POP-ism - Warhol's Sixties

A review of POP-ism - Andy Warhol and Pat Hacket's 1980 Kiss and Tell Review of Warhol's 60s.

‘People say that you always want what you can’t have, that ‘the grass is always greener’ and all that, but in the mid-sixties I never, never, never felt that way for a single minute. I was so happy doing what I was doing, with the people I was doing it with’

Andy Warhol 1977

Andy Warhol is an art world phenomenon: a character that seems to mystify everyone, despite his assurances that his art was only ever surface deep. I read his second autobiography, POPism, in an attempt to better understand this enigmatic figure, especially after attempting his previous volume, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, which, intent on concealment to the point of incoherence, barely gave anything away. 


His second book is more accessible and reveals an underlying connection between his writing style and artistic approach.

POPism is set out chronologically, as opposed to The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, which is thematic. It charts Warhol’s 1960s: as the years progressed, so did the artist’s notoriety, social circle, and artistic style. He started out the decade a lowly graphic designer and ended it a cultural icon. The scene is set with his first solo show at the Stable Gallery in 1962, which showcased works which now litter the collections of major art galleries worldwide: Elvis, Marilyn, and the disaster series. The infamous Factory, haunt of Warhol’s Superstars, was founded on East 47^th Street in 1963. The space was loved by students, artists, and celebrities, and became the location of constant mass production of art, with every visitor recorded in a Screen Test.

The Screen Tests were a natural progression from the large celebrity silkscreens into a different art medium; Warhol made around 500 silent portrait films in 2 years of his studio’s visitors, and in doing so solidified his industrial method and aesthetic. A major turning point came at the end of 1964 when Warhol bought a sound camera, which he used to create 33 minute reels with his scriptwriters Chuck Wein and Ronald Tavel, previously of the Theatre of the Ridiculous. Now the Screen Tests evolved to become talking silkscreens, and the Superstars were really born.

Still with Nico and Ondine in the final scene from 'Chelsea Girls' from the 2003 Italian DVD print of the film.

The Superstars were immortalised in Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls, a 3 hour experiment comprising of collated episodes of the Superstars’ shenanigans in the Chelsea Hotel. Pope Ondine, Ingrid Superstar, and Gerard Malanga all made appearances, and played themselves so well that the film got good reviews in the mainstream press and was commercially released nationally in 1967. The film marked Warhol’s step from the underground into the mainstream. The Chelsea Girls was followed up by an even more ambitious project, ****; a 25 hour long epic which was only screened once, at the New Cinema Playhouse on 15^th and 16^th December 1967.

It was around this time that Andy Warhol met the Velvet Underground, and his artistic experiments entered the field of music. By branching out into other artistic mediums, Warhol began to realise he could monopolise multiple art forms in the city simultaneously. At one point he had films playing uptown at the Film Makers’ Co-Op, the Silver Clouds and cow print wallpaper installation on show at the Castelli Gallery, and the multimedia performance piece the Exploding Plastic Inevitable – which featured live music, a light show, and multi-screen film projections –  on at a dance hall on St Mark’s Place. By the end of 1967 Warhol’s meteoric rise engulfed all areas of the New York arts and social scenes.

Warhol’s writing mimics his art: it is at once detached, chatty and frank, and very funny in places, just as he would be in life. Just as Pop-Art took a wry and open dance with consumerism and made it art; Warhol described Pop as referring to ‘just the surface things’, and this is reflected in his directness of dialogue and catty observations.

Andy Warhol Dollar Signs

The apex of the book comes in June 1968, when Valerie Solanas, a sometime Factory visitor, shot Warhol. This event perhaps marks the point at which the artist’s fame became most acute: compared to the Warhol at the start of the decade, his shooting cemented his iconic status. Similarly, his survival perhaps echoes the persistence of his tongue-in-cheek Pop humour: just as he got away with being shot, his themes of celebrity, status, and money are still ever present in art and society today.


Written by Alexandra Bannister at Gallery Violet.
www.galleryviolet.com

Pollock in the Hall of Fame.

In December 1956, New York’s Museum of Modern Art hosted an exhibition that was as much a celebration of Jackson Pollock’s life as it was a retrospective study of his art. Pollock had died four months earlier and MoMA’s marking of the artist’s passing underlines how seriously the gallery took his work and the shockwaves it had sent out across America and the Atlantic Ocean.  

Pollock was only 44 by the time of his death but the wildly innovative approach to painting that he’d perfected between 1947 and 1950 – in what has become known as his ‘drip period’ - had established him as a superstar of the New York art world as well as an intriguing if not perplexing fixation of the US media.  The challenging nature of his work and his own personal fierce charisma made him a regular subject for feature writers and critics in TIME and LIFE as well as a number of high profile and acclaimed showings at MoMA.

Since his death, Pollock’s stature as both a great artist and a modern American icon has only grown in its magnitude.  Along with the enigmatic portrait of a spectral Warhol in dark glasses, Hans Namuth’s photographs of Pollock brooding over a paint struck canvas have become definitive images in the technicolour narrative of American culture whilst Pollock’s mythic reputation as a reclusive and troubled genius has also allowed commentators from historians to actors to claim him as a quintessentially rugged example of American individualism.

The problem with Pollock’s induction into the Hall of Fame for All-American Mavericks - where the brooding poses of John Wayne and James Dean guard the entrance - is that it allows the cult of his personality to undermine the gravity of his creative brilliance.  Pollock’s art and its relationship to American life in the turbulence of the mid-twentieth century is both troubling and complex.  The image of him as a pin-up for those who wish to export the notion of American individualism and exceptionalism and champion the First Amendment above all else is certainly one that is worthy of suspicion. Although it is obviously politically motivated - bearing the scars of the ideological battlegrounds of the Cold War – it is also a simplistic rendering of the man that undermines the sheer complexity of his art and as a result, his genius.

Paintings like No. 5, 1948 (1948) and No. 1, 1950 (1950) with their complete rejection of figurative imagery and their embrace of dramatic textures cut savagely by fraught lines of explosive colour are impossible to fix with any one interpretation. Do they reflect the speed of modernity refracted in the electric skyline of Manhattan?  Do they constitute a desperate attempt to create an aesthetic capable of dealing with life after the Second World War and its atrocities? Are they an ecstatic celebration of creative freedom in an age of tyranny and dictatorships?  Or are they far more introspective than that?  Do they channel Pollock’s own understanding of psychoanalysis and his troubled psyche?  Or perhaps are they simply the visceral expression of one man’s existential angst.

It is a testament to the intensity of Pollock’s art that all these readings are possible, though it is exactly this intensity that eclipses everything else in his painting.  The sheer scale and force of a piece like No. 31, 1950 (1950) is what makes a multitude of meanings possible as the work presents an occasion for subjective experience rather than objective interpretation.  It is Pollock’s almost primal approach to the act of painting that reveals his genius because in an age where even the most banal aspects of culture were being politicised he was able to present a form of artistic expression that was genuinely uncompromising.   The irony here however is that Pollock’s radical refusal to facilitate linear and simplistic interpretations through his paintings also creates a narrative absence that actually allows the potent myth of his celebrity to distort the viewer’s subjective and instinctive experience of the artwork itself.

Pollock’s status as both a preeminent figure of the avant-garde confronting mainstream culture and as an American icon rooted firmly in it presents a paradox that is emblematic of a particularly volatile time in American history where the country needed figures that symbolised the qualities of democracy.  The fact that leaders of the American avant-garde like Pollock, William Burroughs and John Cage were capable of being subversive (and even explicitly transgressive in Burroughs’ case) only served to ensure their eventual canonisation as it allowed politicians, historians and critics to point to these artists as proof that an egalitarian state could tolerate dissenting voices in ways that their ideological enemies never could.  This recontextualising of the American avant-garde as Liberal celebrities embodying all-American values would undermine the power of the art were it believable – Pollock’s work transcends politics and the time it was created in and thus carves the fault line in this narrative.

Despite Pollock’s emergence as an American icon and what this may say about how nations construct their own myths for explicitly ideological reasons, the tension between the man’s idealised image with his art’s multifarious treatment of meaning ultimately serves to undermine the assumptions inherent in any kind of idealism. It is also analogous to the contradictions implicit in American culture and rhetoric because although Pollock’s search for a mode of uninhibited artistic expression is an inherently optimistic act, it is complicated by the intimidating mood and intensity of his work and the knowledge of his personal demons. 

This tension between optimism and intimidation, or hope and fear, is central to Pollock’s art. It is possible to understand this as a parallel to the constant battle of promise and volatility, faith and despair that have characterised American society in the twentieth century. 

It is in somehow embodying the dualities and the complexities of his country as it forges a meaning for itself in the world, rather than the facile image of the painter as a rugged all American  individualist that makes Pollock a truly great American artist.

Gallery Violet.

www.galleryviolet.com