Warhol: A Documentary Film
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Warhol: A Documentary Film. Directed by Ric Burns, written by Ric Burns and James Sanders

When he got the idea of painting well-known commodities and their labels-Campbell's Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles-young Andy Warhol hoped he'd found the key to changing his image and transforming his career. He was already New York's most sought-after commercial artist. But he wanted to be serious artiste with a vision independent enough to mark him off from the likes of Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein, who were already launching Pop Art as a radical reaction against the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and company. Painting everyday items from the supermarket, he decided, might be just the ticket.

Anyone who thinks Warhol simply jumped into his new style can learn differently from Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, a four-hour movie directed by Ric Burns for PBS's long-running "American Masters" series, now available on DVD as a PBS Home Video release. The artist invited four friends and opinion-makers to his studio and showed them two different versions of the Coke-bottle motif. One had marks of painterly technique, with detectable brushwork and other signs of the artistic "interpretation" that true paintings were supposed to have. By contrast, the "tight" version was almost photographic in its direct, uninflected effect. The friends voted for the tight one, and Warhol cheerfully accepted their verdict, just as he'd have accepted the opposite verdict if that had been handed to him.

Warhol has plenty of detractors, and they're likely to see this as confirmation of the view that he was no less a commercial sell-out during the "art" phase of his career than he'd been in the advertising/journalism phase, happy to deploy any trick or gimmick that would titillate the art world and satisfy his hunger for money and fame. His defenders might argue that Warhol saw himself as a human tabula rasa, less an "original" thinker than a conscientious reflector of the signs and signals beamed out by contemporary American culture. Firing back, the detractors might call this nothing but passive-aggressive nonsense, fueled by the narcissistic notion that if Warhol liked staring at a boring thing, then everyone would like staring at the boring thing. Firing back in turn, the defenders could say things aren't boring when transplanted to an artistic context. To which the detractors could say..

And on it would go, soup can after Coke bottle, arguments without end, amen. To my mind, much of Warhol's art is as daring and beautiful as it is witty and, yes, original. But one of its most appealing strengths is its capacity to open up thought and debate on an enormous variety of fronts, from the merits of particular works to the theoretical import of terms like "style" and "content" and "originality" itself. Warhol's best achievements, from the early Coke bottles to the stunning self-portraits and monumental Mao pictures of his late career, are forever oscillating among multiple levels of meaning and interest, rewarding both the casual gaze in the gallery and the deeper ideas prompted after you leave. As an art dealer interviewed in Burns's movie says of the "simple" soup cans, "They're complicated in their implications."

Despite the deadpan image he cultivated, Warhol was also complicated. Born in 1928 to an immigrant family in Pittsburgh, he was afflicted as a child by everything from poverty and his father's untimely death to a case of rheumatic fever that left him with blotches on his face, tics in his movements, and many days home from school. He whiled these away by drawing, perusing his mother's movie magazines, and getting infatuated with Shirley Temple, who sent him an autographed photo he revered.

After studying design at Carnegie Tech he overrode his mother's objections and headed for New York, quickly establishing himself as a hugely inventive commercial artist. One of his trademarks was a blotting procedure that made images look "printed" when they were fresh from the drawing board. As an expert in Burns's documentary notes, Warhol intuitively understood the magazine world's mania for mass production as a way of life, and this also dovetailed with his affection for the assembly-line sameness of modern artifacts. When his first work was published, a typesetter's error dropped the final letter from Warhola, the last name he was born with. True to form, he stuck with the tighter version.

By this time Warhol was doing mighty well for someone "with a bad nose and St. Vitus Dance and blotches, et cetera, who was gay and really, really swish.and was bad with people, was probably dyslexic, a little autistic," as writer Wayne Koestenbaum puts it in the documentary. He had some disappointments, as when he replaced his long-distance Shirley Temple crush with a fixation on Truman Capote, who showed no interest in even meeting him. But such eccentricities rarely interfered with work, work, work. Warhol sometimes appeared to be sabotaging himself in peculiar ways-why did he use those cheap, ill-fitting wigs to hide his thinning hair?-but Burns's film provides a salutary reminder that he was a very hard, very disciplined worker in every stage of his career.

It was in the 1960s that Warhol started to click with his Coke bottles and soup cans, which drew little attention at first, but soon became a sensation on the art scene and beyond. Some of that sensation was couched in sneers and derision, of course, but I've always thought Warhol was smarter than his negative critics realized. Looking up something recently on the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, for instance, I glanced at the Warhol entry and was delighted to see one of my all-time-favorite Warhol quotes there. Finding an utterly American democracy embedded within low-end consumer culture, he said,

You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

I don't agree that all Cokes are good; quite the opposite, I think all Cokes are bad--useless bottles of junk-food crapola produced only to make money for corporation stockholders. But hey, the stuff is democratic, and Warhol is astute and witty to point this out.

Finally recognized as more than a commercial artist for hire, Warhol turned to silk-screening as a way of cranking out large quantities of work-without violating his aesthetic for an instant-and moved his base of operations from an Upper East Side apartment to a large loft. This was dubbed the Factory after a friend decked the walls with spray-painted silver, a color that Warhol associated with the future, the past, and the trait of narcissism, since mirrors are backed with it.

In this larger space Warhol could experiment further with sculpture and, most dramatically, with film. Moviemaking appealed to him in many ways, since it hooked up with the glamour of Hollywood and stardom, and also with his assembly-line aesthetic-a film strip contains picture after picture after picture, each slightly different from the next, rather like the serial paintings and prints he was making. These lines of thought converge in the idea of movie studios as dream factories. Warhol had the dreams and the Factory, so nothing was stopping him.

It has been said that the ontogeny of Warhol's cinema recapitulates the phylogeny of cinema as a whole, moving from silent to sound, from unedited to edited, from spectacle to narrative, and from black-and-white to color. This isn't really accurate, since the seminal Tarzan and Jane Regained.Sort Of, made in 1963, is an edited narrative film, sort of. But roughly speaking, Warhol's films can be divided into three groups: silent pictures made with a fixed camera, such as Empire, his eight-hour portrait of the Empire State Building, and Eat, in which artist Robert Indiana slooooooowly consumes a mushroom; sound productions with zooms and camera movement, such as Vinyl, based on Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange, and the epic Chelsea Girls, with two reels projected side by side; and narrative movies with dialogue and editing, such as Trash and Flesh, which Paul Morrissey directed under the "Andy Warhol Presents" rubric.

Warhol's movies, especially before the Morrissey period, drew highly deserved praise in enlightened precincts of the avant-garde community, which recognized them as adventurous, often phenomenally creative works. Playing into his public image as an ultracool artist with a minimum of emotions, Warhol gave the impression that he liked film because the camera did all the work, and because transforming ordinary people into "superstars" was an amusing diversion. In reality, though, he took painstaking care with framing and lighting. It's no accident that his best pictures--such as the silent Haircut No. 1 and the sound Vinyl, both excerpted in Burns's documentary--are stunning visual experiences.

It was the Factory that allowed Warhol to move in these fascinating new directions, but it was also the Factory that caused the greatest problems of his career. Looked at from one angle, the place was as democratic as a case of Coke, welcoming anyone who wanted to join the gang and allowing rich celebrities to rub elbows (and other body parts) with working-class hustlers and drag queens. Looked at from another angle, it was a magnet for deluded, sometimes seriously disturbed people ill equipped to handle the drug abuse and hyperactivity that eventually ran rampant at the place.

Warhol has been harshly criticized by detractors and supporters alike for maintaining his inexpressive, voyeuristic posture even when a close companion like Edie Sedgwick was visibly falling apart at the seams, and I agree that his failure to intercede at such times was deplorable. The bluntly negative picture of Warhol's behavior toward Sedgwick in the 2007 movie Factory Girl is, sad to say, completely on target.

Warhol paid an extremely high price for standing mute while the Factory slid downhill, however. One day in 1968 the Factory denizen Valerie Solanas showed up packing two pistols, furious that Warhol had lost the script for her play Up Your Ass, which she'd expected him to adapt into a film. She fired several shots, wounding Warhol almost fatally in the process. Surrendering to the police, Solanas said she'd done it because Warhol had "too much control over [her] life."

Some feminists applauded Solanas for her act, which is preposterous; as my girlfriend observes, Warhol posed about as much threat to women's rights as Liberace did. In any case, he never got over the terror of the attack. When he'd recovered from his wounds and his lease on the Factory ran out, he moved operations to an office suite and entered the final phase of his career.

For all the frenetic activity of his '60s period, Warhol hadn't made a great deal of money then, so his closest associates got together to put things onto a more stable financial footing. While the artist focused on commissioned portraits for wealthy collectors like Ethel Scull, the others took his enterprise into related fields--starting Interview magazine, for instance-so that different facets of Warhol's talent would support one another financially. In his 1975 book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, quoted by the documentary, Warhol said, "Making money is art, and working is art, and good business is the best art." That may be rationalizing, but it's consistent with Warhol's longtime rejection of boundaries between culture and commerce.

Warhol died in 1987 after gall-bladder surgery. It's likely he was still weakened by the wounds Solanas inflicted. But the immediate cause was outrageous medical negligence by a hospital that failed to monitor his postoperative condition, allowing him to be drowned by fluids backed up into his lungs.

Burns's movie, narrated by performance artist Laurie Anderson, gives as thorough an account of Warhol's life as can be expected from a four-hour condensation. Its archival footage is accompanied by interviews with experts-filmmaker Morrissey, brother John Warhola, critics Dave Hickey and Stephen Koch, curator Donna De Salvo, art dealer Irving Blum, author George Plimpton, and more-plus Warhol quotations spoken by artist Jeff Koons.

Inevitably, the documentary has flaws along with its considerable merits. Some moments are simplistic, as when the iconostasis in Warhol's childhood church is discussed as if it single-handedly explains the icon-like look of his celebrity pictures. As usual, the six-hour Sleep is talked about as if it were a single unbroken shot rather than a highly edited film, and the superb Sedgwick movie Poor Little Rich Girl is said to be good even though half of it is out of focus, whereas Warhol deliberately chose its out-of-focus footage. Warhol's links in the 1980s with other artists (Jean-Michel Basquait, Julian Schnabel, David Salle) are pretty much ignored. The occasions when he remade his public personality are either superficially psychoanalyzed or passed over with too little comment. And it's tiring to hear the narration hype one Warhol period after another as his most explosive burst of creativity.

Such shortcomings aside, Andy Warhol is engrossing almost every step of the way. If he could see it, I suspect Warhol's main complaint would be that it just isn't boring enough.

David Sterritt
© FIPRESCI 2008

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