Pop Art brought the image back from the grave where Abstract Art had dumped it, but it was not the same image, instead of man and his tiresome worries about his soul and his desires, it was the image of man’s possessions; his soft drumset, his bathrobe, his comics, even his flag in a new format or worse yet a goat wearing the tire of his precious car. Portraying our culture through man’s commercial objects is certainly valid especially when man’s main aspiration is greed, but why is Warhol alone becoming the most famous artist of our time?
We are all obsessed with fame and Andy wasn’t any different. Warhol is the icon of our time not just because he painted the American icons; the silver Elvis, the Marilyns, the soup can, but because he was interested in their fame. Like an alchemist Warhol’s art tries to extract the essence of fame from the icons he paints. What he really wanted to paint was fame. He is not interested in Norma Jean. He is interested in the star, Maralyn Monroe. He is not interested in his personal interpretation of Maralyn or in exercising his talent for drawing. As Morgan Fisher points out, instead of drawing Warhol wants to trace. Silk-screening a photo of the object is a form of tracing, and tracing is a form of adoration. Warhol then adds color, more adoration, in flat blocks on the eyes, mouth, or skin, reminiscent of the unnatural effects of make-up. I think it’s because he wants to erase the icon’s humanness so just its fame is left. In reverse, if he paints an unknown collector the same way he makes them famous.
Fame is the elusive thing everyone wants because it’s the only escape from death left to us now that heaven is no longer a viable option. Science and logic have proved there is no heaven but that hardly erases our need for an afterlife and Fame is the only antidote available. By picking celebrities, Warhol addresses this need more perfectly than any other Pop artist.
The electric chair is a serious celebrity, an icon of shame which we don’t like to think about, but Warhol puts it on a canvas, he colors it like a painting, and shows it in the sacred place reserved for art. When you look at this icon in it’s true place, your knees start to buckle with recognition. The soup can is a humble celebrity but it is a powerful icon. It’s the day your mother became modern and started feeding you canned crap instead of Grandma’s home-made soup, the day she was liberated by minute maid with fortified vitamin C, and by mister washing machine, and the vacuum, the day you came home and found she had gone mad because she had nothing to do and had to be put on drugs. The famous red and white can reeks of the new modern poverty, food without nourishment and the appearance of this poisonous can was proof that SHE didn’t love you…anymore. Warhol hated Campbell’s Soup. As a child he got it for lunch every day and his mother played a terrifying part in his determination to be famous. The C can is probably the most emotional painting he ever did.
On the other hand, Sleep, the portrait of Andy’s sleeping lover, is the most romantic idea anyone has had in decades, to have your sleeping lover on film playing forever on your bedroom wall, so when you’re fucking someone else you can still get off, even after he’s left you. Like the fairytale, Sleeping Beauty, he will never grow old. The immortality of the moment that only film can achieve is what Sleep is really about.
Good night
Artillery Magazine Vol 3 no. 4 April 2009