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Andy Died for our Sins
by Anna McWillie
The number of books and articles written about Andy Warhol are uncountable. A new biography, Andy Warhol by Wayne Koestenbaum, which came out this year, sticks to the facts, which Koestenbaum went to great lengths to collect. The fascinating story of Andy's complex life and the deep meaning found in his work by curators and art critics is all here.
Starting with his parents, Andy's life was marked by trauma. His father beat his mother to marry him, in Czechoslovakia, then brought her candy; his mother Julia lost an infant daughter due to the baby's bowel malfunction; he was ridiculed on his first day of school by a girl and then was unable to go back for 2 years; when he did go back, he came down with St.Vitus Dance, chorea, a disease which made him tremble spastically and develop horrid blotches on his skin, making it painful to the touch and disfiguring his complexion for life; upon his father's slow death from poisoning when Andy was about 13, his mother sat in a chair beside the corpse in its coffin for one week while Andy hid under the bed, refusing to pay his last respects. Andy's first idol was Shirley Temple, and he wanted to be a tap dancer like her, and he sort of was, with his twitching from the chorea. Andy's "male" body was a trauma.
Andy and his mother, Julia, were always very close, although it has been said that she made him feel like the ugliest person on earth. When he was little, they drew pictures and made little books, although Andy was very dyslexic and practically could not write, nor talk. After his father's death, it was decided that his savings for his 3 sons' college education would only be enough for one, and that the youngest, Andy, would most benefit from it since he was such a misfit. Then another trauma: August 6, 1945, on Andy's 17th birthday, the U.S. dropped the A-bomb on
Hiroshima, commemorated in his 1965 silk-screen painting and also indirectly symbolizing his own birth.
Andy loved the letter "a." Maybe because he dropped it from his last name "Warhola" he wrote the book a: a novel, and his last book, America, about his beloved country. He loved lists, especially his A-list, and he loved repetition, categories, motionless bodies (like his father's corpse), candy, cats. He and mom Julia had 20 cats. When he was little, his mother would buy him comic books which he would cut up, stealing the images, making new images out of them. She called him a cutting wizard. At the same time, his life was marked by an aversion to cutting, not being able to cut loose the junk and trash from his life. Just before entering Carnegie Institute of Technology, another trauma marked his psyche: his mother developed colon cancer. Her bowels cut out, she was left with a colostomy bag for the rest of her life, the secret workings of her waste system now being embarrassingly on the visible outside, possibly leading to Andy's obsession with cultural waste products and private bodily functions (his piss and cum paintings). "Pop" for Andy was Mom putting on the outside what is on the inside, and vice versa.
"Andy Paperbag" as he called himself, who made a living out of bringing "dirt" to the surface, went to art school at Carnegie Tech in his despised home of Pittsburgh, home of steel, the color of silver - another theme in his works (his silver clouds, The Silver Factory, his silver wig), where he flunked his first year but managed to get back in and even win art prizes (his famous "nose-picker" drawing), and was recognized as an eccentric talent. During the '50s he worked in New York's advertising ranks, hanging out with handsome and socially-elevated artistic gays, doing layouts and illustrations (shoe campaigns for I. Miller being the most famous, and shoes and feet becoming a great theme in his works). His appearance was in great contrast to the beautiful people he associated with. He was unbathed, unearthly pale, but Andy understood that people were fallen, and he was a magnet, and he demanded collaboration.
At this time he made little self-published books, by hand, with the help of his recruits and his mother, who would ink them and even sign his name, and the books were given to ingratiated art directors and associates. The most significant of these little books (he made little books all through his life) were the Pussy Heaven books. One of Julia and Andy's 20 cats was taken to be spayed by a friend, and the cat died under the knife. It is said that from this time, Andy changed and became unfeeling - 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy. The cats played with each other, and they played by themselves, much like Andy's own sexuality, and contrary to popular belief, Andy was not asexual, he was extremely sexual, and gay, and loved to watch, gay or straight.
So successful was Andy in the New York advertsing world that in 10 years he was able to buy a townhouse on Lexington. During those years, at age 25, he got his first wig, having lost most of his hair by then. Julia didn't mind Andy's "same-sexness" and was supportive of his erotic errands and beautiful boyfriends. Then he started making cock drawing books and erotic drawings. The Campbell soup cans of the early '60's were a spin off of these erotic drawings. Trying to break into the world of fine art, he was rejected by Leo Castelli because he already had a "comic artist" in Roy Lichtenstein. Andy was persistant and came back with an energetic drawing of a Pepsi bottle, and one of a perfectly realistically painted one and asked him which one he liked better. He said, the perfect replica, and the rest is history. The
Campbell soup can connects to his erotic hunger, the can a sexual receptacle, disguising whether it is full or empty, an "ass," isolated from the rest of it's body parts. Campbell's "condensed" is a property of dreams and the unconscious, condensing unspeakable procedures, condensing real time. He also ate a lot of Campbell's soup growing up.
Andy recieved rejection and humiliation in the art world. He wanted to befriend Truman Capote, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg (the latter two were reportedly somewhat of an item but kept it hidden), but they snubbed him. The Factory, his band The Velvet Underground travelling with his multi-media show The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, his stars and collaborators - curious Andy - he drew people to him, sucked them in.
In a rare exhibit, "I Shot Andy Warhol, Portraits of Andy and the Warhol Scene," at the Fahey/Klein Gallery on La Brea (see art section for more info), of some unpublished, some never before printed images of The Scene and The Factory, you will catch a glimpse of the magnetic charismatic Andy. The gallery's co-owner David Fahey met Andy in 1982 while he was organizing a show for Interview magazine called "Working in L.A.," and was a contributing editor for the magazine, also. He describes Andy as quiet and shy, but very curious about The Scene and interested in gossip. When I asked Fahey why he thought Andy had become such an icon, he said that it was Andy who put forth the idea of "the art of business, and the business of art." He was all about engaging the broader culture in all its forms and never put himself forth as an elitist. Fahey says he's only going to get bigger. People liked him because of his innocence and his outrageous personality, his looks, his brilliant comments.
Fahey found a group of photographers that had a connection to Andy to make up this show: Michael Childers, Peter Beard, Gretchen Berg, Charles Henri Ford, Greg Gorman, Dennis Hopper, Christopher Makos, Gerard Malanga, David McCabe, Fred W. McDarrah, Jim McHugh, Billy Name, and Steve Schapiro. Of the people pictured in the photos of this exhibit, Andy said, "A lot of people thought it was me everyone at the Factory was hanging around, but that's absolutely backward: it was me who was hanging around everyone else... I just paid the rent and the crowds came...to see each other...to see who came" (POPism: The Warhol '60s.) When I asked Fahey if he sees any new "movement" on the horizon, I mean, the outrageous shock stuff has been going on for about 40 years now, he said that the viewer has become more and more jaded, and that it is getting harder to shock, but that hindsight is always more clear than when one is in the midst of a "movement." Maybe there is one brewing but we are just not noticing it.
In 1968 Andy was shot in his office at The Factory by Valerie Solonas who had written the script for a film Up the Ass but had not been paid or given credit, even thugh Andy never did use the script and could not even find it in his studio every time she had come looking for it. Another member of the Factory was shot, another one spared as she departed in the elevator. If she hadn't done it, I would have, said Factoryite Taylor Mead (see Early Films article) afterwards. Andy was pronounced dead at the hospital, but a second attempt to revive him succeeded after the doctors learned who he was. Things changed for Andy after that. He had to wear a corset, and had many of them dyed in different colors. He was paranoid (Solona
s was released from prison after 3 years and continued to make threats on his life). He continued to paint, getting $50,000 for a portrait to make some rich person a star, but just the act of paying money for it decidedly made them uncool, and he was criticized and his work was not taken seriously by the art world after that. He kept working, though, and creating, recording, writing books (transcribed by his collaborators).
The most celebrated of his portraits, uncommissioned, were ironically part of his post-"rupture" body of work. Begun in 1972 were the series of Chairman Mao Tse Tung, the subject which is at the heart of Andy's philosophy: Commonism - the world's greatest star represented a society which called for the collapse of the individual.
That is the double-edged sword of Andy's and our own philosophy: to embrace celebrity and worship consumerism is to loose yourself to the control of Corporate America and its media machine. He modeled, made TV appearances; he was de-wigged at a book-signing, by a woman. Andy's images, before and after his "rupture" are the symbols of our mass identity - see for yourself at the exclusive North American exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles arranged by our former councilmember Joel Wachs, now President and CEO of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Multiplications, repetitions, serials, archiving, categories,"time-capsules" - boxes of magazines, paper clippings, junk - after his death in 1987 Sotheby's raised over $25,000,000 dollars selling off part of his collections. And the Museum of Modern Art in New York finally gave him a show, finally recognized him. The hospital where his gallbladder surgery was performed paid a $3,000,000 wrongful death settlement. (He died supposedly from a heart attack due to an adrenalin rush from fear after his surgery, he refused any pain medication.)
As Koestenbaum puts it, Andy is a shining star because he burned hot and hard. He is immortal because his hard labor became incarnate, but there was little time for love. Andy wanted love and needed love, but do you think he loved his work, or that if he had found a true mate, he would not have worked so hard, spending time instead, loving him? He has left us books, films, Interview magazine, a museum in Pittsburgh, a foundation for art, legends, quotes, and many many seductive images. He also made us feel like it is OK, even cool, to be different.
One thing that Andy predicted was wrong: he thought that in the future people would make their own movies about their own friends and family and prefer to watch them rather than commercial stuff. What would he think of today's suicide bombers, teen snipers, corporate stealth, depleted resources, and the branding of America?
Oh Andy, where are you when we need you! Get us out of this mess you thought was cool!
- Andy Warhol by Wayne Koestenbaum
Adbusters to the Rescue by editors AM, AM, & JC
This is a call to arms. Get a can of spray paint and “skull” the face of a model on a Calvin Klein billboard, or on a Guess billboard, in the middle of the night. If you get arrested, even better.
When a telemarketer calls you to sell you something, tell him that you make $100 per hour, and
that if his company will send you a check for $25, you will listen to his schpeel.
When the telephone company makes a mistake on your bill, refuse to pay the bill until they send you a corrected copy.
Erase ads whenever you can, like ones placed on shopping carts or in public restrooms. Jam foreign objects into coin operated services, like the carts at the airport. Speaking of airports, if you were doing what you liked, you wouldn’t want to go on vacation.
Don’t go anywhere you can’t get to by riding your bike, for, my friend, you are suffering from seperation anxiety from nature. And the auto/oil industry is keeping you from living your own life.
We are a nation of basket cases. Ten million suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder; 14 million are alcoholics, 15 million are pathologically socially anxious, 15 million are depressed, 3 million suffer from panic attacks, 10 million have Borderline Personality Disorder, 12 million have “restless legs,” 5 million are obsessive/compulsive, 2 million are manic-depressive, 10 million are addicted to sex. These tallies were compiled by writer Jim Windolf from an article he wrote in Oct. ‘97 for The New York Observer which posed the question, Is everybody crazy? (We asked that ourselves on the cover of our Jan 2001 issue.) He concluded that “77% of the adult population is a mess,” a nation of self-absorbed hypochondriacs.
So it says in Culture Jam; How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge - and Why We Must - by Kalle Lasn, a leading media activist and internationally known documentary filmmaker, who delivers an eloquent call to action for all. He is the president of Adbusters Media Foundation, publishing the magazine Adbusters, which it contains no ads. In this book, Lasn outlines how modern civilization has been increasingly pushed-over by corporate culture, which rules the media.
“In 1977, Chrysler, one of the 5 largest advertisers in the U.S., sent letters to one hundred newspaper and magazine editors demanding to review their publiations for stories that could prove damaging or controversial.” - Culture Jam, pg 35.
And the media propoganda controls us by persuading us to buy certain goods, jolts us about every 3 seconds with a startling image or a cut or sound, keeping us addicted to their voice. The news, movies, and shows are also part of the plan - delivering shocking violence which has made us jaded, unfeeling, and numb. It has also turned us all into substance addicts. None of us can live up to the standards of our media role models. We don’t know what to do wi
th ourselves during down-time, and TV and the internet are so easy. Our kids have ADD, we avoid intimacy because our bodies are not perfect.
“Think and grow rich. Dreams, by definition, are supposed to be unique and imaginative. Yet the bulk of the population is dreaming the same dream...wealth, power, fame, plenty of sex and exciting recreational opportunities.” - pg. 57.
One out of every 4 restaurant-prepared breakfasts in the U.S. are eaten at McDonald’s. And the fat content of the food served at McDonald’s is, well, very high. Boeing had to widen its airplane seats in 1970 because its passengers had grown too fat to fit in them.
Fruits and vegetables at the supermarket, ripe and colorful, but out of season, grown and flown in from who knows where - “The nice ripe, red tomato, a “Flavr Savr,” is genetically speaking part flounder. (The technology for this process is owned by chemical giant Monsanto.)” pg. 79.
“Gone the evening meal, once joyous ritual of family life. Gone the prayerful ac-knowledgment of the harvest. Gone the con-nection between the actual growing of food and its consumption...In exchange for zero responsibity, we get zero control.” pg. 80.
In this book, Lasn describes his efforts to buy TV airtime for a spot he did showing the hypocracy of the logging industry specifically in the spot they were showing, in British Columbia. No TV station would sell him airtime for his spot, as it would be, of course, a conflict of interest, “in opposition to their policy.”
Lasn points out that British kings and corporate presence in the American colonies actually fomented our Revolution at the Boston Tea Party, and the Declaration of Independence actually freed us from the tyranny of British corporate power as well as its Crown.
We carefully regulated the size and power of subsequent corporate charters, making sure they were subordinate to people power. His description of how they shifted after the Civil War, taking advantage of the disorder and corruption, much to the chagrin of President Lincoln, will leave readers breathless and baffled.
An 1886 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, in a dispute over a railbed route in California, deemed that “a private corporation was a ‘natural person’ under the U.S. Constitution and therefore entitled to protection under the Bill of Rights.” Could it have been that getting the gold in those “rush” days caused the U.S. government to suddenly make concessions to a corporation? Suddenly, considering their vast financial resources, corporations thereafter would have far more power than mere individuals, eventually leading Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to say of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad that the decision “could not be supported by history, logic or reason.”
Lasn’s points bring to mind the Roman civilization at it’s peak. Gladiators were the jockies who kept the masses in check. The wealthy elite funded horrific “games” of consumate violence to amuse the popluace into submission to the gross inequality of comfort and opportunity. When the Vandals came knocking at the door, hungry for plunder, the Roman masses were too dissipated to put up the fight, and thus the disintigration of that great society, decayed from within by the toxic affect of too much “good” food, too much of the “good” life.
Most interesting is Lasn’s familiarity with the Paris riots in the ‘60s prompted by The Situationists, who loosley believed that we should make our own experience,
whenever and wherever we are, and not let anyone else do it for us. They spoke of “the spectacle’ of modern day life, the billboards, the ads, art exhibits, radio, TV programs, and that we can choose to refuse to cooperate with the demands of consumer culture. Their leader, Guy Debord, is an unheralded culture jammer. Where Marshall McLuhan described the mass-culture trance, Debord suggested ways to break-out of it, similar in thought to Beatniks, but especially to the punk movement of the ‘70s, where hero Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols screamed, swore, and pissed for anarchy over the Berlin Wall. Alvin Toffler was right in his book Future Shock - although there became a potential for an infinite amount of messages in the media, there is now really only a few, those of Corporate America.
So many brilliant ideas and analyses are pointed out by this very perceptive and iconoclastic writer that you, too, will eagerly match up his ideas with your own history of either rebellion or conformity. Yes, I was a Beatnik, or a Hippy or Yuppie: I’m a Punker or a Rocker. Instead of road rage, drugging-up or dropping-out, or just tripping-off into cyberspace where your voice has little impact on the real and urgent problems, or just sitting, vegging in front of your favorite Media outlet to see how you compare with the latest athlete superhero, or supermodel and letting yourself “go with the flow,” I urge you to devour this book. The message is “we can change the world.” and Lasn gives you potent tools to snap yourself out of the “media-consumer trance:”
Take Back the Show
• Don’t buy anything for an entire day.
• Develop “Demarketing chic,” that is, take the cool out of cars, Calvin, fastfood, and expose all of it for what it is, undermining over-commercialization by reducing it to satire. Wearing a plain white t-shirt is far cooler that wearing designer threads, which isn’t cool at all.
•What you can do if you are repulsed by an ad campaign is protest it, write letters to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, or even lobby the FCC to try to revoke a TV license or two. You could reclaim the tools of broadcasting, write your own materials, produce your own media. If you have money, you can fund your own TV commercials, films, your own documentaries. The key isn’t to get away from it, but to get involved with it.
•Get involved with public radio and local TV and newspapers for the betterment of the community you live in. Flood them with press releases about your protesting a certain corporations bad doings.
•Start culture-jamming on campus. Bring up the ideas to classmates and professors who seem interested, especially those in economics. Don’t buy into the neoclassical economics now being taught, ridicule its logic at every chance possible to show its limitations and how they hurt the world. Corner your professors relentlessly.
•Use your spending power to not merely complain about injustice, but do something about it. The best way anyone could help rid the world of capitalist greed is to not condemn capitalism, but to stop buying their trendy stuff.
• Un-cool corporate vampires: look what happened to the tobacco industry once the antismoking activists blew out their flame.
• Undertake spontaneous acts whenever possible. Talk to strangers.
by Anna McWillie
The number of books and articles written about Andy Warhol are uncountable. A new biography, Andy Warhol by Wayne Koestenbaum, which came out this year, sticks to the facts, which Koestenbaum went to great lengths to collect. The fascinating story of Andy's complex life and the deep meaning found in his work by curators and art critics is all here.
Starting with his parents, Andy's life was marked by trauma. His father beat his mother to marry him, in Czechoslovakia, then brought her candy; his mother Julia lost an infant daughter due to the baby's bowel malfunction; he was ridiculed on his first day of school by a girl and then was unable to go back for 2 years; when he did go back, he came down with St.Vitus Dance, chorea, a disease which made him tremble spastically and develop horrid blotches on his skin, making it painful to the touch and disfiguring his complexion for life; upon his father's slow death from poisoning when Andy was about 13, his mother sat in a chair beside the corpse in its coffin for one week while Andy hid under the bed, refusing to pay his last respects. Andy's first idol was Shirley Temple, and he wanted to be a tap dancer like her, and he sort of was, with his twitching from the chorea. Andy's "male" body was a trauma.
Andy and his mother, Julia, were always very close, although it has been said that she made him feel like the ugliest person on earth. When he was little, they drew pictures and made little books, although Andy was very dyslexic and practically could not write, nor talk. After his father's death, it was decided that his savings for his 3 sons' college education would only be enough for one, and that the youngest, Andy, would most benefit from it since he was such a misfit. Then another trauma: August 6, 1945, on Andy's 17th birthday, the U.S. dropped the A-bomb on
Hiroshima, commemorated in his 1965 silk-screen painting and also indirectly symbolizing his own birth.Andy loved the letter "a." Maybe because he dropped it from his last name "Warhola" he wrote the book a: a novel, and his last book, America, about his beloved country. He loved lists, especially his A-list, and he loved repetition, categories, motionless bodies (like his father's corpse), candy, cats. He and mom Julia had 20 cats. When he was little, his mother would buy him comic books which he would cut up, stealing the images, making new images out of them. She called him a cutting wizard. At the same time, his life was marked by an aversion to cutting, not being able to cut loose the junk and trash from his life. Just before entering Carnegie Institute of Technology, another trauma marked his psyche: his mother developed colon cancer. Her bowels cut out, she was left with a colostomy bag for the rest of her life, the secret workings of her waste system now being embarrassingly on the visible outside, possibly leading to Andy's obsession with cultural waste products and private bodily functions (his piss and cum paintings). "Pop" for Andy was Mom putting on the outside what is on the inside, and vice versa.
"Andy Paperbag" as he called himself, who made a living out of bringing "dirt" to the surface, went to art school at Carnegie Tech in his despised home of Pittsburgh, home of steel, the color of silver - another theme in his works (his silver clouds, The Silver Factory, his silver wig), where he flunked his first year but managed to get back in and even win art prizes (his famous "nose-picker" drawing), and was recognized as an eccentric talent. During the '50s he worked in New York's advertising ranks, hanging out with handsome and socially-elevated artistic gays, doing layouts and illustrations (shoe campaigns for I. Miller being the most famous, and shoes and feet becoming a great theme in his works). His appearance was in great contrast to the beautiful people he associated with. He was unbathed, unearthly pale, but Andy understood that people were fallen, and he was a magnet, and he demanded collaboration.
At this time he made little self-published books, by hand, with the help of his recruits and his mother, who would ink them and even sign his name, and the books were given to ingratiated art directors and associates. The most significant of these little books (he made little books all through his life) were the Pussy Heaven books. One of Julia and Andy's 20 cats was taken to be spayed by a friend, and the cat died under the knife. It is said that from this time, Andy changed and became unfeeling - 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy. The cats played with each other, and they played by themselves, much like Andy's own sexuality, and contrary to popular belief, Andy was not asexual, he was extremely sexual, and gay, and loved to watch, gay or straight.
So successful was Andy in the New York advertsing world that in 10 years he was able to buy a townhouse on Lexington. During those years, at age 25, he got his first wig, having lost most of his hair by then. Julia didn't mind Andy's "same-sexness" and was supportive of his erotic errands and beautiful boyfriends. Then he started making cock drawing books and erotic drawings. The Campbell soup cans of the early '60's were a spin off of these erotic drawings. Trying to break into the world of fine art, he was rejected by Leo Castelli because he already had a "comic artist" in Roy Lichtenstein. Andy was persistant and came back with an energetic drawing of a Pepsi bottle, and one of a perfectly realistically painted one and asked him which one he liked better. He said, the perfect replica, and the rest is history. The
Campbell soup can connects to his erotic hunger, the can a sexual receptacle, disguising whether it is full or empty, an "ass," isolated from the rest of it's body parts. Campbell's "condensed" is a property of dreams and the unconscious, condensing unspeakable procedures, condensing real time. He also ate a lot of Campbell's soup growing up.Andy recieved rejection and humiliation in the art world. He wanted to befriend Truman Capote, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg (the latter two were reportedly somewhat of an item but kept it hidden), but they snubbed him. The Factory, his band The Velvet Underground travelling with his multi-media show The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, his stars and collaborators - curious Andy - he drew people to him, sucked them in.
In a rare exhibit, "I Shot Andy Warhol, Portraits of Andy and the Warhol Scene," at the Fahey/Klein Gallery on La Brea (see art section for more info), of some unpublished, some never before printed images of The Scene and The Factory, you will catch a glimpse of the magnetic charismatic Andy. The gallery's co-owner David Fahey met Andy in 1982 while he was organizing a show for Interview magazine called "Working in L.A.," and was a contributing editor for the magazine, also. He describes Andy as quiet and shy, but very curious about The Scene and interested in gossip. When I asked Fahey why he thought Andy had become such an icon, he said that it was Andy who put forth the idea of "the art of business, and the business of art." He was all about engaging the broader culture in all its forms and never put himself forth as an elitist. Fahey says he's only going to get bigger. People liked him because of his innocence and his outrageous personality, his looks, his brilliant comments.
Fahey found a group of photographers that had a connection to Andy to make up this show: Michael Childers, Peter Beard, Gretchen Berg, Charles Henri Ford, Greg Gorman, Dennis Hopper, Christopher Makos, Gerard Malanga, David McCabe, Fred W. McDarrah, Jim McHugh, Billy Name, and Steve Schapiro. Of the people pictured in the photos of this exhibit, Andy said, "A lot of people thought it was me everyone at the Factory was hanging around, but that's absolutely backward: it was me who was hanging around everyone else... I just paid the rent and the crowds came...to see each other...to see who came" (POPism: The Warhol '60s.) When I asked Fahey if he sees any new "movement" on the horizon, I mean, the outrageous shock stuff has been going on for about 40 years now, he said that the viewer has become more and more jaded, and that it is getting harder to shock, but that hindsight is always more clear than when one is in the midst of a "movement." Maybe there is one brewing but we are just not noticing it.
In 1968 Andy was shot in his office at The Factory by Valerie Solonas who had written the script for a film Up the Ass but had not been paid or given credit, even thugh Andy never did use the script and could not even find it in his studio every time she had come looking for it. Another member of the Factory was shot, another one spared as she departed in the elevator. If she hadn't done it, I would have, said Factoryite Taylor Mead (see Early Films article) afterwards. Andy was pronounced dead at the hospital, but a second attempt to revive him succeeded after the doctors learned who he was. Things changed for Andy after that. He had to wear a corset, and had many of them dyed in different colors. He was paranoid (Solona
s was released from prison after 3 years and continued to make threats on his life). He continued to paint, getting $50,000 for a portrait to make some rich person a star, but just the act of paying money for it decidedly made them uncool, and he was criticized and his work was not taken seriously by the art world after that. He kept working, though, and creating, recording, writing books (transcribed by his collaborators).The most celebrated of his portraits, uncommissioned, were ironically part of his post-"rupture" body of work. Begun in 1972 were the series of Chairman Mao Tse Tung, the subject which is at the heart of Andy's philosophy: Commonism - the world's greatest star represented a society which called for the collapse of the individual.
That is the double-edged sword of Andy's and our own philosophy: to embrace celebrity and worship consumerism is to loose yourself to the control of Corporate America and its media machine. He modeled, made TV appearances; he was de-wigged at a book-signing, by a woman. Andy's images, before and after his "rupture" are the symbols of our mass identity - see for yourself at the exclusive North American exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles arranged by our former councilmember Joel Wachs, now President and CEO of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Multiplications, repetitions, serials, archiving, categories,"time-capsules" - boxes of magazines, paper clippings, junk - after his death in 1987 Sotheby's raised over $25,000,000 dollars selling off part of his collections. And the Museum of Modern Art in New York finally gave him a show, finally recognized him. The hospital where his gallbladder surgery was performed paid a $3,000,000 wrongful death settlement. (He died supposedly from a heart attack due to an adrenalin rush from fear after his surgery, he refused any pain medication.)
As Koestenbaum puts it, Andy is a shining star because he burned hot and hard. He is immortal because his hard labor became incarnate, but there was little time for love. Andy wanted love and needed love, but do you think he loved his work, or that if he had found a true mate, he would not have worked so hard, spending time instead, loving him? He has left us books, films, Interview magazine, a museum in Pittsburgh, a foundation for art, legends, quotes, and many many seductive images. He also made us feel like it is OK, even cool, to be different.
One thing that Andy predicted was wrong: he thought that in the future people would make their own movies about their own friends and family and prefer to watch them rather than commercial stuff. What would he think of today's suicide bombers, teen snipers, corporate stealth, depleted resources, and the branding of America?
Oh Andy, where are you when we need you! Get us out of this mess you thought was cool!
- Andy Warhol by Wayne Koestenbaum
Adbusters to the Rescue by editors AM, AM, & JC
This is a call to arms. Get a can of spray paint and “skull” the face of a model on a Calvin Klein billboard, or on a Guess billboard, in the middle of the night. If you get arrested, even better.
When a telemarketer calls you to sell you something, tell him that you make $100 per hour, and
that if his company will send you a check for $25, you will listen to his schpeel.When the telephone company makes a mistake on your bill, refuse to pay the bill until they send you a corrected copy.
Erase ads whenever you can, like ones placed on shopping carts or in public restrooms. Jam foreign objects into coin operated services, like the carts at the airport. Speaking of airports, if you were doing what you liked, you wouldn’t want to go on vacation.
Don’t go anywhere you can’t get to by riding your bike, for, my friend, you are suffering from seperation anxiety from nature. And the auto/oil industry is keeping you from living your own life.
We are a nation of basket cases. Ten million suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder; 14 million are alcoholics, 15 million are pathologically socially anxious, 15 million are depressed, 3 million suffer from panic attacks, 10 million have Borderline Personality Disorder, 12 million have “restless legs,” 5 million are obsessive/compulsive, 2 million are manic-depressive, 10 million are addicted to sex. These tallies were compiled by writer Jim Windolf from an article he wrote in Oct. ‘97 for The New York Observer which posed the question, Is everybody crazy? (We asked that ourselves on the cover of our Jan 2001 issue.) He concluded that “77% of the adult population is a mess,” a nation of self-absorbed hypochondriacs.
So it says in Culture Jam; How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge - and Why We Must - by Kalle Lasn, a leading media activist and internationally known documentary filmmaker, who delivers an eloquent call to action for all. He is the president of Adbusters Media Foundation, publishing the magazine Adbusters, which it contains no ads. In this book, Lasn outlines how modern civilization has been increasingly pushed-over by corporate culture, which rules the media.
“In 1977, Chrysler, one of the 5 largest advertisers in the U.S., sent letters to one hundred newspaper and magazine editors demanding to review their publiations for stories that could prove damaging or controversial.” - Culture Jam, pg 35.
And the media propoganda controls us by persuading us to buy certain goods, jolts us about every 3 seconds with a startling image or a cut or sound, keeping us addicted to their voice. The news, movies, and shows are also part of the plan - delivering shocking violence which has made us jaded, unfeeling, and numb. It has also turned us all into substance addicts. None of us can live up to the standards of our media role models. We don’t know what to do wi
th ourselves during down-time, and TV and the internet are so easy. Our kids have ADD, we avoid intimacy because our bodies are not perfect.“Think and grow rich. Dreams, by definition, are supposed to be unique and imaginative. Yet the bulk of the population is dreaming the same dream...wealth, power, fame, plenty of sex and exciting recreational opportunities.” - pg. 57.
One out of every 4 restaurant-prepared breakfasts in the U.S. are eaten at McDonald’s. And the fat content of the food served at McDonald’s is, well, very high. Boeing had to widen its airplane seats in 1970 because its passengers had grown too fat to fit in them.
Fruits and vegetables at the supermarket, ripe and colorful, but out of season, grown and flown in from who knows where - “The nice ripe, red tomato, a “Flavr Savr,” is genetically speaking part flounder. (The technology for this process is owned by chemical giant Monsanto.)” pg. 79.
“Gone the evening meal, once joyous ritual of family life. Gone the prayerful ac-knowledgment of the harvest. Gone the con-nection between the actual growing of food and its consumption...In exchange for zero responsibity, we get zero control.” pg. 80.
In this book, Lasn describes his efforts to buy TV airtime for a spot he did showing the hypocracy of the logging industry specifically in the spot they were showing, in British Columbia. No TV station would sell him airtime for his spot, as it would be, of course, a conflict of interest, “in opposition to their policy.”
Lasn points out that British kings and corporate presence in the American colonies actually fomented our Revolution at the Boston Tea Party, and the Declaration of Independence actually freed us from the tyranny of British corporate power as well as its Crown.
We carefully regulated the size and power of subsequent corporate charters, making sure they were subordinate to people power. His description of how they shifted after the Civil War, taking advantage of the disorder and corruption, much to the chagrin of President Lincoln, will leave readers breathless and baffled.
An 1886 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, in a dispute over a railbed route in California, deemed that “a private corporation was a ‘natural person’ under the U.S. Constitution and therefore entitled to protection under the Bill of Rights.” Could it have been that getting the gold in those “rush” days caused the U.S. government to suddenly make concessions to a corporation? Suddenly, considering their vast financial resources, corporations thereafter would have far more power than mere individuals, eventually leading Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to say of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad that the decision “could not be supported by history, logic or reason.”
Lasn’s points bring to mind the Roman civilization at it’s peak. Gladiators were the jockies who kept the masses in check. The wealthy elite funded horrific “games” of consumate violence to amuse the popluace into submission to the gross inequality of comfort and opportunity. When the Vandals came knocking at the door, hungry for plunder, the Roman masses were too dissipated to put up the fight, and thus the disintigration of that great society, decayed from within by the toxic affect of too much “good” food, too much of the “good” life.
Most interesting is Lasn’s familiarity with the Paris riots in the ‘60s prompted by The Situationists, who loosley believed that we should make our own experience,
whenever and wherever we are, and not let anyone else do it for us. They spoke of “the spectacle’ of modern day life, the billboards, the ads, art exhibits, radio, TV programs, and that we can choose to refuse to cooperate with the demands of consumer culture. Their leader, Guy Debord, is an unheralded culture jammer. Where Marshall McLuhan described the mass-culture trance, Debord suggested ways to break-out of it, similar in thought to Beatniks, but especially to the punk movement of the ‘70s, where hero Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols screamed, swore, and pissed for anarchy over the Berlin Wall. Alvin Toffler was right in his book Future Shock - although there became a potential for an infinite amount of messages in the media, there is now really only a few, those of Corporate America.
So many brilliant ideas and analyses are pointed out by this very perceptive and iconoclastic writer that you, too, will eagerly match up his ideas with your own history of either rebellion or conformity. Yes, I was a Beatnik, or a Hippy or Yuppie: I’m a Punker or a Rocker. Instead of road rage, drugging-up or dropping-out, or just tripping-off into cyberspace where your voice has little impact on the real and urgent problems, or just sitting, vegging in front of your favorite Media outlet to see how you compare with the latest athlete superhero, or supermodel and letting yourself “go with the flow,” I urge you to devour this book. The message is “we can change the world.” and Lasn gives you potent tools to snap yourself out of the “media-consumer trance:”
Take Back the Show
• Don’t buy anything for an entire day.
• Develop “Demarketing chic,” that is, take the cool out of cars, Calvin, fastfood, and expose all of it for what it is, undermining over-commercialization by reducing it to satire. Wearing a plain white t-shirt is far cooler that wearing designer threads, which isn’t cool at all.
•What you can do if you are repulsed by an ad campaign is protest it, write letters to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, or even lobby the FCC to try to revoke a TV license or two. You could reclaim the tools of broadcasting, write your own materials, produce your own media. If you have money, you can fund your own TV commercials, films, your own documentaries. The key isn’t to get away from it, but to get involved with it.
•Get involved with public radio and local TV and newspapers for the betterment of the community you live in. Flood them with press releases about your protesting a certain corporations bad doings.
•Start culture-jamming on campus. Bring up the ideas to classmates and professors who seem interested, especially those in economics. Don’t buy into the neoclassical economics now being taught, ridicule its logic at every chance possible to show its limitations and how they hurt the world. Corner your professors relentlessly.
•Use your spending power to not merely complain about injustice, but do something about it. The best way anyone could help rid the world of capitalist greed is to not condemn capitalism, but to stop buying their trendy stuff.
• Un-cool corporate vampires: look what happened to the tobacco industry once the antismoking activists blew out their flame.
• Undertake spontaneous acts whenever possible. Talk to strangers.