Nothing Special: an informal sketch of Andy Warhol

By Mike Mallory

Selected Biography. Andrew Warhola was born on August 6, 1928 to working-class immigrant
parents in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Warholas had changed their name from Varchola when
they emigrated from Slovakia. The family was Byzantine Catholic and they remained religious
people..
Andy’s father worked in the coalmines. His mother often sold craft items. During the
depression she sold soup cans that she cut with scissors into decorative pieces. As a child Andy was
afflicted with St. Vitus’ Dance or chorea. This viral infection caused Andy to shake convulsively and
left him with jig-saw puzzle shaped blotches on his skin, including his face until he was in his 30’s.
Andy studied commercial art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He moved to New
York and began a successful career in commercial art in 1949. He invented both the name and the
personality of “Andy Warhol” as part of his artistic vision. By the late 50’s Warhol was devoting more
and more time to his painting and personal art career, rather than his commercial art.
A series of painting based on advertisements and comics in 1961 (See Roy Lichtenstein) and
a series on Campbell Soup Cans in 1962 launched Warhol into celebrity status as a Pop Artist.
In 1963 Warhol leased a studio on the upper east side of Manhattan he called the “Factory”.
The factory was not only a place where Warhol produced his artwork, but also a place where other
artists, often on the way down from their career peak would hangout. The regulars at the Factory
became the stars of Warhol’s movies, which he started producing during this time. Warhol started
with a silent 16 m.m. camera. Initially he would slow the film down to the speed of older silent
movies. Some have said that this was done to conserve money and make the film last, but it also
had the effect of presenting in a documentary and almost archival way that suited Warhol’s artistic
vision.
On June 3, 1968 Warhol was shot in the chest by Valerie Solanas a factory regular and writer
who thought that Warhol was suppressing her own film career. Warhol was taken to the hospital but
the doctors in the emergency room were unable to keep him alive. He was pronounced dead.
Warhol was resurrected when a cardiac surgeon recognized Warhol and took it upon himself to save
the life of America’s Pop Artist. The surgeon cut open Warhol’s chest and manually massaged his
heart until Warhol’s vital signs were restored. For the rest of his life Warhol had to wear a girdle or
belt in order to keep himself together.
After the shooting Warhol decreased the access he had given to the strange ménage of
characters that had been hanging around the factory. Warhol relocated his studio and begin devoting
himself to commissioned pieces he called “Business Art”. This was a period in which Warhol was
often found socializing with the celebrities he found so interesting. In the mid-80’s Warhol begin
producing television shows and music video’s.
For several years Warhol, who had a fear of hospitals, put off going in for needed gall bladder
surgery. On February 21, 1987 he finally went in for the scheduled procedure. Unfortunately for
Warhol the attending nurse that night was so consumed in reading her bible that she failed to notice
Warhol suffering post-operative stress. He died alone and unattended the night following his surgery.
The hospital ended up paying three million dollars in a malpractice settlement for negligent post-
operative care. Warhol’s estate was auctioned off for over twenty million dollars. A portion of the
estate funds was used to set up the Andy Warhol Museum and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts.

Warhol’s Art in Context. The history of Western art may be viewed as a succession of steps
toward the portrayal of a subjective reality.

Classical - Portrayal of the formal or idealized objective form.

Romanticism – Portrayal of the ideological reality where objective truth is combined with the
emotive response of the artist.

Impressionism – Portrayal of a scene as it appears to the artist at a particular time and place.

Expressionism – Portrayal of the emotional truth concerning some subject.

Abstract Expressionism – Portrayal of the interior subjective reality of the artist without
reference to an objective subject.

At the time Warhol was inventing his approach, both Jackson Pollock, with his action paintings
and Mark Rothko were in the public eye.

By the mid 50’s the art-world had reached the point where artists and their art were expected
to plumb the depths of their existence and to offer the viewer a naked, unadorned glimpse of the most
profound interior scenes of human experience. And then along came Andy...... Instead of
attempting to focus the momentum of the art-world in a new direction, Warhol simply chose to
reinvent art in his own terms. One way to view Warhol’s work is to compare it to the Abstract
Expressionists (at least an admittedly simplified version of Abstract Expressionism ) who were his
contemporaries.

Subject Matter. While the subject matter for abstract expressionists was the deepest current of
human experience, Warhol depicted the surface of human culture. Celebrities fascinated Warhol, but
he was fascinated by all of the images that gained cultural popularity. Not only did he create portraits
of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, he also produced series depicting an electric chair, the most
wanted fugitives and fatal car crashes. And, of course there was sex.

Multiplicity. For the Abstract Expressionist each painting represents the singular artistic vision of the
painter. In contrast, Warhol collects images from popular culture and in the same way that these
“pop” images are pervasive in the culture; he routinely presents his paintings as multiple versions,
often identical. At the same time Warhol’s work should not be viewed as multi-perspectival. He
worked with the “common” or cultural perspective, which while a plurality was still essentially unified.

Connectivity. Whereas there is an implied promise in Abstract Expressionism that somewhere,

encoded in the image, there is some universal truth with which the viewer is capable of communion,
Warhol’s art is not universal. Warhol loved America. He claimed his favorite food was “Airport Food”.
(It should be noted that Warhol frequently lied to interviewers and there is always a “credibility issue”
when dealing with his claims.) Due to the tight contextual nexus between his work and the American
Pop Culture, his work is not fully universal. Warhol was an American artist, creating for American
(and to some extent “Western”) viewers.

Justification. There is a sense in which the paintings of Abstract Expressionists demand

justification. If the paintings offered from this movement represent the profound, then, it seems, the
art-world is entitled to honesty, insight and at some level a struggle on the part of the artist. Without
warranties to these features in the artistic process, the very authenticity of these works cannot be
justified. On the other hand, for Warhol, its surface all the way down. Warhol once said, “You see, I
think every painting should be the same size and the same color so they’re all interchangeable and
nobody thinks they have a better painting or a worse painting. And if the one ‘master painting’ is
good, they’re all good. Besides, even when the subject is different, people always paint the same
painting.” (Philosophy, p 149) Although he was very intentional about promoting his art he was also
dismissive about his painting, saying things like, “Well, it’s just something I do.” He always wanted a
TV program entitled “Nothing Special.”

Impersonality. With Abstract Expressionism one expects the artist to be intimately involved. The
painting is designed to communicate a deep truth accessible only by an individual artist engaged in a
unique struggle towards authenticity. Warhol’s role as an artist shifted from the hands-on to more of
a conceptual role. Warhol loved to work and even kept himself at least slightly hopped on
amphetamines to keep himself going. Nonetheless, the name “factory” aptly describes his studio.
For instance, when he was manufacturing his Brillo Boxes, the factory floor appeared to be a factory
assembly line with Warhol supervising several young attractive men all laboring under his supervision
to construct and silkscreen each box. Allowing assistants to work on a “Masters” artwork has a long-
standing tradition, but Warhol goes further than most with his openness to the irregularities, oddities
and unanticipated contributions of his assistants as they added “interest” to his work.

Meaning. While it is common to approach Abstract Expressionistic paintings as if on some heuristic

mission, Warhol eschews the very notion of meaning. Warhol said, “An artist is somebody who
produces things that people don’t need to have but that he – for some reason – thinks it would be a
good idea to give them…. So on the one hand I really believe in empty spaces, but on the other hand,
because I’m still making some art, I’m still making junk for people to put in their spaces that I believe
should be empty: i.e., I’m helping people waste their space, when what I really want to do is help
them empty their space.” (Philosophy, p. 144) He believed that each time a person saw an image
there was a little less meaning in it. Thus his motif of repetition and seriality can be seen as
techniques to reduce and/or eliminate meaning. Similarly many of his films such as Empire State
Building, Sleep and the Kiss stretch the temporal dimension to the point where the film simply outlasts
any attempt to draw meaning from it. The audience left at the end of the showing has no option other
than to accept the images at face value.
In Popism: The Warhol ’60s, Warhol said, “I’ve been quoted a lot saying, ‘I like boring things.’
Well, I said it and I meant it. But that doesn’t mean I’m not bored by them. Of course, what I think is
boring must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the
most popular action shows on TV, because they’re essentially the same plots and the same shots
and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently most people love watching the same basic thing,
as long as the details are different. But I’m just the opposite: if I’m gong to sit and watch the same
thing I saw the night before, I don’t want it to be essentially the same – I want it to be exactly the
same. Because the more you look at the exact same thing, the more the meaning goes away, and
the better and emptier you feel....” (365 Takes, p. 365) Warhol does not offer us meaning. His works
are purposefully designed to strip away meaning and leave us with empty abstractions of the images
of popular culture. Unlike Abstract Expressionism, his art is not created for the sake of profundity, but
simply because the image is “interesting”.
One of my favorite “Andyisms” occurs when Andy is being interviewed and is asked what a
particular series of paintings mean. Andy replies, in affect, “Oh, I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me
and I will just repeat what you say.” The interviewer says that he can’t do that, he wants to know
what Warhol believes. But, Warhol keeps insisting that he doesn’t have anything to say and keeps
offering to repeat what the interviewer tells him.

Emptiness: Warhol said, “When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want
the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it’s lost space when there’s something in it.”
(Koestenbaum, p. 165) Warhol was a brilliant artist. He had an uncanny sense of artistic design. In
artistic design, the area that surrounds the subject of an image is called “negative space”. In the
quote above, Warhol is telling us that he perceives the world in an abstract relationship between
positive (subject) and negative (contextual or background) shapes and spaces.
With Warhol the idea of abstract positive and negative space goes beyond two-dimensional art
design. In addition to the name, the “Andy Warhol” personality, complete with its trademark
“deadpan” response to his own celebrity status was created as a contrasting negative space to what
he considered the stupidity of those who interviewed him. He turned what someone watching would
expect to be a positive action into emptiness.
Indeed, Warhol’s eschatology is to return to emptiness. He said, “I never understood why
when you died, you didn’t just vanish, and everything could just keep going the way it was only you
just wouldn’t be there. I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no
name. Well, actually, I’d like it to say ‘figment’.” (365 Takes, p. 99)

Gay, but not Queer Art. Warhol was a gay man, but he is not generally associated with “Queer
Art”. There are homoerotic images in Warhol’s work, but he never seems to have bought into the
liberation agenda of Queer Art. Warhol considered politics, like sex to be “so abstraaact”. Warhol’s
purpose was to document, not change the world. The term “gay” is insufficient to describe Warhol’s
sexuality. While he was sexually active and had a small number of long-term partners he was
described more than once as “asexual”. He did not like to be touched. Warhol would rather watch
than participate. He definitely had a solid streak of voyeurism. (Given that he was often behind a
camera filming sex acts, he was open about his voyeuristic leanings.)
Perhaps the clearest divergence between Warhol and the Queer Art scene is Warhol’s
assessment of his own sexuality. Warhol remained an active member of religious faith throughout his
life. This is a faith that condemned homosexuality. Warhol surmises that he was a “mamma’s boy”
because he lacked (was deficient in) some normal chemical in his body. He referred to his chemical
deficiency as the lacking of “responsibility chemical”. (Philosophy, p. 111). Given that Warhol saw
his own sexual orientation as condemnable and deficient, he just didn’t fit in with the Queer Art crowd.
But, then Warhol claimed that he really never “fit in” anywhere.

What is “Art” after Warhol? The notion of “art” had already been destabilized by others, including
Marcel DuChamp, before Warhol started painting. However, Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, which were
seemingly identical to their commercial referents, sparked two new revisions of the term “art”.
George Dickie, in a move some will see as elitist, posited that an object is “art” when that label is
conferred by the “art world”. This is know as the Institutional Theory of Art. The critic Arthur Danto,
also responding to the Brillo Boxes advanced a relational view of art suggesting that something is art
when the cultural context in which the object is presented enables the artist and the viewer to
mutually grasp the object as being a work of art. One can analyze such works as the Brillo Boxes
and the Campbell Soup cans as sitting in the tradition of the Still Life, yet it is a disquieting stillness.

An Overview. Andy Warhol’s oeuvre lays over the pond of American culture like a thin transparent
film highlighting and abstracting those images, which float to the surface of the cultural
consciousness. Warhol scrubs these iconic images free of meaning and then allows them to drift
away, like his silver pillows, as a tribute to the beauty of popular culture.
Viewing Thomas Moran, we must contemplate a safari to search out beauty in the world. With
Warhol, all we need to do is click on the T.V or better yet, go shopping! Warhol insisted that there
was nothing special about his art; it was just something he liked to do. Yet, when I allow the images
of his varied and vast work to parade before me, I can’t help but believe that the “nothing” he gave us
is indeed quite special.

Everett, Washington
October 28, 2006

Bibliography

Andy Warhol Museum.

Andy Warhol Museum, Andy Warhol 365 Takes, (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2004)

Cynthia Freeland, But is it art? (Oxford University Press, 2001)

Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, (Viking, 2001)

Public Broadcasting Service, American Masters: Andy Warhol, September 20, 2006.

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again, (Harcourt, 1975)

Warholstars

Wikipedia, Andy Warhol