Blake Stimson believes that Andy Warhol is a contradiction. Warhol has explicated many times that he has no political affiliation when approaching his work and repeatedly expresses that he is apolitical. But Warhol’s pieces, more than any other modernist 1960s artist, has created art using such political and social iconography: race riots, the death penalty, criminals at large, crowds, political assassinations, and the atomic bomb, all topical and explosive issues. Castro, Mao, Lenin, Che, the hammer and sickle, Nixon, John F. Kennedy and Jackie, Goldwater—all of these examples are loaded with political iconography. This dichotomy of what Warhol says he is compared to what his art says leads Stimson to believe that Warhol is a thinking, feeling social and political commentator on the version of Warhol that is a numb, apathetic machine and symptom of the flattening out of the economy. This is the core structure of Warhol’s influential aesthetic sensibility. Andy Warhol also found very disturbing and sordid imageries to be beautiful, ornate, and charmful. He said to love everything, as to make his persona fluid and unattached. He would constantly utter, “Everything is art, everything is beautiful.” Stinson calls this a childlike, open relationship to the world. Warhol regularly affirmed metaphors for his own non-identity. Things such as “Warhol the machine, Warhol the mirror, Warhol the ‘Nothing-ness Himself.’” His capacity to disregard institutionalized interests, move from aesthetic to aesthetic, act as a “solvent that neutralizes mortality,” allowed him to transform the expectations of the different professional worlds he encountered throughout his career. This was especially important since he was a gay man, who did not interact with the Marxist view of social relations that dominated the Jewish-led intellectual and art culture that started its reign in the 1930s. He gained entry into their restricted domain. He became a star. The Warhol that found everything to be beautiful, the Warhol whose affect appealed by being unattached, the Warhol that openly mirrored the world around him, now served as an abstract social principle and alternative art ideal for the decades to come.
Hal Foster states that Andy Warhol was porous in his art and his life. Warhol was a paradoxical celebrity: his image oscillated between the iconic and the ghostly. This was central to his persona, which Foster believes is sometimes seen as his ultimate work. Warhol once suggested that “the best American invention is to be able to disappear.” This interesting mindset also comes into play when Warhol is approaching his art. He favors photographs in which the criminals attempt to stare down the camera or have so blank of an expression that it challenges their individualism. Warhol seems to support this resistance to disciplinary act of a mugshot. He does this in other forms too: he chooses dated material (his cases are from 1955 to 1961) and strips them of the information needed for identification (last names are never given, and the photos are blown up to become grainy and obscure). Lastly, Warhol cuts the explicit gaze of the state with a very different look, an implicit one of gay desire. This leads to the term “most wanted men” to take on a connotation that mocks the disinterested postures of law officers. Another set of works that define Warhol are the figures of Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson, Oprah, Geraldo, and Brando. These pieces allow a witnessing of the bloating, slimming, wounding, and general humiliation of the public body. The bodies of these public icons display our own mutant desirability. Foster believes that Warhol was very keen to this sadistic side of consumption. This is most clearly displayed in his distressed images of commodities and celebrities alike. “We ‘eat up’ stars,” Warhol said in 1966.
Anthony Grudin believes Andy Warhol’s class plays a key role in his work, and that is demonstrated stylistically and by his choosings of iconography. Warhol’s bourgeois background, combined with his skilled artistry and aesthetics, makes the vulgarity of his work striking and powerful. The content of his work is viewed in the context of his mid-upper class upbringing. In relation to the very clean and austere qualities of the white bourgeois people– anything explicitly sexual or homoerotic becomes shocking. A monograph Grudin researched refers to “the bare declarative aesthetic of the proletarian representations [Warhol] began to favor,” but then claims, pages later, that Warhol’s “mandate was: paint what we are.” “The breakthrough,” the author of the monograph, Danto, continues, “was the insight into what we are. We are the kind of people that are looking for the kind of happiness advertisements promise us that we can have, easily and cheaply.” The question of who “we” are and whether “our” enthusiasms may vary—or be presumed to vary— with our class, goes unaddressed. There are some pieces where Warhol relates to us all as the same type of human. A claustrophobic tunnel of boxes could be interpreted “as the closing in of consumer products, confining us as prisoners.” Closer consideration demonstrates that, in the face of the increasing success of generic brands, the motifs Warhol borrowed in his early “brand image” artworks—Campbell’s Soup, Brillo, and Coca-Cola, among others—were deployed and widely understood as class-specific images, explicitly targeted at a working-class audience. “In contrast to white collar women,” as one advertisement put it, “(who have no qualms about private [generic] labels) the working class wife has an extraordinary emotional dependence upon national brands—her symbol of status and security (because she is basically unsure of the world outside her door).” The motifs discussed in this essay are, by contrast, more obviously class-specific—comic-book panels, pulp advertisements, and tabloid headlines. Grudin’s main argument is as follows:
Class permeated Warhol’s work from two directions: it infused both its motifs (no matter how “American” or “universal” some of them may now appear) and the technique and style of their execution. The working class’s perceived fondness for popular culture—for brand names and celebrities and comic books—was a key element in Warhol’s contemporary scene, one that he constantly incorporated into his work and his persona. “Amateur cultural participation” is an apt way of describing Warhol’s style during the 1960s and after, as it incessantly tested the possibility of consumer-grade reproductive technologies like silkscreens, Polaroids, and video cameras to contribute to the “common culture.” But Warhol’s work and persona were also informed by a less noticeable counter: indications of a working-class suspicion that the world of popular culture, despite its promises to the contrary, was being channeled to them unilaterally, without the possibility of consumers’ ever really participating in its production. Warhol’s reproductions of popular images constantly telegraphed their own incompletion and impossibility—the “precisely pinpointed defectiveness that gives [Warhol’s] work its’ brilliant accuracy.” The manufactured imperfections in Warhol’s work should tell us something about the ways in which culture has been produced and consumed in the United States. As recent investigations of Warhol’s identity have demonstrated, it was often Warhol’s conspicuous inability to reproduce ideals that made his artistic production remarkable.
Warhol’s art was not fundamentally an art about the attitude of art, it was an art that represented the possibility of the masses participation in capitalism.