As the man at the epicentre of the 60s Pop movement, Andy Warhol shaped how we think about art now. Elevating the everyday into art, he blurred the lines between high and low culture. He created the model of the artist as media persona, mass producer and businessperson, a concept taken forward by contemporary art giants such as Damian Hirst, one of the most successful artists working today.
Yet despite his epoch changing career, Warhol’s real identity and motives remain in question. Was his work simply a celebration of surface and the cult of celebrity or was there something more underneath? A series of portraits of Warhol in drag that greet you at the start of MALBA’s exhibition, ‘Mr America’ seem significant in this respect. Dressed in coarse blonde, brunette and red wigs with shocking crimson lipstick and strangely white skin, his stark stare provokes us to consider what motives might be beyond this crude manipulation of his own identity.
“The Polaroid portraits of Warhol wearing makeup and in drag were deliberately contrived to recall Man Ray’s well-known portraits of Marcel Duchamp dressed as his famous alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, and to position Warhol as his most spectacularly successful descendent,” says the show’s curator Philip Larrat-Smith. Duchamp, like Warhol, was a famous user of ruse, irony and sensationalism in his work.
The show moves on to the screen-prints of Campbells Soup cans which helped launch Warhol’s career at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962, and finishes up at the voyeuristic filmic portraits taken at The Factory, his centre of artistic production and microcosm of 60s alternative culture, where “rich and poor, famous and marginal, gay and straight met and mingled”.
The aim of the exhibition, according to Larrat-Smith, is to present the works that show: “…the political and popular culture of the United States through Warhol’s eyes.” It abounds with icons of the American dream, from Uncle Sam to the Empire State Building, seductive graphic portraits of Marilyn Monroe using his signature silkscreen process, to celebrations of the mass-produced superabundance that has come to represent the US myth.
Larratt-Smith is keen not to brand Warhol’s work as a straightforward avowal of American ideals, however. “For all that his Pop canvases may appear to uncritically reflect affirmative American values, his work is never without an awareness of the tragedy and entropy that accompanies stardom and self-exposure,” he says. In particular, he considers Warhol’s silkscreen series of disaster victims, criminals and Hollywood stars to represent the dark side, and therefore a critique of, the American dream.
This compelling ‘Death and Disaster’ series features four screen-prints of electric chairs on pink, violet, yellow and grey backgrounds, pictures of most wanted criminals taken from CIA files, as well as grainy images of car crashes and race riots blown up from newspapers. But Warhol’s refusal to acknowledge any meaning beyond the surface denies us any overtly moral reading of these works. Famously deadpan, he adopted an emotionless speaking voice in interviews and once declared: “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.”
Warhol’s cultivated facade prompted rumours of a double identity, and debate remains as to whether the cool, unaffected persona hid a deeply sensitive, even religious man. Critics however felt that his exploitation of the strange and troubled characters who came into The Factory, for his work, proved him to be as cool and heartless as his public persona. This cast of eccentrics, drag queens and drug addicts became the subjects of hundreds of works including his ‘screen tests’, shown in the exhibition. In these filmic portraits, taken between 1964-66, he fixed the camera upon his subjects for a period of minutes.
Behind their images of dramatically lit glamour and mystique, were tales of personal tragedy as many inhabitants of the Factory slid into irreversible decline. In particular, Warhol famously looked on as Edie Sedgwick, a beautiful and deeply troubled heiress took a path of drug abuse and self destruction in front of his eyes, dying at the age of 28.
Despite accusations of heartlessness, others see Warhol as representing a martyr like figure who used his work to highlight a symbolic and universal plight, and put up a troubling mirror upon American culture. A show in Paris’s Grand Palais in 2009, inspired by Warhol’s Catholic-Orthodox upbringing, even likens his portraits to religious icons, and puts them in terms of parable-telling and religious ideas. In his later years, the curators point out, Warhol moved beyond the film stars and political icons and turned to religious imagery, including works such as 112 screen-prints of Christ and a series of screen-printed images of the last-supper.
With his religious references, dramatic disasters and portraits in drag Warhol seemed to demand that the viewer look beyond the visual seduction of the image, and yet his insistence on remaining passive and superficial forces us to do the work of interpretation. In terms of Warhol’s attitude to the American Dream, Larrat-Smith sees the drag images as a pointer towards his true intentions: “From Hollywood to TV footage of the man on the moon, America has constructed an idealised image of its own hegemony,” he says, asking: “Is the American dream which Warhol embodied in his life and expressed in his art really just a series of images of an empire in drag?”
The exhibition runs until 22nd February at Malba, Av. Figueroa Alcorta 3415. Open Wednesday-Monday, 12-8pm. For more information, visit www.malba.org.ar
