Depth and dying

I'M HANGING ON TO SOME ADOLESCENT SENSE OF LOYALTY, like a good fan. Perpetual fandom--that's my sense of the Warhol legacy. Personally I find myself situated uneasily between making cartoons and having serious concerns--desirous of a high-level conversation but pretty willing to dress up and pose in Harper's Bazaar or for whoever asks, to live out a glamorous fantasy of superficiality. I like to think that the one thing balances the other. Whenever I'm too close to the sun, I feel most black.

The Warhol I've absorbed, the Warhol who saved me, is the ambivalent cynic. Yes, human beings are worthless and life is slavery, but there is grace to be had in accepting that, loving what makes up our empty capitalist souls, plus a little tiny bit of death. Of course, not a day passes when I don't think, "Hey, I'm a successful artist, I should be having lunch with Hugh Jackman or Russell Crowe, not suffocating in my studio." In a perfect Warholian world, however, I would still just be in my studio working, and the stars would come a-calling.

Redan High School, Stone Mountain, Georgia, 1985-87: Who knew who Andy Warhol was besides the host of an MTV show? I was reading POPism: The Warhol Sixties (1980) and The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (1975) when I was a junior. In a class called "Graphics" I designed a Warhol screenprint (taken from a Ray-Ban ad, I think) and produced about twenty T-shirts that I gave away to everyone I had a remote interest in, a bunch of cool kids I had crushes on. Alone much of the time, I felt like Warhol. I made a mock cover of Interview magazine and put celebrated cool girl Valerie Kennedy on the cover, inspiring a bit of jealousy from Vicky Coleman, who worshipped Edie Sedgwick. I didn't want to be a superstar, I wanted to be near them. Redneck kids who watched a little MTV and made the connection with the books I was reading (on semipermanent loan from the downtown Decatur Library) teased me: "What, do you like him, do you want to fuck that old guy?" (In A to B, Warhol said he didn't find black women attractive. Hurt, I was hurt, I admit.) Warhol died during my senior year in high school, at the height of my hero worship. By then the few cool people I had managed some limited contact with were like, "Sorry that guy you like died." The nicer folks offered their condolences in my yearbook. The day after his death was announced I wore a black taffeta cocktail gown and a large bolero hat (a la Prince's "Mountains" video) to school. I got detention for the hat.

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There are a lot of angles and surfaces, but when it comes to Warhol, depth is a much harder read; it lasts longer. I really believe the myth of Warhol the boy, sickly and soft-spoken. I identify with his hunger and cynicism. True glamour is so boring. I keep on thinking that the fandom I'm alluding to is something more like worship. This is very discomfiting, but Warhol as Jesus? Warhol as Everyman? His surface was just naturally absorbed into the culture at large, but what is so compelling to dedicated artists is his honesty.

Pop alludes to the distressing possibility that surface is all there is--that commerce and bright color are the pinnacle of human achievement. Pop presents that idea as heroic. I saw my first Warhol exhibit when I was about twelve, visiting La Jolla with my parents. My father, who's an artist, said admonishingly, "He's a pretty weird guy." The gallery was filled with screenprints of soup cans. I had never seen anything so grand and empty before, and so similar to actual life. All the art I knew was about "touch."

Warhol's influence? It's all too obvious, isn't it? Just look at the surface of my work: There's nothing behind it. Of course, the trouble is, there's plenty behind it. The impetus for my working with silhouettes came from looking at the surface of things: black, "negro" images and objects. The paper cuts in my work are all surface. Having absorbed and accepted twentieth-century modes of communicating blackness, I'm concerned with their seeming superficiality; if that weren't such a concern for me, I wouldn't constantly be searching for another way toward art. Pop revels in mechanical processes; I'm thrilled by the ad hoc, the handmade, what's mutable.

Would it be too romantic of me to say that Warhol breathed art? His exhalations were a by-product, just waste material produced by unseen internal mechanisms. I always interpreted him not as empty but as lost in thought. Every image or film I saw of the guy reminded me of someone who was burning every person, object, or image onto his retina for future reference.

--As told to Bob Nickas

Kara Walker, a New York-based artist, has solo exhibitions at Tate Liverpool through October 31 and at the Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, opening in November.

Bob Nickas is curatorial adviser at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York.

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