ORDER/SUBSCRIBE          SPONSORS          CONTACT          WHAT'S NEW          INDEX/SEARCH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reviewer biography

Current Reviews

Review Articles

Book Reviews Archive

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 Camp——the ironic sensibility crackling through much urban gay male discourse——and 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.

 

 




Updated 1st June 2005


Contact LDR: ldr@leonardo.org

Contact Leonardo: isast@leonardo.info


copyright © 2004 ISAST