Lindsey Coven
Summer 2010
Film Internship
Research Paper
“Figment”
After recently visiting Haunted, a contemporary photography, video and performance exhibition at the MoMa, the Andy Warhol persona I had once envisioned metamorphosed drastically. Where does such an artist find inspiration for both dazzling commercial pop art and pallid uncanny images? Or, I wondered, does the pop art stem from something more ominous?
Artists create art about what they are familiar with, and often times artistic expression forms out of deep emotion and experience. If an artist is talented enough, the traumatic influences can become either dark or light artwork, depending on how this influence is used.
The piece that so awed me in the aforementioned exhibit was Mr. Warhol’s Orange Disaster #5, an acrylic and silkscreen enamel on canvas from 1963. The rusty burnt orange images of a lone electric chair, repeated a total of fifteen times, made me wonder who would fill the empty seat. In the upper right hand corner of each square is a sign reading “silence,” metaphorically implying the destined individual’s fate. Had I walked past this piece without reading the subtext I do not think I would have realized it was a Warhol. Of course the repetition in the artwork was there, but the color scheme and subject matter radically differed the Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe’s I had seen before. Yet, despite the difference, this piece left just as large an impact on me as did the others. What did Andy put in his artwork that made me, and millions of others, come back wanting more?
Capers, author of On Andy Warhol’s “Electric Chair,” explains that Andy’s art is so mesmerizing because, like a highway accident, his, “pictures become the Real, at least in our collective imagination, and prompt tangible responses to whatever truth they reveal,” (245). When you drive past an accident, your head immediately focuses in on the scene of the crime – who was hurt, how did it happen, why did it happen? As removed as we are from the situation, we become obsessed with this trauma. Capers made me understand that images, especially Warhol’s silkscreened photographs, have, “the weight of fact,” (247). The Electric Chair piece made me think about how many victims sat in that chair and why they were sentenced. Capers notes that, “by manipulating the size of the photo along a rectilinear grid, Warhol also focuses the viewer on the mechanics of death and its replication,” as well as the “anonymity of most executions,” (249-251). I do not know if I would go as far as Capers in saying I take pleasure in looking at traumatic scenes, but I do agree that, “after a while, of course, the spectacle became a little redundant. We became a little anesthetized. Like the tessellation in Warhol’s Electric Chair paintings, repetition numbs. But still we watched,” (257). The more Andy repeated a death or a disaster, the more trivial it became, ultimately making the concept of death less of a thing to fear and more of a thing to visualize. Hal Foster in Death in America, names Andy’s repeated depictions the “traumatic real,” (46). Therefore, a piece of art portraying the lost, makes us as the viewer appreciate our exterior role, while also making us yearn for the interior of the art (53).
Like other works in Haunted, Andy’s “embodies a melancholic longing for an otherwise unrecuperable past,” (Blessing). For Andy, his appropriations of photographic silkscreens were a method of bringing things of the past back to the present. The MoMa displayed works of reproductive mediums that allowed the artist to, “amass fragments of reality either by creating new photographs or by appropriating existing ones,” and showed, “the power of the document to reiterate the past…embedded with history,” (8). By creating mass produced art of mass produced subject matter, such as deaths, celebrities, and store-bought products, Andy foresaw the future of the twenty-first century and, “touched on the darker side of a burgeoning media culture.” His celebrity portraiture idolized Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor as “public commercial property,” rather than as individuals (Bergin 361). The pop colors and blotted line technique Andy used in these silkscreens is said to be influenced by Andy’s blotchy young face, making his embarrassment something now lucrative (Koestenbaum Audiobook). Sadly, Andy hoped “to become a commodity” in his world and, “by exploiting the media to expose himself to constant view, he transformed his private life – or lack of it – into public spectacle,” (Whiting 70). In Andy Warhol, the Public Star and the Private Self, Whiting explained that these stars became “brand-names,” which is why the facial portraits, “minimized detail, emphasized outline, and exaggerated expression,” just like a soup can advertising campaign would have done (58). The Death and Disaster Series consisted of the following pieces: Red Jackie, Jackie, Three Marilyns, Electric Chair, White Burning Car III, The Last Supper, and Skull – all of which, as seen by their titles, deal with an obsession with death and the consumerist society of the 1960s.
In an interview with The Guardian, director David Cronenberg explains how Andy related death and celebrity. He became consumed with the concept of death and realized that the more traumatic the passing, the more press it received - but this naïve view obviously changed after Valerie Solanas’ assassination attempt on Andy’s life. After seeing the white light once, only to be left with a body full of reminding scars, Andy became terrified of dying. He understood that he could no longer promise everyone their fifteen minutes of fame, because when this dream did not come to fruition, people like Ms. Solanas could return, looking for some retaliation. David Cronenberg linked Andy to the troubled subjects in his artwork, stating, “Andy became Jackie in the end. Elvis, too, and the electric chair.” This director, and authors like him, called Andy, “prophetic,” in terms of his ability to understand the future of America, specifically noting commercialism and the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center buildings (Cronenberg).
All of his artwork touched on the emptiness of the era and of his life. The soup cans came from Andy’s memory of only eating Campbell’s soup when his mother was sick in the hospital. The celebrity portraits looked into the desolate eyes of figures that had come into contact with or had come close to death. Growing up as somewhat of a pariah, Andy learned to find beauty in the most ugly and boring of concepts (Koestenbaum Audiobook). The idea of capturing the past in a picture made me think of why I like to make films and take photographs. When asked this question before, I could not think of a proper answer, but now I know that the answer is simple – I do it to capture life, or as Andy said, “A picture means I know where I was every minute. That’s why I take pictures. It’s a visual diary,” (Warhol Brainy Quote). In addition, I appreciate that Andy wanted everyone, not just members of the elite class, to be able to find meaning in his art (Burns).
Although in interviews Warhol seems enigmatic, his banal responses, based on his quiet personality, show true in all of his works. Most imperative to Andy (once a boy growing up in Depression hit Pittsburgh) was the fame of it all. As reserved and socially awkward as he was, being in the celebrity limelight, having his name in the gossip columns, and being around gaudy people was enough for him and for his artwork. The subjects for most of his masterpieces were his friends, the Superstars of his Factory. Although the press saw these figures as part of his entourage, to Andy, they were just “other generic characters to deny the existence of a private self,” calling them “blanks,” that “could be transformed into anything, all reflecting one another as empty mirrors, non-existent selves,” (Whiting 71).
The style of the films, like the silkscreen paintings, was a new form of expression for Andy. “It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it,” (Warhol Brainy Quote). What I found most inspiring and remarkable was that the films, especially the earlier ones, were referred to as living paintings that demanded more constant attention from the viewer. Mary Woronov, when interviewed on the eight-hour film Empire, says, “But the building continues to demand my attention. And, unlike a painting, it is not dead. It’s living, like a window that sees only the past…I realize that Andy never meant to do a film, he was doing a painting…He wasn’t directing, he was painting. It’s only taken me 40 years to realize that these films were never meant to screen in a theater, where I thought they were boring. They were meant to hang on a wall. They are Andy’s greatest paintings,” (Indiana 95). Andy was known to say that there was nothing to his work, just what was on the surface. This proves that his work closely resembled his personality. In my opinion, the best aspect of Warhol’s films was his prolonged timing, projecting sixteen frames per second (silent speed) with twenty-four frames per second footage (sound speed), physically slowing down the action in his movies (Bourdon). He once said, “when nothing happens, you have a chance to think about everything,” (Bourdon). Andy, like his audiences, was more of an observer than a participant, and his films called for more intense viewings than anything else. He took everyday actions, like sleeping, kissing, eating, and haircutting and made them into visual phenomena. By eliminating all forms of editing, leaving only angles, framing, and lighting to do the job, Andy relied on the machine of the camera to make the art. Often times, he considered himself a plastic machine, in relation to the factory-like production in his art Factory. The processes of silkscreening and repetition allowed for the mass manufacturing of artwork. Interestingly, Andy noted that the more times an image is repeated, the more meaningless it becomes. Even in regards to his Death and Disaster series, Warhol said that the viewer must see these images objectively, just as they see the soup cans or Brillo boxes (Bergin 361).
According to Bourdon, “the notion of introducing stillness to movies was a radical idea,” (Bourdon). Jonas Mekas called Warhol a “primitive who has taken cinema back to its origins, to the days of Lumiere, for a rejuvenation and a cleansing,” (Bourdon). By slowing down the actions in his films, Stoller notes that what his films contain that the paintings don’t is “the aspect of time,” reminding me of another artist I became fascinated with this summer, Maya Deren, who always considered the role of the camera and the continuous time it seized (Stoller 35-38).
The pure brilliance of Warhol’s mass produced art were his Screen Tests films, shot over a period of two years. Any time a guest came to visit Andy, they would have their portrait taken, or in other words, have their portrait filmed. “Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” Warhol was known to say, and these film portraits gave people that very opportunity (and in return, made Andy ever the more famous) (Brainy Quote). What these simplistic films portrayed was nothing more than the sitter’s facial expression, but when watched, even a slight twitch of an eyebrow or a hint of a smile could reveal much about the person and his or her life – the films showed their truth and vulnerability. I love that these films are considered fine art. Andy took objects and subjects that one could buy in a grocery store or find on the street and made them art. But, if I turned my camera on, left it rolling for three minutes, and put someone in front of the film, would people have called it art? I wonder if the arousal came from Andy’s growing celebrity, or people’s excitement knowing that art could be anything. If Andy can become famous from these films, why can’t I [myself and the rest of the world are thinking]?
What I also love about Andy’s films and silkscreens is his allowance for mistakes. The reason he turned from free-hand to silkscreen was that when creating the same image over and over again, each draft would look somewhat different than the next, giving each piece something special. Whether completely overexposed or out of focus films, Andy left these so-called errors in for suspense and wonder. And when it came to narrative structure in his films, something that Andy was not educated in, he relied on his creative superstar friends to ad-lib their dialogue. In a 1966 interview with Cavalier magazine, Andy continuously answered very lackadaisical responses in regards to the value of his artwork and the reasons for him becoming an artist: “It gives me something to do…we don’t have any feeling about them at all, even when we are doing them. It just keeps us busy. It’s something to pass the time,” (McIlhenny, and Ray 1-4). Although this may be true for his drug-ridden friends, I am doubtful that Andy made these pieces with no love for them. Yes he loved the fame he received from them, but I like to believe that he had pride in his talent as well.
Life was a fantasy for Andy. The silver aluminum covering his Factory, the candy he loved to eat, the wigs and sunglasses he wore, the stardom of Hollywood and New York – all of these things kept Andy going and allowed him to remain the little boy his mother raised. Without speed-driven characters to spark his ideas, I wonder if Andy could have been successful on his own, or whether eventually, the flame would have died out. Either way though, Andy the person seems as aesthetically beautiful as Andy’s artwork proves to be.
“I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I’d like it to say “figment,” ” (Warhol Brainy Quote).
Works Cited
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