Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Look for erotic charge in Warhol's art, and you probably won't be disappointed. In his movies alone, there's enough variety to satisfy just about every taste. My hopelessly heterosexual appetite inclines me toward debutante manqué Edie Sedgwick, whom Koestenbaum perfectly describes as "hypnotized by her own gestural carnival," but there's also ample footage of Gerard Malanga, depicted by Koestenbaum as "a beat Beau Brummel," and even of the Puerto Rican post office worker turned drag queen Maria Montez.
Warhol also made silk-screens of subjects perhaps more physically enticing than those early pictures of Popeye. That Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley were sex idols clear across American culture goes without saying, and his images of each capture them at the prime of their glamour. The series he titled "Torsos" is more explicit, silk-screens made from Warhol's Polaroids of male and female genitalia, and pictures like "Silver Car Crash" may just qualify as pornography within the J.G. Ballard set. But Koestenbaum is after something more, something different. Perhaps taking his cue from Warhol, who liked to call sex abstract, he gives the following sexual exegesis on Andy's notorious Campbell's Soup silk-screens:
"[D]isplacement and other metaphoric processes contributed to his choice of Campbell soup as subject, and connected the image to his erotic hungers. Indeed, cans, in Warhol's work, continue the task of [his earlier] 'cock drawings,' for cans allude to the sexual body, and to limbs iconically isolated from the whole: as a ... penis (in his 'cock drawings') is featured in relative isolation from face and torso, so the can is alienated from the act of eating that it nonetheless announces as a purchasable possibility. The can's most arresting word -- the eye ignores it for the first hundred times -- is condensed: 'Campbell's Condensed.' Condensation is a property of dreams and the unconscious; the soup-can fetish condenses Andy's unspeakable interior procedures, and gives them a shopwindow's attractiveness."
Even ignoring the obvious implausibility of Koestenbaum's claim, we must consider the more tenuous assumption from which it arises: Rather than taking Warhol's life and art as two faces of an interesting fiction, he imagines that we can understand Andy's life by deciphering his art, as if Warhol were an Enigma Machine systematically encoding some known quantity. Certainly those soup cans are loaded with metaphoric potential. So are Warhol's films, and the stories swarming his life. Yet Koestenbaum, like so many of Warhol's would-be biographers, confuses metaphor for fact, a mistake as great as assuming that an accurate nautical map spread smooth on a table proves that the world is flat.
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Echoing the estimable art critic Arthur Danto, Koestenbaum says that Warhol was a philosopher. "He used his art to think through problems of space, time, and embodiment, and the center of his metaphysical investigations was the aroused or indifferent body ..." I must disagree: Andy Warhol wasn't a philosopher. He was, and remains, a philosophy.
What I mean is that he interests us not as a commentator but as the object of ever inconclusive commentary, not as an investigator but as the scene of a perfect crime. This may seem odd, as he's popularly perceived as a voyeur, the man who routinely asked strangers to drop their pants, never went anywhere without a tape recorder (an accessory he suggestively called his wife). But all that was part of his act, facets of the life that was his art. While I don't doubt that Warhol knew what he was up to with his naïveté, by now I also know better than to quibble: Dismiss Andy's act and you've missed his art, but indulge his naïveté by emulating it, and you start truly to appreciate his work.
Koestenbaum wants to believe that Warhol explored the problems of philosophy as if his Factory were his laboratory, as if each artwork were an experiment with which he came to metaphysical conclusions presented for our edification, concealed in an iconography of Leonardo-like sophistication. What he actually did was less complicated but more difficult: In his life, he embodied ideas worthy of laboratory study.
We're told that Warhol once had another man in powdered hair impersonate him on a college lecture tour, and also that he wished he could be replaced by a robot. We're told that he had his mother sign his name to his drawings, that he had studio assistants pull his silk-screens, and acquaintances inseminate his ejaculation paintings. We're told that he routinely asked people what he should paint, and some of his best subjects, including soup cans, were suggested by others. We're told that he may have authorized Malanga, that beat Beau Brummel, to run off fraudulent Warhols in Europe. We're told that Andy authored his only novel by first pursuing his speed-freak groupies with a tape recorder for 24 hours and then insisting that his publisher print the typescript, an erratic document produced in Factory off-hours by various nameless studio squatters, without any copy-editing whatsoever.
Elsewhere we're told that same story, except that Warhol hired a professional typing service to make the transcript. I prefer the first version, not because it comes from a more credible source but because it involves more accomplices, another chancy element along the ever-unaccountable Warhol assembly line.
Chancier and chancier. I can choose the story I find more suitable, the one that opens more questions, because the Factory systematically overwrote any attempt at one official story. So we're told not only that Warhol hired an impersonator on the college lecture circuit but also that he expected anybody who answered the Factory telephone to be Andy on his behalf. That was especially important when Warhol was called by interviewers: Even the lies they were told weren't Andy's own. Astoundingly, he seems to have accelerated history: It's taken centuries for us to become as unsure about Shakespeare as we are of Warhol. He could become an icon in his own lifetime because even as we saw him with our own eyes, at a flea market, say, or at a party with Bianca Jagger and Halston, we couldn't even begin to agree with one another who he really was, couldn't be sure that anybody, even he, knew the truth.
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