The Critical Response to Andy Warhol

The third edition of Feldman and Schellmann's Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonne 1962-1987 provides, perhaps, a foretaste of the results of the much larger projects of cataloguing the films and paintings currently being undertaken, respectively, by Callie Angell and Neil Printz. The redesign of the print catalogue into a significantly larger and weightier format signals a seriousness borne out by the inclusion of forty-eight previously uncatalogued prints, as well as by the addition of a bibliography, an exhibition history, and an extensive chronology of Warhol's printmaking activities. Although not all of the new entries are of equal interest, certain added details furnish important insights into Warhol's work. To cite just one example, the addition of documentation on the Teletype text by Phillip Greer, which Warhol included in his portfolio of the Kennedy assassination, Flash - November 22, 1963 (1968), restores a significant dimension to that work's engagement with issues of mass media and information technology.(11)

At the same time that its increased documentary completion affords greater understanding, however, the thrust of the print catalogue is perhaps Unavoidably one of museological canonization, an impetus not resisted by either Arthur Danto's or Donna De Salvo's essays. Although the sheer size of Warhol's production necessitates some form of separation, a strictly medium-based catalogue such as that of the prints not only runs the risk of reconfirming traditional models of authorship and artistic production, but also threatens to elide those ephemeral and virtually intangible acts that form an indispensable part of Warhol's work. Since it is infeasible to combine all aspects of Warhol's production within a single publication (like the integrated, two-volume catalogue raisonne of Marcel Duchamp), perhaps it will eventually be necessary to undertake a separate "catalogue raisonne of Warhol's gestures."(12) The Warhol Look, to its credit, resembles something of the sort.

Arguing against the contention that Warhol was truly a popular artist, Robert Hughes once asserted that "To most of the people who have heard of him, [Warhol] is a name handed down from a distant museum-culture, stuck to a memorable face" (146). In this, Hughes may inadvertantly have shown himself too much a part of that same museum-culture to perceive how Warhol actually succeeded in invading the world at large. Not only through his art, but also through his associations with music and fashion, his own projected image and sexuality, and his adept manipulation of the press, Warhol reached first into the underground and moved from there into the mainstream of popular culture. It is precisely those aspects of Warhol's artistic self-fashioning that The Warhol Look succeeds in capturing. Clearly revealed when looking through the catalogue is the fact that Warhol's draw or allure is as integrally tied to the image he and his entourage forged in the sixties (and to the photographers who canonized it) as it is to his museum and cinema-bound artworks. Moreover, this image provides a dimension to Warhol's work that deftly fulfills, even as it undermines, the role traditionally played by the artist's biographical personality. To ignore this paradoxically one-dimensional added dimension is to fail one of the many challenges Warhol posed.