I’D LIKE TO BE A GALLERY [382]

Andy Warhol, by turns a renowned artist, counter-cultural figurehead and inventor of our modern notion of celebrity, has to my surprise only appeared three times on this website so far: regarding the endless reproduction of Arnold Machin’s image of Queen Elizabeth II on British postage stamps [link]; as an associate of the iconic artist Keith Haring [link]; and as a man whose career changed when he painted his lunch [link]. Having now belatedly watched “The Andy Warhol Diaries”, a Netflix series I should have known about much earlier, I feel I need to review that latter article, written back in September 2016, because I am not entirely sure of the point I wanted to make.

In the article, I explained that Warhol ate the same lunch of Campbell’s Condensed Soup and Coca-Cola for twenty years, presumably saving thinking time. In an act of “method writing”, I ate the same lunch, finding it not to sustain through to dinner time. I think I was trying to say the whole move could be counterproductive, if that indeed was what Warhol was doing.

Rather than painting what surrounded him, Warhol was responding to a friend’s suggestion to paint objects already familiar to people. In the event, the reaction to the first Coca-Cola and Campbell’s paintings was either bemusement or outrage – I tried to point out that making the individual objects by hand, from mixing the drink and cooking the soup, through to blowing the glass bottle and printing the labels, would be extremely difficult. This may be the kernel of my article, having a point to make, and building a case surrounding it, using names well-known to people, particularly that of Warhol.

I then quoted from “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol”, where he stated that what made the United States great was how it “started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest… the more equal something is, the more equal it is”. This feeds into Pop Art being based in the use of imagery from popular culture, and in the democracy of art as the levelling of a playing field – anything can become art. It’s a good point worth making, but only because we have seen how this is developed into works like Damien Hirst’s embalmed shark, and Tracey Emin’s unmade bed.

I would try not to write the last sentence of the article today: “For Andy Warhol, having had his first successful art show, he could concentrate on pictures of what he enjoyed the most – soup, Coca-Cola, money and celebrity.” The parodic, postmodern incarnation of celebrity of classical Hollywood celebrity pioneered by Warhol’s Factory of paintings, films and actors, and continued in one sense by video content creators from their home studios, makes the process transparent – interviews with Warhol always looked for profound replies, only to be met by a banal reply that could be misinterpreted as superficial. We know enough about Warhol, especially from his Diaries, to now there was a three-dimensional person behind the image he created, and the business his art was produced. The human drive to create, and to remain vital, loom large in Warhol’s career, the celebrity and money being the reward.

I'll have a better article about Warhol in due course, once I think of a better idea.

GET INTO THE GROOVE [191]

I stand in front of a painting of two figures - one hand a hole in their torso, and is being used as a hula hoop by the other. Their outlines are painted in white acrylic, within a white outline, on red tarpaulin (not canvas – the metal eyelets have been used to fix it to the wall), and all the remaining space within the outline is filled in with short black-lines, zig-zagging and curving around each other. I look closer. It is not hard to see the artist’s brush strokes, as the lines are roughly an inch wide, but the light in the gallery shows up both the thickness of the paint, and the speed with which it was applied – the drip marks either mark moments of consideration for the artist, or the failure of the paint to keep up with them.

I first discovered the art of Keith Haring around fifteen years ago. Already used to the primary colours and thick outlines of Matt Groening’s creations like “Life in Hell,” “The Simpsons” and “Futurama,” Haring’s works appeared superficially similar and iconic, adding the same bright colours to reoccurring elements like the “Radiant Baby,” flying saucers, coyotes, televisions, computers. However, Haring fused painting with performance art – most of his work appeared outside of gallery spaces, first as graffiti, then as murals, becoming events. The scale of some Haring works, filling whole walls and sides of buildings – locations varying from a tenement in Philadelphia, to the Church of San’Antonio in Rome, and the Berlin Wall - and the sheer numbers of figures and icons compacted together, is overwhelming and bewildering. Think “The Simpsons,” then Hieronymus Bosch, followed by acid house, whose colourful aesthetic he inspired.

An exhibition of Haring’s work, titled simply “Keith Haring,” opened at Tate Liverpool in June 2019, the first UK retrospective of his work. I had to go: I have seen so many of his pictures, but only in books, or online. I could find out what size the pictures were, or the materials used, but I would have no sense of the scale, or the pace at which they were made. I already knew the vast majority of his works are labelled as “Untitled,” the work’s meaning coming only from within itself, and I knew that an art gallery was not the right context for this work – from sticking fragments of art to lampposts and door handles around New York, to sketching onto the paper used to blank expired artwork on the Subway, his artwork is best when it is active, just appearing to you, instead of being held in a vacuum. Regardless, these pictures buzz and excite.

Haring was not given enough time to produce his work – he would die of AIDS-related complications in 1990, aged only 31, and his knowledge of his condition only caused him to work faster and bigger still, while supporting gay and AIDS activist groups, posters for which appeared at the exhibition. I wish he could have lived to have seen the rise of emoji – he left the meaning of his own iconography to his audience, and I imagine he would have got a kick out of everyone now doing the same themselves.

Keith Haring wrote in 1978, the year he arrived in New York, “I am not making pictures anymore... My paintings, themselves, are not as important as the interaction between people who see them and the ideas that they take with them after they leave the presence of my painting.” Within a couple of years, he became a contemporary of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, whose work first inspired Haring to become a painter. What do I do next?

* “Keith Haring” continues at Tate Liverpool until 10^th November 2019, moving to the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels from 6^th December to 19^th April 2020, and finally, from 22^nd May to 20^th September 2020, the Museum Folkwang in Essen.

I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR [16]

I cannot comprehend how the Pop Art-ist Andy Warhol ate the same lunch for twenty years – like Albert Einstein, or Alfred Hitchcock, who always wore the same clothes, I can only guess a standard lunch of condensed soup (usually tomato) and Coca-Cola means you save precious seconds that can be spent thinking how to produce the perfect screen print of Marilyn Monroe, or of an electric chair, or something.

Having just eaten this lunch before writing – I had cream of mushroom – I feel that fewer than three hundred calories does not feel like enough to sustain you until dinner, and the soup really needs to be eaten with something. It might fill a hole in your stomach, but not much more.

However, this was not why Warhol, whose career as a commercial illustrator for newspaper and magazine advertisements led him into fine art, chose to make his name by painting the cans and bottles that he saw every day. With a chance to submit works to a gallery, and a need for to distinguish his work from more polished artists, like the comic book-style canvasses of Roy Lichtenstein, or British artists like Peter Blake (he of the “Sergeant Pepper” album cover), a friend suggested Warhol should paint a subject already familiar to people.

The final work, literally named “Campbell’s Soup Cans” (1962), consisting of thirty-two paintings of every flavour available at the time, including Manhattan clam chowder, caused a sensation, mostly from people not sure what to make of it, or outrage over seemingly too much effort used to paint a picture of such an easily available, manufactured object.

Pop Art is based around taking images from popular culture, often changing their context and meaning as a result. The more ironic the use of a banal or kitschy item, the more success the artist may have - the reason a five-year-old can’t do it is because they wouldn’t know why they should. It was a journey not many people had taken, or would want to take, but in our era of unmade beds and sharks in formaldehyde, gallery audiences nowadays are much more receptive. 

While I see the elevation of mass production into fine art, what I also see how we can rightly take mass production for granted. Without various factories, processes and conveyor belts, consider how much effort it would take to produce a can of condensed soup, and a bottle of cola, from cooking the soup and mixing the drink, through to forming a metal can, blowing a glass bottle, and illustrating the labels.

In the book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol,” whether he wrote it or not, Warhol, an immigrant from what is now Slovakia, stated what made the United States great was how it “started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest… the more equal something is, the more equal it is.” Whether you spent tens of millions of dollars on his paintings of soup tins and Coke bottles or, in my case, £1.68, the meaning of what you see is the same. Democracy, especially in art, means no special treatment for anyone, and levelling the playing field, however that is done, means someone had to take a big step first.

Originally intended to be sold off as individual canvasses, the gallery owner bought all of “Campbell’s Soup Cans,” and they are now kept together by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For Andy Warhol, having had his first successful art show, he could concentrate on pictures of what he enjoyed the most – soup, Coca-Cola, money and celebrity.