Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL
he accomplished by the “contamination” of the modernist artwork “with the
vulgarity of the most trivial of commonplaces” (Buchloh here has in mind the
matchbook-cover paintings of 1962). The adoption of the silkscreen technique
emphasized the photographic image and substituted a mechanical mark for
Abstract Expressionist gesture. 56 In this Buchloh follows in Crone’s footsteps; all
that is missing is a quotation from Benjamin (the other major source of the analytic
framework employed here is, of course, Benjamin’s fellow Frankfurter,
Theodor Adorno).
Corresponding on the iconographic plane to the use of mechanical reproduction,
according to Buchloh, is “the abolition of the hierarchy of subjects
worthwhile representing.” As Buchloh sees it, the lasting fascination of the paintings
of Marilyn, Liz, and Elvis “does not originate in the myth of these figures,
but in the fact that Warhol constructed their images from the perspective of the
tragic condition of those who consume the stars’ images.” 57 Because he made the
point of view of these consumers that of his art Warhol was unable to pass
beyond the demolition of art’s pretensions to an active resistance to the “state of
general semiotic anomie” represented by “the advanced forms of the culture
industry.” 58
Just as the conventional emphasis on the mechanical aspect of serigraphy
misses, I have argued, the actual effect of paint handling produced in the printing
process, so Buchloh’s idea that Warhol’s images reveal glamour to be only
the reflex of “collective scopic fixation” reduces the consumers of mass culture to
manipulated victims, erasing them as subjects. 59 This is—to repeat an argument
I have already made, in a different form, with respect to Crow—to ignore the
ways in which mass culture, like art culture, serves as a means for the active construction
of subjectivity. Buchloh speaks of “semiotic anomie” because he does not
care about the semiotics of the movies, advertising, fashion, and the news. But
Warhol did care about such things. For him, as for most people, the myths mattered.
It was this actual involvement in “vulgarity” that led Warhol to the insight
that Marilyn, Jackie, and Mao share an identity as media constructions, along
with the victims of car accidents and civil rights marchers attacked by police
dogs. This identity is artificial, but it provides materials that people work with,
just as leftish art writers can find in Warhol’s paintings a critique of consumer
culture.
In criticizing the writings on Warhol by Danto, Crone, Crow, and Buchloh, I
have not meant to assert an incompatibility between close observation of works
of art and the employment of theory, philosophical or otherwise, in their interpretation.
What I have meant to challenge is the insistence on certain theoretical
constructs in the face of artistic phenomena—meaning both artworks and their
56 Buchloh, “One-dimensional,” p. 48; see p. 50.
57 Ibid., p. 53.
58 Buchloh, “One dimensional,” pp. 65, 66; see also p. 68.
59 Buchloh, “One-dimensional,” p. 57.
150