rewrite:

I

There is the assumption that Warhol is one of the cheif poets of mechincal reproduction, and everything that he does can be associated with isolating the artists hand---his first drawings were for books and magazines; his paintings were screen prints done by others; his films were like empire and couch, with no director and no plots or like screen shots which was dictated conceptually. When narrative plot and semi tradtional acting seemed to be called for, he got Paul Morrissey to take over his task. His novel and his diaries were dictated over the telephone to Pat Hackett, and the Interviews for Interview magaizne were audio taped in a similar way.

II

The standard narrative then ties every aspect of his personality to an almost autistic obsession with machines--and his using of those machines in a very specfic ways. He did not have to t alk to people, he did not need to be nervous about social interactions---in many ways then he was alaways the sickly kid in bed, tracing pictures out of motion picture magazines; his sexual awakening becoming the voyueristic pop culture events (Bob Cocacello talks of this in his nasty biography Holy Terror, with Warhol obsessivley stalking celevrties and reeling them in, taking their poloroids(sp) to mark his place outside of direct one-on-one contact.) The hard minimalist Donald Judd "imagine(d) Warhol's paintings without such subject matter, simply as 'overall' paintings of repeated elements".

III
You cannot deny Warhols work had a mechincal obsession, and he, with his constant talk of machines, with his stated desire to be an automan, with his denial of any formalist skill encouraged this reading. However the concentration of mechincal intercessors---of the magazines tha came from printing presses, the camera, the screen printers, the tape recorders--overshadows the deeply important techincal concerns of his work. The painterly application of line, the choices of subject matter, the draughtsmanship and sepcially the radiucal recentralizing of colour are deeply under represented, mostly I think because formalist readings in the last 100 years have become more and more difficult.

IV
There are peices that break open Warhol, that make a new reading nessceary, a different kind of textual concern come to the forefront. Warhol produced so much and so obsessively that when you get a frame someone uncovers another stash of work that unsettles it all. Bruce Hainley told Wayne Kaustenbaum in November 2002's Art Forum "BEcause of How much Andy Warhol produced, theres always more then can be remembered"). The reworking of Warhol's formalist self is starting slowly, and the works that are being used in this unsettling are seemingly marginal. These works include a series of preprtaory drawings in graphite and pastels done for the paint by number screen prints done in 1962.

V
These drawings are small, crude, ungraceful , smeared and almost juveinle. They lack the skill of his most famous works on paper--for example the Americanized Coceteau lightness of his Boy Book of 1956; the cheerfully commerical shoe advertisments of Bonwit Teller, the ever so slight edgy cats and lips or the lurid smearing of the screen prints. (The qaulity of the screen prints is really interesting, they show much more filedilty to their source mateiral then almost anything else--the smears, chopping, odd colours all have the cheap and available tabloid immedieacy, the lack of formal skill was a delibrate and sly choice, much wittier then the ben day dots of Lichenstien(sp). You can take the mistakes in form of the tabloid prints and compre them to the paint by number prep drawings , where things like colouring outside the lines seems to be because of lack of attention, care and maybe skill rather then any discussion of mechanic energy.

VI
The Paint By Number prints are pure Americana Schmaltz and at first view the assumption can be made that Warhol hired his assitants to blow up commerically avaible rural scenes--but this never happened in any of his other work. Warhol painted his own canvases, he chose the colours, the techinques and the purpose--some times he got help with subject matter, and sometimes he was aided in techincal concerns, but as for the major issues Warhol was queen bee. That said, the apperaence of these was an assitan painting the scenes until someone got lazy and bored or the theoritical work was complete.

VII
Warhol was thought to be easy, lazy, bored, shallow, vaccous. He was thought to be a flanuer who perged cabs to walking and limos to cabs. The prep drawings show his deep work effort, making traditional craft for post modern object. He took the long way around, making sure that the work was taken care of--photographs perfectly composed as back grounds for drawings as backgrounds for prints as backgrounds of paintings--the sheer volume of creative objects would indicate a pack rat with an office seceteary mentatlity and not some one who was lazy. As for shallow, this was something he wanted us to think---his famous qoute of "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am, There is nothing behind it" can be disputed formally, with the drawings for prints--there is something very literally behind his work.

VIII
One of the best examples are a series of prints of Queen Elizabeth II for his living queens series, a minor and decortive series of prints, and with out much theortical baggage--unlike the Sickle and Hammer or Kinves and Guns series of the same time peroid. The QEII prints numbered 5, with each print having a different series of colouring, source material and drawings. These drawings date as early as 1978. So it took him 6 years of thinking, doing prep work and figuring out how to layer surfaces onto each other. The 1978 drawing is graphite on paper, half traced and half free drawn. It is a 3/4 portrait and is subtle, precise and well framed--the later prints have a chaotic, messy, and manic energy--his work as a colourist is the work of a chaotic child.
I also reminds me of watching the Antqiue Road Show on Feb. 2 @005 and seeing a perfect Warholian moment. I watched an appraised for a New York Auction house being unable to tell wether a small 1950s oil sketch of an elm and a red barn was Thomas Hart Benton or a paint by number--and the only way they could find out was turpentine--even x rays would not have worked)

VIII
The drawings for these prints recentralizes how important the actual act of object creation was for Warhol, how even though his harnd would fail at the preicse craft of machine colour and machine drawing, he attempted anyways; which may expalin the difficult painterly quirks that occur throughou this ouevere. Look at the Gold Marylin that is done at the same time as the paint by number drawings--it has been explained religously (as an orthodox Madonna) but there might be something to the teal eyeshadow, a love of that colour, a desire to fram the eyes in a way similar to de Kooning. This connection to dekooning can be seen as an almost fuck you, when you read Popism--his tour of the 60s art world, you find qoutes like" The world of the Abstract Expressionists was very macho. The painters who used to hang around the Cedar bar on University Place were all hard-driving, two fisted types who'd grab each other and say things like "I'll knock your fucking teeth out" and "I'll steal your girl." He again then makes a conceptual point using technique and colour--not words or language. (Another interesting formal note--he used the same shade in the early Liz Taylor paintings.) and the gold marylin was preceded by gold buttocks in the boy drawings--a formal choice that attached conceptual baggage (the desire for property and the desire for sex; conflated with the eye catching explicitness of shiny metallics).

IX
There are other examples, in his introductory catalog essay for the potraits of the 1970s and 1980s Robert Rosenblum noted the continuation of his obsession with painterly techinque as an engagement in a tension between subject (The cold, shallow, formal, historical and empty portrioats of minor celebrities, socialites, royalty, and random people with money. He notes that these are the subjects of any portriture from the beginning of European taste to the American arrvistes in Paris in late 19th and early 20th centuries, pointing out the infamous Madame X by Sargent, nameless but well created) and form (the wild brushstrokes, the strange blocks of colour, the weird off centeredness, the line peeking through, paint smearing across the edges like the shadow of neon on wet ashpalt.) The tension in these 80s portraits might be a microcosm of how Warhol politicises questions of aesthetics. You can also see this in the the work he did with Clemente, Basquiat and Haring near the end of his life. Thinking of the 1985 paintings, they are strange, with Warhol painting by stencil and tracing, giving his blankness for Basquit to paint over, to cancel, to reneg and to fall back onto--his paintings like Paramount (1984-1985) have an almost opedial struggle between the fake raw authenticity of Jean Michaels personae, and the fake cold slickeness of Warhols.

X
Going back to colour for a second, reading David Batchelor explains Warhol as formalist in his brilliant book Chromophobia, using the prep drawing of the paint by numbers as an illustration to a chaperter called Apocolypstick after the Serge Gainsbourgh song. (weird song, and really who was Gainsbourgh but Lou Reed with out the New York Scene, the decadent Nico and the boring CBGBs, its aan interesting question, thinking of Serge and Andy instead of Serge and Lou.) Batechlor calls into question the idea of Warhol as cold, as someone who did not care about formal concerns--of warhol as no more of a painter then the robots who paint cars in Detroit automobile plants. He moves Warhol into a painerly obsessiveness, a creamy, campy, colour fieldest. The chapter is about colour as a signifier of decadence--back to Marylin and Liz's eye shaodw, the gold buttocks, the painterly smears of tabloids and iranain princesses. Baetchlor tals abour Warhol bringing trash to life--but not the ordinary idea of film gossip and casual sex, not the conceptual trash warhol is forgiven for but a formalist, painterly trash. This is a low tash of mark making, colour and techinque, a trash of bright pinks, acid greens, lemon yellows, crimsons--and a trash of slurid smeared shapes, half traced lines and blackened corners.

XI
Warhol's use of colour, according to Baetchlor, is decorive, cosmeic, fun, strange, transgressive, and transformative. The decorotive comes because it does not seem to connect to any larger concern aside from being pretty, it does nto open up spaces, abut other colours in strange ways, recede or command. It is not the colours of abstract expressionists that came before him or the starkness of the minimalists who trained colour after him. It is the colour of cosmetics, literally (lipstick, eyeshadow, rouge, bronzer) and figurtivley (the colour that is there just to be there, the colour of candy, waxed fruit, silk flowers, the arch colour of the other) You can see the comsemtic best in early and late Warhol, in the lipsticks and shoes of the 50s and the Diamond Dust prints of the 80s. ; with this lack of seriousness comes the fun, the random joy that comes with the one perfect shade that cannot consider itself anywhere else. (the comic painings of the 60s, the toys that he did just before he went into the hospital for surgery, the blue tint in the Morissey films) .

XII
But only some of these paintings come with fake and joyful fun. There is transgression in formal choices as well . Look at how he coloured Mao, Nixon, the Death and Disaster Series, the Electric Chairs, Jackie, Race Riots and other overtly political work in the mid 60s and early 70s. Some of them were darkly ironic, like the pure white of the Two Ambulances in 1966 or the jesus blood crimson of Big Electric Chair of 1967 or the fact that Nixon (1972) and Mao 4 (1972) were roughly the same sickly green colour and the same year (I wonder if this was just because of a sale on the paint). But some of them made no sense, some of the electric chairs were lurid pinks and oranges. The Jackies were a handsome Yves Klein Blue and the colouring of the race riots was truly random--including the 1968 Mustard Yellow RAce Riot--which was a diptych, half being a race riot, with dogs and cops and victimized african americans and half being a mustard yellow field of pure colour--it is almost like there is a put on, a cryptic and complex renewal of the imporantace of things that were not considered important before that time.

XIII
The colour of the Race Riots may not be discussed at any length, but the obsessive repetetion is noted again and again--the post minimialist Donald Judd is qouted above, talking about the reptetion of Warhols work in general, but when critic Hal Foster writes of the Death and Disaster series in his essay "DEath in America, he talks of the repetion of the Race Riots in general, saying that having them repeated over and over again, it "serves to screen the real understood as traumatic. . . [Repetition] is a rupture not in the world but in the subject; or rather it is a rupture between perception and consciousness of a subject touched by an image." In this way, the formalist notions in Warhols work, and his obsession with technological intercessors problematizes politics. The rupture is not a conceptual one, but a formal one. The tension between the colour, the placement, the field, the subject matter and the title becomes impossible to solve.

XIII
To pay attention to colour is difficult, especially in work that is so open as Warhol--we are told not to pay attention to anything so frivolous, so when it becomes difficult, when it unstablizes pleasure, viewers become nervous. This does not only happen in Warhols work, but in art history from modernism on. It is one of the reasons why Clement Greenberg had to spend thousands of pages killing decoration whe trupted colour field--because he did not believe that colour could be used to signify anything either pleasurable or serious, anything that was not strictly formal. He called the work of those who split from the abexers novelty art in the mid 60s and was shocked in the 90s that it had managed to last 30 years. So it becomes strange that some one who was so good at noting the effects of colour and shape and line in a nebolus abstract way, lost it completley when a master used it to a much greater effect then people like de Kooning and Pollock, people Greenberg considered the greatest painters of 20th Century, but then maybe he was correct. Warhol was novel, he was obsessed with the new, the strange and the vital.

XIII
The thing about Greenberg is that he is needed when we talk about painting, he settled the formalist arguement in the mid century, defined the terms, and became the person to wrestle with. Up to this point we have talked about Warhol as a painterly formalist, as one who is opposed to Greenbergs modernism in how he used colour and line. But there is also Warhol as a photographer, and this is perhaps where is most transgressive and transformaitve. Warhol started taking pictures about the same time as it was getting a new critical voice. Though his movies were black and white, and the very early Stephen Shore photos of the factory were also black and white, things changed when Warhol came on the scene.

XIV
It took 100 years of the history of photography for a serious colourist to make it into the musuems. William Eaggleston was the first example--and it was because colour was so intergeral to Eagglestons work, it was impossible to deny his talent, and eaggleston took photos of the same kind of America that Andy did, the lost, the trashy, the broken, the pop --and in many ways, his photos were as formally trashy, though he shot with a leica, he often shot blind and he devolped his thousands of rolls at a local wal greens drug mart. The machine and the blankness were shared not only by Eggleston, but by a whole series of new creators. Stephen Shore was encouraged by Andy, who gave him his first break, and who later returned the favour by consulting on the book of fotos America, done by Warhol in the late 80s--he was also a series coulourist. The thing that these three had in common was nailed on the head by Baetchlor--, he qoutes Walker Evans, who saw these people as vulgar, and described "colour as someting that came up from the streets, discorandtly and inchorently" ...according to hin "colour photographers confuse colour with noise, they blow you down with screeching huse alone. a bebop of electric bluse, furious read and posion greens." Aside from the misplaced bebop this is a perfect description of Warhols paintings, but not of his fotos.

XV
Warhol was quiet in his poloroids, and his 35 mm. They were not art for arts sake, but photos to record and photos as preps for paintings and prints. They were lovingly composed and strange though. There were the stack for the sex part series, with elbows and knees and bellies taking as much precedent as cocks and asses, so that sex parts became tactile, futile skin. (JAsper Johns saw these little sqaures in the Factory when he was meant to look at larger paintings--he spent hours with the sex parts and minutes with the prints). There were also shots of people he knew, so that he could remember them (something that has become a popular quirk, rockstar Dave Navarro, film maker John Waters and hip new fotog Ryan McGinley among others have been known to do this.) There were still lives for later prints (including a heart breakingly composed foto of a bright blue sledge hammer and a bright red sickle on a white field, making a pervese socialist stars and stripes). Each of his prints was composed and shot with great care, they were not accidental, and the processing done by hand is not something expected of photographers anymore. That said the 35 mm prints were more candid, and more immediate, less composed and less careful--but they were also printed by hand, the paradox of mechanics is still very much in place.

XVII

I think sometimes about F Holland Day and Andy Warhol. F Holland Day started in the beginning part of the century, at first doing banal domestic and pastoral scenes, until he had a prophetic revsltoin and dressed himself as christ, crucified himself, and took photos both naked and suffering. Thinking of some of Andy Warhols late photography and these Day Suegertypes, i think there are more similaries then differences, there is the sexual ambiguity, he devolpment of personae, the conflation of personal idenity and religous obsession, the strange annonymity found in historical presentations. Then is the difference between a 19th century American Religous Mystic and a 20th century flanuer a question of technology ? How many formalist concerns are settled by the technology availbe at the time ?

XVIII
What you notice about the photographers then is useful in general. Warhol as colourist used the colour of the other. He used the immigrant colour on his ruthyn churchers in his gold pictures, in the hollywood icons. He was a formalist other, using decoration and cosmetics to disrupt the butch theatrics of greenbergian modernism. He was the social other, who painted and drew because he could not interact with people one on one, using formalist concerns to mitigate social awkardness. In many ways his colour meaning and theory and word though--i t became the comsemtics of mechincal reprodcuion, and it pushed forward a scandalized artifical aesthetics, or as Baetchlor qaoutes Barthes.."it is chemical in that it aggresivley refers o the artifice of chemisry, in is oppostion to nature. " He was unnatural because he was queer and urban, but also because nature posioned him as a child, and because nature was impossible to control in the same way that his work was. His work is a a chemical packaging of idelogical America--but it is eene more of a twist then that, because he uses the skills of tradtional arists to mock both artifice and realism--through a cosemtic blankness.

XIX
This would explain the radical clamation of paint by numbers flours, to use one earlier example. In the journey between pittsburgh and New York were hundreds of chemical companies, companies that made food dye, make up, paint for commerical and home applications, fake flavouring for food, perfumes, toys, plastics and oil. These companies provided a huge sieres of what warhol latter created in his paintings, they became a microcosm of the fake paradises, and the bitter destruction , the bright colours and sallow promises that marked the entirity of Warhols career. In the hour and half by train may be the key to the formalist puzzle we have been trying to eek out here.

XX
The question then--if Warhol reclaims commerical crassness as formalist masterpeice then doesnt that reduce the author to Andy as theorist instead of Andy as craftsmen--can we escape the conceptual orgy that is his work ? By having work that is hand coloured, smeared, befuddled, graceless, work that has been worked over and over again, is there a redemption of craft ? Is he an artist again, whose concerns are not about what painting is or the difference between commerical and fine art is or what chemical and comeic perfection can do to new artists ?

XXI

However perverse this seems, the work on the centent of Warhol the baggage of gender, sex(uality), status and class are seeing to be wrestled in a million grad sdchools (see the Freudian wank job that was Wayne Kaustenbaum's PEnguin Lives biography for a rather obsessive version of this) Warhol as formalist can refround discussion of the poliuical implications of colour, shape, line--how it can be cosmetic, decortive, serious and camp all in one. It is important to notice then, what is in front of us, notice the surface of texts, and how literally those surfaces top, bottom, abut and readjust each aother. Warhol as strictly formal painter and draftsmen tells us what we need to know about these things.