Andy Warhol, Properly Labeled

At the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach the other day, I was looking at Stephen Shore’s 1960s photographs of Andy Warhol and lamenting what’s happening to the original King of Pop.

Not because of Shore, whose snappy documentary pictures vividly recall that pivotal milieu of 30 years ago. Nor because of the show per se (which runs through April 26). Instead, the simple juxtaposition of Warhol with academe was the source of my malaise. I get a headache thinking about the way Warhol’s art is now being taught to younger generations.

Simply put, the artist who immortalized the Campbell’s soup can in painting is being bent, folded and mutilated into a pessimistic critic of American consumerism.

Typical of the grizzly problem is Thomas Crow’s new book, “The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent.” Published last fall by Harry N. Abrams Inc. (then a part of Times Mirror Co., parent company of The Times) and meant to serve as a college-level introductory text about a watershed moment in 20th century art, it is a readable, often insightful chronicle. Yet Professor Crow’s interpretation of Warhol’s great silk-screen paintings takes a pratfall worthy of Buster Keaton.

If only it were half as funny.

Crow, a well-known Marxist historian whose scholarly field is 18th and 19th century European art, but who has also been writing contemporary criticism for several years, has taught at several American schools, including Harvard, and is now chair of the history of art at the University of Sussex, England. “The Rise of the Sixties” is a slim volume--just 174 pages of text, sprinkled with more than 100 photographs--which is valuable because of the author’s determination to consider the 1960s from an international perspective.

Mostly, the ‘60s have been seen as an American art moment, with New York as epicenter. Rather than limit himself to that established scene, Crow is anxious to examine far-flung corners of contemporary art. A coherent attempt is even made to integrate some Los Angeles art into the larger scheme of things.

Early on, though, disaster strikes. Warhol’s riveting fusion of traditional painting with the language of commercial art is subjected to contortions of interpretation that will give your brain a charley horse.

The Campbell’s soup can labels, portraits of Marilyn Monroe, pictures of an electric chair, images of gruesome accidents splashed across the tabloid press--many of the great early ‘60ssilk-screen paintings are here. So is the emphasis on modern mortality often prominent in Warhol’s art, whether it’s post-suicide Marilyn or a horrid execution device.

Crow claims Warhol is a significant artist because his paintings are a powerful critique of our deathly consumer culture. “Warhol came to produce his most powerful paintings by dramatizing the hollowness of the consumer icon,” he asserts, “that is, events in which the mass-produced image as the bearer of desires was exposed in its inadequacy by the reality of suffering and death.”

Because the artist used commercial mass-production motifs and techniques to render images related to death, the hapless historian wants you to imagine this art as a kind of Pop vanitas. Warhol, he believes, posts an ironic warning against the threat of mortality lurking within the stylish, skin-deep heart of consumerism.

Well . . . no. Andy’s energetic Pop is many things, all about as far from consumer admonishment as you can get.

Actually, the brilliance of Warhol’s 1960s Pop paintings is just the opposite. They’re a freewheeling exploitation of a powerful weapon--namely, the overheated visual language of contemporary American commerce. With it, the artist slayed the dragon of a stale, exclusionary, European-based aristocratic idea of Modern culture, which lingered in Existentialist odes to 1950s American Abstract Expressionist art.

A dragon, not incidentally, that also excluded from entry into the castle the likes of an unattractive, effeminate, working-class homosexual from Pittsburgh. Death lurks inside Warhol’s mass-produced imagery, all right, but it’s not the kind Crow imagines.

Take the famous car-crash paintings, in which bloody highway death is apotheosized. Warhol’s glamorized images, plucked from the daily tabloids and often tarted up with lurid color, nostalgically recall the celebrated deaths by automobile crackup of painter Jackson Pollock (in 1956) and actor James Dean (1955). For High art and Low, Pollock and Dean were united as the reigning romantic icons of aggressively tortured American machismo.

Six years later, when Warhol-the-limp-wristed-fairy chose to paint totally anonymous car wrecks, it was partly in order to democratize that exclusionary celebrity myth. Goodbye, Jackson, the paintings announced, a new and different artist has arrived; move over, movie-star Jimmy, make way for a ‘60s superstar.

Crow, alas, continues to speed recklessly down his potholed highway in a second book also published last fall (by Yale University Press) and lavishly praised in the Times Literary Supplement by Arthur Danto, Columbia University philosophy professor and art critic for the Nation. In “Modern Art in the Common Culture,” Crow claims that Warhol’s car-crash paintings “commemorate events in which the supreme symbol of consumer affluence, the American car of the 1950s, lost its aura of pleasure and freedom to become a concrete instrument of sudden and irreparable injury.”

Yes, and I am Marie of Romania.

Americans will be shocked to learn from the good professor that the car lost its aura of pleasure and freedom 30 years ago, when an artist finally exposed the awful truth.

At issue here is the reality of effective social change. Crow depicts Warhol as merely lobbing smarty-pants critiques of consumerism from off on the sidelines.

Warhol, meanwhile, actually helped change the world. Automobiles may, indeed, not set you free; but when oddball Andy simply assumed for his upstart art the position of centrality held by commercial culture in American life, he altered the public consciousness and the status quo. Perennial social outcasts suddenly found a way in.

A familiar variation on Crow’s cautionary fable about the untold grief caused by mass-produced consumer imagery was trotted out 40 years ago by the late journalist Vance Packard, he of “The Hidden Persuaders” fame. Packard’s schlocky 1957 bestseller claimed to find things like skulls and death’s heads airbrushed into the ice cubes of magazine liquor ads.

More amusingly than Crow (if absent the academic pedigree), Packard ostensibly “exposed the reality” of suffering and death hidden inside Madison Avenue’s mass-market images. His dire fantasy of subliminal advertising wreaking havoc on an innocent public was written during a time obsessed with ferreting out “the enemy within,” from covert Reds hiding in the U.S. State Department to space alien body-snatchers on the silver screen. And though Packard’s widely read thesis isn’t exactly the same as Crow’s moralizing claim about Warhol and consumer vanity, it would still have rendered Warhol’s subsequent art redundant, if indeed that’s what Andy’s paintings were about.

But anti-consumerism is not what they’re about. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

Nor do you have to go way back to 1957 to discover the silliness of this interpretive folderol. Recall instead the legendary 1988 Sotheby’s auction of Warhol’s estate.

Remember that? Veritable truckloads of cookie jars, fine jewelry, junk jewelry, toys, rugs, celebrity memorabilia, Art Deco silver, Swatch watches, French furniture, academic paintings, a 1974 Rolls Royce Silver Shadow--a staggering total of some 10,000 items went under the gavel, many still in the original wrappings in which they’d been purchased. The haul gave front-page testimony to the artist’s shop-aholic ways.

When it came to consumerism, Andy made Imelda Marcos look like Mother Teresa. To turn him into some kind of moralizing anti-consumerist now is like trying to make Joe McCarthy into V.I. Lenin.

What’s remarkable about the all-too-common academic Marxist take on Pop art is that it gets Warhol exactly backward, like a photographic negative. Mr. Conspicuous Consumption becomes Ralph Nader in drag.

The 180-degree flip is accomplished by invoking that all-purpose critical term beloved of our time: irony. Irony, as my Webster’s puts it, is “a method of humorous or sarcastic expression in which the intended meaning of the words used is the direct opposite of their usual sense (the irony of calling a stupid plan ‘clever’).”

Critics have always called Warhol’s art ironic. The hitch is that when it came to popular culture, Andy was no ironist--Modern, Postmodern or otherwise. His mainstream success as an advertising artist in the 1950s is evidence enough that his passion for consumer pop culture was frank and sincere.

What irony there is in Warhol’s Pop art will be found on the art side, not the pop side. Pop had his respect. It was art’s preening pretentiousness--which definitively excluded the lowly likes of him--that Warhol was pleased to stand on its head.

When the Abstract Expressionist crowd used the vernacular lingo “soup” to describe the thick, splashy paint in, say, a typical De Kooning canvas, Andy obliged by packaging the motif in tasteful all-over pictures of Campbell’s labels. When the champions of imperiled abstract art tried to revive the failing genre with a style they called Color-Field painting, Andy fell in line with huge commercial pictures of field flowers, aglow in Kool-Aid colors.

The genius of the misfit working-class fop was in how he harnessed consumer pop culture as an engine to fulfill the promises of democratic freedom, which inevitably failed inveterate outcasts like himself. Without the bottom-line volatility of pop, he wouldn’t have had a chance.

I’ve begun to think there are at least two good reasons for the blatant misrepresentation of Warhol’s art advanced in writing such as Crow’s (and Danto’s). In the university curriculum, Marxist-based art history and theory have long since joined the establishment. (I benefited from its audacious insights myself 20 years ago.) First, it’s awfully hard to maintain dissent from the dominant class when you’re comfortably settled within it. And second, the impact of Warhol’s art on successive generations is so pervasive that Marxist-based theory better be able to gather it under its wing, if the theory is to maintain credibility.

Unfortunately, propagating the fiction that Warhol’s art is some sort of ironic critique leveled at the deadliness of pop consumerism will only hasten the already looming irrelevance of academic Marxist theory. For one thing, Warhol’s own art eloquently refutes the idea. For another, many among those successive generations of artists know the difference, and it shows up in their work, too.

If Warhol’s art is a critique at all, it actually exposes the cramped, restrictive, party-line viewpoint represented by this sort of sanctimonious palaver. But then, finger-waggling academic Marxists don’t quite know what to do with the power of popular democracy as a vivid subtext in contemporary art.

It’s too bad. As I left Cal State Long Beach, I realized it’s especially too bad for students. For they might now be required to study, memorize and even repeat Crow’s incontinent textbook nonsense--which actually undermines Warhol’s truly critical role in making the ‘60s rise.

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* “The Velvet Years/Warhol’s Factory, 1965-67: Photographs by Stephen Shore,” University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., (562) 985-5761. Through April 26. Gallery hours: Tuesdays to Thursdays, noon to 8 p.m.; Fridays to Sundays, noon to 5 p.m.