Andy Warhol— From A to B and Back Again
Commerce, at its best, is art. Art, at its most profitable, is commerce. Until the 1950s, the two were mutually exclusive. Commerce wasn’t high concept, and art wasn’t supposed to be a sales pitch. Then Andy Warhol came along and broke down the boundaries between the two.
Brillo Boxes (1969)
Warhol predicted and predated commodity culture with flair, taste, and irreverence. He married commerce and the avant-garde. Compared with his pop art contemporaries, Warhol’s output was considered second-rate, inane. While these other artists’ work have stood the test of time, Warhol’s has transformed art’s place in society and our understanding of what can be art, evident from the Whitney Museum’s retrospective “Andy Warhol— From A to B and Back Again.”
The Whitney show begins with Warhol’s early drawings: A painting of his mother’s living room done while he was a student at Carnegie Mellon University, a series of illustrated advertisements for I. Miller shoes, and his homoerotic sketches of men’s feet and faces. Visually different from Warhol’s mid-and-late career output, they were the genesis of his future content. Warhol was the father of content, distilling his subjects down to Merriam-Webster’s definition of the word, the “principal substance.” Though Merriam-Webster’s conception of content relates primarily to the internet, Warhol’s early drawings told stories in the manner that today’s content does, a face-value narrative that nevertheless possesses more intelligence, context, layering, than the first glance indicates. The drawings communicate Warhol’s attitudes toward family, lust, commerce, much in the way that a narrative essay or branded content would today, garnering thousands or millions clicks and views.
The show’s greatest focus is on what New York critic Jerry Saltz called the “magical years of 1962 to 1964,” and those directly preceding and succeeding them. The magic of these years comes from Warhol’s transition from strict commercial work to subverting commercial imagery, creating a sort of advertising that did more for products than product promotion. He began exploring ways of representing products and celebrities that were at once exact yet imperfect. Consider Warhol’s epic silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe (1962), made soon after her tragic overdose, and how each variation is slightly different from the next. Each image of Marilyn addresses the flaws that make beauty beauty, the idolatry of fame and the imperfection which public demands eradicate. The contrast between the showy, gold first panel and austere, black-and-white second panel symbolize the downfall of Marilyn’s commodity without rebuking it, without knocking her off her mantle as the idealized American sex symbol, changing perspective without shifting her status.
Warhol’s iconography dealt as much with things as with people. His Coke bottles, Campbell’s Soup cans, and Brillo Boxes represent the commercial ideal, representations of products that are not only good, but are good to look at. They’re better than the traditional advertising of the time, and are a large reason why art and advertising have fused. The late, great Glenn O’Brien, editor of Warhol’s Interview magazine and longtime Factory habitue, posited in his 2017 book Like Art, “What is the difference between art and advertising? Quality? Clearly not. The only difference I could come up with for sure was the logo.” While Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans, Coke bottles, and Brillo boxes weren’t commissions from these companies, they introduced the artistic power of logos, that classic Greek persuasive technique. A pleasing image, perhaps complemented by a catchy phrase, goes a long way in building a brand. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t an ad man or that these works were representations rather than promotions; Warhol made you want to buy products and buy into the notion of commodity.
Sunset, 1972
Warhol’s love of commodity and celebrity made sense since he craved spectacle, subjects that were campy, outré, grotesque. His “Death and Disaster” series was produced during these “magic years” as well, and these works commented on the homicides, suicides, car crashes, and police brutality that dominated news headlines during the mid-1960’s. The empty panels that several of these works feature represent the void, emptiness, meaninglessness, asking “Why?” Yet tragedy fit within Warhol’s “15 Minutes of Fame” ethos, predating the idea that any fame is good fame, any publicity is good publicity. The images, sometimes the names, became known. Warhol’s “13 Most Wanted Men” series of the same era follows this logic, too, celebrating the new idea of the public figure, not criticizing the infamous but representing them, giving them agency when they’ve lost all traces of it.
Beyond his mid-’60’s masterpieces, the show makes the case for Warhol’s later work, unfairly derided by critics who find it flamboyant and unapologetically commercial. What they miss is the genius behind Warhol’s reproduced images, refined after his early explorations but no less iconoclastic. After Warhol “retired” from painting in 1965, he doubled down on silkscreen production. Of course, there were Interview, his many films, and his books, but on the canvas, less seemed to change than critics realized. What did change, however, was the drollness present in Warhol’s work, veering toward self-amusement and the complete acceptance of creating a new commodity culture. These works embodied Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase “The medium is the message,” and possessed discernible layers of subtext involving Warhol’s life, obsessions, and contradictions.
Warhol’s late work looked as much like paintings as his actual paintings did. Consider his series of 632 printed sunsets, produced for the Marquette Hotel in Minneapolis in 1972. Though the near precision of the works’ shapes and lines define the silkscreen process, the room for error and variation make each work appear unique. Their merit as art is by no means diminished by their commercial origins, and is fact enhanced by it because, though gone from the hotel now, they were art alive, visible for visitors’ appreciation. Not only were these sunsets beautiful, they were functional. Art that serves a purpose lives on.
Paramount, 1984-85 (with Jean-Michel Basquiat)
Though the number of late-period Warhol works is limited on the Whitney’s fifth floor, the small first-floor gallery features his expansive series of portraits, produced between 1968 and 1987. These silkscreened photographs mark the beginning of the personal brand, the person as something outside of personhood, the figure as more significant than the individual. Even Warhol considered these portraits “Business Art.” Today we market ourselves in the manner that Warhol portrayed these subjects. We filter our photos, curate our angles, sublimate our appearance. We make our personal Instagrams business pages, mine says “Writer.” These portraits are people as business. Their location makes them less trafficked, and they’ve received less attention than the rest of the show, perhaps because it reveals a truth that’s uncomfortable for most of us, something completely beautiful and modern.
My current iPhone lock screen photo is of a painting by Eric Yahnker, from his ongoing “Factory Reset” exhibition at The Hole gallery (ending December 23). The painting is of Warhol, holding an iPhone XS, presumably looking in a mirror, his image reflected on the canvas. Were Warhol alive today — he would be 90 — he would have approved of Yahnker’s repurposing and representation. That’s what Warhol built his career on, and that’s the future of imagery. The marriage art and commerce is going strong, given that banner ads and billboards are now looking like masterworks and masterworks are looking like banner ads and billboards. The two will only become more intertwined as our society becomes more image-based and technology progresses. As Lou Reed sang, “Pop goes pop artist,” spreading his ideas among us everywhere, wherever things are sold.