POP-ism - Warhol's Sixties

A review of POP-ism - Andy Warhol and Pat Hacket's 1980 Kiss and Tell Review of Warhol's 60s.

‘People say that you always want what you can’t have, that ‘the grass is always greener’ and all that, but in the mid-sixties I never, never, never felt that way for a single minute. I was so happy doing what I was doing, with the people I was doing it with’

Andy Warhol 1977

Andy Warhol is an art world phenomenon: a character that seems to mystify everyone, despite his assurances that his art was only ever surface deep. I read his second autobiography, POPism, in an attempt to better understand this enigmatic figure, especially after attempting his previous volume, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, which, intent on concealment to the point of incoherence, barely gave anything away. 


His second book is more accessible and reveals an underlying connection between his writing style and artistic approach.

POPism is set out chronologically, as opposed to The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, which is thematic. It charts Warhol’s 1960s: as the years progressed, so did the artist’s notoriety, social circle, and artistic style. He started out the decade a lowly graphic designer and ended it a cultural icon. The scene is set with his first solo show at the Stable Gallery in 1962, which showcased works which now litter the collections of major art galleries worldwide: Elvis, Marilyn, and the disaster series. The infamous Factory, haunt of Warhol’s Superstars, was founded on East 47^th Street in 1963. The space was loved by students, artists, and celebrities, and became the location of constant mass production of art, with every visitor recorded in a Screen Test.

The Screen Tests were a natural progression from the large celebrity silkscreens into a different art medium; Warhol made around 500 silent portrait films in 2 years of his studio’s visitors, and in doing so solidified his industrial method and aesthetic. A major turning point came at the end of 1964 when Warhol bought a sound camera, which he used to create 33 minute reels with his scriptwriters Chuck Wein and Ronald Tavel, previously of the Theatre of the Ridiculous. Now the Screen Tests evolved to become talking silkscreens, and the Superstars were really born.

Still with Nico and Ondine in the final scene from 'Chelsea Girls' from the 2003 Italian DVD print of the film.

The Superstars were immortalised in Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls, a 3 hour experiment comprising of collated episodes of the Superstars’ shenanigans in the Chelsea Hotel. Pope Ondine, Ingrid Superstar, and Gerard Malanga all made appearances, and played themselves so well that the film got good reviews in the mainstream press and was commercially released nationally in 1967. The film marked Warhol’s step from the underground into the mainstream. The Chelsea Girls was followed up by an even more ambitious project, ****; a 25 hour long epic which was only screened once, at the New Cinema Playhouse on 15^th and 16^th December 1967.

It was around this time that Andy Warhol met the Velvet Underground, and his artistic experiments entered the field of music. By branching out into other artistic mediums, Warhol began to realise he could monopolise multiple art forms in the city simultaneously. At one point he had films playing uptown at the Film Makers’ Co-Op, the Silver Clouds and cow print wallpaper installation on show at the Castelli Gallery, and the multimedia performance piece the Exploding Plastic Inevitable – which featured live music, a light show, and multi-screen film projections –  on at a dance hall on St Mark’s Place. By the end of 1967 Warhol’s meteoric rise engulfed all areas of the New York arts and social scenes.

Warhol’s writing mimics his art: it is at once detached, chatty and frank, and very funny in places, just as he would be in life. Just as Pop-Art took a wry and open dance with consumerism and made it art; Warhol described Pop as referring to ‘just the surface things’, and this is reflected in his directness of dialogue and catty observations.

Andy Warhol Dollar Signs

The apex of the book comes in June 1968, when Valerie Solanas, a sometime Factory visitor, shot Warhol. This event perhaps marks the point at which the artist’s fame became most acute: compared to the Warhol at the start of the decade, his shooting cemented his iconic status. Similarly, his survival perhaps echoes the persistence of his tongue-in-cheek Pop humour: just as he got away with being shot, his themes of celebrity, status, and money are still ever present in art and society today.


Written by Alexandra Bannister at Gallery Violet.
www.galleryviolet.com