In second year, art history class, our instructor Art Perry told us that the famous artist Andy Warhol had died. Everyone probably already knew, since it had been all over the news.
I’d seen one Warhol up close a few years earlier, when his photo-painting “After the party” was loaned to our high school library from the Vancouver Art Gallery. Aside from that, I’d seen slides and photos of his Mau and Marilyn prints and his Campbell’s soup cans, and heard about something called The Factory, and Lou Reed.
In 1985, I’d watched a video of Andy painting a digital portrait of Debbie Harry at a launch event for the Commodore Amiga microcomputer. It was a big, splashy event where Commodore tried to steal some of Apple’s Mac PR thunder by using a major celebrity.
At the time, I really felt as if Andy’s few minutes of mouse clicking was a major endorsement of desktop computer paint systems. Andy’s commercial persona and his ability to reinvent his art had spanned all forms of analog media, including performance and video. With the Amiga demo, he’d touched on the realm of digital home computers. It was a big deal for neophy computer graphic artists like me – like juicy validation wrapped in a tasty, crispy layer of sales hype.
Art Perry said a few lines about Warhol’s career, fame, and impact and then played us the song “Andy Warhol” by David Bowie. It was novel to listen to a song in art class, but it also seemed a bit superficial: a piece of pop media used to celebrate a pop art artist. However, that veneer-like, surface comparison sort of matched the persona that Warhol had seemed to hide behind throughout most of his career.
However, recently, after watching the documentary series “The Warhol Diaries”, I felt a lot more sympathetic towards Andy Warhol as a man and an artist. My art history classes and texts never dove very deep into his career; a course called “Modern Art Survey” didn’t go deep – it was, as advertised, a high-level view of movements, names, and dates – just enough coverage to pass an end-of-term slide exam. Anything more you wanted to know, you’d have to find out on your own.
Looking back now after watching The Warhol Diaries, I’ve decided that Bowie’s song was actually making fun of Andy Warhol. It’s was not a tribute, but more like a shot over the bow of Warhol’s fame and infamy; a cocky young, unestablished artist mocking a mature, established one. Young versus old. Clique versus clique.
To watch that deeply sympathetic Netflix series and to realize Warhol’s long, complex evolution from illustration and printed graphic design, through film and video, into computer graphics and robotics – all filtered through the veil of his vulnerabilities and the layers of commercialist masks that he hid behind – I realized that Andy’s creative path appealed to my multimedia, multi-modal creative spirit.
