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'I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR'
Three enduring images from Andy Warhol's Fame Academy
By Robert Brown
One look at today's television programming and it becomes clear that Warhol's famous prophecy that 'in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes', is close to becoming truth. In addition to the increasing proliferation of so-called 'reality' TV shows, there are now celebrities for every ordinary, banal and mundane human activity it is possible to think of. If television is to be believed, the world is slowly transforming into the kind of freak show parade in a hall of mirrors that characterized Warhol's Silver Factory in the late 1960s.
As Warhol himself remembered of the sixties, when everyone is considered a star and lives in the kind of twilight-zone atmosphere of constantly being 'on' that his own incessant film-making and recording activities at the Factory encouraged, the boundaries between what is real and what is not become blurred. For Warhol, these boundaries remained unimportant. Mesmerized by both the allure and shallowness of celebrity, Warhol, through his art, sought to elevate everyone and everything to the same 'heady' level of stardom. In so doing he showed us that 'everything is worthy of our attention' (John Cage) and became 'a speechless and rather terrifying oracle who made visible what was happening in some part to us all', (Calvin Tomkins).
Among the most famous and enduring images in all of Warhol's work is one of his first; the Campbell's Soup Can. Focusing on this seemingly bland and unassuming image from the supermarket shelf with all the reverence and devotion of an icon painter, Warhol conferred it with star status. Not altogether unknowingly, in converting one of the most ordinary and best-loved products of American mass-consumerism into a magnificent icon of Fine Art, the Slovak Catholic boy from Pittsburgh who had grown up among pictures of the saints and the Virgin, transformed the history of American art at a stroke.
Not only were Warhol's soup cans seen as heralding a 'return to Realism' in modern painting, but their seeming authorlessness, lack of painterliness, and their overriding display of a cool and distanced objectivity—a feature which distinguishes much of Warhol's work—was deemed distinctly unnerving. Was this a critique or a celebration of consumerism, people wondered? The monolithic Soup Can offered no answer and, true to form, Warhol himself remained deliberately ambiguous on the subject. 'I just paint things I always thought were beautiful,' he once elaborated, 'things you use every day and never think about.' I'm working in soups, and I've been doing some paintings of money. I just do it because I like it.' Such an attitude merely prompted further vexation and anxiety from his audience.
Standing silent and alone, a friendly and familiar face from the supermarket that gazes coldly out from the canvas, Warhol's Soup Can offered itself up, like its creator, as a mirror to be whatever people wanted it to be. Pop art is 'just taking the outside and putting it on the inside or taking the inside and putting it on the outside' Warhol said at this time. After having elevated the banal and the ordinary to celebrity status with his honorific portraits of Soup Cans, Dollar bills, and Coca Cola bottles,Warhol then reversed the process with his next series. These were iconic portraits of Hollywood celebrities which, through their often repetitive imagery revealed stars like Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando to be brand images for another mass-consumer industry.
With its unforgettable image of a leather-clad Marlon Brando resting on his Triumph motorbike in a scene from the 1953 movie The Wild One Warhol's 1966 silkscreen painting Brando encapsulates the 'Rebel Without a Cause' stereotype of the teenager that was promoted by Hollywood in the late 1950s and later capitalized on by the denim industry in the early '60s. Executed on a raw unpainted canvas, the rare (for Warhol) material quality of this painting echoes the rough masculinity of its subject. This heightened masculinity is, as with Warhol's portrait of Elvis with a gun from the movie Flaming Star, part of a Hollywood-style 'butchness' that is also highly camp. Indeed, by the time that Warhol painted Brando, the leather outfit and biker's cap that the star is seen wearing had become de rigueur for many a butch queen in the downtown clubs of New York. In this way Warhol once again held up a mirror to society by creating an ambiguous and double-sided image that questions the conventions of the way we look at, and up to, our idols.
By 1966 however, Warhol himself had become a star and an idol. Ensconced in his Silver Factory where he was largely preoccupied with the making of his notorious films, Warhol's face was better known than that of any other artist in America. Largely self-constructed, after a nose operation and the donning of a peroxide wig Warhol's self-image was as much a conscious act of self-promotion as it was also a mask to hide behind.
In his 1966-67 series of Self-portraits, he reflects this duality by presenting his face half hidden in shadow and semi- abstract. Executed during the height of 60s drug experimentation, the lurid hallucenogenic colours of these self-portraits reflect the idea that reality itself is an artificial construction of many different layers. 'All my films are artificial,' Warhol once observed, 'but then everything's sort of artificial. I don't know where artificial stops and the real starts.'
In this Self-portrait Warhol presents in the contemplative pose of the objective and dispassionate observer that he liked to take up when standing behind his movie camera as it ran 'sucking in reality like a vacuum cleaner'. In this early version from the series, Warhol has emphasized the fakeness of his self-image by outlining in lurid red, the contours of his wig. Underneath this somewhat comical appendage his impassive face stares back at the viewer's inquisitive gaze returning it like a mirror and revealing little. Deliberately exposing the artifice of both his image and his artistic practice Warhol presents himself as a flat iconic fiction that exists somewhere on the borderlines of reality: a visual personification of his statement that 'if you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.'
Robert Brown is Head of Research & Education, Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Art.
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ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
Sale 1232, Lot 5
Campbell's Soup Can (Pepper Pot)
signed and dated 'Andy Warhol 62' (on the stretcher)
Casein and graphite on canvas
Estimate: $1,500,000 - 2,000,000
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