Case Study #10: The Case of the Half-Known Icon

[Published on the Facebook Group Thunkity Thunk: An Open Ideas Forum on July 1, 2020]

Recently, a lot of us have been rounding out our knowledge of famous people with some unsettling facts that our school history books should have made clear from the start, before we graduated and became adults paying for things with currency built around those ignoble dudes’ faces at stores in cities, counties, and states named after these same founding father golems made of myths and skewed or suppressed facts. But what if the opposite has happened just as frequently too: The cartoonishly inadequate representation of a celebrity’s broad, positive impact on the world, in the name of the same sieve of convenience and arbitrary paring-down that plagues all iconography. I’m curious who this brings to mind for you. For me I think of Andy Warhol, known to most as one of the most famous artists of the second half of the 20th Century, but, in my view, he should equally be known as one of the most influential modern American philosophers.

In fact, my fast journey toward believing this began when my eye was caught by the title “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol” on a white softcover spine at Orca Books in Olympia. That was in the mid-90s. I came to value that book so much that I bought more copies to mail to friends. By the end of the decade, I’d also read his “Popism” chronicle of many mid-career, overlapping, multi-genre projects; and I’d read his complete “Diaries,” which I plugged away at for years; and I’d dipped in and out of “a: A Novel,” which wasn’t one, but rather was a transcription of conversations between various of his “superstars” and Factory hangers-on. I’d never liked Andy Warhol’s art in actuality (and that opinion hasn’t changed), yet the more I read his literary output, the more I liked his art *in theory* and the more I appreciated the varied ideas he made popular, both directly and indirectly.

More over, the deeper I delved into his oeuvre, the more I discovered coincidental parallels to my own take on things and the projects I was engaged in. I too had taped and transcribed conversations with friends, with the intention of using snippets as the dialogue in a freewheeling nonfiction chronicle of my 20s. I too kept a daily diary nearly as full of mundane details as his own. As he did, I valued mixing it up not only in terms of artistic mediums, but also in terms of collaborating with individuals and groups in my local community. Yet, there was so much more that I learned from Andy Warhol — which he’d already sown across culture and in fact all aspects of society decades before.

His compression of high and low art; his ease in moving between and uniting street life and affluent movers and shakers; his insistence that the superficial be given as much gravitas as the traditional “deep” approach to the creation and understanding of art; his critique of uniqueness through unrepentant mass production; his dynamiting of the pedestal erected for the singular author of a work through his blasé employment of numerous assistants to help carry out various projects (including his books, which Pat Hackett essentially turned into prose); his melding of the mushy old insular domain of the artiste with the ambitious reach of a Capitalist business empire — all of these facets of what Andy Warhol preached and represented — conveyed in a readily digestible manner befitting his keen understanding of how the American mind works — laid the foundation that later made it easier for me to understand the likes of Don Delillo, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, and other heady thinkers.

Andy’s greatest gift, in fact, was in giving us all permission to approach everything in an *easier* manner: art, art appreciation, self-promotion, philosophy, acceptance of all facets of your own personal aesthetics, etc. (While he did pay the gallerist Muriel Latow $50 for the idea of his original set of repetition paintings, the Campbell’s soup can, that was actually what he loved to have for lunch everyday, so it was his innovation to foreground the celebration of something so personal, yet mundane). This had to have permeated down to the DIY, limited skills/no judgement approach of the early punk rock movement in the ‘70s (to say nothing of when that philosophy came back twice as strong in the ‘90s). After all, in the mid-60’s, he’d been impresario to the Velvet Underground: stage managing them, introducing them to Nico, suggesting they all wear black, and so on. He was a master at effectively marketing with *what’s manageable and easily at hand* because, of course, he started in marketing himself: first as a commercial illustrator, then by providing backdrops to department store display windows. At the same time, though, he didn’t shy away from challenges; though his work is pigeonholed as being all about technicolor repetition, he was always experimenting, whether in music; film; literature; “oxidation” paintings whose process included having guys passing through the Factory piss on them; on up through the last decade of his life, when he produced collaborations with the likes of Jean-Michael Basquiat and even returned to hand-painted artworks all on his own. He was a striver, a one-man vanguard, that most American icon: the restless pioneer.

His influence is so pervasive at this point that, in looking for some images for this write-up, I realized that his 1980s photography series of celebrities eating bananas (an homage to his own famous banana silk screen prints) bore a resemblance to the cover photo shoot for my favorite album at the time I took home my first book of his: “Laid” by James. In that book, he blew my mind by writing that, despite all the expensive, decadent items only they can access, the rich still have to drink the same Coke-a-Cola as the rest of us. In the same sense, Andy and all that he imparted was a great equalizer too: none of us can feel more *in the know about it* than others, despite fancy degrees and networking connections. We all have the potential in us to accomplish what he did, only in our own area of personal strengths and interests.

I, for one, would love to see this gay, asexual son of immigrants take the place of a racist founding father on a piece of American currency!