Art, Death, & Phenomology: I Shot Andy Warhol

2,450 words

I always run into strong women who are looking for weak men to dominate them.
-Andy Warhol

Valerie Solanas took the elevator, got off at the 4^th floor.
She pointed the gun at Andy, saying, “You cannot control me anymore”.
-Lou Reed and John Cale, Songs for Drella

The Shot Heard Around the Art World

On June 3, 1968, a slovenly, homeless, but highly intelligent woman approached a police officer in Times Square. She was wearing a black trench-coat, fisherman’s cap, and a black, turtle-neck sweater. She wasn’t a stevedore, although her loose, lesbian swagger might have fooled the untrained eye. She was wearing classic Beat-generation gear. The member of NYPD’s finest asked her how he could help, and she informed him that she had just shot a famous artist. The woman was Valerie Solanas, and the artist was Andy Warhol.

Solanas was telling the truth, for once in her life. She had just shot Warhol in his office. Warhol would later pose with the stitched scars across his abdomen. Her action had nothing to do with art criticism but rather with the fact that, as she believed, Warhol was controlling her mind. It was also because he was a man, a white man, and so fair game, and Solanas had taken her dislike of the male of the species beyond what we are now used to in our own culture, although she stands as a precursor of that now-ingrained, state-mandated hatred.

In the 1960s, feminism was still shifting gear from its bra-burning first phase to Gloria Steinem. Misandry was in its relative infancy, but Valerie Solanas gave us a taste of things to come. Like The Unabomber, Al Qaeda, and Anders Behring Breivik, Ms. Solanas had been good enough to provide the world with a testament to her thoughts. This was entitled The SCUM Manifesto, an acronym which stood for the Society for Cutting Up Men. There is something quaint about the fact that Solanas called it a “society”, as though it were a literary salon or a university debating concern. But there was nothing quaint about Solanas. She was the messenger of what was to come, the first post-modern feminist shooter – and there may be more – the Joan of Arc of Boomer misandry. I don’t believe there were calls for gun control after the world’s most famous pop artist got slotted, but Solanas shot Warhol with a .32 Baretta – of which more later – a snub-gun of the type Warhol would later immortalize in one of his famous screen-prints. She received a light jail sentence, leading one of Warhol’s protegés, Lou Reed, to sing in a later lyric, and with his familiar irony:

You get less time for stealing a car.
I remember thinking,
As I heard my own record in a bar.

Solanas ended up in an asylum, believing that the CIA had planted a listening device in her uterus. Warhol survived the assassination attempt and, in a strange act of cosmic serendipity, Solanas and Warhol died almost a year apart, in 1987 and 1988 respectively. Solanas was found face down over a toilet-bowl, a long-time methamphetamine addict. Warhol passed away while asleep in hospital after routine gall-bladder surgery, and Lou Reed also had an acerbic take on the artist’s death:

Not until years later
Would the hospital do to him
What she could not.

For gun enthusiasts, some sources report that the gun Solanas used was actually a Baretta .22. It wasn’t. I checked. Baretta produced no such caliber pistol. Actually, that’s not strictly true. Baretta produced the Bobcat, the pet name for the 21A, in the late 80s, a .21 gauge which could be adapted to .22 (can someone tell me why you would even want or need to do that? It’s a serious question) in the late 80s. The gun Warhol screen-printed in 1981, however, although not a Baretta, was a .22. Andy wanted art to imitate life, just as much as the artists who preceded him. Which brings us to mimesis, phenomenology, and art in general.

Art and Phenomenology: Vancouver, 2001

I am not looking for a cage-fight over the relative merits of modern art, or art in general, and I am certainly not trying to sell Andy Warhol to a Right-wing readership. That said, I like Andy Warhol’s work very much, and I know why. It’s because I like Andy Warhol’s work very much. I once had 24 hours to kill in Vancouver eight months before 9/11, after which I would never be at a loose end again. I made sure to visit that great city’s Museum of Art, where two viewings made me think about an individual’s response to art, where it comes from and how it manifests itself. They also made me think about death. I had been in a downstairs gallery, small and devoted to etchings and preparatory sketches. I was enthralled by one of Rembrandt’s preparatory line drawings for the great crucifixion etchings, and I remember thinking that it was sheer technique which separated “classical” art from its modern version. View representational art as superior to non-representational or abstract art, and you are applauding the artist’s ability to utilize mimesis, or the copying of nature. This is one reason Plato wished the poets expelled from the res publica, not because they told lies (Plato’s own mentor Socrates would be accused and convicted of doing just that), but because as mimetic artists, they were copying the world, which is itself a copy of the eidos, sometimes glibly referred to as the “mind of God”. For Plato, there was a sort of metaphysical distaste in the copy of a copy. But we have no religious impulse to guide us with art now, modern or classical, and our responses originate from other sources.

When I left the small gallery and walked up into a brightly lit hall, I saw an artwork on the wall opposite which made as strong an initial impression on me as I can remember any artwork making, before or since. It was one of a series of Warhol’s silkscreen prints entitled Electric Chair, and such a device is the work’s central image, slightly off-center as it is. This very American machine of execution is in fact, as rendered in Warhol’s original, an “Old Sparky” from Texas. It was mimetic, take from a photograph, and although the technique was limited, for me this was the announcement of great art. The print was duo-chrome, in a sort of deep umber and a dirty yellow. It made me think of death, just as Rembrandt’s etchings of the crucified Christ had made me think of death. But it also made me think of phenomenology. What accounted for the strength of the impact this artwork had made on me? It hit me, as they say, faster than a speeding bullet. On the subject of which, let’s leave Vancouver for now, and return to New York, to Valerie Solanas, and to the artist Valerie considered herself to be. And also to her target, Andy Warhol, already by 1968 the “famous artist” Solanas told the officer she had shot.

An Actress Prepares

“Trash! Yeah, pick it up!”
New York Dolls

Warhol was an ugly man inside and out. A childhood illness meant he lost hair and facial pigment, leaving him with, as Lou Reed describes his mentor in song, “bad skin, bad eyes, gay and fatty… a pink-eyed painting albino”. Inside, Warhol was a carnival of neuroses, frightened of the world even before Solanas put a bullet in his abdomen, petrified of it afterwards. There is an extent to which Warhol was guilty of what lawyers call “contributory negligence” in inviting Solanas far enough into his circle to put a bullet through his gall bladder without vetting her first. But he already did vet his acolytes, rewarding vice rather than virtue, and most of Warhol’s entourage at The Factory would be on some kind of watch-list today.

Valerie Solanas was little more than street trash. A product of alcoholic and sexually abusive parents, she had wanted a bite of the Big Apple, and ended up getting the wormy bit. She got a bit-part in one of Warhol’s dreadful movies, and had written a play, Up Your Ass, in addition to The SCUM Manifesto. Quotes from this tract include, “Sex is the refuge of the mindless”, and, “How often do you set your period?” This burgeoning literary talent was spotted by, and conned by, Maurice Girodias, avant garde publisher of literary porn by Henry Miller and Frank Harris. He gave her a worthless written contract, just as Warhol gave her an equally worthless verbal one. The SCUM Manifesto remains at the top of the imprint’s bestseller list, and a hardback original can set you back £600.

Solanas had tested 131 for IQ in school. She wasn’t stupid, she was just talentless in a world where that didn’t matter, and she despised men because she was forced – so she believed – to jerk them off for money to pay for drugs. And she was full of hatred in a way that would go on to become standard issue for feminists across the West. When she wasn’t shooting up, she was shooting famous artists. The other way The Factory got what was coming to it in the case of Solanas shooting its Prospero was that they cast Solanas as the runt of the litter, the pharmakos or scapegoat the Ancient Greeks would stone and beat before casting it from the city by way of expiation. If someone is already full of hatred, and you fail to expel them from the city, don’t encourage them to focus that hatred on you. That can lead to a bullet in the stomach, something I bet Warhol found had a very phenomenological impact on him indeed.

Husserl, Heidegger, Warhola

Andrej Warhola changed his name from the Czech when it was misspelled in copy without the “a”, and he liked it. It’s reminiscent of the moment in Joyce’s Ulysses in which Bloom sees that the brand logo in the rim of his hat has lost a letter from sweat and erosion, going from reading “hat” to “ha”. For Bloom, his “hat” becomes his “ha”, a phenomenological change affecting the very thing the name of which has been changed. Res, nomina. The power of naming.

Naming the phenomenon, describing it in its actuality, was the philosophical quest of both Edmund Husserl and his student, Martin Heidegger, and both had something to say about aesthetics with reference to phenomenology, Husserl’s “science of the things”. Aesthetics, although the word itself is an Ancient Greek construction, has only really been applied to the plastic arts in the Anglophone world since Walter Pater used it. Now, everyone has an opinion on art, some informed by knowledge of the history of art, some a pure response to a visual experience intended to please the viewer in some way. Art history is a subject I dip in and out of purely for pleasure, but the second response is of interest philosophically, and has something in common with a part of the perceptual process examined by Edmund Husserl, the so-called “Father of phenomenology”, and Martin Heidegger’s mentor.

This is in no way a philosophical examination of art, and of the thousands of hits you get searching with “phenomenology and art”, I have read none. But I wanted to get some sense, some meaning and even something like a dark beauty, from the trashy chaos of Warhol’s artistic output. Three short quotes will give no more than a light sketch of the phenomenological impact of, say, Electric Chair on me. The first two are from Husserl’s Ideas:

“Immediate ‘seeing’, not merely sensuous, experiential seeing, but seeing in the universal sense as an originally presentive consciousness of any kind whatever, is the ultimate legitimizing source of all rational assertions”.

The second is included as it joins the great phenomenologist as he himself walks through an art gallery:

“A name reminds us, namingly, of the Dresden Gallery and of our last visit there: We walk through the halls and stand before a picture by Teniers which represents a picture gallery. If, let us say, we allow that pictures in the latter would represent again pictures which, for their part, represent legible inscriptions, and so forth, then we can estimate which inclusion of objectivations which can be seized upon. But such very complicated examples are not required for eidetic insights, in particular for the insight into the ideal possibility for continuing ad libitum the encasement of one objectivation into another.”

The last is from Heidegger’s, The Origin of the Work of Art:

“The setting-into-work of truth thrusts up the awesome and at the same time thrusts down into the ordinary what we believe to be such.”

Perhaps it’s Warhol’s influence, but I seem to be using something like the “cut-ups” technique Bowie stole from William Burroughs. Bowie and his entourage turned up at The Factory one day so that Bowie could play Warhol his song, Andy Warhol, who hated the song and hated Bowie. Years later, Bowie would play Warhol in the film Basquiat. Now there’s an artist I genuinely dislike, phenomenology or no phenomenology.

Conclusion: I Shot Andy Warhol

 Andy loves those Hollywood movies.
We’re gonna scare you hip-hop pricks to death.
Reed and Cale, Songs for Drella 

The movie I Shot Andy Warhol was released in 1996 to a tepid critical response. It is not a good movie but not a bad one. It shows Warhol the businessman, the introvert, and the pervert, and it doesn’t shy away from the full depths of Solanas’ literally violent misandry. Warhol showed if nothing else that the art world is supported by nothing but a core value set entirely by what the market dictates, given that this market is somewhat exclusive. In theory, anyone can buy a Warhol for several million dollars. It’s not a great leveller, though, unlike Warhol’s opinion of Coca-Cola, which was just that. After all, said Warhol, not even the President can get a better Coke than you.

Warhol is famous for his visual output, but also for the line, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” There are many of these gnomic pearls, and they occasionally have a coda, as with Nietzsche’s famous statement that “what does not kill me makes me stronger.” That is rarely quoted with its parenthesized coda: “From the military school of life.” Warhol also amended his famed quip, possibly predicting the rise of the Internet in an, autobiography he called, “A parody of a personal revelation”, From A to B and back Again. “In 15 minutes,” he wrote there, “everybody will be famous.” Solanas got her 15 minutes. Don’t rest in peace, Valerie, you were always bad news even before you hit the headlines.