Warhol concluded his private history of the cinema by becoming a namebrand producer, rather than a hands-on director. His shooting by Solanas certainly played a major part in this, but one also feels that by 1968 he had probably done all he could with the form.
Later Warhol movies such as Flesh (1968), Trash (1970) and Heat (1972) were directed and largely conceived by Paul Morrissey. They tend to be rather sneered at these days but were well regarded at the time, and Warhol was happy enough to put his name to them. They seem to belong to the world of commerce rather than art, although there is certainly still nothing very slick or professional about them. They are populated by typical Warhol characters — hookers, junkies, transvestites — but they feel like movies about the Warhol milieu rather than being a product of it. Later there were a couple of horror movie parodies, one of Dracula and one of Frankenstein, which were just dreadful.
Whether Warhol’s movies have any lasting influence beyond the art world is debatable. They are essentially sui generis. They were of their time, there had never been anything like them before and there is never likely to be anything quite like them ever again.
Summary
Warhol was part of the American ‘underground film’ movement.
Warhol’s early films can be regarded as conceptual, later ones are more like documentaries about the world he moved in.
His work represents a personal history of the cinema.
By 1968 he seemed to have exhausted the possibilities of what he could do with film.
6 Warhol’s Other Projects
After his death, when Christie’s came to value the Andy Warhol estate, they took a look at the 100,000 or so photographs he had left behind and concluded that they were worth the grand sum of $107,000. With some notable, expensive exceptions they calculated that the majority of the standard prints were worth a dollar each, and that the Polaroids were worth five cents.
Now, it is perfectly possible to believe that many of these photographs were just disposable test shots and the like, but obviously Warhol had chosen not to dispose of them, and in any case, anonymous, nondescript old photographs sell for more than that at flea markets.
Christie’s explained that they had arrived at this amazingly low figure because they considered Warhol to be only a painter, not a photographer of any repute. All the money and the art was therefore in the paintings and nowhere else. Needless to say their assessment was not allowed to go unchallenged. Exhibitions had been held of Warhol’s photographs. He had used photographs as the basis for portraits. He had published photographic books. The estate managed to find an expert witness who valued the same collection of photographs at $80 million. As I write, an Internet company is selling some of the Warhol Polaroids, apparently very successfully, for $12,500 each.
Even leaving aside the matter of the photographs, the idea that Warhol was only a painter is patently absurd. Throughout his career he worked in other media, and created a number of sometimes minor yet always distinctive works. He was, for example, responsible for two of the most striking record album covers ever designed.
The first, The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), shows a big yellow and black banana on a plain white background. In the original edition the skin of the banana peeled off to reveal the flesh beneath. A large Andy Warhol ‘signature’ appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the cover, as though that might be the name of the recording artist. The image of the banana is simultaneously provocative and silly. Yes, the banana is a crude, obvious phallic symbol, but how could anyone seriously take this bald, cartoonish image as a symbol of anything? Beck (Hanson, the musician) says of it;
“It’s so blank it says everything and nothing.” (in Vanity Fair, November 2001, p.216).
Far more ‘something’ is the cover of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers (1971) featuring a close-up of a man’s bulging, be-jeaned crotch complete with an actual zipper that opens. The result is funny, sexy, very faintly shocking, somewhat in bad taste: everything that rock music is supposed to be. It is extraordinarily original, yet so completely obvious that you can’t quite believe somebody hadn’t thought of it before.
These album covers are perfect pieces of commercial art. They draw attention to themselves and to the product within. Here, Warhol’s art is satisfyingly functional. He did a similarly successful job on the poster he designed for George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972. It is very hard to think of Warhol as a political animal, but this poster was a wonderful piece of agitprop*.
≡ Literally a political strategy involving techniques of agitation and propaganda to influence public opinion. Originally used by the Marxist theorist Plekhano and then by Lenin.
It simply shows a Warhol-style portrait of the rival candidate, Richard Nixon, looking sour, surly, jowly, shifty, green-faced, very much the sort of man you wouldn’t by a used car from let alone choose as president; and underneath it is the simple caption, ‘Vote McGovern’.
The poster caused considerable outrage at the time, at least from members of the Republican Party, having supposedly crossed the line of what was acceptable as political debate. Warhol always claimed that Nixon was sufficiently offended that after he had won the election he turned the Inland Revenue Service on Warhol, having them go through his finances with a fine-tooth comb, looking for evidence of tax fraud.
Warhol also created a variety of what might be called sculptural objects. The best known of these are the Brillo and Campbell’s soup boxes, but he also did boxes of Del Monte peaches, Heinz Tomato Ketchup and Kellogg’s Cornflakes. These are not quite Duchampian ready-mades since Warhol didn’t simply sign existing cardboard boxes, rather he went to the trouble of creating heavy wooden replicas instead. At other times he worked with helium-filled silver balloons, and huge inflatable versions of wrapped Baby Ruth chocolate bars.
Warhol made a few appearances in other people’s movies, sometimes in quirky independent productions such as Cocaine Cowboys or Blank Generation, but he also appeared in something as mainstream as Tootsie. It will come as no surprise that he almost always played himself. Having perfected the Andy Warhol act he was hardly going to start playing other parts.
He never had a successful television show, although he did have a couple of unsuccessful ones. Andy Warhol’s TV and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes. There have certainly been shorter, more ignominious television careers.
The reasons for television success and failure are mysterious at the best of times, but for all of Warhol’s instinctive understanding of the media, and for all his ability to manipulate them, we might have guessed that he would not be a big hit on his own chat show. Yes, he is iconic, and yes his connoisseurship of banality would not seem to be out of place on TV, but there are other qualities that television demands that Warhol did not possess and did not have any interest in. Warhol is not warm, and he is never ingratiating, and warmth and ingratiation are at the very heart of television.
Print was an area where he was far more likely to be successful, and Interview, still in business today, must surely be the longest-lived magazine ever founded by an artist. It would be hard to make any great claims for Interview as a work of art, although it did contain a lot of material created by Warhol. He supposedly set up the magazine in order to get tickets to movie premieres.