Saturday night before my San Diego trip, we watched Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture
, a documentary I had TiVo’d off the Ovation channel a few weeks ago. Neither Amy nor I like Warhol’s work particularly, but I’ve long been fascinated by his place in the contemporary intersection of art, commerce and celebrity, so we gave it a try.
I think discussions of Warhol’s work tend to center more on “the art world” than on art per se, and whether he was perpetrating a massive fraud on such. Unfortunately, I’m not versed enough in art history to give you guys a real critique of Warhol; I’m sure some of you have enough knowledge of it to beat any of my assertions to death on the rocks of my ignorance. Since the documentary raised enough questions about Warhol as a person, I’m gonna follow that lead.
The early stages of the movie — chronicling Warhol’s family history in Pittsburgh, his work as a commercial artist in NYC, and the rise and significance of pop art — tease out a number of elements that hint at the “boy behind the myth.” Perhaps it was a simplification of his formative years, but at least it yields a singular idea of who Warhol was. It’s a straightforward story, described mostly by his brothers, of a kid who was overly attached to his mother and didn’t really fit in at school.
(Note: I’m really want to see a documentary about the lives of his two brothers. It seems that they knew their brother was an artist in New York City, but had no clue as to how famous he was. One is filmed in a Harley-Davidson trucker cap, and it seems that he and Andy talked often, if not daily. At his death, Andy left each of the brothers $250,000, but his estate ended up valued around $600 million. No word on how they felt about that.)
What piqued my interested was the explicability of that young Warhol as contrasted with the ambivalence of the later edition(s).
Once Warhol becomes famous, there’s an explosion in the number of perspectives on him — understandably, since many more people knew him — but the figure they describe becomes much less clear. The more material there is, the less it makes for a coherent picture. This phenomenon seems to arise partly from the nature of the interviewees — artists and hangers-on, in a particularly drug-addled era — and partly from some elusive aspect of Warhol himself. The more they had to say, the less of a Warhol there was. I found myself wondering how this multiplicity of self paralleled one of his main forms of art: silk-screening. Do these prints, meaningful in their repetition and reduction, tell us something significant about the life of this artist?
Watching the documentary, I kept trying to resolve this issue of identity, especially as Warhol becomes a stand-in for the concept of celebrity and fame throughout the ’70s and ’80s. One of the interviewees talks about watching O.J. Simpson’s low-speed chase in 1994 and how similar it was to Warhol’s movie Empire, which consists of eight hours of a static shot of the Empire State Building.
Flipping through websites like the Superficial, I wonder what he would’ve made of today’s celebrities — even the marginally talented ones — who are followed by dozens of photographers every time they step outside. I suppose Paris Hilton, famous for being famous, would’ve made perfect sense to him. But that “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” aspect of Warhol doesn’t describe him.
What perplexes me about this is the fact that Warhol was an obsessive recorder of his activities, a “recording angel.” One of the interviewees considered this an attempt at staving off death; that is, by accreting so many moments, they can never really be lost (there’s a reason I call this blog Virtual Memories). The downside of such voluminous recording is that the task of sorting through it all becomes overwhelming. And, as Kierkegaard tells us, we need to be able to forget. (I think he said that.)
Even though there are mountains of tapes, I think the documentary only has one brief segment of Warhol’s voice: after his mother’s death in 1972, he calls his brother and tells him that he won’t be coming out for the funeral and that she would’ve wanted the cheapest arrangements possible. Occurring near the end of the film, it’s a perplexing choice. The only time we get “the man” in his own words, he’s essentially tossing his mom into a cheap pine box. (He was buried next to his parents at the “Byzantine Catholic Cemetery.” According to Wikipedia, he was buried in a solid bronze casket with gold-plated rails and white upholstery. And, of course, a platinum wig.)
As Virtual Memories go, I saved the answering machine tape of my dad informing me of his mother’s death. I’m not sure why I did that, but the likeliest reason was because of the emotion in my dad’s voice. Warhol, on the other hand, could almost be making a call to a caterer, for all the feeling he shows on that tape.
Far be it from me to judge how someone relates to his family. Cutting off his family and excising his past would’ve been explicable — I’ve known enough artists and poseurs who’ve followed that route — but that’s not who he was. Warhol kept his mom with him in NYC from around 1949 to 1971 or so. There’s a cute anecdote about how some visitors to his apartment assumed this elderly woman with the heavy accent was Warhol’s cleaning lady.
I know this is getting all over the place, but that’s what I’m trying to get at, this electron-cloud of self. The movie portrays a man who starts out somewhat “normal” and winds up bifurcating over and over into a range of human experience that no one can put a finger on. While this isn’t such an extreme phenomenon — I’ve written about the impossibility of biography before — it raises the question of whether there was an “essential” Warhol behind all the mysteries.
Far too early, the documentary mentions how Truman Capote once described Warhol as a “Sphinx without a secret.” I thought it was an ingenious metaphor for the man. When I looked up the phrase, I found out that Oscar Wilde used it first.
