifetime: I could not write anything that meant anything without seeking his wisdom and human awareness. I owe to Ti-Grace Atkinson what special knowledge I may have of the devious Valerie Solanas, my sensitivity to the deep issues of feminism—and I cherish the truth that the master painter Sean Scully has never allowed his uncertainty regarding this book's subject in any way to stand in the way of acknowledging the certainty of his friendship with its author. Finally this book and many of its peers owe their existence to Georges and Anne Borchardt, and their acumen, literary and practical. And for the beauty of her soul, her marvelous sense of comedy, her keen eye and her good sense and the gift of her love, I have been blessed—
blessed!
—by my marriage with Barbara Westman.

The format is simple. Parenthetical references in the text are to the books listed in the bibliography. I have placed a word that refers to a title, together with page numbers. I have sought a readable text, in enjoyable language, and have kept references to a minimum.

Andy Warhol

In Victor Bockris's biography
Warhol
, there is a chapter titled “The Birth of Andy Warhol: 1959–61.” This obviously does not refer to Andy Warhol's birth as a baby, which took place in 1928, in Pittsburgh, to immigrant Ruthenian parents. It refers, rather, to a set of changes in Warhol's identity—the breakthrough, in effect, through which he became an icon. One of the works that helps visualize the breakthrough is a painting done in 1961, which consists in a greatly enlarged version of a simple black-and-white advertisement of the kind that appears in side columns and back pages of cheap newspapers. It advertised the services of a plastic surgeon, and showed two profiles of the same woman, before and after an operation on her nose. The left profile shows her with a large, witchlike nose, the right one with a cute turned-up nose, like a cheerleader's or a starlet's—the kind of nose that readers
with beaky noses dream of having. Since we read from left to right, there is a relationship of before and after between the two images, and indeed Warhol titled his work
Before and After
, of which he painted several versions. As such, it was the embodiment of the kind of dream that haunts people concerned with changing their looks in order to be, they think, more attractive. Replacing
before
with
after
is the path to beauty as they conceive it, and to happiness.

The years 1959 and 1961 constitute a zone of biographical change between two stages of Warhol's life, a zone of transfiguration. He was transformed from a highly successful commercial artist into a member of the New York avant-garde—something he lusted after with all the passion of Miss Big Nose yearning for the look of Miss Tiny Turned-up Nose. It was a transformation underscored by the imagery of
Before and After
as art. Before Warhol,
Before and After
would have been a piece of boilerplate commercial art, whose maker would be long forgotten. By 1961, greatly enlarged, it became a work of high art. Reproductions of
Before and After
before and after this transformation took place look exactly alike. The difference, one might say, is invisible. Part of what made Warhol the icon he became has to do with the fact that initially almost nobody would have acknowledged a difference between the two images. Warhol did not simply replicate a grungy piece of commercial art. He made the distinction between a piece of grungy art and a piece of high art at once invisible and momentous. But that meant that he changed not so much the way we look at art but the way art was understood. That meant that between 1959 and 1961, the seeds of a visual and indeed a cultural revolution were planted.

Before and After:
American Iconic Dream. Andy Warhol,
Before and After
, 1960. Synthetic polymer paint and silk screen ink on canvas, 54 × 70 in. © Copyright The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, NY

What happened when Andy Warhol became the cultural icon Andy Warhol was not simply a biographical transition, in which a successful commercial artist became a serious avant-garde artist. It was a social transition, in that certain individuals of great importance in keeping track of the frontiers of art recognized that Warhol had done something of significance as far as the shape of
that frontier was concerned. Artistic change has to be recognized and accepted as such by what we shall designate (to follow usage) as “the
art world
” of that time—certain curators, dealers, critics, collectors, and, of course, other artists. That art world was in this respect prepared for Andy Warhol. He entered an ongoing discourse, and contributed to the direction this discourse took over the next years. By itself, that did not suffice, of course, to make him an icon. For that, a culture far wider than the art world of the very early 1960s was required, and Warhol himself had to be perceived in ways that went far beyond questions of the frontiers of art. Certainly, his being an artist was central in his becoming an icon—but how many artists, after all, go on to become icons? Very few. Only Warhol, for example, in the Pop art movement, who collectively changed the face of art in the mid-1960s, in fact rose to iconic stature. Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselman, and James Rosenquist were the chief Pop artists, and none of them really became icons save within some sector of the art world, if even there. They were each wonderful artists. But Warhol was to become
the
artist of the second half of the twentieth century. He became an artist for people who knew very little about art. He represented an ideal form of life that touched his world from many sides. He embodied a concept of life that embraced the values of an era that we are still living in. In certain ways he created an iconic image of what life was all about. No other artist came close to doing that.

The change from artist to icon happened fairly rapidly. By
1965, for example, the transformation was complete. In October of that year, Andy and his “Superstar,” Edie Sedgwick, attended his first American retrospective exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. There was a crowd of at least two thousand rapturous persons, most of them students. No one had expected a crowd that large, and the curator, Sam Green, to be prudent, removed most of the paintings from the walls, leaving the gallery all but bare. But the crowd had not come so much to look at the art as to see Warhol and his consort. Chants of “Andy and Edie! Andy and Edie!” went up. People were jostled and trampled. It became a problem of crowd control much like what was happening at rock concerts. Andy, Edie, and their party found safety on an iron staircase, where, like demagogues on balconies, they waved at the crowds below. Finally a hole was axed in the ceiling, and the celebrities were able to escape to the floor above. Crowd behavior like that was almost standard with certain dreamboat musicians, like the Beatles, or Frank Sinatra before them. But it was unheard of at art events, where the institutional atmosphere of the museum enjoined quiet and respect. The change did not escape Warhol's notice. “To think of it happening at an art opening,” he said. “Even a Pop Art opening. But then, we weren't just at the art exhibit—we
were
the exhibit” (Bourdon, 213–14).

The history of Modernist art was a history of anger and resentment. As far back as the Salon des Refusés of 1863, on the instruction of Louis Napoleon, paintings rejected by the selection
committee were hung in a separate gallery, where viewers could make up their own minds. Manet's
Déjeuner sur l'herbe
was the target of jeers and shouts of derision. There were riots in Paris when Alfred Jarry's
Ubu Roi
was first presented, or when Stravinsky's
Sacre de Printemps
was first performed. There was jeering in the gallery where Matisse and the Fauves were displayed in the Salon of 1905. This did not happen with art in the 1960s. On the contrary, it was felt, particularly by younger audiences, to be their art, to be part of
their
culture. By 1965, everyone knew in a general way the kind of art Warhol was making. The crowds at the ICA created, spontaneously, an event that would not have arisen with Lichtenstein or Oldenburg, and certainly not for the painters in the previous generation of Abstract Expressionists. Nor really did it happen anywhere with Minimalist art, which replaced Pop as the mainstream avant-garde art in the mid-1960s. Pop art's successor was pretty much a big yawn as far as the general population was concerned. But with Pop, the change in art was perceived as radical, the meaning of art for ordinary persons had changed, and much of this was something that Warhol had done. At least, in his case, because of his art he had begun the ascent to the status of an icon.

But let's return to “The Birth of Andy Warhol,” and the period in which he had painted
Before and After.
No one can have known that, with the change in decade, from the 1950s to the 1960s, the whole of Western culture was entering a period of convulsive change. No one could have anticipated the tremendous
change in attitude that lay ahead, especially in youth culture, in 1968. It was a decade in which boundary after boundary was broken and washed away. The boundary between vernacular and high art was breached in the very early 1960s. It was a way of overcoming the gap between art and life. My theory is that when there is a period of deep cultural change, it shows up first in art. The age of Romanticism first became visible in the way English gardens were laid out, “natural” as opposed to formal. In 1964, the Beatles made their first visit to America, wearing long hair, testing a boundary between the genders. That very year, the boundary between the races was attacked as Freedom Riders went into the American South to help black citizens redeem their civil rights. The campus upheavals of 1968 put under attack the boundaries between the generations, and young people claimed a right to determine the curriculum, and to study the subjects closest to them, including courses in ethnic and gender studies that would have been unheard of in the previous decade. But their demands went beyond the institution of the university, into the region where the most far-reaching political decisions were made. Meanwhile, radical feminism emerged in the late 1960s, putting under attack traditional boundaries between the lives of men and women, the latter demanding equality or even more, autonomy. In 1969, the Stonewall Riots put under attack the boundaries between straight and gay sexual differences, deeming them irrelevant to civil life. Late in the decade, Warhol created a kind of cabaret, with the in-house rock group The Velvet Underground,
and other entertainments, which he called “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” “Exploding” and “Inevitable” somehow capture the volatility of change that marked the 1960s. But the transition from Andy Warhol, commercial artist, to Andy Warhol, art icon, while perhaps inevitable, was not explosive. It was, initially, an uncertain kind of groping toward an art that did not really exist yet, and an identity neither Warhol nor anyone close to him would have been able to pin down. And the “discourse” I spoke of, which he ultimately found a way to enter, was as yet ill defined and uncertain. That makes Bockris's metaphor of birth particularly apt. The fetus gropes blindly in the dark, heading toward a world it could not have visualized, in the warm cavity that had so far constituted its entire atmosphere.