Andy Warhol Read Free Page B

when Stravinsky’s
Sacre de Printemps
was first performed. There was jeering in the gallery where Matisse and the Fauves were displayed in the Salon of 1905. This did not happen with art in the 1960s. On the contrary, it was felt, particularly by younger audiences, to be their art, to be part of
their
culture. By 1965, everyone knew in a general way the kind of art Warhol was making. The crowds at the ICA created, spontaneously, an event that would not have arisen with Lichtenstein or Oldenburg, and certainly not for the painters in the previous generation of Abstract Expressionists. Nor really did it happen anywhere with Minimalist art, which replaced Pop as the mainstream avant-garde art in the mid-1960s. Pop art’s successor was pretty much a big yawn as far as the general population was concerned. But with Pop, the change in art was perceived as radical, the meaning of art for ordinary persons had changed, and much of this was something that Warhol had done. At least, in his case, because of his art he had begun the ascent to the status of an icon.
    But let’s return to “The Birth of Andy Warhol,” and the period in which he had painted
Before and After.
No one can have known that, with the change in decade, from the 1950s to the 1960s, the whole of Western culture was entering a period of convulsive change. No one could have anticipated the tremendouschange in attitude that lay ahead, especially in youth culture, in 1968. It was a decade in which boundary after boundary was broken and washed away. The boundary between vernacular and high art was breached in the very early 1960s. It was a way of overcoming the gap between art and life. My theory is that when there is a period of deep cultural change, it shows up first in art. The age of Romanticism first became visible in the way English gardens were laid out, “natural” as opposed to formal. In 1964, the Beatles made their first visit to America, wearing long hair, testing a boundary between the genders. That very year, the boundary between the races was attacked as Freedom Riders went into the American South to help black citizens redeem their civil rights. The campus upheavals of 1968 put under attack the boundaries between the generations, and young people claimed a right to determine the curriculum, and to study the subjects closest to them, including courses in ethnic and gender studies that would have been unheard of in the previous decade. But their demands went beyond the institution of the university, into the region where the most far-reaching political decisions were made. Meanwhile, radical feminism emerged in the late 1960s, putting under attack traditional boundaries between the lives of men and women, the latter demanding equality or even more, autonomy. In 1969, the Stonewall Riots put under attack the boundaries between straight and gay sexual differences, deeming them irrelevant to civil life. Late in the decade, Warhol created a kind of cabaret, with the in-house rock group The Velvet Underground,and other entertainments, which he called “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” “Exploding” and “Inevitable” somehow capture the volatility of change that marked the 1960s. But the transition from Andy Warhol, commercial artist, to Andy Warhol, art icon, while perhaps inevitable, was not explosive. It was, initially, an uncertain kind of groping toward an art that did not really exist yet, and an identity neither Warhol nor anyone close to him would have been able to pin down. And the “discourse” I spoke of, which he ultimately found a way to enter, was as yet ill defined and uncertain. That makes Bockris’s metaphor of birth particularly apt. The fetus gropes blindly in the dark, heading toward a world it could not have visualized, in the warm cavity that had so far constituted its entire atmosphere.
    There had to have been, in 1959 or 1960, some kind of internal change in Warhol. He had