Andy Warhol (18 page)

Andy kidded himself that he was in Christ's position: he, too, wanted to disappear while remaining a static image, to make his eroded body an emblem. He gave grandiose form to his Christ identification in his Last Supper paintings of 1985–86, based on cheap reproductions of Leonardo. In January 1987, Warhol audaciously exhibited twenty of them in Milan—right across the street from the real McCoy. Andy's Last Suppers are predictive accounts of his own upcoming death, as well as paranoid portraits of Factory behavior, in which Warhol as Christ is surrounded by disciples and a lurking betrayer (Valerie Solanas, and other, nonviolent defectors). Andy dared to do a flaming pink Last Supper: nelly spirituality. As crystals were compatible, he declared, with Christianity, so could he reconcile conventional images of Christ with a homoerotic iconography; in
The Last Supper (The Big C)
, in tandem with Christ at the final Passover meal is a blue motorcycle (recalling the motorcycle in his film
Bike Boy
, itself an homage to Kenneth Anger's
Scorpio Rising
, the definitive gay ode to the motorcycle); the words
The Big C
, emblazoned large in the bottom middle of the canvas, suggest that Warhol has finally moved beyond
A
and
B
(his two preoccupying letters) to a third term,
C
, perhaps the
C
of the copyright logo (Andy always eroticized trademarks), or the
C
of Christ, or simply the
C
that is the terminus beyond
A
and
B
's stichomythia. In another Last Supper painting, he juxtaposed Christ with the image of a bodybuilder, captioned “Be a SOMEBODY with a
BODY
.”
Jesus was a superstar—a guy with a body worth displaying; Jesus represented the ideal compromise between a mortified, failing body and a body that had the masculine fortitude to stick around forever.

Was Christ nelly or brute? In Warhol's eyes, both: art, like mysticism, wisely quarries the in-between. His Camouflage paintings of 1986, for example, exploit brutality's nelliness: as camouflage allows a soldier, reptile-like, to survive by blending into the forest or the sand, so the paintings insinuate a nelly theme (soldier sexiness) under the cover of a brute style (abstraction). On the purely brute side, in 1981 he made paintings and prints of guns and knives, a sequel to the hammers and sickles. He had wanted to exhibit the guns and knives in conjunction with his dollar signs, to stress affinities between money, masculinity, and weaponry, but the dollars, to their detriment, were shown separately. On the nelly side, Andy made paintings and prints of shoes, the artifacts' surfaces covered with a substance called diamond dust. Shoes returned him to his roots—the I. Miller ad campaign and the feet drawings of the 1950s—but overlaid the decorative homage to nelly taste with a murderous finish: for Warhol seemed amused by the fact that diamond dust was a lethal weapon. He told the diary: “Diamond dust can kill you. It's a good way to murder somebody.” (So, Andy would have noticed, was semen.) He splayed the shoes randomly across the painting's field, like thrown dice, or corpses post-massacre.

The strongest case to be made for the aesthetic and ethical value of Warhol's late work is its commitment to an arctically­ rigorous process of self-examination. Sometimes the self-portraits­ were direct: images of famous Andy's face. The several­ most haunting, shown in London in 1986, feature the artist wearing a fright wig, strands of hair sticking straight up, as if his head were hanging in air, like a chandelier, or like John the Baptist in the Gustave Moreau painting
The Apparition (Dance of Salome).
Over Andy's face lies a scrim of camouflage pattern; he'd treated the face of artist Joseph Beuys the same way in portraits, for camouflage—honor, not stigma—signified a face worth protecting.

Other late Warhol images committed self-portraiture by veil and proxy. A 1985 series of prints and paintings of an erupting Vesuvius may seem a touristy image, but it actually depicts his own aesthetic “flow,” or the type of atomic explosiveness that he idealized in others (Ondine's verbal torrent, for example), a disastrous eruption that thrills the remote spectator but endangers the locals. The image of Vesuvius shows Andy adoring disaster, marveling at the ability of comic-book-style line drawing to capture excess. The stream of lava resembles the “Puff” of air that Superman blows in the 1960 painting: Vesuvius is a Pop superhero. So were Frederick the Great, Beethoven, Lenin, and Goethe (Warhol never stinted in his praise of famous men): he made images of them in the 1980s, as well as prints of reigning queens (Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland, Queen Elizabeth II) that were conscious ventures into campy self-portraiture. The reigning queens show represented, in Warhol's eyes, his “rock bottom”: behind his fantasy of ruling as a queen lay the reality of coup d'état and guillotine. Warhol understood that his reign was not stable, and that his monarchy demanded reiterative advertisement: he made a series of ad screen-prints in 1985, including a Paramount logo that alluded to Jon Gould, and a Blackgama-clad Judy Garland, whose Stonewall-initiating corpse he'd waited in line (with Ondine and Candy Darling) to see at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in 1969. (While waiting, they'd begun to compose—via tape recorder—a novel,
b
, the unfinished sequel to
a.
)

Other self-portraits were more gastric, for Andy dimly knew that his internal organs were in trouble. Several paintings featured intestines—an anatomical site that, ever since his father's “stomach poisoning” and his mother's colostomy, unsettled the Paperbag imagination. A 1985 painting,
Physiological Diagram
, shows a map of the interior of a man's body, including the intestines, rendered externally, like Mrs. Warhola's. And when he made Rorschach paintings, the blots resembled shadowy X-rays of his body's infrastructure: skeleton, rib cage, lungs, spine. Perhaps he engineered the symmetrical ink clouds to be camouflage, to pose as psychiatric invitations, sounding boards for the spectator; but they depict his own body's maternally enmeshed innards, and thus are Janus-faced elegies, looking back to Julia's death and forward to his own. Indeed, Warhol's entire oeuvre—even the late work, which seems, except for the self-portraits, to be especially impersonal—may be interpreted as an externalization, crisply distanced and disembodied, of his abject internal circuitry.

Warhol understood that every mind worked by surgically cutting, cropping, cleaving, copying, threading, and grafting the world's rough evidence into comprehensible shapes; and so the late work, like the early, heuristically unpieces the whole body into its fragments—egg, lip, intestine, skull. In the 1980s he made a series of paintings called Philip's Skull—images of Philip S. Niarchos, who'd commissioned a portrait, and asked that the X-ray of his skull be used, instead of a Polaroid of his face, as the art-work's basis. Similarly decapitating were the pieces Warhol made from details of prior men's paintings (Paolo Ucello, Edvard Munch, Giorgio De Chirico). Though these fragmented appropriations may represent human faces (Botticelli's Venus, for example), their effect is ghoulish. Rather than adding a Warholian touch to past masters, resuscitating them, he seems instead to be killing them, embalming their iconographies. When he makes paintings from ads or commodities, the effect is, in contrast, humanizing: he renders the Coke bottle, for example, as if it were a living idol or his own mutant twin. In a print of a spilled Coke, executed sometime in the 1980s, Warhol seemed to be narrating Coke's death—its mortal liability, as a liquid, to leak; as a bottle, to crack; and as a product, to flop.

Coke is not a person, but Andy thought otherwise. His art is a bill of rights for inanimate objects, giving them suffrage and thus granting his own robotic self the liberty to pursue happiness. In the 1980s, he attempted technologically to produce an Andy Warhol robot that could give lectures and interviews, and in many of his late paintings and prints he seemed to be sweeping actual people aside, clearing space for emptiness, inanition, anhedonia. His least human work, or the work most devoted to the inhumane, is a series entitled Zeitgeist (1982), paintings of German monuments—perhaps his first public-architectural intervention since his ill-fated mural for the 1964 World's Fair. This sequence contemplates unpeopled spaces, and, with a bleakness atypical of Warhol, suggests that bodies obliterated by totalitarianism are twice-erased—first, from the earth, and second, from the rescue of artistic rendering. Another German project, equally unpopulated and untactile, without even the horned warmth of the Endangered Species rhinoceros, was his 1986 sequence of commissioned portraits of Mercedes-Benz cars and automotive parts. We've come a long way from gorgeous Gerry-Pie's torture in
Vinyl:
while sexual sadism at least offered a whip-and-wax mimesis of human touch, the Mercedes motor purrs at the furthest remove from the mortal organism. (Even a Brillo box implies the presence of the comestible, since a Brillo pad removes stuck traces of foodstuffs.) And the toys in the miniature paintings he made for his dealer Bruno Bischofberger in 1983 (Bruno's son Magnus was Andy's godchild) were unliving if not unmoving contraptions—a robot, a clockwork panda drummer, a clockwork motorcycle with sidecar, and various artificial or mechanical animals (frog, parrot, terrier, monkey, mouse). He hung the paintings at child's-eye-level on
Fish
wallpaper, echoing his
Cow
wallpaper, and suggesting Jesuitical conversions, as well as the fetishist's and fisherman's pleasure. We assume the fish, like all toys, are dead. If alive, they qualify as pets.

Andy's pets, in the 1980s, were young artists, whose careers he advanced, even as, Drella-style, he sucked nutrients from them. These friendships—advocacies—included Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. For Basquiat, Warhol felt something nearly like love; together, they produced
Ten Punching Bags
, which represent interracial battle gone amorous. Boxing interested Basquiat, and
boxing
(in the sense of the Brillo boxes, the time capsules) was the core of Warhol's artistic method. The logo of the punching bags,
GENESPORT
, pictures a white and a black figure boxing; the word
GENE
is in black letters, the word
SPORT
in white. (The bags themselves are white, with black paint.) Warhol and Basquiat might have wished to make sport of their “genes,” the word itself a cornerstone of racial categories; the purpose of the “bag” in Andy's life, whether the colostomy bag or the moniker Andy Paperbag, was to replace the body, to hide it by wrapping or enclosing it, and also, with shy exhibitionism, to expose (or indecently “flash”) his practice of fabricating enclosures. The punching bags represent Andy's own tendency to see himself and his art as “put down” by others—rejected, targeted, punched. Christ's face is imprinted on the punching bag: Christ was the star whom oppressors put down but who had, like the bag, the temerity and resilience to rise again. The beauty of a punching bag is that it doesn't feel the pain of the assault, and that it bounces back. Basquiat didn't bounce back—he died of an overdose, despite Warhol's efforts to get him off drugs. And Warhol himself would not bounce back, despite his multiple comebacks and his feline, nine-lived knack for self-reinvention.

Andy had begun to rebuild his distressed body; the last years of his life were a series of attempts to make art of his failing organism. He worked with a trainer; he tried, as his weight-lifter painting advertised, to be somebody with a body. He'd never quite had one before, and even with the workouts, he remained, said Stuart Pivar, “in terrible shape.” Chris Makos took a photo of Andy getting a massage: here, for our astonished gaze, lies Andy, his flabby, pale flesh at rest, ministered to, receiving solicitude from human fingers.

Finally he found the confidence to put his own figure forward—a futility (no one needed his torso, it served no cause) and a long-delayed gratification. In 1985, at a nightclub, Area, he created an “Invisible Sculpture” by standing on a pedestal beside the label ANDY WARHOL, and, more rambunctiously, in 1981, he posed in drag, with a series of inventive wigs and anti-naturalistic modes of maquillage, for Polaroid self-portraits; Chris Makos, too, photographed him in drag, and called it
Altered Image.
The drag self-portraits tour the girlie categories, though none is named; each faked, anonymous visage suggests a vocation (teacher, star, surgeon, char), and his face—camouflaged­ by womanliness—becomes a Blue Guide to the joke of gender. Andy has never seemed more variously himself: the drag portraits send him home to Lana, to Julia, to Judy, to Candy, to all the ladies he has been the near-miss mirror for. He vaguely worried that the drag photos would ruin his reputation, and yet for years he'd been altering his complexion with collagen and astringents; his dermatological regimens were strict, exacting, and involved dozens of products, the collection of them (of course he saved his face-repair creams) now functioning, posthumously, in their cardboard carton in the Warhol Archives, as yet another artwork. He wanted to look not like himself but like the punk-pop-group Blondie's lead singer, Debbie Harry, the most architecturally beautiful face in the history of rock, her cheekbones high and pedimental.

Harry was a regular on Andy's TV shows, of which he concocted several, with the collaboration of Vincent Fremont and Don Munroe. “TV” is shorthand for “transvestite,” and transvestism always haunts Andy's love of television, a medium that permits out-of-body travel within the private home. The highlight of
Fashion
(a TV series of ten segments, including episodes on male models, Halston, designer Betsey Johnson, and makeup), was a conversation between Diana Vreeland and Henry Geldzahler, in which she waxes enthusiastic about the boys who skateboard in front of the Metropolitan Museum, whose Costume Institute felt her high hand. Andy also produced the cable TV show
Andy Warhol's T.V.
and, for MTV,
Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes.
“Good TV means a lot,” he told the diary; good TV was good reception, and open-ended receptivity was half of his TV pleasure. Making television, he could actively transmit his body, an ephemeral, wave-based sculpture to which he was devoting intense reconstructive and reinterpretive labor, trying to imagine it as beautiful, trying to wedge its bizarreness defiantly in the path of put-down.