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Envisaging the Possibilities for Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Consumer Culture and the Pervasivesness of the Media:
Andy Warhol


by Anna Pritchard 

All Rights Reserved © Anna Pritchard and Deep South
Deepsouth v.6.n.3 (Spring 2000)

 
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The media was crucial to Warhol's realm.29 For him, TV and cinema were basic constitutive parts of the social world, not mere reflections. This is evident in his assertion that 'a whole day of life is like a whole day of television.'30 The media not only served as the basis of much of Warhol's work, but formed an integral part of his interaction with the world. He figured his exhibitions as media events, revealing a nuanced capacity for their resonance with the consciousness of the general public such as his announcement of the 'Death in America' show just after the assassination of JFK.
 
 

Warhol so immersed himself in mediated devices that he actually seemed to live out the confusion between mediated and real experiences. He wrote, 'I always suspected I was watching TV instead of living life,'31 and, 'their lives became part of my movies and of course the movies became part of their lives - they couldn't tell the difference'.32 This confusion was furthered in Warhol's seeming literal embrace of media as 'extensions of man', whereby he couched his relationship with mediating devices in emotional terms; referring to his tape recorder as his wife and alluding to his desire to be a machine. He even went so far as to commission a robot that could stand in for him.33 Both Marshall McLuhan and Warhol inhabit a certain pop sensibility that describes a world in which people live most of their lives within enclosed spaces governed by the rule of images. In our media saturated world, to be is to be perceived by the camera. My existence is confirmed only at a remove from myself. 
 
 


A Smile of Critical Distance or Collusion?

 
 

Warhol's seeming unqualified embrace of media and commodity culture highlight the inherent ambiguity of Warhol's works and person. Dore Ashton in a key 1963 symposium on Pop remarked: 'Far from being an art of social protest, Pop Art is an Art of capitulation.'34 And Baudrillard wrote that 'Pop's sense of humour is not the smile of critical distance but the smile of collusion'.35 I think we may approach Warhol as more complex than this though, and acknowledge the impossibility of finally determining whether his work is either affirmative or critical of the status quo when the works and indeed Warhol's statements prove terribly elusive. Andy Warhol had his own way of seeing the world and for him this way of seeing, what he called 'pop', had a transformative effect so powerful that once you 'got it' you could never see a sign the same way again. Indeed, you could never see America the same way again.36 The image that Warhol gives us to see is necessarily distorted and ambiguous.
 
 
 

Warhol himself resisted the idea of representing a counter-cultural critique of mainstream culture, saying 'I can't see how I was ever 'underground', since I've always wanted people to notice me'.37 Despite this, Warhol's work can be seen as combining artistic and sexual subversion of the domiant modes of representation, with the films especially exploring the discontinuities between gender, desire and sexual roles. Warhol's performers occupied liminal social positions - as rejects of the entertainment business, as participants in 'deviant' urban subcultures, or as dropouts who rejected the conventions of their class identity. His films chronicled these marginalities and mythologies of dissent. In Andy's domain even outcasts and those defined as non-normative could imagine themselves stars. Steven Shaviro in The Cinematic Body goes so far as to suggest that Warhol puts all of American society in drag; he grasps social life on the level of the body as a simulacral and superficial product.38
 
 
 

Warhol was acutely aware of the delineation between outsiders and the mainstream and the blurring of the two. He observed: 'The way to be counterculture and have mass commercial success was to say and do radical things in a conservative format. Like have a well choreographed, well scored, anti-establishment 'hippie be in' in a well ventilated, well located theatre. Or like McLuhan had done - write a book saying books were obsolete.'39 As the mainstream began to deal with the same topics as the underground counterculture, the liminal position Warhol occupied was confused as the distinction between black and white became between black and grey.40 Andy Warhol actually seemed to live out the contradiction of existing within different realms and appropriating from both. He embraces everything with the same weirdly unreflective affirmation: 'the world fascinates me. It's so nice, whatever it is.'41 It is a stance that reveals a transgressive effacement of boundaries and binaries and Warhol seems to invite us to see otherwise, to find the cracks and fissures within all communities and cultures and to take from all of them to construct a mosaic of complicated and contradictory experience.
 
 
 

No easy polarisation is possible here, since both complicity and resistance are dialectically entwined. Warhol undercuts the possibility for a critical avant-garde to exist outside the circuits and structures of the commodity form. As Warhol's controversial legacy showed, critical art cannot avoid the circuits of exchange but must find its leverage in them. Both poles, oppositional and affirmative, can be inverted or logically extended into each other so that they end up overlapping and penetrating one another.

 

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29 He surrounded himself with multiple TV sets, taped every thing and filmed constantly.
30 Andy Warhol, Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1975), 5.
31 Ibid
32 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett. POPISM: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1980), 180.
33 We might understand this as revealing a certain cyborgian tendency (fusion of human and machine) explored by Donna Haraway in 'A Cyborg Manifesto' In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 854-866.
34 Peter Selz. (ed.) ' A Symposium on Pop Art' a Special Supplement to Arts Magazine April 1963, 36-45.
35 Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings of the Modern Object and its Destiny, 1968-1983. Paul Foss and Julian Pefanis (eds.) (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1990), 87.
36 Jonathan Flatley, 'Warhol Gives Good Face' Pop Out: Queer Warhol, 101. 
37 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism, 47.
38 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 231.
39 Andy Warhol, and Pat Hackett, POPism, 250.
40 Ibid p 280.
41 Interview with Gretchen Berg, 1989, 60.