As with many of Warhol’s elegantly provocative statements this isn’t entirely true.
Warhol was often quoted as saying that he wanted to be like a machine, and a machine, certainly a printing press or a photocopier, is able to reproduce the same identical image indefinitely. Printing is a ditto device, according to Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist and author of The Medium is the Massage.
But in using silk-screening as his means of production, Warhol was deliberately choosing a process that was very low-tech. The kind of machinery and the kind of mass production that Andy Warhol embraced here was of a distinctly cottage industry variety. And as Warhol said, results varied.
Silk-screening is a very hands-on process. However careful or skilled the inker is (and some of Warhol’s assistants were neither), there are likely to be variations in the amount of ink and pressure applied, and the final images will be similarly non-identical. It is a machine process that leaves behind traces of the human being who uses it. Warhol made this work entirely to the advantage of his art.
It is all too easy for the repetition of an image to reduce its impact. It may make us immune to its beauty or its horror, and blind to its meaning. Inevitably we have come to know the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the atom bomb explosions, the race riots of the 1960s as a series of vivid media images Because the image is so immediately recognizable, indeed so familiar, there is a tendency to think that we know all about this subject and think there is no need to explore it any further. The images have become iconic, and icons are not to be questioned or challenged. It was Warhol’s self-appointed task to change that.
Sometimes, however, repetition can make us look more closely, especially the way Warhol uses it, for example, Lavender Disaster (1964), is a grid of 15 black silk-screened images of the electric chair, printed on a lavender background. (Other versions of course used many different background colours and different numbers of images.) On one level one could interpret the repetition of the image as suggesting that death is common, and that death too can be mass produced, just like a photograph. But then we see that these multiple images of the chair aren’t exactly identical after all. The hand of the silk-screener is evident. Some images are darker than others, they have more ink, they are denser, blacker, more sinister. There are small but important differences between them. It wouldn’t be over-interpreting to take from these images the realization that, even though death is ubiquitous and commonplace, no two deaths are ever identical.
And yes, there is a sort of grotesque beauty in Warhol’s electric chairs, one he obviously recognized. He said;
“You wouldn’t believe how many people will hang a picture of an electric chair in their room — especially if the color of the picture matches the curtains.”
However much Warhol enjoys playing with and subverting aesthetic notions about the produced image and the nature of mass production, his use of repetition also raises a more humane issue. Warhol’s professed reason for painting multiple soup cans was that he had eaten Campbell’s soup for lunch every day for 20 years. And this is surely how most of us live our lives. However much we crave variety or novelty, however special we consider ourselves to be, our lives are essentially made up of repeated acts — eating, sleeping, working, having sex. Warhol’s art embraces these multiple repetitions. He celebrates and redeems them.
Summary
All Warhol’s work involves repetition and multiple images.
He chose silk-screening as the cheapest, simplest way of producing multiple, yet slightly varied images.
His work finds fascination and variety within repetition.
8 Warhol and Sex
The received wisdom is that Pop Art’s predecessor — Abstract Expressionism — was a virile, macho, heterosexual (if not heterosexist) art form. This is allegedly demonstrated by its grandeur, energy, aggression and high seriousness. In reacting against Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art is therefore supposed to be playful, ironic, vernacular, dandyish and camp, even if not necessarily gay.
A biographical analysis would certainly tell us that the big names of Abstract Expressionism — Rothko, Pollock, De Kooning — were certainly heterosexuals. The stars of Pop were largely, though by no means exclusively, gay. Indeed Warhol was not initially welcomed into the fold by other gay Pop Artists because he was perceived as being too gay by half, though this was evidently an objection to his personal style rather than to his art.
However, the idea that aggression, virility or energy are uniquely heterosexual, or that playfulness and irony are uniquely homosexual, is a proposition that is destroyed by even the slightest acquaintance with either heterosexuals or homosexuals. Would a heterosexual paint a dollar sign any differently from the way a homosexual would? Would a homosexual drip paint onto a canvas differently from the way a heterosexual would? The questions are absurd, but one answer might be that no two people would ever paint a dollar sign or drip paint in exactly the same way, even if they shared the same sexual orientation.
When it comes to subject matter that addresses sexuality, however, the issues are different. While Warhol was finding his style in the late 1950s, his art included a lot of drawings of the male nude. They might be thought of as erotic, and in their day were regarded as mildly shocking, even if they were simultaneously dismissed for their campiness. By any standard they appear transparently ‘homosexual’. Today they also look incredibly old fashioned in a way that Warhol’s work from just a few years later never does. These drawings look ‘1950s’ and demonstrate the extent to which Warhol discovered himself in the 1960s.
The works that first made his name — the soup cans, Brillo boxes, dollar bills, Green Stamps and so forth — appear extremely cool and neutral. To speak of them in sexual terms seems to be missing the point. The Coke bottle admittedly doesn’t quite fit this description. It does have a calculated sexual element: it is a phallic symbol, but one with an hourglass figure. In that sense, however, its appeal would therefore appear to be polysexual. Critics used to speak a lot about Warhol’s ‘polymorphous perversity’ — a term taken from Freud, referring to a state of human development when the child responds to all manner of stimuli, before his or her sexual identity has been fixed.
These days this analysis of Warhol is rather sneered at. The straight world, it is argued, wanted to embrace Warhol’s work but didn’t want to face up to the fact that he was gay so they reinvented him as ‘polymorphous’. There is some truth in this; on the other hand Warhol was also responsible for introducing gay culture to a mass audience that might previously have been alarmed or repelled by it.
He wasn’t alone in this. Warhol was not single-handedly responsible for introducing hustlers, transvestites and sado-masochism to the mainstream: one might cite David Bowie, Lou Reed or John Schlesinger (director of Midnight Cowboy) as equally important. But Warhol prefigures all these people, and they all tip their hat to him. Reed was a member of Warhol’s house band. Bowie sang a song called Andy Warhol and went on to play him in the movie Basquiat. Various Warhol superstars appeared in Midnight Cowboy to give it ‘authenticity’.
This is not the time or place for an in-depth discussion of the 1960s ‘sexual revolution’. Suffice it to say that this was an era in which there was much talk of liberation, both for men and women, and much talk — at least among hippies and would-be hippies — about free love. A refusal to condemn or be shocked by homosexuality was an inevitable part of this package. However, it is extremely hard to make a mental connection between Warhol and ‘free love’. Today he seems the least ‘hippie’ of artists.