The opposite of sex

I should confess that, like Koestenbaum, I never met Warhol. He died in 1987, which was my freshman year in high school. My serious interest didn't begin until college, brought on by conversations that wouldn't end, contradictions that couldn't be resolved. Once I started to see, there was no natural place to stop.

There is too much Warhol. He boasted that in a single year he could produce as many paintings as Picasso did in a lifetime. He shot so much footage that some of his films still haven't been screened, and others, such as his masterly eight-hour image of an absolutely stationary Empire State Building, challenge the attention span of even the most ardent fan. (Another Warhol story, absolutely unverified, tells of the time a few film students kidnapped Andy, chained him to a seat in an abandoned theater, and started "Empire" on the projector. By the time they returned to run the second reel, he'd escaped, vanished without a trace.)

Too, too much. Beyond what we ordinarily call Andy's art, there are multiple ghostwritten books, all those cookie jars that cluttered his house. There are his time capsules, boxes filled with each month's junk, now housed en masse at the colossal Andy Warhol Museum. Koestenbaum starts to catalog one, in which he finds: "porn, fashion magazines, Natalie Wood publicity photos, a newspaper with a picture of John F. Kennedy Jr., a copy of Kenneth Anger's 'Hollywood Babylon,' invitations from Warhol's 1957 Golden Pictures show at the Bodley Gallery, bills, issues of Life and The New Yorker, a piece of blank canvas, a letter from Gerard Malanga ..."

I can think of only one case of a collection that comes close in scope: The dymaxion (a word he coined made from "dynamic" and "maximum") remains of R. Buckminster Fuller now occupy some 1,500 linear feet of shelf space in a controlled-climate storage facility near Stanford University. Still, the Fuller files are the product of an opposite inclination. Bucky, who called himself Guineapig B, preserved every lecture, letter, sketch and dry cleaning receipt in perfect chronological order, indexed as meticulously as Diderot's Encyclopédie, to provide history with a single perfect record of a life lived across the 20th century.

In life he attempted to be exemplary, a renaissance everyman, that he might leave a paper trail as universal as it was comprehensive. Of course his project failed: The volume of information precluded comprehension. The range of thought blew the mind. Bucky Fuller became a cultural icon as the amount we knew about him was overwhelmed by the amount we knew we'd never know.

With Warhol, we don't even have the pretense of comprehension. No Guineapig B, he sometimes called himself Andy Paperbag. The name evokes not experience, but accumulation. As an icon, he out-Buckminstered Fuller in half the lifetime. The boxes just piled up. The parties with Bianca Jagger and Halston bloated his oral diaries. The flea market finds filled his townhouse to warehouse capacity. Ever afraid of death, Warhol buried himself ahead of his years, preserved a little like Pompeii, and now we have all the ambiguity of excavation, the wear of history, intangible antiquity.

We cannot touch Shakespeare or Joan of Arc. Their names are but a façade. We know them by degrees of separation, as hypersensitive Andy held people off with the freak show of his ugly duckling body. No matter who the man in the white wig slept with, the artist Andy Warhol, the icon that is the face of his artwork, is asexual to the degree that he is ahistorical, ahistorical to the extent that he's immortal. We shouldn't be surprised that, shackled into viewing his own moving picture, Warhol slipped right out of the theater.

He had no body, no substance to hold him still. His whole life was a vanishing act, dramatic because the ballast he appeared to add -- the fame, the paintings, the junk -- paradoxically reduced what remained of Andy Paperbag to the iconic shorthand, the laboratory purity, of a Guineapig A. The mystery, how he did it, is the impossible philosophical conundrum he created, the artwork of his lifetime that so aboundingly confounds Koestenbaum, Danto, me.

Maybe the man in the white wig was also a little curious about Andy Warhol. Maybe he was even a philosopher, a man with insight of his own. If so, I'd like to believe he left us a message: In 1985, a New York nightclub called Area briefly showed an Andy Warhol original called "Invisible Sculpture." On a pedestal against a wall, Warhol momentarily stood beside a label bearing the artist's name. Then the man in the white wig walked away.

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