Pop
Trickster Fool: Warhol Performs Naiveté
by Kelly M. Cresap
University of Illinois Press, Champaign,
IL, 2004
216 pp. illus., 4 b/w. Trade, $35.00;
paper, $18
ISBN: 0-252-02926-7; ISBN: 0-252-07181-6.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
mosher@svsu.edu
David Bowie sang about him even before
he met him. Michigan teenagers Destroy
All Monsters lived as if they were superstars
in his underground films. A bookstore
owner who hosted him said he was the dullest
person she ever met. Andy Warhol cut a
contradictory figure in society, from
the Pop Art Sixties until his surprising,
untimely death in 1987, cultivating a
hazy naieveté each step of the
way. Author Kelly M. Cresap reads both
Warhol's aesthetic and persona as rooted
in his homosexuality, and his jester-like
naiveté a well-chosen strategy
for maximum freedom in a circumscribed
world.
Cresap contrasts fey Warhol with the mythic
macho of the New York school, Jackson
Pollock and Willem DeKooning and other
two-fisted action painters boozing it
up and slugging it out at the Cedar Bar
and other smoky, manly dives. These tough
guys cast a pall on the next generation
of artists: witness the trepidation and
delicacy of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg,
gay artists only slightly older than Warhol,
who kept the sissified fact that they'd
decorated store windows as secret as their
relationship. A former commercial illustrator,
Andy Warhol created his "Factory" studio
where he directed assistants serigraphing
imagery on paper and canvas. They joined
Warhol for evenings out on the town, attending
parties, snapping Polaroids, shooting
movie footage almost at random, projecting
films behind the noisy band The Velvet
Underground. Warhol's colleagues called
him "Drella", a name conflating his unique
mix of Cinderella, awestruck at her good
fortune, and Dracula, the scheming nocturnal
vampire. In the musical tribute performed
at Warhol's funeral "Songs for Drella",
the Velvet Underground's Lou Reed and
John Cale sang of his compulsive productivity.
In universities in the early 1980s, some
gay and lesbian painting students (Robert
Morgan at San Francisco State among the
best) depicted domestic "gay genre" scenes
of themselves and their friends that no
longer read as particularly transgressive.
Twenty years before, Warhol created gallery
pin ups of macho figures like Marlon "Wild
One" Brando, the gunslinging cowboy Elvis
Presley, and tragically overdetermined
female stars, like Marilyn Monroe and
Liz Taylor. Warhol's quickly-eradicated
"Most Wanted Men" mural at the 1964 World's
Fair used mug shots from the Wanted posters
you'd see in post offices, and the subtext
may have been that Warhol craved the bad
men's passions. A near-fatal shooting
in 1969 may have weaned him from dangerous
company, for after that he seemed to prefer
celebrities, safely illuminated by flashbulbs.
The book's least successful chapter is
a panoply of contradictory quotes on Warhol
that the author calls the "Free Andy"
Open Forum. Here readers are given brief
items from myriad sources on aspects of
Warhol's persona and career, including
the artist's relationship to the artistic
legacy of Marcel Duchamp. The chapter
seems to aspire to be a theater piece
rather than entr'acte in this otherwise
clearly-argued book. To this gripe the
author might reply that a lack of centered
thesis is more Warholian. What Cresap
calls "anti-cogito" locates Warhol in
various currents of anti-intellectualism
in American society. On encountering The
Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975) in
college, this reader was struck by its
celebration of triviality and of subjectivity.
Why, one musters a case for or against
something with evidence, not the whims
of a moody schoolgirl! To read a middle-aged
artist go on like that was amazing. Meanwhile,
Warhol's cool-looking Interview
magazine was like a big bowl of ice cream
with sprinkles, so mind-boggingly vacant
and agape that it almost gave you a headache
to read it.
Cresap builds the case that the most significant
historical current in which to locate
Andy Warhol is that of Campthe
ironic sensibility crackling through much
urban gay male discourseand
the author credits Warhol as its major
rejuvenator. This reviewer remembers when
the excitedly-anticipated (by eight-year-olds)
television show, "Batman," debuted, and
his parents and neighbors defined its
example of Camp as "so bad it's good".
Perhaps their appraisal of Warhol as "weird"
and "sexless" was their way of discussing
the Queerness That Dare Not Speak Its
Name. Four decades later Kelly M. Cresap
voices concern that popular culture is
now entirely Camp-dominated, its mainstream
so cynical and admittedly trivial that
there are no longer great verities against
which outsiders and sexual outlaws can
snidely dish. We will never see another
Pop Trickster Fool like Andy Warhol.