On Art
BLOCH, BRADLEY W.
On Art WHERE WARHOL FAILED BY BRADLEY W BLOCH Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) until May 2, is every bit the blockbuster show its planners hoped...
...Warhol's defenders claim he was working in the tradition of Conceptualism, but underneath that slick notion there is nothing except chronic cleverness—which is, in fact, the basis of Warhol's continuing popularity...
...The'50s were not merely a time of perfected mass production, they marked the beginning of mass marketing...
...Warhol simply had to choose the image he wanted to reproduce, photochemically transfer it to a screen, and then press ink through the screen to a canvas on the other side...
...Warhol appealed to our sense of hipness...
...Warhol did not invent the paradox...
...Emerging painters and sculptors, working with the fervor of admen, continue to concentrate on thinking up gimmicks that will shock just enough to make their work desirable...
...On Art WHERE WARHOL FAILED BY BRADLEY W BLOCH Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) until May 2, is every bit the blockbuster show its planners hoped it would be...
...Where Warhol is concerned, for example, it could be argued that he successfully captured and chronicled his times...
...After viewing a wall of silkscreened Jackies, aroom of silkscreened Marilyns, and a room of silkscreened car crashes, one is numb and has lost all hope of glimpsing a developing esthetic vision...
...Quite to the contrary, the art world has been unable to move past Warhol...
...He came of age during the Golden Era of American Consumerism...
...The source of the problem is that any vision Warhol had was dwarfed by his desire to be liked, to be the lovable eccentric of the art world...
...But Warhol's influence has been so strong that Picasso and even Pollock today appear to be distant, chthonic gods...
...Different artists appeal to different emotions within us...
...In more sane circumstances, he would have won a secure if decidedly minor niche in the annals of art history...
...A tour through the galleries of SoHo, moreover, leaves one with the unpleasant feeling that change will be a long time in coming...
...While offerings upon the altar of cleverness need not be substantial, they must be frequent, a requirement that left Warhol grasping at straws during his last decade...
...This is understandable, yet it obscures what he accomplished, as well as an assessment of the damage he left behind...
...He even returned to newspaper advertisements for inspiration, producing paintings of light bulbs and girdles...
...With Warhol, regrettably, this responsibility was shunted aside...
...Since everything he did has been called art almost from the start, to many people, that is what it must be...
...He supported himself at the outset by working for magazines and department stores...
...The main impediment to an appreciation of Warhol's early period is virtually everything he did afterward...
...The art world will not be able to put Warhol in proper perspective—and move past him to more significant creation—until the realization begins to take hold that avant-garde art existed long before the first silkscreened Marilyn...
...Unfortunately, compared with similar work he did 25 years earlier, the later versions are lifeless and stale...
...It was the esthetic potential of these images that Warhol's early work explored...
...Perhaps, then, it is a hopeful if ironic sign that his retrospective is being held at the MOMA, home to one of the greatest collections of 20th century avant-garde art in the world...
...It would not be an overstatement to say that as a consequence virtually the entire avant-garde art movement has withered...
...The individual elements of these paintings were faithfully copied from their source, then scrambled on the canvas in collage-like fashion, with an occasional paint drip as a nod to Abstract Expressionism...
...By 1962 Warhol had taken the approach to its logical terminus, removing the brushmarks and other signs of painterly intrusion from his work...
...It is difficult to imagine the trivial efforts of Julian Schnabel or Barbara Kruger, to name only two established lights, being taken seriously without Warhol having broken the ground for them...
...Because of this, the most foolish artists— and the past decade has seen many—are taken to be important by critics and curators struggling to offer high-sounding explanations of works that would be better dismissed...
...Confronted with 32 such renderings of a Campbell's soup can, a viewer at the MOMA experiences in an immediate way the conflict between creation and mechanical reproduction as it was played out at the dawn of mass marketing...
...What role should we assign to the artist's intention in evaluating his creation...
...That is not, of course, what happened...
...It is not difficult to see why...
...It might be suspected that heavy reliance on such a mechanical method leaves little room for personal development, and that suspicion is borne out at the MOMA retrospective...
...Andy Warhol began his career with an intriguing insight that was quickly either exhausted or abandoned, and then spent the rest of his years producing enjoyable yet uninspired, secondrateart...
...Around the same time that Warhol was eliminating brush strokes from his paintings, he was also experimenting with silkscreening, henceforth his favored technique...
...indeed, his name conjures up a complete sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll worldview during a turbulent period of American social history...
...In both cases Warhol is transformed from artist to symbol...
...It is fitting that one of his last works, Moonwalk (History of TV Series),looks like nothing so much as a still from MTV...
...The American visual landscape was being flooded with a new and vast array of images...
...It was common then for an artist to lead the life of commercial illustrator by day and Expressionist painter by night, but Warhol's artistic interests flowed directly from the window displays and newspaper advertisements he did for the shops that lined Fifth Avenue...
...Dealing with Warhol's oeuvre—making sense of the avant-garde work he produced—raises so many complex issues, it is perhaps not surprising to find the task largely avoided...
...Unending streams of visitors dine in a museum café covered with Warhol wallpaper, crowd a screening room to view a documentary about Warhol's life, and stop at the museum gift shop to purchase Warhol posters, lapel pins and stationery, carriedawayinWarholshopping bags...
...Among his first paintings to receive attention were a 1960 series based on advertisements for electric drills, vacuum cleaners and televisions...
...After graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949, Andrew Warhola came to New York with the hope of establishing himself as a painter...
...It is peculiar that Warhol precipitated such a situation...
...The near-universal acceptance of his work has meant that art is whatever the artist says it is...
...Warhol's immense popularity taught artists everywhere the false lesson that cleverness is enough...
...But is this sufficient, or should art also transcend its time...
...Avantgarde art is by definition experimentation, and the cruel reality is that in any endeavor most experiments are destined to fail...
...In 1955, he sent art directors a fanciful lithograph of a woman covered with tattoos of supermarket products and corporate logos...
...For at the very least, the bulk of his work—the formulaic portraits, the predictable repetition of shock images, and so on—should have forced us toward some understanding of what it is we expect from art...
...We live in a time when few things are more highly prized than the single deft stroke of incongruity...
...These questions should stand at the core of any discussion of the avant-garde, not be discarded as irrelevant...
...Therefore, the first responsibility of those within the art world must be to distinguish between what is worthy of consideration and what is not...
...The result of this toying with context was a heightened awareness of the line, space and texture of the everyday, akin to Stuart Davis' wellknown compositions of cigarette packages...
...As Warhol churned out ever more likable art, he made the small yet crucial shift from art inspired by painless consumerism to art that was painlessly consumable...
...This is illustrated with almost pathetic clarity by a 1979 piece (not in the show but included in the catalogue), Big Retrospective Painting (Reversal Series), consisting of parallel rows of his previous flowers, electric chairs and cows...
...In the eyes of a vocal minority, however, he was an avatar of the cheap appeal to fashion now pervading our cultural life...
...Actually, that boundary was blurred long before when graphic designers began packaging products in a visually interesting way...
...No art exists in a vacuum, but avantgarde art in particular requires a dialogue among the curators, critics and audiences who, with the artists themselves, make up the "art world...
...his achievement was bringing it into sharper focus than anybody else...
...Using intense, vivid hues to flatten the image, he gave us matchbook covers and soup cans that were simultaneously ultra-real and parodies of their subjects...
...Here Warhol was the undisputed master, turning out wallpaper decorated with the repeating likeness of Mao Zedong, or a silkscreen of the Statue of Liberty superimposed on a camouflage pattern...
...But then there's the art...
...It is often said Warhol blurred the line between high art and commercial art...
Vol. 72 • March 1989 • No. 6
