The Disaster paintings bring me to another point: the way Warhol seemed to want to make everything about his daily life into art. He aestheticized—again a camp impulse—his whole life, mundane or dramatic: his lunch (soup), his continuous magazine-page flipping (celebrity silk screens) and newspaper thumbing (the news-photo Disasters), his cohort and entourage (the movies), even his mail (the time capsules) and his corporeal being (the wigs and shades, cosmetic surgery). At all times, though, he was both being funny and seeking to profit from publicity, whether or not a viewer might also feel other emotions and intentions. Even the Disasters, which can feel chilling and are often thought of as personally revealing—since it’s well known that Warhol was wildly skittish about any reminder of death—are also funny. Tunafish Disaster—four women die from eating bad tunafish??? There are eyewitness stories about him laughing about it while silk-screening. In Ambulance Disaster, ambulance passengers are crushed when it crashes (think about it); Suicide (Fallen Body) is from a news photo of a woman whose leap from the observation deck of the Empire State Building ended with her looking like Sleeping Beauty, sweetly wrapped, face up, in the roof of a car—these are jokes. It’s all camp, no matter that it’s also powerful art.

I’ve seen Chelsea Girls projected three times—once in the ’60s or ’70s, then six or seven years ago, then 2018. I don’t well remember the first time; the second time I came away awed by how Warhol had managed to reinvent film the way he had so many other mediums; and this most recent time I was so repelled and bored by the people in it I could hardly sit through it. This brings up the moral-v.-camp sensibility again. By “moral” I just mean an artist’s taking life seriously, thinking that in life there’s some kind of meaningful purpose, including compassionate values about how people treat each other; honor and the golden rule. In a way an artwork is simply an artist saying, “I propose this as interesting,” and the assumption is that that inevitably has moral implications. Camp sidesteps the moral part.

Sontag makes one brief parenthetic reference to Pop in her essay:* having described camp as “a tender feeling” (her italics), she contrasts it with much of camp in Pop art, which she calls “ultimately nihilistic,” the implication being that the nihilism disqualifies the work as camp. It’s true there’s not much tenderness in Chelsea Girls; rather, the material is deeply cold and bitchy. For me the cruelty and hysteria are hard to swallow, and make me uncomfortable and depressed, but I think that’s my problem rather than Warhol’s, because: 1) you can call the meanness tender in that the people involved all seem to accept it, as if ultimately it were a fun game played by people who appreciated each other; but also, 2), a nihilistic reading of camp, contrary to Sontag, can be legitimate. Over and over Warhol said that everything is just nothing, but he is exhibit one for how that idea is consistent with camp. In Chelsea Girls he’s simply capturing the theatrical behavior, often enacted by pretty people, that he both participated in and voyeuristically relished in the hard-drug-driven underworld he hosted for the first years of his fame. That world of junkies and camping speed freaks deserves its portraitist as much as any other world, and, like sensationalist news stories and Hollywood glamour, it was just raw material for Warhol to turn into high art in his innovative ways.

He did falter when he narrowed his intentions down to “business art.” The corporate logos, dollar signs, and pulpy signage (“Repent and sin no more!”) he painted in his final years are not in a class with the Soup Cans. Their typical emphatic, hand-painted look doesn’t have the power of the original, more remote, impassive appropriations in the ’60s. The pictures get shrill and desperate feeling, or just soft. The colors aren’t as interesting. Images are just scattered across white canvas. The early grids worked better. The countless perfunctory-feeling commissioned portraits—maybe he just got tired. It feels like he’s simply staying on brand, albeit dilutedly. And sometimes even appearing to try to keep up stylishly with the ’80s youth boom in painting—such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Salle and David Wojnarowicz—which artists had inevitably been influenced by him. Of course, the profit motive was always present. Something I hadn’t realized, and that was noted in the Whitney show, is how he timed his first movie-star silk-screens to sensational news stories—Marilyn Monroe’s overdose death, Liz Taylor’s affair with Richard Burton—so that they would have built-in public interest. Whether consciously deliberated or not, this is true of painters since the cave people, who presumably painted wild game because that’s where their attention was.

But modernism had been pretty contemptuous of the aim to satisfy taste, much less popular taste, and Warhol was the first modern high artist to contradict that contempt—while of course realizing that almost everybody would laugh at the Soup Cans as ridiculous, but that they’d also talk about them, which would force dealers to recognize them and collectors to buy them. Over and over, Warhol said not just that everything is nothing but that everything is good. The idea that everything is good is the essence of Pop as conceived by Warhol. It’s quite Zen. But when Warhol starts doing it all to order—explicitly in the society portraits and commissioned portfolios (Endangered Species, Cowboys and Indians) or exploitively in commemoration (Moonwalk)—the work often suffers, feels rote. There is still great painting after the ’60s—the Skulls, the piss paintings, the Shadows, the Rorschachs, and more—and even some of the portraits and portfolio prints are very fine, with their Juan Gris interlocking geometrical patches in brilliantly unpredictable color combinations, patches of painterly brushstrokes here and there, and elegant cosmetic lines massaging the mix. But overall the level falls off.

 

Original text: Richard Hell / Gagosian Quarterly