Andy Warhol and The Can that Sold the World

Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World by Gary Indiana

By Serena Davies
Published: 12:03PM BST 19 Apr 2010

Gary Indiana, an American polymath and conjurer of nifty aphorisms, has written a book about Andy Warhol and the 32 paintings – each entitled Campbell’s Soup Can – that comprised his first solo exhibition in 1962. These, Indiana says, “were the first shots of a total revolution in American culture”. This was when Warhol started doing his version of pop art better than anyone else. Here was the sly joke of an art that treated cheap commercial products with the reverence usually assigned to portraiture; the elision of high and low art – at a brush stroke.

These soup cans were painstakingly executed in a traditional medium (oil) yet had no discernible character in the way traditional painting has, “no aura”, no meaning. When Indiana quotes some adverse comments from the time, they sound like a vindication of Warhol’s gesture. Jules Langer, for instance, wrote of how “the initial shock” of the pictures “wears off in a matter of seconds, leaving one as bored with the painting as with the object it presents”.

If you elevate surface over content, as Warhol did with his cans (and his Marilyns and his Lizs), then your work is only skin deep and boredom a natural response. Yes, life is boring, says Warhol: face it. During his impoverished childhood he had to eat Campbell’s soup every day and he found it so dull he never touched it again.

Warhol is in many ways an easy artist to write about: his cynical art is still in tune with our own times. Indiana’s short text is full of neat phrases about Warhol, such as his notion of the “empty secret” Warhol promised. He encouraged all that mystery around his person and his art, when, Wizard of Oz-like, there was nothing behind it.

As Indiana traces the biographical and art historical context for the cans, and then the diffuse, corrupt world of the Factory that they spawned, is he saying something new about this overfamiliar artist? There is his surprising comparison of Warhol with Orson Welles, which springs from the fact that when Warhol would have been eating his Campbell’s soup, Welles was broadcasting plays on the radio that Campbell’s sponsored. Both men’s celebrity, Indiana says, came to dwarf their artistic reputation, both grasped their significance as a brand, both were manipulative, both had late career slumps.

Indiana likes Warhol, thinks he was a genius, and particularly adores his thumbs up to the abstract expressionists that came before him and those artists’ “star-spangled clichés of cowboy individualism”. But his book feels most exciting when he expounds on Warhol’s dark side and how his importance was not necessarily a good thing. Importance connotes the baleful as well as the salubrious, Indiana says. With Warhol, finally, he is leaning towards the baleful.

“It is possible that [Warhol’s] importance was, and is, that his art and life changed what Americans consider important,” he writes. And what were the characteristics of Warhol, the man and his cans, that have become so important? “Commodity, consumption and celebrity worship” as well as “velocity, vicariousness, instant obsolescence, the erasure of historical memory, and the three-second attention span induced by the mass media”. It is not a pretty list. As Billy Name, a Factory acolyte, more emphatically puts it, Warhol left behind “hell, as we know it”.Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World
by Gary Indiana
192pp, Basic, £12.99

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/7606781/Andy-Warhol-and-the-Can-that-Sold-the-World-by-Gary-Indiana-review.html