Andy WarholAmerican, 1928–1987

Exhibitions

Banners and Tapestries (1967), 20th Century Master Prints (1975; tour),

Prints from the Walker Art Center’s Permanent Collection (1980; tour),

First Impressions: Early Prints by Forty-six Contemporary Artists

(1989; catalogue, tour), Duchamp’s Leg (1994; catalogue, tour), Art

Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones (1998;

catalogue), Andy Warhol Drawings: 1942–1987 (1999; organized by

the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and Kunstmuseum Basel;

catalogue), The Cities Collect (2000), Let’s Entertain (2000; catalogue,

tour), The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982

(2003; catalogue, tour)

Holdings

5 paintings, 9 sculptures, 1 drawing, 3 photographs, 1 video, 10 edition

prints/proofs, 7 portfolios of prints, 1 multiple, 6 books, 1 periodical

Today, Andy Warhol’s name is as widely recognizable as those of Marilyn, Elvis, Jackie, Liz, Campbell’s Soup, and Coke, some of his most famous subjects. For many people, the name Warhol is also synonymous with glamour, fame, hucksterism, money, and all the excesses of postwar American consumer culture. His life traces the classic American dream: he was born in Pittsburgh to working-class immigrant parents, and built a successful career in the 1950s as a New York commercial artist. He reinvented himself in the 1960s as a Pop painter and avant-garde filmmaker, then tran-scended the art world to become a wealthy interna-tional celebrity who was pursued by groupies and paparazzi. Warhol’s work, too, transgressed categories and pushed at the boundaries that defined what art could be, ultimately transforming the aesthetic land-scape through the unlikely agency of trashy, offhand films and deadpan paintings of banal subjects. Many of his works were made by committee, with the artist directing a band of cronies in the studio he called the Factory. Critic Edmund White called him a “brilliant dumbbell,”1 and he was not alone in wondering if Warhol’s success was attributable to a serendipitous combination of intuition, timing, savvy, and ambition more than simply to native intelligence and talent. But the artist insisted there was no mystery. “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.”2

Warhol had his first New York solo exhibition in 1962 at the Stable Gallery. The eighteen works presented gave viewers a look at what would become his signa-ture devices: a compositional structure based on the grid, and the use of silkscreen to apply photographic imagery to his canvases. The grid had figured in his earlier pictures of airmail stamps and S&H Green Stamps, but these were “painted” using stencils cut from balsa wood or rubber stamps carved out of gum erasers. Warhol first used photo-silkscreening for Baseball (1962), a repeating grid of news photos show-ing Roger Maris hitting a home run. Subsequently, he relied on newspaper photos as well as celebrity head shots, advertisements, comics, and all manner of found images as sources for his pictures, and silkscreening

was a quick, inexpensive, and accurate way to transfer them onto canvas. The smudges, missed alignments, and inconsistencies were always accepted, and give the works a handmade appearance despite the indus-trial process. There are clear connections between these works and Jasper Johns’ flags, targets, and alpha-bet grids, and Robert Rauschenberg’s embrace of news-paper imagery,3 but Warhol had found his own very modern voice by privileging mechanical techniques and serial imagery over the gestural brushwork and personal content favored by Johns and Rauschenberg. Repetition as a condition of modern life is perhaps most pervasive in the mass media, where iconic images, faces, and slogans appear again and again and again, moving from print to television to billboards, changing scale and color, being copied, cropped, degraded, and enhanced—but always remaining the same. Warhol brilliantly exploited this monotonous barrage, lining images up so that the profusion could be understood, then freezing them in place. The melancholy, black-and-blue Sixteen Jackies (1964) quotes from the incessant television coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, after which footage of the same events (inauguration, motorcade, funeral) was repeated for weeks. The Jackie canvases followed other death and disaster series, including the Car Crashes, Suicides, Electric Chairs, and Race Riots, which were based on photos from tabloids and movie magazines. Even his Marilyns, painted after her death, might be seen as por-traits of a suicide. Perhaps Warhol was attempting with these pictures to quiet his own purported fear of death through familiarity and repetition. “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect,” he told an interviewer in 1963.4 In 1964, when Sixteen Jackies was painted, Warhol’s Factory was in full swing, populated each day with var-ious assistants, friends, visitors, and hangers-on. Many were there to work on his films, a medium with which he was becoming increasingly involved; others helped him produce the paintings and sculptures. Some of these were on view in his second solo show at the Stable Gallery, in early 1964, which featured a profusion of grocery-carton sculptures—hand-painted and silk-screened facsimiles of boxes for Brillo soap pads, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Heinz Ketchup, and other prod-ucts. Warhol stacked the boxes in towers so that the gallery resembled the back room of a supermarket, and priced them inexpensively at $200 to $400 each.5 They sold poorly, but the show was a critical success, and the boxes—quintessential Pop objects—have become an important part of a larger conversation about appropri-ation that begins in the 1910s with Duchamp’s “ready-mades,” includes Johns’ painted bronze beer cans of 1960, and continues into the 1980s, when Richard Prince rephotographed magazine advertisements. In 1968 Warhol was shot and nearly killed by Valerie Solanis, a sometime Factory denizen and actress who had had a bit part in one of his films. Most observers mark the event as a turning point in his work as well as his life. Post-shooting, he hired himself out as a por-traitist to the rich and famous, turning out idealized likenesses based on his own Polaroids rather than the mass-media images he’d used during the previous

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decade. He produced new images of Marilyn, Mao, and others, but in negative (the Reversals), and began sprinkling glittery diamond dust (a powder obtained during the manufacture of industrial diamonds) on his canvases.6 Toward the end of the 1970s, he returned to self-portraiture, but the blank cool of his 1960s can-vases is gone; the late self-portraits include haunting images of Warhol’s disembodied head, with gaunt face and fright wig, floating on dark fields of color; expression istic memento mori featuring a human skull; and poignant photographs of the artist in skewed drag, wearing provisional makeup and cheap wigs and looking very mortal indeed. Finally, Warhol turned to abstraction—Warhol, whose soup cans and Marilyns had helped end the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, and whom de Kooning had accused of killing art, beauty, and even laughter.7 The Oxidation, Shadow, Rorschach, and Camouflage series of the late 1970s and 1980s approach the sublime in spite of banal sources and abject materials. The majestic, phantom Shadows were based on photographs of dramatically lit pieces of paperboard, and the Oxidations are canvases prepared with copper metallic paint on which the artist and others urinated, turning piss into cash in an alchemical revision of Action Painting. Warhol’s immense body of work includes thousands of paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, films, photo-graphs, multiples, and books—a cornucopia whose bounty hasn’t dimmed the appetite or enthusiasm of his public. Increasingly, he seems a crucial part of our focus on the proliferation of images and spectacle in contemporary culture, and the increasing overlap of art, consumption, entertainment, and information. Warhol understood long ago that the distinction among these realms would not hold. “I believe media is art,” he said, and he made it so.8

J.R.

Notes1. Quoted in Arthur C. Danto, “The Philosopher as Andy Warhol,” in Callie Angell et al., The Andy Warhol Museum (New York: D.A.P., 1994), 81.2. From a 1967 interview, quoted in Kynaston McShine, Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 457.3. Rauschenberg was unfamiliar with the photo-silkscreening technique when he visited Warhol’s studio in September 1962. After querying Warhol about it, Rauschenberg began using it himself the following month. Warhol was dismayed, fearing that he would be accused of stealing the idea from the older, better-known artist. See Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, eds., Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1997), 561, and David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 131–132.4. Interview with G. R. Swenson, quoted in Bourdon, Warhol, 142.5. Ibid., 186.6. Ibid., 380. The Walker’s collection includes an example of the latter: Diamond Dust Joseph Beuys (1980).7. Danto, “The Philosopher,” 77–78.8. Quoted in Christoph Heinrich, Andy Warhol Photography, Candace Breitz, ed., exh. cat. (Hamburg: Hamburg Kunsthalle; Pittsburgh: Andy Warhol Museum, 1999), 6.

Andy Warhol Self-Portrait in Drag circa 1981 Polaroid 4 1/4 x 3 5/16 in. (10.8 x 8.4 cm) Butler Family Fund, 2003 2003.12

Andy Warhol Self-Portrait 1978 acrylic, silkscreen ink on canvas 16 x 13 in. (40.6 x 33 cm) T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1993 1993.187

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Andy Warhol Campbell’s Tomato Juice Box; Del Monte Peach Halves Box; Heinz Tomato Ketchup Box; Kellogg’s Corn Flakes Box; Mott’s Apple Juice Box; White Brillo Box; Yellow Brillo Box 1964 synthetic polymer paint, screenprint on wood various dimensions Gift of Kate Butler Peterson, 2002 2002.305–311

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Andy Warhol Sixteen Jackies 1964 acrylic, enamel on canvas 80 3/8 x 64 3/8 in. (204.2 x 163.5 cm) Art Center Acquisition Fund, 1968 1968.2

576 ANDY WARHOL

Jackie and Repetition

Jackie recurs: her specialty is repetition. Mass media’s adoption of Jackie as slogan and image ensures that no sighting of her can ever claim to have been the first: it will always rest upon a prior occasion. Thus Jackie, as image, is necessarily cliché and revenant. Events recur in Jackie’s life: her narrative depends on erotic and morbid déjà vu. Black Jack returns as Jack Kennedy, and then again as swarthy Ari; Lee is Jackie’s double. After Jackie almost dies in childbirth, and baby Patrick dies (the second of her children to die), then her husband is shot, a death itself echoed in 1968 with Bobby’s assassination. A 1973 Photoplay headline summarizes Jackie’s connection to repetition: DEATH IN JACKIE’S LIFE AGAIN: GOD, NO MORE! The Jackie look repeats itself. Every mock Jackie echoes the original, as homage or unintended parody; every new photograph of Jackie repeats the foundation we’ve already seen, the progenitive Jackie, whose good taste mandates a fawning series of imitators. Andy Warhol, in such silkscreens as Gold Jackie, Round Jackie, Jackie (The Week That Was), Three Jackies, Nine Jackies, and Sixteen Jackies, was the first intellectual or artist to reflect on Jackie’s status as repeated icon. These Jackie portraits, some pre-assassination, some post-assassination, borrowed the format of his electric chair, car crash, Liz, and Marilyn series. All of these subjects are spectacles associated with disaster and shock: Liz, Marilyn, and Jackie faced disasters (illness, suicide, assassination); witnessed electrocutions turn death into spec-tacle, just as a car wreck attracts voyeurs and photographers. Furthermore, as critic Richard Meyer has observed, Warhol conflated celebrities and criminals: John Waters would do much the same with Divine, who achieves apo-theosis, in such films as Multiple Maniacs, when she goes on killing sprees. Fabulousness lies in Divine’s imag-ined likeness to Liz Taylor, as well as in her theatrical, overplayed monstrousness. Jackie, Marilyn, electrocuted convict: the silkscreened figure, in the Warhol oeuvre, is (like Divine) interchangeably a glamorous female star, a criminal, or a victim. Warhol rendered Jackie—celebrity/victim—in his standard grid, repeating images as if they were mug shots, frames of documentary film footage, or a fan’s clippings. Repetition implies mourning: the Dallas scene is a trauma, and mourning takes the form of recycling and recall, a process that unsettles chronology (images of Jackie before and after JFK’s death get jumbled). Repetition implies commodification: Jackie no longer has control over her own image, nor do we, as consumers, for it is dispersed in culture with a rapidity and vehemence that do not obey the laws of individual desire. And repetition implies obsession: the Jackie photos are cropped—nar-rowing the focus onto Jackie alone, myopically isolating her from context. In Warhol’s Sixteen Jackies, she’s alone in a hall of mirrors, like Rita Hayworth in the final scene of The Lady from Shanghai; lonely Jackie is trapped among reflections of herself, without companion. Though the Warhol silkscreen announces no individual or psy-chological point of view—it seems to erase individuality, its technique underscoring the “inhuman” processes of mass media reproduction—it betrays the emotions of a saintmaker. To repeat Jackie sixteen times requires energy, momentum, and love: Andy evidently cared enough about Jackie to multiply her. Or else her aura was tenuous, and it needed bolstering through multiplication. One would never get deeper into her experience; one could only repeat the faint glow, and hope to acquire a vivid Jackie through stolid accretion. Camille Paglia, arguing that Warhol’s “Jackie” silkscreens emerge from his lapsed Catholicism, considers them images of a mater dolorosa. True: but they were also a gay fan’s cutouts, images from a “pervert” scrapbook. What’s remarkable about Warhol’s Sixteen Jackies isn’t any specific emotion that accrues to the images. We don’t know what the spectator feels, the spectator who repeated and tinted Jackie. All we know about Jackie worship from Sixteen Jackies is that the procedure has sixteen stations; that this fan desires sixteen copies; that her value increases with each repetition. Warhol not only silkscreened celebrities: he also befriended them. He knew Jacqueline Onassis; they even went to the Brooklyn Museum together. He describes the visit: “Being with her is like walking with a saint. . . . It was like she was in a trance.” Jackie told him about a Haitian artist who charged according to how many figures or objects a painting contained. Warhol remembers: “The first three are included—cows, dogs, and chickens. Sheep and goats are extra, and if you throw in some people and houses it gets really expensive. Jackie thought that was an interesting concept of art.” It’s odd to think of the real Jackie having a conversation about aesthetics and value with the artist who, in his silkscreens, commented on (and perpetuated?) her commodification. She also asked him, “What’s Elizabeth Taylor really like?” Onassis gave Warhol credit for knowledge of the “real” Liz, even though he was famous instead for repetitions of a “false,” silkscreened Liz. This scene—Onassis discussing iconic-ity with Warhol—suggests that Jacqueline Onassis, living in a world saturated with images of Jackie and Liz, may have looked toward “Jackie” or “Liz” as the type of alluring stranger about whom ordinary people might ask, “What’s Jackie really like?” The images in Sixteen Jackies, however, are not identical copies of each other. For example, the four smiling Jackies in the top row are the same photo, but the third from the left is not level with the others (like a TV with a vertical-hold problem). Although the image of Jackie doesn’t change, our angle of vision might; the picture may fade, or be artificially brightened; it may fall off-center, or drop below the line of visibility. Each time Jackie gets repeated, she alters. A narrative emerges, and it is not the story of Jackie’s life or the growth of Jackie’s soul—but the narrative of the image and of our relation to the image.

Wayne Koestenbaum

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WALKER ART CENTER COLLECTIONS

Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections is published on the occasion of the opening of the newly expanded Walker Art Center, April 2005.

Major support for Walker Art Center programs is provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, The Wallace Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation through the Doris Duke Fund for Jazz and Dance and the Doris Duke Performing Arts Endowment Fund, The Bush Foundation, Target, General Mills Foundation, Best Buy Co., Inc., The McKnight Foundation, Coldwell Banker Burnet, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Arts, American Express Philanthropic Program, The Regis Foundation, The Cargill Foundation, 3M, Star Tribune Foundation, U.S. Bank, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the members of the Walker Art Center.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walker Art Center Bits & pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole : Walker ArtCenter collections.-- 1st ed. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-935640-78-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Walker Art Center--Catalogs. 2.Arts--Minnesota--Minneapolis--Catalogs. 3. Walker Art Center--History. I.Title: Bits and pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole. II.Title: Walker Art Center collections. III. Title. N583.A53 2005 709’.04’0074776579--dc22 2004031088

First Edition © 2005 Walker Art CenterAll rights reserved under pan-American copyright con-ventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means—electronic or me-chanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage-and-retrieval system—without per-mission in writing from the Walker Art Center. Inquiries should be addressed to: Publications Manager, Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55403.

Available through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers 155 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY 10013

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Wayne Koestenbaum, “Jackie and Repetition,” from Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), © by permission of the author.

Publications Manager Lisa MiddagEditors Pamela Johnson, Kathleen McLeanDesigners Andrew Blauvelt, Chad KloepferProduction SpecialistGreg Beckel

Printed and bound in Belgium by Die Keure.

Cover art Lawrence Weiner

Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center CollectionsJoan Rothfuss and Elizabeth Carpenter