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[T&S 10.2 (2004) 90-98] ISSN 1355-8358

Idol Curiosity: Andy Warhol and the Art of Secular Iconography

Ruth Adams

[email protected]

Abstract

This article examines issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and celebrity in contemporary society. Taking Andy Warhol and Marilyn Monroe as its focus, it considers the fate of the modern-day icon. In parti- cular, it assesses the importance of whiteness and blondness in the con- struction of Western iconography, and the influence of Warhol’s Catholic faith upon his work.

Andy Warhol was perhaps the greatest iconographer, iconolater and iconoclast of our time. This paper seeks to explore what such a claim might mean within the context of twentieth-century Western capitalist culture; within which, ‘whiteness’ is both a cultural norm and a condi- tion to be aspired to, and sexuality and religion contested spaces.

Although an empathy, and even a sympathy with Marilyn Monroe— perhaps his most famous subject—is suggested by both his writing and his art, above all Warhol aspired to her iconic status, and perhaps even envied her a little. David Bourdon suggests that it was not so much her untimely death that excited Warhol sufficiently for him to start painting Marilyns, but the enormous amount of press coverage that it generated. Warhol realized fairly early in his career that if he were to be a star simply being an important painter was insufficient, he would also need to be a ‘face’. ‘Warhol the artist’ became an increasingly essential element of his oeuvre, some said his best work, encouraged by the advice of Ivan Karp who told him; ‘You know people want to see you. Your looks are a certain part of your fame—they feed the imagination’.1 Warhol set

1. Jonathan Flatley, ‘Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics of Prosopopeia’, in Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and Jose Esteban Munoz (eds.), PopOut: Queer Warhol (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 113.

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about creating a persona for public consumption inspired by Holly- wood’s example.

For both Warhol and Marilyn going blonde symbolically represented their biggest life changes—the separation of their public and private selves; the obscuring of Andrew Warhola and Norma-Jean Baker in favour of their astral alter-egos. By changing their hair colour they both cashed in on a long and complex history of blondness; an association between blond hair and sex goes back as far as Roman times and it is probably this, Grant McCracken suggests, that gives the colour its trans- formational effect.

Marilyn’s blonde hair was perhaps a synedoche for her whiteness in general. Being glib about it, we could quote Monroe herself: ‘I do not suntan because I like to feel blonde all over.’2 Marilyn Monroe was in many ways the ultimate white woman—it is no coincidence that in possibly the most famous image of her, the air-vent scene from The Seven Year Itch, she is wearing a white dress to match her hair. Richard Dyer restates what perhaps is obvious: ‘Monroe conforms to, and is part of the construction of what constitutes desirability in women’3 in order to explore what lies behind such a truism. He argues that this desirability is composed of two parts. The first is certain character traits, such as vulnerability, openness, sexual liberality and, I would risk, dumbness. The second is related to social position, or more specifically race—the desirable woman is the white woman. Dyer traces this connection to racist and imperialist fictions and histories in which ‘the white woman is offered as the most highly prized possession, and the envy of all other races’.4 Examples of this abound in popular culture, from Birth of a Nation to King Kong. The white woman becomes object, she is another chattel that enhances colonial man’s standing and can be perhaps used as a bargaining tool or even a unit of exchange in extreme situations. Hence an equivalence between blonde hair and wealth; the fact that blondness is often referred to in terms of precious metals—platinum or silver—or is ‘visually rhymed’ with them makes this evident. The racial aspect of the prestige of the white woman also foregrounds the impor- tance of blonde hair, as it is taken as ‘proof’ that the woman is indeed truly Caucasian and not a light-skinned black woman ‘passing herself

2. Thomas Harris, ‘The Building of Popular Images: Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe’, in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Stardom: Industry of Desire (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 40-44 (43).

3. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1986), p. 42.

4. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, p. 43.

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off’ as such. Blondness guarantees the ‘purity’ of the white race, hence its emblematic appeal to the Nazis.

The image of the white woman appears to have internal contradic- tions, however, when we start to consider issues of sexuality. Monroe’s sexuality clearly was the most important component of her image, how then can we resolve this with the Christian tradition in which white represents virtue and chastity? If Monroe represents one apogee of white womanhood, then another is represented by the Virgin Mary.

Like her son, Mary has been subject to a progressive ‘bleaching’ by the Christian Church: ‘Her fair hair and complexion, often white robes and association with lilies and doves all constitute her virtue in terms of white hair and skin.’5 Mary’s complete virtue is compounded by the fact that she was able to fulfil her ‘destiny’ as a woman—motherhood—without besmirching her chastity. ‘She is never seen pregnant. She goes even further than the most refined white lady: she reproduces without sex.’6 Monroe would appear to be the antithesis of Mary—she has sex without reproducing—yet they are often represented in visually similar ways; as luminescent, glowing. In religious iconography Mary is usually portray- ed as both bathed in, and emanating light. Often this is simply a halo, but I have one postcard where, if you tilt it, the figure of the Madonna dissolves completely into a column of white light. Marina Warner has found links between lightness and blondness that stretch far back in the Christian tradition. She writes that connections are made between blond- ness and ‘heavenly effulgence… It appears to reflect solar radiance, the totality of the spectrum, the flooding wholeness of light which Dante finds grows more and more dazzling as he rises in Paradise.’7 Dyer has written extensively on how Hollywood used judicious lighting to create a beatific glow around its (white) female heroines and how this halo effect is amplified by blonde hair. He cites a scene in Some Like it Hot, which is perhaps paradigmatic of this. Monroe is distinguished from Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis not by clothing, all three are wearing black dresses, but by the play of light on Monroe’s hair. Lemmon and Curtis wear black hats and are standing in front of dark backgrounds to empha- size the contrast with ‘Monroe’s blonde hair which is lit from above, the side and even from below…so that her head is almost a ball of light.’8

So, what is the logic behind using the same visual vocabulary to repre- sent both the most chaste and the most sexual of women in Western

5. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 74. 6. Dyer, White, p. 74. 7. Quoted in Dyer, White, p. 124. 8. Dyer, White, p. 138.

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culture? I would argue that the contradiction is not as great as it would first appear, and that the answer maybe lies in these women’s relation to male sexuality. Dyer suggests that a conflation of Christian symbolism and the imperialist and patriarchal discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have resulted in a polarity with black, male sexuality at one end and white, female chastity at the other. Now posi- tioned at much the same end of this polarity, Mary and Marilyn appears to be less opposites, and more like sisters under—or rather through—the skin. Whether chaste or ‘loose’ they are both portrayed as passive vessels of an active male sexuality. Mary was the unwitting and innocent recipient of the celestial seed, and Marilyn’s sexuality was portrayed as inherent, natural and innocent. Warhol is clearly prepared to suggest such an equivalence. In Gold Marilyn (1962) he presents Monroe as a Byzantine icon. While this painting is often taken to be a comment on the venal, secularizing nature of a commodity culture which can promote a film star to the status of a saint, it functions equally well as an illustration of the argument above. And in light of this, despite his homosexuality, we might consider whether it is significant that the artist was a man, working within—albeit exposing—a venerable patriarchal tradition.

Like Monroe, Warhol adopted white hair for maximum transforma- tional effect. He started dying his hair blond shortly after his arrival in New York, but once his hair started to thin significantly he began wear- ing wigs. The early numbers were grey and fairly naturalistic, but he soon graduated to the, increasingly artificial looking, blond, white and silver versions that became his trademark. While, like Monroe, white/ blond hair offered Warhol both transformational and attention-grabbing qualities, he clearly couldn’t and wouldn’t want it to convey the same messages as Marilyn’s blonde halo. In his book Big Hair, McCracken traces a ‘periodic table’ of blondness from ‘bombshell’, through ‘brassy’ and ‘sunny’ to ‘cool’ and ‘platinum’. While Marilyn’s overt sexuality placed her firmly in the first category. Warhol might be said to have adapted the latter two. ‘Cool’ blondness is a paradox; while at first glance it suggests the same openness and access that bombshell blond- ness offers, this access is refused. This could be seen as symbolic of both Warhol’s persona and his art. They appear glamorous, familiar and accessible at a surface level, but beyond that surface the way is blocked: ‘If you want to know about Andy Warhol, [he said], just look at the surface of my paintings and my films and there I am, there’s nothing behind it.’9

9. Victor Bockris, Warhol (London: Penguin Books, 1990 [1989]), p. 230.

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Warhol might also be compared with the cool blondes of Hitchcock’s movies:

it wasn’t that he wanted them to forswear their sexuality on the screen, what he wanted was a tension between the sexual and the social. He wanted everyday life to be haunted by a sexuality that became all the more power- ful for its annexation. Hitchcock began with blondness, the better to commu- nicate a sexual presence, and then he directed the blondes to stand away from their sensuality. He sought to heighten sexuality by distancing it.10

Likewise, while Warhol did not actually forswear his sexuality, he certainly annexed it. He was not keen on physical contact, or unmediated intimacy of any sort, and therefore explored his sexuality at a voyeuristic distance. Because he was homosexual, his sexuality was also annexed by society. While the homosexual was forced to look on from the sidelines, this very liminality made their presence, while unseen, all the more potent in the popular imagination.

If Warhol was undoubtedly subversive as a ‘cool’ blond, he aban- doned such strategies when he moved into his later ‘platinum’ phase. McCracken describes platinum as ‘the colour of choice for society women in New York City’.11 During the late 1970s and 1980s this is pre- cisely what Warhol appeared to become. The star-struck youth became a fully fledged star and he swapped avant-garde practices for commis- sioned portraits, product endorsement, Interview magazine and nights out at Studio 54. He moved from the outside to the inside, to wealth and celebrity—and his hair reflected this change in status. Many critics of Warhol see this period as evidence of his ‘selling out’ and abandoning his principles. On the contrary, this apparent shift was entirely consis- tent within his commodity logic; Warhol always wanted to be a movie- star, a product, he was simply actualizing his ambitions.

Like Monroe, Warhol was often taken to be ‘dumb’. His blank stare, his glitzy, kitschy tabloid magazine paintings and his apparent inability to manage responses any more erudite than ‘Gee’ or ‘Wow’ all contri- buted to this image. It was often assumed of Warhol, as of Marilyn, that when they did exhibit flashes of incontestable brilliance it was more by accident than design. The truth was quite the reverse, Warhol’s dumb- ness was part of his carefully crafted public persona; it was a blankness that maintained his mystique and resisted the fixing of all by the most ambiguous meanings to him.

10. Grant McCracken, Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self (London: Indigo, 1997), p. 97.

11. McCracken, Big Hair, p. 92.

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Warhol’s ‘dumbness’ might also be interpreted as related to his asser- tion that he wanted to be a machine. Monroe was an object struggling to be taken seriously as a subject. In her last interview with Life magazine she said, ‘That’s the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing—I just hate to be a thing.’12 However, Warhol was a subject that aspired to be an object. In Dyer’s schemata it is the fact that whiteness is taken to be the norm, and therefore unmarked and unspecific, an absence, that allows the white man to aspire to the highest point on the Enlightenment’s intellectual ideal, the observing subject without properties—that is to say, an object. What fascinated Warhol about Monroe was that the real woman had effectively disappeared behind a screen of representation. This is what Warhol’s multiple silk-screens of Monroe show and also makes sense of Warhol’s assertion that one only had to look at the sur- face of his paintings. Since what he was representing was only a surface to begin with, paradoxically the depth of the paintings lies in their very superficiality. The multiplicity of the images might also be interpreted as the many subjectivities that journalists, biographers and fans tried to rehabilitate from Monroe’s terminal object which, by their very nature, could never be more than superficial projections upon that object.

The emphasis placed by Warhol on surface appearance in both his life and work might also, arguably, have stemmed from his devout, if covert, Catholicism. Terry Eagleton describes his experience of Catholicism as ‘a world of compulsive rituals, not of agonized inwardness. In soundly anti-Cartesian spirit, you did the proper thing and the appropriate state of mind would follow. As with the acting technique of Laurence Olivier, you built from the outside inwards…’.13

Such a framework can also perhaps throw some light on what many critics saw as unappealing, anti-humanistic, even anti-artistic aspects of Warhol and his work. Eagleton suggests that Catholicism placed:

A radical stress on material practice, on the public, collective, symbolic dimensions of self-hood…entwined with a callous impersonality which could make even Stalinism seem sentimental. The Church set its face against all phoney subjectivism, and was as indifferent to individual feelings as a psychopath.14

Thus the form and content of Warhol’s work, his rejection of the individ- ualistic, existential angst so crucial to much of late Modernist art, his attitude to his friends and colleagues, his obsessive love of work and

12. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, p. 61. 13. Terry Eagleton, The Gatekeeper: A Memoir (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2001),

p. 31. 14. Eagleton, The Gatekeeper, p. 32.

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money, can be made sense of in a context and history that pre-dates, and stretches beyond that of the dysfunctions of consumer culture and the mass media.

Eagleton further argues that, as a Catholic:

You did not see reason and mystery as incompatible. There was no danger that you could murder God, or a poem, by dissection. If the universalism of your faith encouraged you to ride roughshod over the particular, all those garish icons recalled you to what could be seen and handled, to the material world as signifier and sacrament.15

The very materialism of Warhol’s faith allowed him to appreciate, per- haps instinctively, the importance of the sacred in any society; regardless of how secular and mercenary it might appear. Perhaps with the benefit of an anthropological perspective, Emile Durkheim too realized this and wrote:

in the present day just as much as the past, we see society constantly creating sacred things out of ordinary ones. If it happens to fall in love with a man and if it thinks it has found in him the principal aspirations that move it, as well as the means of satisfying them, this man will be raised above the others and, as it were, deified.16

Warhol’s raising of Monroe and Campbell’s soup to iconic status there- fore appears to be a sincere attempt to record and express the sacred in modern American society, in the same manner as the painters of religious icons of earlier eras. Conversely, his deliberately tacky render- ings of sacred images such as Raphael’s Madonna and da Vinci’s Last Supper might be seen as rueful reflections on the downgrading of art and religion by a society which regards all images as equal.

Given Warhol’s interest in, and awareness of, Monroe’s tragic condi- tion, why would he regard her as aspirational? The roots of this too, perhaps, can be found in the social emphasis of his faith. Eagleton suggests that ‘martyrdom is a kind of socializing of one’s death, placing it at others’ disposal so that, to adopt a phrase of Auden’s, it may be modified in the guts of the living’.17 Martyrdom thus becomes a form of public service, a utilitarian virtue. Gold Marilyn can therefore also be interpreted as a musing on the martyrdom necessary to become an idol. However, Warhol also realized what Marilyn perhaps did not; that objecthood could be a protective haven as well as a prison. Daniel

15. Eagleton, The Gatekeeper, p. 33. 16. Quoted in Kenneth Thompson, ‘Religion, Values and Ideology’, in Robert

Bocock and Kenneth Thompson, Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993 [1992]), pp. 321-66 (329).

17. Eagleton, The Gatekeeper, p. 12.

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Herwitz suggests that this might have been at the root of Warhol’s obsession with Hollywood and fame:

Warhol is fascinated with the film star because she dies on screen and is recast as present in an eternalised, ‘living’, re-presented, past. There she is both herself (with her own qualities) and the film’s material. It is as if Warhol’s fantasy is to die and become reborn as a film image whose life is replaced by glamour and the gaze of everybody.18

In a way, Warhol had found a way to have the fame cake and eat it too. The silver screen works both ways—projecting and protecting. Jonathan Flatley suggests that Warhol’s understanding of this process is made manifest by his casting of himself as ‘The Shadow’ in his Myths series, alongside other iconic figures such as Superman and Mickey Mouse. This painting ‘allegorizes Warhol’s fantasy that…he could move into the public precisely as someone hidden’.19 The bigger his public profile became and the further removed from its source subject, the more it obscured and protected it. In this respect, Warhol faithfully followed his own advice, advice that he might have offered Monroe:

you should always have a product that’s not just ‘you’. An actress should count up her plays and movies and a model should count up her photo- graphs…and an artist should count up his pictures so you always know exactly what you’re worth and you don’t get stuck thinking your product is you and your fame, and your aura.20

Warhol is perhaps suggesting here that Monroe’s tragedy was a result not perhaps of her objectification, but because she invested too much of her subject in her object and was therefore unable to maintain a neces- sary critical distance.

While becoming an object has, as Warhol shows, the positive advan- tage of offering the soft subject a protective shell, it also extracts a price higher than most are prepared to pay. While attaining the pinnacle of whiteness, the subject without properties, can offer ‘an ecstasy to be felt in…luminescent representation…a luminescence that makes sense in the context of whiteness as transcendence, dissolution…and no-thing- ness’,21 within this ecstasy lurks an anxiety ‘the desolate suspicion of non-existence.’22 This anxiety is perhaps well founded and its basis

18. Daniel Herwitz, Making Theory/Constructing Art: On the Authority of the Avant- Garde (London: University of Chicago, 1995 [1993]), p. 243.

19. Flatley, ‘Warhol Gives Good Face’, p. 113. 20. Andy Warhol, From A to B and Back Again: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

(London: Picador, 1979 [1976]), p. 83. 21. Dyer, White, p. 80. 22. Dyer, White, p. 45.

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fluently expressed in both Warhol’s work and image. Both Warhol and Monroe reached such a peak of cultural construction that, to an extent, it ceases to be relevant whether these constructions emerged from ‘real’ people. This anxiety is demonstrated in the public’s desperate need to construct subjects from the empty images of stars, hence the many, often prurient and intrusive, biographies of Marilyn, Diana, Elvis and others. Monroe perhaps shared such an anxiety and this may explain her reluc- tance to entirely separate her subject and object. On the face of it Warhol harboured no such anxieties, he seemed prepared to dissolve into his images, to mediate all his actions and interactions with machinery in order to become more machine like, to accept the death of his subject- ivity with equanimity. However, the screen that he constructed around himself was tough but not bullet proof. After the attempt on his life by Valerie Solanis in 1968 he put himself back together and claimed that more than ever before he felt that he was watching television rather than living life, but the chinks in his armour were beginning to be visible to those who cared to look hard enough. When Baby Jane Holzer said that she thought that since the shooting, Andy was one of the happiest people she knew, Sam Green snapped back: ‘He’s as badly off as Marilyn Monroe.’23

23. Bockris, Warhol, p. 391.