Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL
identity to a mass-commodity fetish,” a commercial pandering to “the erotic fascination”
felt for Monroe by “male intellectuals of the fifties generation” like
Norman Mailer and de Kooning. 46 In the only reference to Warhol’s sexuality in
Crow’s essay, he is said to have “obviously had little stake” in the erotics of MM.
This is to misunderstand profoundly the stake of the gay male subculture within
which Warhol moved—as it misunderstands the stake of many others—in
female movie stars, as representatives of desire and desirability, of the artificiality
of gender roles, and of the conflict between appearance and reality. Monroe
dead, for some purposes, can be superior to Monroe alive; the image of pleasure
stands then in counterpoint to a secret reality of pain, and the eternal life of the
visible acquires a kick from the sad destruction of the bodily unseen.
Warhol’s Marilyns should be put not in the context of the artist’s imagined sentiments
at her death but in that of his lifelong interest in female sexual glamour
precisely as separable from the “woman’s identity,” 47 which in any case has no
existence, as a reality distinct from the complex of discourses constructing the
star, for the movie fan. Similarly, given that there is no reason in the biographical
record to imagine any deep attachment to John F. Kennedy on Warhol’s
part, it sees to me more plausible to see the various Jackies as a response to her
TV stardom at the time of her husband’s assassination, which only added to the
complexity of her already glamorous image. 48 She lines up not only with Marilyn
and Liz but with all the self-destructive “superstars” of Warhol’s filming days,
Edie Sedgwick in the forefront; with his collection of designer dresses of years
gone by; and with the drag queens by whom the artist was always deeply fascinated,
above all the beautiful, Marilyn-imitating Candy Darling (and let us not
forget Christopher Makos’s portrait photograph of Warhol in blond-wig drag).
“Drags are ambulatory archives of ideal moviestar womanhood,” Warhol wrote
in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. “They perform a documentary service, usually
consecrating their lives to keeping the glittering alternative alive and available
46 Crow, “Saturday disasters,” p. 315.
47 Which, if represented anywhere in Warhol’s oeuvre, might be identified, unpleasantly, in the
Cow Wallpaper—or even in Tunafish.
48 The closest I have encountered is John Giorno’s memory:
We heard Walter Cronkite say “President Kennedy died at 2 p.m.,” we started hugging
each other, pressing our bodies together and trembling. I started crying and
Andy started crying. We wept big fat tears. It was a symbol of the catastrophe of our
own lives. We kissed and Andy sucked by tongue. It was the first time we kissed. It
had the sweet taste of kissing death. It was all exhilarating, like when you get kicked
in the head and see stars.
Quoted in Andrew O’Hagan, “Many Andies,” review of Shoes, Shoes, Shoes, by
Warhol; Style, Style, Style by Warhol; Who Is Andy Warhol?, ed. Colin MacCabe, Mark
Francis, and Peter Wollen; All Tomorrow’s Parties: Billy Name’s Photographs of Andy
Warhol’s Factory, by Billy Name; and The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the
Night, by Anthony Haden-Guest, London Review of Books (October 16, 1977), p. 12
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