Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL
1989 text Crone completely ignores Warhol’s return to painting in the 1970s. To
deal with it would either contradict the Benjaminian logic which is supposed to
explain the move to film, or require the bifurcation of the artist into the Critical
(Good) Warhol of the 1960s and the Corrupt (Bad) Warhol of the 1970s and
1980s—a move made in Crow’s account of the artist.
In fact, Warhol’s adventures as a filmmaker can be understood without reference
to the supposed historical movement from painting to mechanical
reproduction. The underground cinema of the 1960s was part of a wider field of
art activities including experimental dance, music, poetry, and performance.
Typically, Warhol combined his filmmaking with adventures in the less arty
realm of rock-and-roll spectacle, alongside quasi-automatic writing (as in the
tape-recorded a (a novel)). Crone’s theoretical fixation prevents him from noting
the surface similarities between Warhol’s films and paintings (a point Warhol
made himself when he screen-printed enlarged frame sequences of his films).
While the out-of-focus picture, meaningless camera movement, and nonnarrative
action of a film like Poor Little Rich Girl make it almost more like a
painting than a film, Empire’s unchanging view is so like a Warhol multi-image
silkscreen work that the differences in medium—“the conditions of production”—can
be taken as relatively unimportant. Such considerations also make
Warhol’s eventual “return to painting” less mysterious. And anyway, despite the
1965 announcement of his retirement from painting to consider a (probably fictional)
offer from Hollywood, the production of paintings—in addition to the
printed Cow Wallpaper of 1966—never actually stopped.
A basic problem with Crone’s analysis, as with Danto’s, is that Warhol’s
career is being used to illustrate a theory that it fits only very imperfectly. While
Brecht’s alienation effect operated against the conventions of theatrical naturalism,
Warhol’s explicitness about matters of form and medium is—despite the
dismay his work aroused among modernist critics—quite at home in the context
of American modernism. And with respect to the employment of reproductive
techniques, the effect is, as I observed earlier, not one of anonymity (as in Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy’s paint-by-telephone experiments, to which Crone compares it).
Warhol’s enormous success as a commercial artist depended, after all, on a signature
style; and the artistic (as well as commercial) achievement of the
silkscreen paintings has much to do with the nonmechanical, handmade character
of the marks by which they are realized: the varying heaviness of the paint,
the off-register effects, the smears and other imperfections that are traces of the
handling of the silkscreen (just as the wilfully crude cinematic technique both
emphasizes the mechanics of the medium and marks each film, no matter who
actually made it, as a Warhol).
At the same time, it is clear that Warhol’s use of photography and silkscreen
for his paintings, along with his choice of subject-matter, brought the imagery of
commercial culture into art culture in a particularly powerful manner, and that
this is at the heart of both the aesthetic effect and the historical significance of
Warhol’s work. It is not unthinkable that Benjamin’s theory might cast some
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