Andy Warhol: the man in the ironic mask
(ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP via Getty Images)
Andy Warhol and Tate Modern might have been made for one another. The man who made an art form out of advertising and brilliance out of banality began his life in Pittsburgh, once the capital of America’s steel industry, now part of its rust belt. Everything about Warhol screams “post-industrial”.
And so Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s Bankside Power Station, opened in 1952, now London’s temple of modern art, is the perfect setting for an exhibition of the works of the artist who turned his studio into “The Factory”. Warhol’s art may be decadent, but it is so in a thoroughly modern way. Without him, mass producers of the meretricious, such as Damien Hirst, would not exist. It is easy to take the persistent presence of Warhol and his innumerable imitators in our culture for granted, but somebody had to do it first. His originality consisted in the abolition of originality.
The Tate Modern show, which closes on 6 September, offers a good overview of Warhol’s meteoric career. Born Andrew Warhola, his parents were poor immigrants from the Carpathians in what is now Slovakia. They spoke their mother tongue, Rusyn, at home and his mother, Julia, is seen doing so in one of his films. Though he moved to New York as soon as he could escape, changed his name and reinvented himself as a gay idol, his Catholic upbringing was important to him and he remained very much his mother’s son, bringing her to live with him until her death.
Unlike the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which meticulously explains his methods, the Tate show devotes less attention to the technical and more to the erotic aspects of his output. Warhol’s sexuality was certainly unorthodox, embracing the trans subculture long before it became either as fashionable or as controversial as it is today. But one has the impression that his relationships were, like everything else in his life, just grist to the mill of his art. The person who figured most vividly in his output was not a man, let alone a lover, but his “Superstar”, the actress Edie Sedgwick. Like others in his circle, she drank, took drugs and died young. The Factory was, however, also the launching pad for many careers in film and fashion as well as art.
Warhol’s iconography of himself — which anticipated the “Selfie” by a generation — was no less artificial than the rest of his imagery. His first priority on arrival in Manhattan was a nose job. When his hairline began to recede in his twenties, he wore a wig; several of them are displayed with their boxes in a vitrine as yet another macabre joke. His face is one of the most familiar in the history of art; yet the man himself is elusive. A fascinating yet excruciating film sequence shows him being made up. Though he occasionally speaks, one has no sense of his personality. Warhol was the man in the ironic mask.
The most dramatic event in his short life — he died in 1987 aged 58 — was the moment in 1968 when the radical feminist writer Valerie Solanas sought him out in the Factory and accused him of plagiarism. Warhol had given her a part in one of his films, I, a Man, but he failed to produce her play, Up Your Ass. Claiming that he had stolen or lost her manuscript, she then fired three shots at him. The first two missed but the third critically wounded him in chest and abdomen, damaging several vital organs. Declared clinically dead at hospital, Warhol was miraculously resuscitated. He eventually recovered, but suffered chronic pain and wore a surgical corset for the rest of his life. Solanas, who also shot at two of Warhol’s associates, was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and served only three years. She continued to advocate the “elimination” of the male sex. Norman Mailer, who had also stood trial for stabbing his wife, called her “the Robespierre of feminism”. After her release, Solanas stalked Warhol, was repeatedly institutionalised and eventually drifted to San Francisco, where she outlived her victim by just a year. She is remembered for her SCUM Manifesto, but mainly for her failed attempt on Warhol’s life. Perhaps she was really less of a Robespierre than a Charlotte Corday.
The irony is that plagiarism had always been Warhol’s metier. He would take a brand name, a celebrity photo, a propaganda image — and stamp it with his own charisma, usually using his signature silk screen printing technology. But his art changed after the shooting, becoming if possible even more impersonal. He suffered from anxiety and security at the Factory was tightened. One of the most powerful images in the exhibition is not actually by him, but by the photographer Richard Avedon. It shows Warhol’s body in pitiless close-up, the head missing, so that the eye lingers on the stitches that criss-cross his torso. The effect is almost anatomical, yet there is a strange beauty in these terrible injuries. Perhaps this is why Warhol, the most enigmatic of narcissists, allowed Avedon to depict him so intimately.
Warhol’s own later images are less memorable than the pop art of the 1960s. There is something sinister about some of them, especially his obsession with monsters such as Mao and Lenin. The exception is his celebrated late self-portrait — perhaps his outstanding achievement. Shock-haired, his features ravaged by pain, his expression grim, his eyes vacant, it is a disturbing document of his physical decline. Warhol may have been vain, but he was also merciless. There is nothing ironic about the face that stares out at us. Here, finally, Warhol’s mask slipped.
