Monday, May 12, 2008
Andy Warhol, ultimate icon of pop, made painting an orgy and pornography an art form. But you'll never guess what he did between the sheets.
Sep 28, 2001 | The public grade school in my neighborhood, like so many around the country, is a preposterous edifice of neoclassical posturing, with a miscellany of famous names inscribed across its facade. Neither arbitrary nor encyclopedic, the list seems to me the lasting trace of a spectacularly capricious selection process. Homer and Galileo and Comte. Pericles and Shakespeare. Pasteur and Moses and Wagner. About the only thing the names have in common is that each overshadows the accomplishments of the man it marks. They are names we know before we know why we know them, and better than we'll ever know the people for whom they once stood: Galileo and Homer are our cultural icons on account of their obliging anonymity, our idols because they embody whatever we desire.
Andy Warhol also had that. He made himself a name, and vanished in our midst. That was his art. Pity anybody who undertakes his biography: Whatever one claims is questionable, and to catch him whole is less feasible, even, than dismissing him out of hand.
Wayne Koestenbaum, English professor and cultural commentator, has made an arresting attempt. His new book -- part of the Penguin Lives series profiling such edifice icons as the Buddha, Mozart and Joan of Arc -- is an important study in ambivalent sexual identity. Whether "Andy Warhol" truly depicts Andy Warhol is irrelevant, a point with which I have to assume Koestenbaum would agree: Over the decade I've been entranced by Warhol, greatest artist of the late 20th century, and I've read only perhaps half the sources in Koestenbaum's eight-page bibliography, yet even I can appreciate the skill with which he's navigated contradictory accounts to find for his biography a set of facts convenient to his own vision of male sexuality.
The great glory of Warhol is that, even more than with Moses or Mozart, you can believe anything, and find a wealth of material to complicate your theory into a self-sustaining object of study. He is a blank-check metaphor to be spent time and again. The only trouble comes if you try to cash in, mistake hypothetical for history. As Koestenbaum vividly illustrates in his compellingly irrelevant account, even the best and brightest writers are susceptible to that slip into the Warhol abyss.
Koestenbaum's discourse on gay sex in the '60s through the '80s stars Andy Warhol as ugly duckling, and certainly there's ample physical evidence to support such casting: Before the age of 30, Warhol wore a wig and had been to a surgeon to sand down his bulbous red nose. Combine that with the neurological damage done by chorea while he was still a child -- he was hypersensitive to touch for the rest of his life -- and the deep divide between his public fame and his intense privacy, and you have all it takes to make up a fascinating sexual profile, especially against a backdrop as free of inhibition as the studio Warhol called his "Factory," in a world as repressed as America before Stonewall.
Naturally, every kink only adds interest. As Koestenbaum's inquiry falls into the throes of sex, he finds that, "For Warhol, everything is sexual. Stillness is sexual. Looking and being looked at are sexual. Time is sexual: that is why it must be stopped. Warhol's art was the sexualized body his actual body largely refused to be."
Warhol seems to have been amenable to people thinking of him like that. Speaking to one of his '60s superstars about some of the comic book characters who were the subject of his first pop paintings, he claimed that they'd been his sex idols as a child: "My mother caught me one day playing with myself and looking at a Popeye cartoon," he confessed.
If we take him at his word, never advisable in his case, that makes those innocuous images consistent with the sexually explicit scenarios characteristic of his films (aptly titled "Blow Job" for example, or "Taylor Mead's Ass") and the paintings made late in his life by ejaculating onto canvas.
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