Andy Warhol

Of all the painters working today in the service - or thrall - of a popular iconography, Andy Warhol is probably the most single-minded and the most spectacular. It seems that the salient metaphysical question lately is "Why does Andy Warhol paint Campbell Soup cans?" The only available answer is "Why not?" The subject matter is a cause for both blame and excessive praise. Actually it is not very interesting to think about the reasons, since it is easy to imagine

Warhol's paintings without such subject matter, simply as "overall" paintings of repeated elements. The dead-pan, sweet, know-nothing quality of Andy Warhol's personality is continuous with his paintings. He plays dumb just as his paintings do, but neither deceives us. The paintings are of canned, commercial images, whether Campbell Soup, Marilyn Monroe, or of scenes of destruction and death, an auto crash, an electric chair. The image always has a context and a history before Warhol uses it: he takes the second-hand or the familiar and presents it freshly, with immediacy.

The feelings Andy Warhol's paintings evoke in us are socially ordained, the forms of feeling and the expression are what our popular society has evolved and superimposed: there is meant to be little ambiguity in our response. It is here that Warhol knows something he isn't telling. There is no image so simple that it means only one thing, no image so familiar that it has lost its meaning. The impact grows through repetition, the forms dissolve into patterns on the canvas, then regroup in fresh recognition.

There is little casual in the apparently casual art of Andy Warhol. He searches through the magazines and newspapers for images that carry the directness and submerged ambiguity that are his subject matter. A silk-screen is ordered, of a certain size, never the size of the original photograph. The image is then repeated a certain number of times, on a canvas of determined size. The canvas is either left white or painted a uniform background color, or several canvases with backgrounds of different colors are mounted together.

Some of Warhol's ideas about composition come from advertising lay-outs, as do the repeated motifs and, often, the choice of subject and attitude. Perhaps only Uger, Gerald Murphy and Stuart Davis, before Andy Warhol, were interested in the possibilities of appropriating commercial devices, emblems and techniques, the look of the package or the advertisement, to what we consider fine art, traditional painting. But the barriers have been failing one by one.

Andy Warhol's very flat, photographic, two-dimensional images do not in any way lead to the expectation of sculpture: the possibility is not inherent in his silk-screen, reproductive, serial work. The boxes, three-dimensional sculpture, are, if anything, flatter and more dead pan, less present as image or object than the paintings. They are wooden boxes, constructed commercially to the exact specifications of the cartons they represent: the four sides and top are painted through photographically exact silk screens. The colors, size, the look of Andy Warhol's boxes, stacked rather casually in the studio, are precisely those of bright, clean, as yet unused Del Monte, Heinz, Brillo cartons. They are newly minted: nothing has yet happened to them. This is what differentiates them from the cartons of our grocery and movie experience.

Andy Warhol's films conceal their art exactly as his paintings and sculpture do. The apparently sloppy and unedited appearance is fascinating. What holds his work together in all media is the absolute control Andy Warhol has over his own sensibility - a sensibility as sweet and tough, as childish and commercial, as innocent and chic, as anything in our culture. Andy Warhol's eight-hour Sleep movie must be infuriating to the impatient or the nervous or to those so busy they cannot allow the eye and the mind to adjust to a quieter, flowing sense of time.