Andy Warhol (15 page)

Had Warhol painted a dollar sign as a further myth, everyone would have seen what he was getting at. We are all preoccupied with money, and, in its way, the plain unvarnished dollar sign is as much an emblem of America as the flag. There is even a widely repeated textbook account of the origins of the dollar sign, namely that it was a monogram for the United States, with a “U” superposed over an “S.” That would account for the two vertical lines and the necessary cuts—but it leaves an embarrassing problem of dollar signs with single lines, and it has no convincing way of explaining the loss of the “U” 'S curved bottom, which must already have disappeared when the dollar sign first appeared in print, in 1797. The curve would have had to vanish even earlier: Jefferson used it in a memorandum of 1784, in which he recommended the dollar as the chief unit of American currency. It can hardly be believed that the “U” could have lost its bottom so soon after American independence! There are deep historical reasons why the dollar sign could not conceivably have descended from a monogram for the United States, but I am stressing only the point that the dollar sign could as readily have been one of the American myths as, say, Uncle Sam (“U.S.”).

But critics found it difficult to grasp what Andy was getting at when he mounted a show at Castelli in 1981 of drawings, prints,
and paintings of dollar signs, which may have seemed, too literally, to have been a show of business art. The critics' grumbling notwithstanding, the
Dollar Signs
are marvelously inventive. Sometimes Warhol compiled a sort of anthology of his variations within a single frame—twenty dollar signs in four rows, no two alike, some as fat and impulsive as Chinese ideograms; some curved and elegant, like something executed by a master of italic script; some sans serif and others with ornamental termini. It is very much as if he meant to demonstrate that he was as interested in the possibilities of the sign itself as in what it stood for—as if he were submitting designs for the dollar sign, and showing us various ways of drawing it. The variations could be endless. There was a kind of gaiety in the show, notwithstanding the critical response, which was dour and sour, as if Warhol were taking liberties with a sacred symbol. The show was also a failure financially; not one painting sold. The
Dollar Sign
paintings flopped as badly as the Death and Disaster paintings in the 1960s, mainly, I think, because they were perceived as frivolous.

Somehow, everything about the show seemed to reflect the fact that it was a corporate endeavor. Cutrone, who installed the show, alternated the
Dollar Signs
with images that Warhol had done of knives and revolvers—the same pistol, according to his account, that Solanas had shot him with. Fred Hughes said that this display looked too European, that the show should just be of
Dollar Signs.
He was correct, as no one was interested in this part of the show. The handgun is somehow too charged an emblem
for someone to say, as Emile de Antonio said of Coca-Cola, that it is who we are—even if the Second Amendment is a hot political issue, and despite the fact that the Saturday night special is part of the American scene. Everyone can understand why Warhol might have painted what is, after all, associated with the most traumatic episode of his life. But for just this reason, it seems to me, it does not belong with his vision of the world. People would feel uncomfortable with it. It would not be part of what gives meaning to our lives as Americans. Its meaning would be too private and too autobiographical for someone who was so public an artist—so much the artist laureate of the American soul, for which Warhol in his prebusiness phase seemed to have such perfect pitch. That is something he seems to have lost, or to have found only intermittently in the 1970s. That is why the Feldman show was so successful—the symbols belonged to everyone. Somehow, it seems to me, the
Dollar Signs
are too decorative and too playful. They would make good designs for sophisticated shower curtains, or even wallpaper, but for something that verges on a national symbol, they seem too shallow.

A work that seems far too personal to have been business art is an installation of paintings of shadows that Warhol and Cutrone executed in 1978. As with the
Hammer and Sickle
paintings of the previous year, they seem to belong to an impulse that Warhol should do something that would have a purity as art—something that really meant something—the way shadow implies substance without being substantial in its own right. They are abstract
while at the same time representational, though what they represent remains a central question in Warhol interpretation. Shadows play a certain role in mythological accounts of the origin of drawing. A Corinthian girl is said to have drawn around the edge of her lover's shadow cast by firelight on the wall, creating a silhouette of his profile. Warhol's shadows are more abstract. They are cast by objects that have no obvious specific identity, though Bob Colacello claims that they are shadows of erect penises—erect
uncircumcised
penises, one would want to specify, to account for the blip at the tip. That would be consistent, certainly, with Warhol's irrepressible prurience, but somehow inconsistent with what one takes to be the aesthetic agenda of the space he must have visualized for them. But they could as easily be of eggplants or cucumbers, or, as someone has proposed, the Empire State Building. Or they could be of outcroppings of rock in a desert—or lunar—landscape.

The likelihood of some identifiable object to which the shadows in these paintings refer is probably slight. Andy wanted to make some abstract paintings, according to Cutrone' s recollection, mainly because he came from a generation of artists who resisted abstraction when the general view was that real painting must now be abstract, that abstraction's time had come in a revolutionary way, and resisting the revolution was inconsistent with the true impulse of art history. Artists in my generation, as in Warhol's, felt a twinge of guilt in doing figurative art. Jackson Pollock castigated de Kooning as reactionary for painting
women in 1952 in his landmark exhibition at the Janis Gallery. Cutrone said to Warhol, according to his recollection, that he was from a later generation and had no such hang-ups. It was he who proposed painting shadows of forms that were not forms
of
anything—whose resemblances to anything would be purely coincidental, unlike one's lover's profile.

The
Shadow
paintings do have the somewhat mysterious look of twilit abstract landscapes, with what one might call “decorator colors”—aubergine, Klein blue, chartreuse. The Dia Foundation purchased eighty of them, which are today installed in a large dedicated room as a single integral environment, one abutting another, and all hung very close to the floor, at the Foundation's space in Beacon, New York. So placed, Warhol's
Shadow
paintings fit the identifiable spirit of Dia, which has favored art of a marked spirituality, such as the nearby monument by Blinky Palermo
To the People of New York City
, made up of several components in the colors of the German flag. Or, for that matter, of the general feelings one imagines the Foundation aspires to achieve through the work of Fred Sandbeck, Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, or Donald Judd—a kind of elevating mystical abstraction that lifts the spirit onto a plane of communion with higher forces. It is, as I say, not what one would think of as business art. But nor is it what one thinks of as Warholian art. There is nothing brash about it, nothing that presses against the envelope in ways one expects from Warhol. It is like a wish come true for someone who respects and admired Warhol as a serious artist, but who
longs to see him produce a piece of art of high spirituality. Far closer to Warhol would be the roomful of silk-screened
Last Suppers
, based on a cheap color reproduction, with double Jesuses and price tags, that he did in his last years.

The art produced by Andy Warhol Enterprises consists of the portraits, and then, mainly, the suites of prints dreamt up as commercial propositions, like the athletes, or the endangered animals. The
Shadow
paintings brought in $1.6 million—something of a steal, everything considered, in a class with the sale of all the original
Campbell's Soup Can
paintings for $1,000.

Andy had, by nature, a philosophical mind. Many of his most important works are like answers to philosophical questions, or solutions to philosophical puzzles. Much of this is lost on many viewers of his work, since philosophy itself is not widely cultivated outside universities, but in truth most of the philosophical knowledge needed to appreciate Warhol's stunning contributions did not exist until he made the art in question. Much of modern aesthetics is more or less a response to Warhol's challenges, so in an important sense he really was doing philosophy by doing the art that made him famous. In other words, most of the philosophy written about art before Warhol was of scant value in dealing with his work: philosophical writings could not have been written with art like his in mind, as such work simply did not exist before he created it. Warhol demonstrated by means of his
Brillo Box
the
possibility that two things may appear outwardly the same and yet be not only different but momentously different. Its significance for the philosophy of art was that we can be in the presence of art without realizing it, wrongly expecting that its being art must make some immense
visual
difference. How many visitors to his second show at the Stable Gallery wondered if they had not mistaken the address and walked into a supermarket stockroom? How many, walking into a theater in which the film
Empire
was being shown, thought that they were looking at a still image from a film that had yet to begin its showing?

Something similar can be true as well of certain religious objects, which we expect to look momentously different from ordinary things but which are disguised, one might say, by their ordinariness. Of the four vessels today claimed to be the Holy Grail, for example, the one that most persuades me that it might be genuine is an ordinary-looking vessel, drably colored, rather like an individual salad bowl, in a vitrine in the cathedral of Valencia in Spain. It really looks like something Jesus could have used at the table, given that he affected the life of the simple persons he lived among—carpenters and fishermen and the like. Of course, as befits so venerated an object, the
Sacra Cáliz
, as it is called, is supported by an ornate and gilded stand embellished with pearls and emeralds, but if one saw it by itself, it would be unprepossessingly plain, though it is carved out of a piece of stone. The Grail would not have been on so ornate and precious a stand at the Last Supper itself, where it was actually used for whatever was
eaten on that tremendous occasion, touched with the lips or the fingers of who those present were certain was the Messiah. Jesus himself was like that bowl, if indeed, the claim is true that he was God in human form. Imagine that there was a man just his age in Jerusalem, who looked enough like Jesus that the two were often confused for one another, even by those who knew them well. The difference could not have been more momentous than that! Confusing a god with a mere human being is,
toutes proportions gardées
, like confusing a work of art with a mere real thing—a thing defined through its meaning with a thing defined through its use. Imagine a student who has followed a program of institutional critique whose thesis consists of substituting in a museum display an ordinary Brillo box for one of Andy's—a work worth $2 million at Christie's in exchange for a mere cardboard box of no greater value than that of the material of which it is made.

Relics are typically presented the way the
Sacra Cáliz
is in Valencia today—a fragment of bone is placed in a golden housing, set with priceless stones and perhaps images of the saint to whom the bone is believed to have belonged. One has to take it on faith that the bone is the bearer of special powers, but in the nature of the case it must look like a mere human remnant, and be able to pass all the obvious tests, like DNA assay. It is felt that the Grail must have extraordinary powers, given the belief that it was touched by God incarnate, but the history ascribed to the Grail, if it really still exists, has left no traces on its surfaces. That it was touched by Christ's lips, that it held Christ's blood, cannot be deduced from anything the eye now sees. Its plainness alone testifies to the possibility that it was present at the last meal Christ shared with his disciples, where it looked like an ordinary dish, maybe a little special given the special character of he who used it. But the test for whether Jesus was God embodied is not part of the forensic repertoire. The Transfiguration described in the Synoptic Gospels was intended to show selected disciples that Jesus transcended the merely human, for example, by his radiance. But the so-called Messianic Secret was meant to be kept quiet—Jesus preferred not to be trooped after by groupies thirsting for miracles. For anyone other than witnesses to the Transfiguration, Jesus was out and out human.