It’s been twenty years since Andy Warhol died on February 22, 1987, but his legacy lives on. Highly accomplished in many fields, Warhol served as a modern version of the classic Renaissance man, making a name for himself first as a graphic designer, then an artist, filmmaker, music producer, publisher, and writer. In doing so, he became a celebrity, even a household name. That is a rare achievement for a visual artist, reserved for the likes of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso.
In honor of Warhol and the anniversary of his peculiar death at New York Hospital, several events in February paid tribute to him and his entourage — that quirky group of misfits who hung out in Warhol’s studio, which he called The Factory. New York’s Gershwin Hotel hosted “Warhol Week,” a variety of events including an awards ceremony praising Lou Reed and Joe Dallesandro, a Levi’s fashion show, and performances by the band The Warhol Crowd, Debbie Harry, and Chris Stein.
The film Factory Girl (2006) was also released, focusing on the tragic life of Edie Sedgwick, one of Warhol’s greatest superstars. An heiress and debutante, she starred in Kitchen and Poor Little Rich Girl, but ended up squandering her fortune and dying from a drug overdose. Although the heyday of the Factory was not that long ago, it’s difficult to recreate such a “scene” today. With all the drugs involved, a film like Factory Girl can look sadly superficial, and many critics, unfortunately, tore the film apart.
For the exhibition Andy Warhol: In His Wake, Carrozzini von Buhler Gallery in New York also tried to recreate the look of The Factory by painting the gallery silver, the signature color of Warhol’s first Factory. On view was work by several artists from the old Factory: documentary photographs by Billy Name, expressionistic and surreal paintings by Taylor Meade and Ultra Violet, and a film by Ivy Nicholson.
The exhibition also included work by artists inspired by Warhol, among them Anton Perich, Steve Joester, William John Kennedy, and Cynthia von Buhler. The latter’s Great Warhola offered a clever play on fortune telling. By inserting 50 cents into what looked like a gumball machine, you could receive a thought-provoking statement in the form of a Campbell’s soup label. Perich exhibited a machine-processed painting of Warhol and footage from a late 1970s cable television program showing Warhol being interviewed outside the hip nightclub Studio 54. Warhol fielded the questions cleverly, the mark of a true celebrity. He sometimes repeated the question as a means to turn the tables and make the interviewer the center of attention. At other times he continuously rephrased his answer, finessing his response each time until it sounded more and more like a witty sound bite.
While these events commemorated Warhol, they were most interesting not because of Andy, but because of the Factory crowd. Whatever happened to those former superstars who helped Warhol become such a successful artist? Sadly, they didn’t make much money — Edie got only 50 dollars — and many are living their senior years on a tight budget. Except for Perich’s machine-made portrait of Warhol, much of the work on view at CVB, even though it was inspired by Warhol, didn’t seem to reflect the look of Warhol’s Pop art. The work was gritty and eccentric while Warhol’s was slick and removed, reflecting a stronger graphic sensibility.
I had to ask myself in what way we can see the direct influence of Warhol on the visual arts today. Whether you are viewing one of the latest art fairs, or an international biennial, or shows in Chelsea galleries, distinctive visual evidence of Warhol’s effect on contemporary art does not seem readily apparent. There is little if any derivative work related to Warhol’s repeated Pop icons, like Campbell’s soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles, or his silkscreen technique (except as a Photoshop effect). In general, large-scale photographs, video projections, and sculptural installations seem to dominate contemporary art.
So what is Warhol’s legacy today? It’s probably best observed in his philosophy. In 1968 Warhol declared, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” This phrase quickly became so much a cliché, Warhol reworked it many times over, restating it, for example, as “In 15 minutes, everybody will be famous.” However, if you take into account the relative ease with which people can promote themselves these days on the Web or reality television shows, you can see that Warhol’s statement has ironically come true. As Time magazine declared, the person of the year for 2006 was “you.”
Regarding death, Warhol said that when you die, you should just vanish, never to be seen again, and the world would continue on. He wanted his tombstone to be blank or say only one word: “figment.” Nevertheless, Warhol is, and will continue to be, an inspiration. The Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts provides funding, directly and indirectly, to artists, curators, scholars, and institutions that produce “work of a challenging and often experimental nature.” And the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh describes itself as “ever-changing and constantly re-defining itself in relation to contemporary life.” This means Warhol won’t disappear. He will continue to live on and — most importantly for a Pop artist — always be new. Like his continuous rephrasing of statements in interviews, he will never be stagnant.
