ASPEN ART MUSEUM Summer Magazine 2021

ASPEN ART MUSEUM

ANDY WARHOL: LIFETIMES

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Warhol in Public

“On social media we have all become public objects. We are all Andy Warhols. Life has become a performance.”

(From A to B and Back Again) , from 1975, he wrote, ‘A whole day of life is like a whole day of television. TV never goes off the air once it starts for the day and I don’t either. At the end of the day, the whole day will be a movie. A movie made for TV.’ Today this finds an echo in the saying, ‘My life is a movie.’ Or, ‘Last night was a movie.’ When people say this, they not only mean that they feel like they’re in a movie, but that our scripted, filmed, edited and broadcast lives, have become the dominant cultural form now—the one that’s replaced movies. On social media, we have all now become public objects. We are all Andy Warhols. Life has become a performance. If 20th-century post-war culture was driven by materi- alism, 21st-century culture is driven by narcissism. We don’t merely affirm our identities through brands and consumer objects but turn ourselves into brands and consumer objects. With this, Warhol lit the way—he transformed what art could be, and also helped transform how society would function (for the worse).

More significantly still, he made himself into a recognizable brand and a star. In this he’d likely had a lot of encourage- ment from his dealer Ivan Karp, of Leo Castelli Gallery, who had spent a long while persuading him to make that first series of self-portraits. As Carter Ratcliff notes in Andy Warhol (1983), Karp told the artist, ‘People want to see you. Your looks are responsible for a certain part of your fame—they feed the imagination.’ Warhol made those self-portraits, then bounded many steps forward and made himself into an artwork. He made everything he did into art: hanging out, making money, shopping, going to par- ties, climbing Manhattan’s social ladder, enjoying all of life’s new freedoms in the 1960s. He saw how society was changing, and placed himself right there at its cen- ter. Warhol came up with and perfected the idea of the artist as celebrity. Documenting society also became his way of navigating modern life. Writing in the same article, Indiana observed that in Bob Colacello’s Holy Terror: Andy

Warhol Close Up (1990), which focuses on the 1970s and ’80s, ‘Warhol often ap- pears forlornly isolated in rooms full of ostensible friends, clutching a tape recorder or camera like a magic wand, as if turning life into the memory of life without having to experience it.’ Does this sound familiar? Like how we live now? Documenting life, rather than experiencing it. ‘Sharing’ life with an imagined audience, rather than partak- ing of it with those in the same room as us. Imagining how what’s happening around you, or to you, will appear on the screen. Allowing reality to sink below the horizon. Speaking with Alfred Hitchcock in 1974, for Interview , Warhol remarked that his experience of being shot six years earlier had felt ‘like watching TV.’ He was able to view the world with great de- tachment—at least that’s how he chose to present himself. Having somebody try to kill you was like watching television, and living was like making television. In his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

Warhol is alleged to have once said, ‘I paint pictures of myself to remind myself that I’m still around.’ He turned his life into art but also used art as a way to construct himself, and reassure himself of his place in the world. But in these self-portraits, nothing is revealed. Unlike the great portrait painters of the past, who strove to express something of their personality and emotional state in their brushwork, Warhol designed an empty, impenetrable mask for himself. ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,’ he said in a 1967 interview with Cahiers du Cinéma , ‘just look at the sur- face of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.’ The surface, the image was all that mattered. Though he made himself into a public object, he revealed nothing of his inner, private life. His was a mask that never slipped.

Above Andy Warhol and Jane Holzer at the opening of ‘Andy Warhol: Portraits of the 1970s’, Whitney Museum of Art, New York, November 20, 1979 Photo: © Marcia Resnick/ Getty Images

Dean Kissick is a writer based in New York. He publishes the column ‘The Downward Spiral’ on Spike Art every month.

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