Given the recent history of art it may seem odd to think that paintings of soup cans could be considered outrageous or shocking, and no doubt the controversy was stoked by the media, yet some of the outrage was undoubtedly real, caused by the feeling that Warhol was somehow insulting and conning his public. What helped to fuel the debate was the fact that in an important sense you didn’t need actually to see these works of art in order to get their point, in order to have an opinion about them and be able to join in the debate. The very idea of a so-called serious artist painting soup cans was outrage enough. In that sense Warhol was always something of a conceptual artist.
He began to make paintings of iconic yet banal, all-American subjects — Green Stamps*, ‘Glass — handle with care’ labels, postage stamps, dollar bills — and he continued working with soup cans and Coke bottles, creating multiple rather than single images.
≡ Stamps that were given out with purchases in shops and supermarkets in the 1960s as a kind of bonus system. Stamps were stuck into books and redeemed against consumer items.
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Warhol discovers mass production
In 1962 Warhol began to use silk-screening in his work, a process that enabled him to make repeated yet often slightly differing images. In May 1963 he told Time magazine;
“Paintings are too hard. The things I want to show are mechancial. Machines have less problems. I’d like to be a machine. Wouldn’t you?”
Right from the beginning, Warhol was always very quotable.
The silk-screen process enabled him to make art in great quantities, and he often left some of the manual work to assistants. He went to his collection of movie magazines, and used extant images as the basis for portraits of Elvis Presley, Troy Donahue, Liz Taylor, Warren Beatty, Natalie Wood, and of course Marilyn Monroe.
Later he began dealing with profoundly American forms of violence and death: images of car crashes, the electric chair, the atom bomb, race riots. At that point in the 1960s there was no shortage of loaded material. His images of Jackie Kennedy mourning her husband’s death have become part of the iconography of the event itself.
The 1960s also offered new, more extreme forms of celebrity. In a world of Beatlemania, there was room for the right sort of artist to become a pop star too, and Warhol looked and acted the part in a way that the likes of Johns or Rauschenberg simply didn’t. Besides, their art was complex, awkward and ambiguous in ways that Warhol’s apparently wasn’t, although this is in no way to deny the depth of Warhol’s work. Warhol very soon became far and away the most famous of the Pop Artists.
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Warhol goes to the movies
Given Warhol’s prolific output at this time it may seem surprising that he still found time to be an avid movie-goer, but somehow he did. His tastes were very broad; both mainstream and avant-garde. He began to attend screenings at the New York Film-Makers’ Co-op, where the stars of the emerging American ‘underground film’ showed their work.
These relentlessly subversive, rough-edged, often sexually very explicit movies appealed greatly to Warhol. He thought he could do something similar, if not better. He bought a Bolex movie camera and told people, “I’m going to make bad films.”
Warhol’s movies are much more talked about than they are seen, and sometimes they are much easier to talk about than they are to watch. In movies such as Kiss, Eat, Sleep, Blow Job and Empire, the conceptual element was once again highly important. You didn’t actually have to see a five-and-a-half-hour film of a man sleeping, or an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building to get a firm, if sometimes mistaken, idea of what they were like and what they were about.
The best of them were not narrowly conceptual, however. Movies like Chelsea Girls or Beauty #2 or even the simple screentests, show Warhol’s fascination with people, especially if they were beautiful young men or women, or if they were bikers or drag queens, or in some other way extraordinary. This was surely why Warhol was able to perform the extraordinary feat of introducing avant-garde film to a mass audience. The public shared his fascination.
Making movies was expensive, so Warhol continued to make silk-screens, largely to finance his movies. Both silk-screening and movie-making were labour intensive, requiring the employment of numerous assistants. They also required large premises and so Warhol moved to a warehouse, a place that came to be known as the Factory.
It was a single room, 100 feet by 40, and its interior was eventually painted entirely silver by Billy Name, a photographer and to a large extent the caretaker of the Factory.
Warhol’s fame drew a vast crew of oddballs, some far more picturesque than others, a mix of high life and low life, street junkies, heiresses, transvestites, rent boys and poets. It was an archetypal 1960s environment. There was a good deal of sex and drugs and rock and roll, and the Factory even had its own rock band, the Velvet Underground, and this eventually led to Warhol becoming briefly involved in multimedia events such as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable*.
≡ A multi media event and environment involving rock bands, dance, and the projection of slides and film.
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Warhol and Valerie Solanas
The Factory was hardly a nurturing environment. In some ways it resembled a court with its members trying to find favour with Warhol. For his part he took pleasure in seeing people antagonize each other, and these tensions and confrontations often became the raw material for his movies. One of his less stable actresses, Valerie Solanas, was soon to change things completely.
Solanas was a self-styled feminist. She had founded and was the only member of an organization called SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, though her political activities hadn’t extended much further than writing a manifesto.
It would be absurd to make any claims or excuses for Solanas, but some of the things she put in her manifesto are not so mad that she wouldn’t have found plenty of radical feminists who, in 1968, shared her views. Even today one would not have to go far to find agreement for her complaint that;
“We all know that ‘Great Art’ is great because male authorities have told us, and we can’t claim otherwise, as only those with exquisite sensitivities far superior to ours can perceive and appreciate greatness,” (p.28 SCUM Manifesto).
Solanas appeared in a Warhol movie called I, a Man and afterwards she gave him a script she had written, entitled Up Your Ass, which she wanted him to make into a film. Warhol apparently loved the title, but when he failed to take on the project Solanas, not unnaturally, requested the return of the script, and when he told her he had lost it she asked for money. Warhol was always notoriously bad at giving money to his collaborators, and Solanas was no exception.
On the morning of Monday 3 June 1968, Solanas went to the Factory (which by now had changed location) looking for Warhol. On being told that he wasn’t there she waited outside until his arrival in the late afternoon. She followed him into the lift and then into the Factory itself where she produced a gun and fired twice at Warhol without hitting him. With her third shot, however, she struck him in the right flank, the bullet exiting through the left side of his back.
The bullet damaged both Warhol’s lungs, his liver, spleen, gall bladder and intestines. At the hospital he was clinically dead for an hour and a half, but he survived after a five-and-a-half-hour operation that included the removal of his spleen.
The shooting was a major news story, although there were those who thought it was some kind of Pop Art publicity stunt. The story would no doubt have run longer in the media had it not been rapidly replaced by another shooting, the assassination of Robert Kennedy.