Repetition turned into original art
Martin Gayford praises the Andy Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern
Most people, the artist Andy Warhol once observed, are happy to watch more or less the same thing every night on television. He, he went on, was different. He preferred to watch exactly the same thing, time after time. The more repetitions, the more good and empty he felt. As with a great many things Warhol said this observation is both funny and weird. And he succeeded, as is demonstrated again and again in the huge and marvellous Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern (until 1 April) in making that Zen taste for the repetition of trivia the foundation of profoundly original art.
Warhol was an extremely witty man. I am especially fond, for example, of his response to the solemn question, 'What is art?' Isn't that a guy's name?' But, notoriously, the price paid by wits is not to be taken seriously by the dull majority. That, perhaps, is part of the difficulty many of us have with Warhol. He seems too cool, too shallow, too flip to be a serious and important artist. Many of his practices — the employment of assistants to turn out work, which in any case often consisted of silkscreened photographs — can seem outrageously cynical (in the past I have had difficulty in understanding and appreciating Warhol's work, for exactly that reason).
But both his art and his wit, on reflection, spring from the same source. Most of the time, Warhol simply stated how things were as he saw them, and — because he had such an unusual take on the world — the result on first hearing sounds funny. 'When you think about it,' he remarked, 'department stores are kind of like museums,' But, actually, when you think about it, department stores really do resemble museums — in their encyclopedic range of contents, in the way those are set out in glass cases, and so on.
It's just the same with Warhol's art. What initially appears outrageous turns out to be merely logical in an original manner. It wasn't necessary — for what he wanted to do — to draw the image. A photographic silkscreen was better. To check this, in the exhibition, simply compare his early efforts, which he executed in a conventional manner by hand, with the later ones though perfectly competent is boring and verging on bad). He didn't need to squeegee the ink through every silkscreen, any more than Rubens needed to paint every inch of the Banqueting House ceiling. All he needed to do was plan the work and oversee the result, so that was all he did.
The results, especially from the five year period, 1962-67, from which most of his best-known and best work comes, is a provocative remix of elements that are quite traditional in themselves, Consider 'Marilyn Diptych' from 1962, 25 coloured Marilyn Monroes flanking 20 black-and-white ones, arranged on a grid, the monochrome ones getting steadily fainter towards the right. Formally, most of it comes from abstract art. To see an earlier version of the device, simply stroll along Bankside to the excellent Klee exhibition at the Hayward. In the Warhol, the variations produced by more or less ink on the silk screen produce variety within the monotony of the grid in the way that changes of colour and tone would in the Klees. The strong, simple, flat areas of colour come from abstraction, too. But the image, of course, is nothing to do with modernist art at all. It's a mug shot of a film star, which is on the one hand cheap and tacky, on the other gives meaning to the cliche 'screen goddess'.
As one walks round this show it's obvious that Warhol's work has a strong — though peculiar and heterodox — relationship with the religious art of the past. If Marilyn is a bit of a goddess, Venus perhaps, and Elizabeth Taylor, gently smiling, a Madonna, Elvis facing us gun in hand is more like a martial god or warrior saint (St George perhaps). Warhol chooses a particular kind of star to transform into his art — vulnerable as well as divine. Elvis looks distinctly nervous as well as defiant. It's hard to imagine Warhol doing much with Cary Grant or Doris Day.
The paradox of Warhol is that he seems the most cool and detached of modern artists, but his subject matter is the most emotionally hot (that combination may explain his perennial appeal to the young). 'Everything I do,' he once said, only exaggerating a bit, 'is connected with death'. The series that follow the icons of Elvis et al at the Tate certainly are, since they consist of multiple images of car crashes, wanted criminals and electric chairs.
Some of these, again, remind one of altarpieces — the kind with multiple gruesome martyrdoms arranged in strip-cartoon rows. The late David Sylvester noted that the artist he would most like to see hung beside Francis Bacon was Warhol. And though the comparison seems odd it's true that Warhol disaster pictures have the same combination of morbidity and almost lurid forcefulness that much Bacon has.
Warhol's own life turned lurid in 1968 when he was shot and almost killed by a deranged member of his entourage, The Factory. The year before he had announced his retirement from art in favour of film-making. In due course, he went back on that decision, but the work from the Seventies and Eighties — Warhol died in 1987 — does not quite have the power of the 1962-67 period. But though his later work is patchy — sometimes scrappy — the later rooms don't show a complete decline. The celebrity portraits of Mick Jagger, Mao and Lisa Minnelli aren't up to the earlier Marilyns and Elvises.
But the works based on Leoriardo's 'Last Judgement', 'Mona Lisa' and the traditional momenta marl symbol, the skull, make absolutely explicit his relationship to the art of the past. And there were other strange, sometimes haunting experiments, especially the 'Shadow' series, based on photographs of shadows taken in his office, which are like ghosts of abstract paintings.
Andrew Warhola — Andy Warhol — was a very odd man, a supercool avantgardist who was also a practising Catholic and never missed Mass on Sunday. A celibate for much of his life, he was obsessed with his mother, self-loathing, pornography, shoes and death. But, then, you'd expect a powerfully original artist to be strange and neurotic (it's the well-adjusted ones one wonders about).
He watched TV all the time, went to a lot of parties, idolised celebrities, loved trivia, yet his art frequently turns out to be about first and last things. But, then, that's what artists are supposed to do — find profundity in the everyday.
This is a splendid show. My only lingering doubt is that the rooms at Tate Modern are stubbornly ungrand and unatrnospheric perhaps because of the combination of lowish ceilings and artificial light. And Warhol's art could do with some grandeur around it.
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