On Andy Warhol and pop art culture
Stacks of Campbell's soup cans, Coca- Cola bottles, Brillo boxes, Dick Tracy and Superman.
The recent Bank of America Andy Warhol Exhibit at my old alma matter College of DuPage has me thinking.
To paraphrase a line from the movie High Fidelity, "Am I sad because I like pop art, or do I like pop art because I'm sad?"
Warhol began working as a commercial artist in the 1950s, during the post World War II boom when suburbia was being born and mass small-mindedness was preyed upon, coerced and manipulated by budding corporate ad campaigns that Warhol helped pioneer. Spinning and titillation would become the new substitute for intellectual depth, moral courage and spiritual revelation. This was in vogue of course after the Great Depression, the horrors of fascism, the Holocaust, a horrendous war with U.S. nuclear bombs incinerating masses of civilians and later Stalinism going into the 1950s. The spawning of "the society of spectacle," to quote French philosopher Guy Debord, seemed a welcome escape, escapism from too much reality.
The many artists who came before and had aesthetic influence on Warhol - Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Lee Krasner and Robert Motherwell - imagined a societal renewal and/or revolution, the dawn of a principled society of mass equality, social justice and the unfettering of human possibility. Many of these abstract expressionists, were later jaded, demoralized and many lost to alcoholism after the Second World War and the dawn of the American Century with its coattails of capitalist suburbification, commercialization and commodification seeing their ideals fading as shooting stars landing into Trotsky's proverbial waste bin of history.
Enter Warhol into this seeming end-of-history, who through his advertising work had perfected packaging before product, dopamine-dosed campaigns that he would seek and succeed to take into the realm of fine art. Brightly colored cultural icons like Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and Mao Zedong propped up like mocked would-be Greek gods, the showy colors splashed across their faces seemingly irreverently, exposing them as empty canvasses, sensationalist media creatures, mere consumer products, victims of blood sucking advertising that plagued and still plague postwar capitalist life.
Naomi Klein in her famous book No Logo, talks of postwar American perfection of the ad campaign with Nike as an example that unleashed commodity fetishism - psychology and art colliding, conniving, almost pornographically - on unsuspecting consumers to make us look beyond the product and crave desire itself, crave the crave, to sell products.
But behind the meaningless flashing logo, exists soul death, and more often than not, injustice in the product's material creation. Art critic Guy Hepner writes Warhol "redefined the concept of what art had to be, creating excitement directly based on popular culture."
This "excitement" of mass-produced, celebrity, objects and artifacts inspired Warhol's taking the commercial and banal into the realm of fine art. The banal would become the essential. To this late generation Xer and to my Generation Y-Z and millennial contemporaries after millions of Warhol- inspired sensationalist ads watched and been subjected, such mundane corporate rococo if anything has lost all excitement and would-be intrigue in our quest for what's real and authenticy.
Pop art done right has its dynamism and denunciation of McSociety but, no fault to the incredible Cleve Clarney folks, one feels lonely, almost numb after the fleeting seconds of flash and spectacle of the first 15 minutes of the exhibit, walking along soup cans, the flashing lights of the Studio 54 exhibit and the mass celebrities hanging on the walls alongside assorted animals slapped with a fresh coat of paint, seemingly as empty as the mass producing-cult of celebrity making machine itself.
But there is no questioning of this machine in Warhol, no rage against the machine, if you will. Only a voyeurism at best and Warhol as a naked, self-promoter at worse. Warhol who became increasingly withdrawn, bizarre and mummified through the years, while increasingly taking commissions directly from the rich to create self-flattering works, said "The idea is not to live forever; it is to create something that will."
The best of art invites us on a voyage of reinterpretation and challenge of reality. but with Warhol's lack of philosophy, poverty of critique or vision for a world beyond spectacle - which he if anything reinforces - his art comes across like the flashing feed on social media - Facebook, Twitter, etc., that gobble undigested imagery passing as information that ultimately means nothing.
I am not sure what will live on forever in his art except its vulgar exposé of commodity capitalism (which I'm not sure he was even trying to make) that sees citizens as but dumb consumers in a valueless, unheroic and individualistic quagmire - hopefully not! One seeks the shatter of the thunderclap looming over T.S. Eliot's proverbial wasteland.
• Cristóbal Cavazos, of Wheaton, a member of the Daily Herald editorial sounding board, is co-founder of Immigrant Solidarity DuPage and an activist for the Latino community in Chicago's Western suburbs. His work is featured at the COD exhibit representing his beloved hometown of Glendale Heights.