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Andy Warhol's Religious and Ethnic Roots: The Carpatho-Rusyn Influence on His Art
Art Journal, Winter, 1998 by Branden W. Joseph
Raymond M. Herbenick. Studies in Art and Religious Interpretation, vol. 20. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. 259 pp. $89.95.
"What type of people buy your paintings?"
"You're not supposed to talk about that. Let's just talk about boots and Chinese food."
- Student reporter and Andy Warhol, 1966
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Warhol studies can plausibly be said to have begun in 1970, the year in which the first two scholarly monographs devoted to his work - Rainer Crone's Andy Warhol and John Coplans's widely distributed catalogue of the same name - were published.(1) Although both represent serious attempts to provide art historical analyses, in retrospect it seems to have been John Wilcock's unassuming, slightly irreverent, and virtually self-published The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol (1971) that succeeded in setting the tone for a majority of subsequent Warhol literature. The method Wilcock pioneered in assembling a collection of interviews and statements by the artist's associates and superstars has become a staple within the field. The work of Patrick Smith, Lynne Tillman, and most recently (although less successfully) John O'Connor and Benjamin Liu are all reminiscent of its structure.(2) Indeed, many of the book-length personal memoirs and biographical recollections of life at the Factory can be seen as larger entries within the same category.
Wilcock's title promises a revelation of Warhol's true character, a claim that, on reading, reveals itself as false sensationalism, the unfulfilled promise of consumer desire. Yet, by weaving his book around this premise, Wilcock cleverly engaged with Warhol's self-fashioned image, reinforcing the impression that Warhol had nothing to say on his own behalf, that there was, behind the surface, nothing there. In the place where an interview with the artist might have appeared, Wilcock cleverly inserted an image of Warhol (appropriated from the cover of Coplans's book) and added an empty speech balloon issuing forth from his mouth.
Warhol's self-effacement operated at all levels of his cultural production, from his public (no) comments to such constructions as Gerard Malanga's "Andy Warhol on Automation: An Interview," originally printed in Chelsea magazine in 1968: "Q. How will you meet the challenge of automation? A. By becoming part of it" (Pratt, 37). Playfully evident in Wilcock's Autobiography is an interaction between Warhol's supposed subjectlessness and the suspicion that this is, in fact, an impossibility. The desire to penetrate this impassivity has inflected much of the critical and art historical commentary on Warhol as well, where a dialectic frequently unfolds between the attempt to define the artist's meaning and the tacit assumption that neither he nor his art will provide the means to do so. In a large portion of the writing on Warhol, the result is an analysis that cedes to projection, with the overall impression being one of an ineffectual and unenlightening hermeneutic spinning out of control. "[I]t's often impossible to distinguish the authentic Warhol from the act," Alan R. Pratt notes in the introduction to The Critical Response to Andy Warhol, "And with little that's reliable to go on, critics have enjoyed wide latitude in extrapolating or inventing motives for him" (xx-xxi).
Were it not for Warhol's Pop art presenting a similarly disquieting impassivity and resistance to interpretation, the blankness of his persona would surely not have been able to effect such a disturbance. His fiat, repetitive, and seemingly haphazardly applied silkscreen images of the sixties provide little on which to attach definitive readings. Confronted by such an insistent short-circuiting of hermeneutic investigation, the conclusion reached by the artist's detractors and supporters alike has often amounted to that expressed by John Updike, who remarked that one "can honorably discuss [a Warhol] show without attending it at all, if you've ever seen a Brillo box, a Campbell's soup can, a photograph of Marilyn Monroe, and a silver balloon" (Pratt, 192). At such a remove, however, the works only lend themselves all the more easily to subjective projection.
In this respect, the earliest and in some ways closest engagements with Warhol's paintings are still revealing, as much for their failure as for the partiality of their success. In their attempts to analyze Warhol's production, critics such as Michael Fried, Donald Judd, and Henry Geldzahler all applied conceptual frameworks developed in relation to different artistic practices. Fried momentarily abandoned his orthodox formalism, seeming almost to mourn "Warhol's beautiful, vulgar, heart-breaking icons of Marilyn Monroe" (Pratt, 1). Judd, true to his developing Minimalism, attempted "to imagine Warhol's paintings without such subject matter, simply as 'overall' paintings of repeated elements" (Pratt, 2). And Geldzahler revived an understanding of avantgarde estrangement in the idea that Warhol "takes the second-hand or the familiar and presents it freshly, with immediacy" (Pratt, 3). All differently reveal the manner in which Warhol's brand of Pop art both did and did not conform to existing critical schemes.
