Second Draft of Warhol

Warhol is one of the chief poets of mechanical reproduction andeverything he does can be associated with isolating the artistshand--his drawings at first, were for books and magazines; hispaintings were screen prints done by others; he abandoned this for filmthat required no direction and when direction was necessary Andy gotPaul Morrissey in on the action. His novels were dictated and so were heInterviews for Interview magazine--and threw out his life he traced,making his own images out of the dross of mechanical technique.He had an obsession with motion picture magazines from the beginning,these were intercessors of intercessors, and his obsession with all of these machines twined with a casual and effective draftsmanship was create because ofthis mechanical reproduction--of the magazines that came from printingpresses, of the camera (both still and film), of the vehicle and thetruck that brought them to the little queer kid in Philadelphia, hisstyle was created because of his desire for cybernetic union, and laterwas done for it.(ADD DISCUSSION OF POLOROIDS HERE)Which is why the preparatory drawings for the 1962 DIY paint by number screenprints are so seismic a change in how one views Warhol's work (that’sthe thing with Warhol, he produced so much and so obsessively thatwhen you get a frame someone uncovers another sash of work thatunsettles it all--or in the words of Bruce Hainley in an interviewwith Wayne Kostenbaum published by Art Forum in November2002--"Because of how much Andy Warhol Produced , there’s always morethen can be remembered.") (TIE TOGETHER BETTER T HE FIRST AND SECOND HALF)The paint by number drawings are small, crude ungraceful--they lack theAmericanized Cocteau lightness of his Boy Book from 1956, thecheerfully commercialism of shoes, the daisy fresh cats and lips, orthe lurid smearing of the screen prints done, where the "bad" quality(lack of technique and formal skill) were reflected by a fidelity ofsource (tabloids) (EXPLAIN MORE) and a respect for exactly what the machine could do (the thing about the screen prints, was that every smear was anindication of how the product was created, that it was not created byartists skill but by machines mistake). As opposed to these paint bynumber prep drawings, where the colouring outside of the lines seems tobe because of lack of skill rather then any mechanic energy.The prints that resulted from these drawings are pure Americana schmaltz and atfirst view the assumption can be made that he just blew up a commercially available rural scene, and had one of his many assistants paint the scenes untilthe assistant got lazy and bored or the theoretical work was completed. (AWKARD) (Because for Warhol being easy, lazy, bored, a flanuer who did not want to walk,was something to be expected and this laziness had theoreticalbaggage, was almost a punch line) (This reminds me of watching theantique road show on Feb. 2 2005 and seeing a perfect Warholian moment.I watched an appraiser for a new York auction house being unable totell whether a small 1950s oil sketch of a elm and red barn landscapewas a Thomas Hart Benton or a paint by number--and the only way thecould find out was turpentine--even x rays would not have worked).The drawings for these prints recentralizes how important the actually act of object creation was for Warhol, how even though his hand would fail at the precise craft of machine colour and machine drawing, he attempted anyways--which may explain any number of his difficult painterly quirks through out hisoeuvre (i.e. in the over the top teal eye shadow, and lurid oleo colouredhair of the Gold Marilyn done in the same year as the Paint by Numberdrawings I’m talking about here or the smeared canvases on some of theambulances or the 1970s and 1980s portraits with the Ab-Exdetailing---a detail that Robert Rosenblum talks about as acontinuation of his obsession with painterly technique and to engagein a tension between subject (cold, shallow, formal, historical,empty) and form (warm, complex, wild, almost amateurish) or the workhe did with Keith Haring and Jean Michael Basquiat near the end of hislife). (THIS IS CENTRAL TO YOUR THESIS, EXPAND)This drawing, aside from dealing with issues of form, craft and objectcan also explain this use of colour or at least this is how DavidBatchelor explains in his brilliant book Chromophobia, using the prepdrawing as an illustration to a chapter called Apocolypstick, afterthe Serge Gainsbourg song (TALK MORE ABOUT THE SONG), he calls into question the canonical cold formalism of Andy, moving him into a painterly obsessiveness, a creamy, campy, colour fieldest. The chapter is about colour as a signifier of decadence--quoting Baudlieare and Gainsboug among the other relevant French. He talks about Warhol who brings trash to life-not the literal trash of supposed low culture (tabloids and movies, not the literallow trash reclaimed by the theoretical content but a formalist t lowtrash, a low trash of mark making, colour, and technique.Warhol's use of colour, according to Baetchor, is decorative,cosmetic, fun, strange, transgressive and transformative (really, itis all colour that works this way it seems to me in reading this--thewhole book is about how in western culture colour is avoided assomething both silly and dangerous, the unstablizing of pleasure thatoccurs whenever what is assumed to be frivolous is foregrounded, itsjust that Warhol is one of the absolute best at it--its one of thereasons why Clement Greenberg (QUOTE) had to spend 1000s of pages killingdecoration when he trumpeted colour field---how he had to make all ofit a moral issue and how avant-garde and kitsch reads like a midmodernist Zwinligi---and how Warhol is really a libertine who topplesprotestant joylessness). It is the danger of our formalist selves--thatwhich is brightly coloured is that which can be dismissed ascarnivalesque (sp).In fotos (WHY FOTOS, EXPAND AND EXPLAIN) it took until William Eaggleston in the 1970s before a serious colourist made it into the museums--to use an example (and there is really not any photographer working whose colour is asintegral to meaning and theory as Eggleston--even the snapshotfotographers of the late 80s often sacrificed form to otherthings---Nan Goldin being the example that c comes to mind.) Batechlorpicks this up in Chromophobia, quoting Walker Evans about WilliamEaggleston; he says Walker Evans, the great monochromatic photographer, considered colour photography a 'vulgar' medium. He also thought of colour as something that came up from the streets, discordantly and incoherently:'colour> photographers confuse colour with noise,' they '[blow]> you down with screeching hues alone. a bebop of> electric blues, furious reds and poison greens.
So Warhol as colourist was the colour of the other (the immigrantother, the formal other, the social other, the other of Ruthianchurches, mobile stars, immigrant costume, colour that transcendedmeaning and theory and word--cosmetics of mechanicalreproduction--which became an assault to seriousness; its pretty andbecause its pretty, is worth pushing forward a decorative, scandalized and aesthetic...or as Baetchlor quotes Barthes "it ischemical in that it aggressively refers to the artifice of chemistry,in its opposition to nature ..."(61) ( CENTER) (which is why the paint by numberswere against nature, they were the mockery of authentic artistsbringing plain air eyes to specific scenes--it is then a chemicalpackaging of ideological America--but it is even more of a twist thenthat, because he uses the skills of traditional artists to mock bothartifice and realism--through a cosmetic blankness.)This would explain the radical reclamation of paint by numbers flowers,the insane colours, dictated by companies, that also made food dye andmake companies; companies between Warhol's past in Philly and Presentin New York (CLARIFY)--(by extension work that bridged the gap between makework projects instituted by his mother and done by the young AndrewWarhola and make work projects in the opposite direction.The question then--if Warhol reclaims commercial crassness asformalist masterpiece then doesn’t that reduce the author to Andy astheorist instead of the Andy as craftsmen which is talked about in this essay.
By having a hand coloured, smeared, befuddled, gracelesswork--a work that looks like its been worked over, there is aredemption of craft--He is an artist again, whose concerns are notabout what painting is or the difference between commercial andfine art is, or what chemical and cosmetic perfection can do to newartists (what does he development of technology's do to the Artist forexample--how do the sex parts Polaroid’s of Andy in the 70s differ fromF Holland Days daguerreotypes, the sexual ambiguity, the development ofpersonae, the conflation of personal identity and religious obsession,the strange anonymity--all of these are the same in these two works,and the unique object is invented in each process--what’s thedifference ?)Were any of this addressed, it doesn't matter as much as making sure that Warhol's reclaiming and negation of formal categories is addressed—or, Blatechor again, "A perverse rehearsal of the academic habit ofcomposition--contour-chichousco-colour" (61). (TALK MORE ABOUT THIS) However perverse this seems, the work on the content of Warhol, the baggage of gender, sex (uality), status and class are seeing to be wrestled in a milliongrad schools (see the Freudian wank job that was Wayne Kaustenbuam'sPenguin Lives biography for a rather obsessive vision of this)Using a unique object of handicraft reground discussion of thepolitical implication of color, shape line-decorating, cosmetic,serous and camp in all in one, is an ingenious and new way ofintroducing new exculpatory evidence. By extension--maybe we can notehow lovely the gold of Marilyn is, or how strange and hygienic thetwo white ambulance (1963) are or how ineffective the green of theIranian princess (1981) is in relation to the death pallor of Nixon(1972)--or even what it means when Nixon and Mao are the same colour.Form as political replication, something needed to look at, as criticsas well as viewers. (STRONGER AND LONGER)