The Many Deaths Of Andy
Warhol published in Art & Australia, Spring 1987, Sydney
Philip Brophy, 1987
"It's best to be born fast, because it hurts, and it's best to die fast, because it
hurts, but I think if you were born and died within that minute, that would be the
best life." 1
Warhol died on Sunday February 22nd 1987 at New York Hospital's Cornell Medical
Centre after gallbladder surgery. A few days later, art dealer Ronald Feldman reflects
on Warhol's recent works, completed (a large reworking of DaVinci's Last Supper, a
set of Lenin portraits, a portfolio of prints continuing his hommage to the late Joseph
Beuys) and unfinished (a commission by a Danish publishing group on Hans Christian
Anderson and his fairy tales) : "Andy was on a roll this year, and he must be very
angry that he died." 2 Perhaps not. A certain or particular Warhol died - that of the
silver hair and black skivee ; that of whom we inscribe the 'real person' named
Warhol. But other Warhols live - those that deny art ; those that speak 'the death of
the artist' 3 ; those that have already died. Warhol is dead - long live Warhol.
One wonders in fact if Warhol's death is an event, a point to render historic. If the
Warhol we have pronounced 'artist' dies, we can romanticize his past through
mourning his death, in that our mourning would be the condition of our belief in the
living person as creator of art, as the one we can pronounce 'artist'. This Warhol's
death would then become an event because it will cause change due to its future
inability to change : the artist dies - no more art. But this romantic death is a
paradox : on the one hand, the artist is para-human, above and beyond fellow
humans ; on the other hand this paranormality, this genius, is extinguished in the
death of the human. The paradox is covered, though, by the historicized 'life-afterdeath' of the artistic genius : the human dies - the artist lives.
This of course is overly simplistic. The true values of the dead artist are mythical
(created by the writings of history and criticism) and economic (determined by a
state of collectability). Both values are mutually exclusive and live in a harmony
peculiar to the cultural status of the artist at that point in time. It also follows that a
dead Warhol does not project the same combination of values as a dead Van Gough
or a dead Rothko. Or, for that matter, a dead Arthur Cravan (who?) 4 or a dead Chris
Burden (is he dead?) 5 . The romanticization of the artist's death is often itself the
very process used to both cite the artist's life as source of its genius and prepare the
death-event for history. (In Egypt they called it mumification.) But as many counterhistories have so salaciously pointed out, most artists' life-before-death is at the
other extreme to their mythical life-after-death : their twilight is the definitive
Hollywood Babylon 6 where those mummies are monsters.
If the monstrous is the result of mega-mythicism, Elvis (not Godzilla) is King Of The
Monsters. Tales of the great hedonist hermit in his twilight mansion (part Egyptian
tomb, part Baptist shrine, eerily named Gracelands) coloured his life even while he
lived. Like Warhol, Elvis had died many authorial and artistic deaths before August
16th, 1977, both through offering himself up to a society for repeatable consumption
and through a series of developments that signalled a draining of his consumerable
energy : his conscription in 1958, the Hollywood musicals that followed, his 'live'
return to Burbank (via television), Hawaii (via satellite) and Las Vegas (via film).
Elvis' death - like that of the romantic paradox - was mythicised as much as his life,
branded as he was with, as and by the birth of Rock'N'Roll. Warhol's portraits of Elvis
are first degree eulogies, especially the more famous serialization (from 1963
onwards) of a still from Flaming Star (a telling title for all concerned). Those works
celebrate not Pop music icons and their stardom (as most disposable histories of Pop
would have us believe) but the nature and type of death effected by that cultural
process we call fame.
Art historicism has remained ignorant of the profound irony of what the Elvis series
represents : a Rock'N'Roll cowboy whose hips signal death and sex ; a gunslinger,
poised and ready to shoot, to give us the erotic of death ; a refugee from the
Western - a cinematic genre dying a classical death by the 60s ; a superimposition of
a body on a void of colour, rendered in monochrone or with garish colour-overlays,
carefully illustrated or carelessly executed by the silkscreen process. Warhol - out of
perversity - simply titled these works Elvis, having us assume that we were directly
experiencing his picturing of Elvis, when in reality he was serializing a publicity still
from a film which was a promotional vehicle for communicating the productivity of
the Elvis 'phenomenon' to fuel the commodification of the Elvis 'identity'. Most Art
histories have documented the simplicity without revealing its perversity.
The ironies and perverisites are culturally perpetuated : in 1973 the Australian
National Gallery purchased a Single Elvis from 1963 in a typical museographic
gesture that celebrated the death of Pop Art as another mummy in the great halls of
Modernism. The Gallery purchased the print for $25,000 at a Sotheby auction in
London - by proxy, via a cable which stipulated how high they could bid 7 . Ten years
later in 1983, director James Mollison would mention that Single Elvis is one of their
most popular exhibits with 'the family'. One suspects that such a work most clearly
communicates to 'the family' the precise function of the museum in its
mummification of art, artists and all their icons. The logic flows mercilessly - true
artists are dead artists ; real art depicts dead art. The Australian National Gallery's
presentation of Warhol's Single Elvis gives the Elvis public everything they didn't get
with the infamous shrine in the Melbourne Cemetery. And in the end (or for the time
being) Single Elvis perversely does function as 'simply' Warhol's picturing of Elvis
Presley.
A similar functioning of fame-by-death and death-by-fame enlivens various other
stars Warhol serialized in the sixties (fan magazine shots of Taylor, Monroe and
Donahue, plus stills of Brando from The Wild One, Lugosi from Dracula, Cagney from
Public Enemy, and Taylor from Cleopatra). In particular, the more famous Liz and
Marilyn serializations evidence death in their very surfaces - do their faces not
resemble the grotesque work of a mortician who lavishes over a creation of beauty
to signify the end of beauty for and to the cadaver's loved ones? This effect of
beauty, of marking beauty and the thin line that separates it from the monstrous,
reminds us of the articulation of beauty through make-up, and of how make-up in
fact signifies a lack of beauty in the same way that the beautified cadaver signifies
the lack of life that generates beauty. It is further interesting to note here that the
visual persona of Warhol - his image - has always been that of a cadaver, of a lack of
life, of an absence of beauty. It is an image that speaks of the death that he - as
creator, producer and manufacturer of absent beauty in art - both covers and
imparts in his work.
The greater bulk of Warhol's silkscreens from the sixties are directly concerned with
death - the series and serializations of Jackie Kennedy at her husband's funeral ;
suicides by jumping from building tops ; fatal car crashes 8 ; newspaper headlines of
disasters ; and the infamous Ten Most Wanted Men commission for the New York
World's Fair of 1964. Concurrent with the hyper-production of these works from
1962 to 1967, Warhol experimented with picturing his own image in the Self Portrait
serializations, which (along with portraits of Ethel Scull, Holly Solomon, Sidney Janis
and Watson Powell Sr.) prefigured what is generally referred to as his Portraits Of
The Seventies 9 . Of course, the gap between 1967 and 1970 was caused by Valarie
Solanis' attempted assassination of Warhol, giving the artist what would amount to a
memorable death-experience. Healing from the multiple bullet wounds, Warhol said :
"I don't know whether or not I'm really alive or whether I died. And having been
dead once, I shouldn't feel fear. But I am afraid. I don't understand why." 10
Warhol's Portraits Of The Seventies are intensely concerned with death - not that I
want to base this observation on the fraility of the above quote, but more because of
the relationship he entertains with living subjects, those who willingly sit for their
portraits. As has been well documented, Warhol used the Polaroid camera in the
preparation for his photographic screen production because of its intrinsic capability
to obliterate all but the facial contours of the subject. Warhol saw this as a 'readymade' form of beautification, cancelling out the flesh's capacity for signifying age
through its texture. But consider the following :
"I stand three feet away. When the flash cube goes off the people can't see a thing,
so they blink. I wait 60 seconds and do another." 11
Warhol is now involved in the act of death, in capturing it in the process of
portraiture and the presence of painterliness. That "flash" (an after-image of Soanis'
gun blasts?) works as an erotic aroused by the state of passing into death, as a
dimensional punctuation of spheres of existence. The graphic, pictorial rendering of
the death act through representation (of stardom, of photography, of history, of
media) in his 60s work is replaced by what in essence are snuff portraits, with
Warhol as actor-murderer and cameraman-murderer. As if in a perpetual recall of
both his multiple wounds (life) and his multiple absences (art), Warhol grants his
subjects the experience of immortality - an experience which they can replay for
themselves simply by gazing upon their death-masks, Warhol's portraits. These
portraits (i) present the act of death in the event of portraiture, and (ii) represent
this layering of death over life (and vice versa) by the high-contrast transparency of
the photographic screenprint (the presence/absence of the subject) overlaying the
opaque, painterly terrain underneath (the presence/absence of the artist). Moreover,
this layering is blurred and blended by a clash of surfaces, creating the illusion of
each lying within one another.
In a way, this textual trompe l'oeil replicates the strange simultaneity of birth and
death that Warhol talks of in the initial quote above, that which he describes as "the
best life". It appears to be a time where one is not even aware of the difference
between life and death - a difference whose lack and gain are displayed, demarcated
and dissolved in virtually all of Warhol's work in one way or another. A great part of
the Warhol myth deals with his removal, his absence, his negation of material and
mechanical involvement with the production of his work, usually circulated around
his infamous denial of humanism : "I want to be a machine". However, it could be
more likely that these various absences and absentings propel the desire of death
through a carthartic release in the act of being absent.
In 1967 (the year of his 'brush with death') Warhol hired Allen Midgette to
impersonate Warhol on a college lecture tour - where Midgette had to perform the
typical Warhol by not answering questions and letting other 'super stars' like Gerard
Malanga field the questions. In 1969 (almost as a warm-up event for the Portraits Of
The Seventies) Warhol posed for Richard Avedon, the result being that portrait of
Warhol baring his scared torso, providing photographic proof of his life-after-death.
Sometime in the early seventies, Warhol - as part of his retirement from painting exhibited some of his 'super stars' (among them : Brigid Polk, Gerard Malanga and
Candy Darling) in person, having them tied by a lease to the gallery wall. After being
exhibited, they were available to be rented from $4000 to $5000 a week :
"People only want art so they can talk about it. This way they can take the art home,
have a party for it, show it to their friends, take Polaroids of it (which I will sign),
make tape recordings. And after the week is over, they'll still have anecdotes." 12
No doubt the process of portraiture was more economical and more sellable, but still
one can see links between the Portraits and the 'people art' - the objectification of
the body ; the commodification of the act of possession ; the replaying of the
experience ; etc.. Warhol's self-declared retirement from painting was most likely a
pause wherein he came to terms with how he should deal with death in art and the
death of art now that he himself was living a life-after death.
On the economic plane, the artist Warhol (the person to whom we attrribute the
culutrual origination of value) died in an everyday ocurrence in capitalist society :
incorporation. Surely this must be the greatest fear of the romantic ethos of art and
artists - replacing the artist's decisions (the proof of his life force) by hegemonic
manoeuvres determined by monetary growth. Warhol's first fundamental death in
this direction was neither his repetition of pre-designed graphics (soup labels,
stamps, adhesive labels, dollar bills, drink bottles, dance diagrams) nor his selection
of the silkscreen process - but the stamp he ordered made to function as his
signature. By this decision and process, Warhol inverted Duchamp's gestural signing
of the toilet basin (as "Mr. R. Mutt") and transformed the gesture into a manoeuvre :
he replaced the alter-ego with a logo.
Warhol incorporated himself through a series of moves which followed the pattern of
his cultural exchanges : from the production of the Velvet Underground's first album
to the promotion of The Erupting (later Exploding) Plastic Inevitable tours to
Morrisey's early films to the publishing of Interview magazine to the franchising of
his name for the Andymat fast food restaurants 13 to the executive production of the
Andy Warhol's TV cable show to the guiding of the ever-present Factory. In legal
terms, the act of incorporation is not only the forming of a buisness body, but also
the disappearing of the human body, of the person(s) to whom decisions can be
singularly traced. Warhol's life as a true Pop artist has always been assured and
insured through his death by incorporation.
In summation, Warhol's artistic life can be divided into two death phases, separated
by Solanis' gun blasts : (i) death by painting, by the signification of his artistic and
authorial absence, and (ii) death by the painter, by the materialization of his artistic
and authorial presence. In this sense, the screen-prints from 1962 to 1967 are
deathly ; those from 1967 to 1987 are ghostly. Not only the Portraits, but also series
like Myths, Skulls, Shadows and Endangered Species, and especially the Reversal
Series, where all his now-incorporated icons from the sixties are rendered as
apparitions in negative. (All these latter works await further analysis along such
lines.)
This article is too brief to fully discern, analyze and propose all that has yet to (and
should already have been) written about Warhol outside of the banal voices of
certain art histories' obsession with formalism and imperception of mass media. As
suggested by his death, I have picked on one of many possible thematic effects
which run through Warhol's work - that of the notion, act, event and dimension of
death - and to introduce it as such. Most importantly, it is in death that we find an
integral link with Duchamp through a shared dandyism : Duchamp spoke of the
death of Art ; Warhol speaks of how Art is death.
NOTES
1 Taken from an issue of the drug culture magazine HIGH TIMES from around 1979,
in which Warhol wrote a celebrity one-off column about his then-chosen favourite
topic, fast life, titled Why I Love To Live Fast.
2 As reported by Grace Glueck in THE NEW YORK TIMES Arts & Entertainment
section on Thursday February 26th, 1987.
(TEXT MISSING HERE FROM FILE CORRUPTION - awaiting data re-entry)
... Barthes' article titled The Death Of The Author, which clearly and simply lays
some fundamental groundwork in how one can begin to discern the multiple
modalities, layers, acts, performances and events of writing within a given text in
relation to our conceptualization of its author. (The article itself is not as important
as the general area of linguistic discourse and its relation to cultural production.)
More specifically, I relate this notion of death to Warhol following Robbe-Grillet's
comments on Lichtenstein as reprinted in Roy Lichtenstein, edited by John Coplans
(Praeger Publishers Inc. 1972).
4 Arthur Cravan : boxer, poet, sailor, Dadaist. He apparently disappeared one day in
1918 sailing in an absurdly small boat in the Gulf of Mexico to meet his wife as part
of what was presumed to be his ultimate Dada gesture.
5 No - but what would the market value of Burden's body be if those bullets did kill
him, or if those cars on the L.A. Freeway had killed him?
6 The title of Kenneth Anger's volumes which detail the underside of Hollywood's
many and varied tragic deaths.
7 As reported by Ken Davis in the Melbourne SUN, July 7th 1973.
8 I shall never forget as a teenager being chided by an adult for admiring Warhol's
Saturday Disaster series because of my ignorance of the fact that Warhol would get
ambulance drivers to phone him up to rendezvous at the scene of a horror smash
where the drivers would wait around for Warhol to snap his pics while innocent
people died. An extreme and hysterical example of the confusion of image with
reality.
9 The title of the Whitney Museum exhibition of Warhol portraits in 1979. The
Random House book serves as the show's catalogue. In many articles, the Mao
serialization of 1972 is cited as the first '70s portrait' (coinciding with his publicized
'return to painting') although portraits like that of Dennis Hopper and some of the
later Self Portraits appear to cover the 1969-1970 period. One should also note the
commissions for album covers (The Rolling Stones, Dion, Diana Ross, Julien Lennon
and Aretha Franklin) and book jackets (James Dean and The Beatles) Warhol
recieved throughout the seventies and into the eighties.
10 Quoted in Carter Ratcliff's Warhol (Abbeville Modern Masters series, 1983) from
Peter Gidal's Andy Warhol, Films & Paintings.
11 As quoted by Kathleen Brady in THE AUSTRALIAN WOMEN'S WEEKLY, January
25th 1978.
12 As quoted in an obscure article (torn from a second-hand magazine and passed
onto me) on 'contemporary art' from what could be ESQUIRE from around 1970.
13 As reported by 'Dick Tracy' in THE NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS sometime in Summer,
1978. The article cites Araldo Cossuta as the restaurant's architect and quotes a
spokesman saying that the Andymat's aim is "to recapture the gracious format of a
varied menu served in comfortable surroundings". The Andymat (due to have opened
in Autumn 78 - did it actually open?) serves 75 different dishes of frozen food.