Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold The World
http://www.citypaper.com/arts/review.asp?rid=15923
By Raymond Cummings
4/7/2010
Before Andy Warhol, a Campbell's soup can was just a Campbell's soup
can: a mass-produced fact, a container of processed nourishment.
After Andy Warhol, a Campbell's soup can would become both a symbol
of the banality of modern life and a demonstration of how the most
quotidian of objects can be repurposed--and exhaustively
re-commodified--as art objects. The "Campbell's Soup Cans" series of
paintings helped create "a pertly designed window into the abyss, in
a sense, erasing the sense of spirituality that earlier generations
had associated with art," author Gary Indiana writes in Andy Warhol
and the Can That Sold the World, his thoughtful look at the late Pop
artist's defining work. "The viewer was obliged to confront glut; a
ceaseless proliferation of objects for sale, objects that defined
modern lives as quanta."
After an eccentric stretch of study at Carnegie Institute of
Technology, Warhol moved to New York in 1949, soon enjoying a
celebrated career as a sought-after advertising illustrator while
incrementally easing himself into the city's abstract
expressionism-dominated art community. By the time the soup cans
appeared in the early 1960s, he had produced and shown reams of
homoerotic and non-quite-commercial fine-art pieces, which "were
given perfunctory attention, when noted at all, in the art press,"
Indiana writes.
The soup can paintings didn't fare much better at first; they would
acquire significance over time. Stark, plain, and ambiguous, the
paintings baffled much more than they beguiled, empty visual vessels
that forced the observer to imbue them with meaning. While the series
referred back to Warhol's upbringing--the thriving factories in
Pittsburgh, where he grew up, and the countless cans of Campbell's
his "overbearing and hypercritical" mother served him for lunch as a
child--the paintings project the same affect-free detachment that
eventually colored his public persona and the for-sale artistic
facsimiles that subsequently became his calling cards. In a larger,
more transformative sense, reality effectively became a valid basis
for art, and the artist was given license to act less as a prism than
as a living mirror--an idea that continues to shape, inform, and
arguably damn the mediums of film, television, music, and art today.
The Can That Sold the World is not a Warhol biography in the
traditional sense. Indiana doesn't mention the Velvet Underground at
all, and refers to Valerie Solanas to explain his subject's retreat
from the entourage of crazies, drug fiends, and anti-stars who
surrounded him at the Factory. Warhol's subsequent experimental
artistry and conceptual decline--as a reclusive, toadying
silkscreener to the morally-if-not-financially bankrupt--is presented
to underline the seminal nature of his original
innovation-qua-violation. Yet in narrowing his focus, the author
locates and captures Warhol's essence.
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