WHEN 15 MINUTES STRETCHES OUT FOR A HALF CENTURY
Uh...yes...uh...no...
by Don Stradley
In an
unnerving premonition of his own death, Andy Warhol devoted a few paragraphs of
his memoirs to a friend who’d received poor medical care and died right in his
hospital bed. To Warhol, this was a nightmarish way to go; he imagined the
horror of being “taken to the wrong hospital, or if you happened to get the
wrong doctor at the right hospital.” Popism: The Warhol Sixties,
Warhol’s bright, absorbing look back at the Pop Art decade and his place in it,
was published in 1980, seven years before his own death. Warhol would die after
a simple gallbladder operation because floor nurses failed to look in on him
(he’d been flooded with fluids which resulted in heart failure). Maybe Warhol
jinxed himself with his fear of hospitals. He was, after all, adept at predicting
how things would happen with art, film, and celebrity culture. Why not, in the
manner of an amphetamine-loaded, porn-loving Nostradamus, his own demise?
Warhol
chroniclers have harped on his alleged fascination with death, doting like WW2
code-breakers on his macabre silkscreens of electric chairs, and car crashes,
but the Warhol who shared his memories of the 1960s was far less consumed with
death than, say, parties, and specifically, the famous people who occupied
couch space at these parties. “Vacant, vacuous Hollywood was everything I ever
wanted to mold my life into,” he writes at one point, gushing about a modest gathering
thrown by Dennis Hopper as “the most exciting thing that had ever happened to
me.” One would think Warhol’s unlikely jump from being a commercial illustrator
to one of the top names in American art would provide him with moments of
greater significance, like when six of his self-portraits were featured in the
U.S. Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo, but no, Warhol was more thrilled by
witnessing Judy Garland get pissed off at Tennessee Williams. Warhol’s hero,
Picasso, didn’t hang with movie stars, so in that regard, Andy had Pablo pinned
to the mat.
If his
fetish for fame has sometimes obscured his actual talents, Popism clears up a few things about Warhol. He was easily
embarrassed and developed a quick, dismissive way to deal with the press,
letting his friends pretend to be him for telephone interviews, or having Edie
Sedgwick answer questions for him on talk shows. If Warhol was fascinated by
the fame of others, he found his own notoriety rather ridiculous. He explains
that much of modern art is a game, anyway,
less about having the right style than having the right rich people to
buy your stuff, and that remaining aloof allowed other people to instill his
work – and his entire existence - with meanings he’d likely never considered.
In Popism, he’s not out to ascribe
meaning to his paintings; he’s more concerned with what the girls were wearing
in those years, how they painted their eyelashes, or how rich people spent
their money.
The
strangest thing about Popism is that,
while many of Warhol’s stories are amusing,
none are especially dramatic. Except for his detailed account of being
shot by Valarie Solanis, the book is
surprisingly light and airy. There was a casualness to Warhol – if a painting
of his was accidently destroyed, he’d simply create another one - and this
breezy attitude is what makes the book so readable. He offers some interesting insights
about art, but doesn’t dwell on any theories, keeping his views as streamlined
as one of his Coke bottle paintings. The closest he comes to revealing any emotion
is when he addresses the accusation that he was somehow responsible for the
number of people in his circle who died young. The death of dancer Freddie
Herko, who pirouetted out “his window with a leap so huge that he was carried
halfway down the block onto Cornelia Street five stories below,” seems to have
affected Warhol the most. Still, Warhol suggests the people around him who
ended badly were damaged when he met them. “It wasn’t like someone was issuing
me newborn babies with good chemicals and letting me raise them,” he writes.
But he also admits that he thrived in the company of whack jobs, and proudly
states, “we were all odds-and-ends misfits, somehow misfitting together.” He
recalls Viva and Candy and the rest of the Factory regulars with what seems
like real affection, and appears legitimately disappointed that none became
mainstream film stars, though their spirit appears to live on in this current
era of “YouTube sensations” and “reality TV celebrities,” minus the Factory
crowd’s sense of melancholy and danger. Late in the book, Warhol suggests that
many of his friends had probably lied about their pasts to make themselves
more attractive to him; the cocktail of lies, drugs, and general mental
unbalance created a kind of living theater that could only end tragically,
despite the fun had by all.
Today,
of course, no artist could write a nearly 400 page memoir and expect it to sell
five copies, not when most contemporary artwork ends up in dull corporate offices,
hanging innocuously in conference rooms
like the visual equivalent of piped in “muzak.” Warhol would be nearly 90 now, and probably
bored by the culture he’d helped shape. Not only are contemporary celebs badly
dressed and void of glamor, but the art world suffers from neglect, with no one looking in on it.
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