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With an exhibition of Andy Warhol self portraits about to open, Paul Dale explains why the artist is as relevant today as he ever was.
ndy Warhol said many things. many of them
contradictory. While he reyelled in the
company oi those swimming in the shallowest pools ol' celebrity. he was all too aware of his ability. as the most celebrated pop artist of his generation. to mix tip gobbledegook with guru-isms in order to perplcx both his critics and his admirers. But occasionally he wotrld ctrt to the quick. such as when stating: '.»\n artist is someone who produces things that people don‘t need to haye btrt that he ~ for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to giye them.’ Or when later in his life he wrote: ‘l'ye decided something: commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks.‘
Warhol‘s bland soundbites and even more corny diary entries and writings (‘l neyer think people die. They just go to department stores.‘ he once wrote on hearing about the death of an acquaintance) were in tact part oi a greater game he played with both his own sanity and the art world at large. [I was through his most sustained and fully realised piece oi writing. his l‘)77 book The Philosophy rill-truly Hirr/rols From A to If and Back Again. that I first became obsessed with the man and the artist. The book was his paradoxical. contradictory confession ol’ a me liyed masquerading as a mercenary pop artist (is there any other kind'.’). I had nicked the book from my older brother. who was at that time (the mid [980st
a po—l‘aced l'an ol progressiye rock with a penchant for
the writings ol~ Marx. Lenin and David ()wen.
What had attracted my brother to Warhol was his take on historical materialism. or what Marx himsell' called 'the materialist conception of history. a method which accounts for the deyelopments and changes in human history according to economic. technological and material deyelopment‘. My sibling. an employment law student. at the time hated the modish ambiyalence with which Warhol dealt with commerce. art and capitalism. At one point Warhol writes: ‘A lady friend of mine asked me. "Well. what do you loye most?" That's how I started painting money.‘ Needless to say. I loyed everything that my brother despised. I immediately got Warhol's hiin art al‘l'rrmation ot‘ contemporary mass culture and got his loye tor the cheap energy of the world and his amoral militant shallowness. His worldview stood against all the political correctness that my elders took every chance to pronounce.
From that point on I became obsessed with Warhol. searching out his silk-screened repros ot‘ icons such as
Marilyn Monroe and Jackie ()nassis. I collected cans ot~
tomato soup. building up stack towers ot‘ the stuff in my student digs. and watched as the cans peeled and
10 THE LIST 3—1 T Feb 30-35
WARHOL MADE IT COOL TO BE ELUSIVE, COMMUNAL, BOHEMIAN AND PROPHETICALLY AMBIVALENT
It. I had eyer had the chance to point any oi this stul'l‘
Pop idol
dampened with the red—black sludge born the inside slowly calcil'ying the outside. I got into the \clyet l'nderground; l scoured t'S \ ideo catalogues tor copies ol' the e\perimental moyies he made with Paul Morrissey. Putting on Slurp or Blow Job are still among my layourite ways to driye unwanted guests l'rom my house. Yet just as l was warming to the cra/y world ol' this sickly (‘/ech emigre t'r‘om l’cnnsylyania. he pulled the curtain on the show and died in I‘)87.
Since his death. Warhol‘s art has gi\ en [tie to a million homages but none had as cultural historian James Park puts it « ‘discoml‘orted so many by being so positiyc. and had so mtrch that was negatiye. eyen nihilist. read into his work. For eycryone but him. it seems. the celebration will always he tinged by dread.‘ The idea that Warhol's work will l‘orcyer inhabit that area ol insipid analysis that is always pr'el'ixed with the phrase ‘how can they call that art'." seems sad to me. Bcwiggcd and incorruptihlc. Warhol was the man who predicted the celebrity obsession \\ e now liind ourselyes in with his utterances about lame. But more than that he made it cool to be elusiye. bohemian
mass production: much of which he grasped from the writings ol‘ the philosopher Walter Benjamin.
out to Warhol he would haye just giggled in that inimitable litisetto way and pointed me in the direction of his sell portraits (a project he worked on l‘or oy er 40 years) and whispered: 'You want to know about .-\ndy Warhol. just look at the sur‘l‘ace ol my paintings and lilms and me; there I am. There’s nothing behind it.‘
Andy Warhol: Self Portraits, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Sat 12 Feb-Mon 2 May.
PlUCKING fRUliS FROM THE CUlillRAl BUSH
and ambiyalent towards the age oi
I That wonderful m< we ~ntlustry
phrase 'in developrneut' rovers: a multituoe of Cinematic rains. Whitt- so many projects never see the light of day one of those languishing in development hell that has been t'OStitlHl — thanks to Anton Corbijn is the rirlanned biopic of Ian Curtis, he ot .loy Drvrsron, who topped himself back in 1980. ihe film had been held up by its backers" inability to agree on a director of a suitable calibre. but the Dutcnborn phottxjrapher has been lined up to make his directorial debut at the helm of the movre. now called Control It's based on the book by Curtis' Widow. Detxnah, and production is due to start in July With a number of major British actors in the running for the lead. 0er money's on Bill Oddie . . . Outkast’s Andre 3000 has been confirmed as one of the stars of the new animated remake of famous children's book Charlotte‘s Web. Andre wrll mice the part of Elwyn the crow and joins Julia Roberts as Charlotte. John Cleese as Samuel the sheep. Oprah Wrntrey as Gussy the goose and Reba McEntire and Kathy Bates as the cows. The film IS scheduled for a 2006 release . On a Similar note. where have all those great oprum-addled Victorian TV detectives gone these days? The same place as the cast of Brooksr‘de. we suspect. but fear not. as the ever versatile Shane Richie has been signed up to play Inspector GeOrge Frederick Abberline in an eight—part drama about the hunt for Jack the Ripper. A scarier prospect still IS the proposed Sharon Osbourne reality show in which the darling of fly on the wall TV attempts to become an MP in the next general election. A chilling thought indeed.