Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL
found a “strictly neutral” attitude, “neither for the material nor against it.” 37
Coplans’s view at least had the virtue of conforming to Warhol’s own description
of his work as expressing not a political position but indifference. 38 But Warhol is
well known for the falsity of his information about himself, which lends force to
Crow’s insistence that any critical account of the work “will necessarily stand or
fall on the visual evidence.” 39
But how is that evidence to be understood? Crow’s readings of individual
images, basically associationist in method, are imaginative. The silkscreened face
of the star in Gold Marilyn Monroe (Figure 9.1, overleaf), for example, seems to
him to resemble memory in being selective, elusive, vivid in parts, and “always
open to embellishment as well as loss.” The sentiment in the Jackie portraits
strikes him as “direct and uncomplicated”; these pictures recognize by their use
of the “impoverished vocabulary” of news photographs “the distance between
public mourning and that of the principals in the drama.” In the Tunafish Disaster
pictures “the repetition of the crude images” forces “attention to the awful
banality of the accident and the tawdry exploitation by which we come to know
the misfortunes of strangers.” 40
None of this, I have to say, seems to me to follow upon “the visual evidence.”
Basic to these interpretations is the idea that Warhol’s treatment of his sources
effects a distancing from them—a distancing which, given the nature of the
material and his own attitudes to it, Crow cannot help but see as critical. It was
this idea that led him, against the visual evidence, to seek the source of Gold Marilyn
Monroe in a combination of two studio stills. 41 In the revised version of his
article, Crow views Warhol’s cropping and enlargement of a black-and-white
still as draining away “much of the imaginary living presence of the star.” In this
way Warhol’s treatment is said to avoid, at least to a significant extent, Hollywood’s
“reduction of a woman’s identity to a mass-commodity fetish” and to
exhibit “a degree of tact, even reverence, that withholds outright complicity”
with that reduction. 42 It is, of course, true that Warhol’s picture looks different
from and functions differently from a publicity still. As a picture of a photograph it
comments directly on what Crow calls the fetishization of the person pictured.
And it is a response to a death. But to reduce it to an expression of the sentiment
of mourning is to leave unexplained much of its interest and power.
First of all, as Crow seems to have forgotten, while the actual woman was
dead, the image remained (and remains) very much alive. The Marilyn pictures
unite two of Warhol’s lifelong preoccupations, death and celebrity. As an image
37 John Coplans, Andy Warhol (Greenwich: American Graphic Society, 1970), p. 49.
38 See the discussion with Glaser and others in Mahsun, Pop Art, p. 153.
39 Crow, “Saturday disasters,” p. 312.
40 Ibid., pp. 316, 317, 320.
41 Compare the version of “Saturday disasters” in Art in America, p. 133, with that in the Guilbaut
volume, p. 326 n. 8.
42 Crow, “Saturday disasters,” p. 315.
145