The Strange and Significant Life of a ‘60s Pop Art Icon

Andy Warhol, spooky, off-the-wall, form-shaping avatar of blankness and cultural keenness, meets biographer Wayne Koestenbaum, poet, celebrity explicator and rollicking gay theorist. A lovely match.

Warhol’s work, this writer argues forcefully, is about desire and the passage of time, a theme all the more unsettling when you realize that the artist has been gone for 14 years, indeed that this waif wayfarer was a child of the Depression, born in 1928. The story of his odd life and weirdly complex work feels both remote and pertinent. Koestenbaum, author of “The Queen’s Throat” and “Jackie Under My Skin,” attacks it with care, thoughtfulness and leaping consideration.

The artist was extremely close to his plain mother, an immigrant from Czechoslovakia who in middle life had a colostomy. It’s a fact that our guide notes with great significance: “He would make his name and fortune through a similarly graphic, unsettling externalization of interior matter.” In the early ‘60s Warhol showed big boxes of Brillo pads and paintings of Kellogg’s cornflakes and Heinz ketchup; “masculinity, as a system, fails, just as ketchup rarely pours,” concludes the biographer. What’s more, Koestenbaum hypothesizes that Warhol’s two main methods, the blotted-line technique and silk screening, are “elaborate forms of blotching, in compensatory mimicry of his skin,” which was pocked by a form of chorea that he suffered at an early age. Well, perhaps.

Warhol’s conceptual art is strange and significant, his life so disturbing, wry and suggestive that one imagines a novelist should tackle it; we forgive Koestenbaum his occasional straining because he has written such a sympathetic book.

In popular imagination, Warhol is often dismissed as a con artist, cranking out cheesy, easy images--but Koestenbaum makes a convincing case that he was really a philosopher of images. Arriving in New York from Pittsburgh in the early ‘60s, he quickly leapt from a commercial artist with a gift for enshrining ladies shoes to become the father of Pop art. This much of the story is widely known. A big merit of this book is that Koestenbaum takes very seriously Warhol’s subsequent work starting Interview magazine, which gazes obsessively at celebrity culture; dabbling in TV; and, most of all, taking film back to its roots in the peep show and re-imagining its psychic and graphic potential.

Critics are still trying to get their minds around this brief flowering of films. Once viewed as enervating, grainy sub-pornography, they are now being seen in a new light as caustic, challenging tableaux of surrealism and desire. Koestenbaum rises to the occasion when he explicates and considers films like “Haircut,” “Kiss,” “Couch,” “Blue Movie” and “Vinyl.” On the screen, pretty boys, more often than not three at a time, occasionally get entangled, but mostly just stare darkly at one another--the homoerotic lifted quite a few levels, if you see it that way.

“His art ponders what it feels like to wait for sex; to wait, during sex, for it to end; to wait, during sex’s prelude, for the ‘real’ sex to begin; to desire a man you are looking at; to endure postponement, perhaps for a lifetime, as you wait for the man to turn around and look back at you.”

And, also on the films: “Warhol teaches changelessness--how a motionless face grows metamorphic and articulate, if you pay attention.” Hear that, Hollywood development specialists?

The personal story is still amazing. How Warhol gets shot on the eve of the assassination of Robert Kennedy, his bodily life pretty well wrecked. How he turns to insane shopping and collecting, a proto avant-garde Martha Stewart. How he exists at the direct heart of the N.Y. demimonde, shy, restless, stupendously (wickedly?) inarticulate but ever alive to the next new thing: “I will go to the opening of anything, including a toilet seat.” How he kept a fascinated but shy distance from the budding gay liberation movement--maybe the swishiest guy in New York, who arguably made art in order to be surrounded by “strong muscled assistants” but had not the slightest political inclination. How late in life he set out on a comically foolish errand to “get a good body.”

Lovelessness, cupidity, the breaking down of artistic boundaries, violence, depression, a mania for shopping, celebrity worship, transfiguration: These are just some of the themes that crowd around Warhol. In 20th century America, one wonders, what else have you got?

Koestenbaum draws on a growing mountain of research, plus gobs of personal interviews, to construct what is almost a model of the brief contemporary biography. With marvelous fluidity, he sets out the facts but never lets them get in the way of a brilliant apercu or an original bit of speculation about the meaning of the work. His book overall is restrained, smart, respectful and amusing.

He gives us a Warhol who is ineffably sad but heroic too: a man full of bravado, patience, energy and devotion to work, to making things. It’s a book that should tempt both those generally familiar with Andy Warhol and, even more, young people who have trouble imaging how popular art can challenge the status quo.