(Image credit – Wikipedia)

‘I don't know where the artificial stops and the real starts.’
---Andy Warhol

Whenever I get bored, I watch Andy Warhol’s interviews on YouTube. Not to listen to what he says but just watch him struggle with words and verbal expressions. “Words troubled and failed Andy Warhol,” writes Wayne Koestenbaum in Warhol’s biography. Warhol was essentially a shy person, and this was often misinterpreted as neurotic, deviant and aloof.

Lately, I’ve been suffering from the “Warhol itch” as Michael Glover calls it. It inflicts his fans now and then. All the more now when Netflix’s ‘The Andy Warhol Diaries’ has been released. I liked when the narrator, Jeffery Deitch says in ‘Season 1, Episode 5’,

Andy Warhol’s greatest work of art is Andy Warhol. The way he constructs his persona. He is an early example of artist as art. You could put Gertrude Stein in that category, Salvador Dali and Oscar Wilde as musicians.

Having shocked the art world in 1962 with images of Campbell soup tins he went on to do more remarkable things with art. He drew the American archetype ‘coke bottle’ and weird self-portraits that were accepted and appreciated by the audiences. In July 1986, ITN's Stephen Phillips interviewed Andy Warhol when the artist made a rare trip to London to open an exhibition of self-portraits. Warhol responded to Phillips' inquiries in a way that was usually unconventional. On being asked what interested him in soup cans, Andy responded, “I eat them every day.” And then there was the famous 1965 interview with Edie Sedgwick where he hardly said anything. Yet Warhol named his magazine ‘Interview’.

Extremely conscious of the commercial aspect of art he put himself into every aspect of mass media. He was extremely self-aware. Yet the cry for acceptance was too loud in his works. He famously said that in future everybody will get 15 minutes of fame. How true has it turned out to be in the era of crass Tik-Toks and shorts?

The paradox is that his fascination with uniformity was thought to be creative. For those who thought he was an accidental artist, he wrote a novel that has been called among the ten greatest books of the '60s. Whether it was penned with some ‘ghostly assistance’ is still debatable. Capturing the times, and times being uninteresting to him. He saw consumerism as the driving force in all art that is to be. Alongside Picasso, Warhol is regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. He was an immensely successful graphic artist and an art director. He was always conscience of his appearance and his skin. He wished he was less pale and more muscular. He worried about becoming poor, had a phobia of hospitals and an immense fear of becoming irrelevant. He pulled down art from the pedestal to the floor. Creating replicas of tin cans and neon images of Marilyn Monroe he looked at everything as art. He turned out to be a perfect example of what an American artist might be. In a veiled manner, he did offer a scathing critique of consumerism and consumeristic art.

Warhol was, in the words of film theorist and writer, Peter Wollen: “A filmmaker, a writer, a photographer, a band-leader (if that’s the word to characterize his involvement with the Velvet Underground), a TV soap opera producer, a window designer, a celebrity actor and model, an installation artist, a commercial illustrator, an artist’s book creator, a magazine editor and publisher, a businessman of sorts, a stand-up comedian of sorts, an exhibition curator, a collector and archivist, the creator of his own carefully honed celebrity image, and so on...Warhol, in short, was what we might loosely call a ‘Renaissance man,’ albeit a Pop or perhaps post-modern Renaissance man.”

He was called fatuous. He knew he was an outsider because he was gay. He produced similar images in an attempt to blend in with the world he could no longer relate to. He implied, in a sense, that ordinary life lacks any artistic quality. Furthermore, Warhol faced challenges as a gay man living in a time when LGBTQ rights were not widely acknowledged. These struggles affected his art as well as his interactions with the outside world. He was indeed a brave gay when it was tough being a brave gay as Michael Glover says. His relationships with Jed Johson, John Gould, and Basquiat were such an eye-opener to know about Andy in the recent Netflix series.

Andy Warhol's ironic response to popular culture has long been associated with the repeated image of a soup can on canvas. However, there is mounting evidence that the late pop artist's obsession with consumer goods, his love of repetition, his care to speak with few words, his inability to recognise friends, and his inability to socialise are all considered to be clues to his artistic sensibilities.

People often misread his works. It’s the deviation that’s worthy of reflection as he himself was.

References

Glover, Michael. “My Argument with Andy Warhol”. March 21, 2020. Hyperallergic.com.
https://hyperallergic.com/548569/andy-warhol-tate-modern/

ITN Archive. 1986: “Andy Warhol Interview.” YouTube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMpJswC4QXM

Koestenbaum, Wayne. Andy Warhol: A Biography, Viking, 2001

Public Delivery. 1966: “Andy Warhol interview (1966)” YouTube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7nw9Up54pg&t=73s
“15 Minutes”, The Andy Warhol Diaries, Netflix.com,
https://www.netflix.com/in/title/81026142