Andy Warhol
Guardian
IN 1961, a young woman named Dorothy Podber shot a bullet into a stack of Marilyn Monroe portraits in Andy Warhol’s studio.
A peripheral member of the artist’s large and motley entourage, she’d obtained the artist’s permission before shooting. He was nevertheless stunned by her action, possibly indicating that he’d expected her to do her shooting with a camera.
The bullet cleanly penetrated four canvases, whereupon the mischievously entrepreneurial artist proclaimed that, henceforth, Orange Marilyn shall be known as Shot Orange Marilyn, Red Marilyn as Shot Red Marilyn, and likewise for Sage Blue and Light Blue Marilyn. A bullethole in a canvas was an occasion for renaming, not restoring.
Other Marilyn portraits in the stack were unscathed. Still others were elsewhere and were also unscathed.
Now, many are making their way to London, as part of the major Warhol retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery (from September 7 until November 5).
The exhibition is like a time machine trip back to the Sixties.
When Podber pulled the trigger, cultural and artistic history were hardly foremost in her mind. But of all works of art to choose for target practice, and of all artists, her selection of Warhol’s Marilyn was extraordinarily, if accidentally, prescient.
She did not shoot Warhol’s Mao or Truman Capote or — relief all around — Elvis. She didn’t get his gold Marilyn, an esteemed work which is on display at the Hayward, along with Turquoise, Green, Blue, and Slack and White Marilyn- Shot Orange Marilyn, although not in London, was in the New York retrospective and is in the Hayward catalogue.
But this absence is minimised by the fact that the other Marilyns are very similar to Shot Marilyn. The artist, a devotee of the Time is Money school of art, ran off many prints from the same basic portrait.
At the time of Monroe’s death in 1962, Warhol was in California exhibiting the Campbell’s Soup paintings that made him an instant celebrity. Learning of her suicide, he decided to paint her.
Paint her he did. He selected one pouting portrait and printed many versions in different colours. He put 50 on one canvas, and 100 on another. He portrayed her small. He portrayed her large. One variation shows only her lips, 500 times.
The portrait that emerged was clear or smudgy depending on the mood of the artist’s equipment. In silk-screening, paint can smear and lines can blur- But Warhol wasn’t overly finicky, as is abundantly evident in his movies. While shooting one film, his sound man warned him that the batteries were dying. Carry on, said the director. With another movie. Warhol accidentally overexposed footage of the Empire State Building but screened it anyway. In America, such casualness isn’t necessarily uncalculated.
Warhol genuinely might have seen the Marilyn bullet holes as an aesthetic improvement. In art as in science, chance favours the prepared. And in modern art, just about anything goes,
Picasso attached a bicycle seat to handlebars and called its bull’s head, which it was. Found Art is an established school. And if not an aesthetic blessing in disguise, bullet holes have outrageousness value. And in America, outrageousness means publicity, and publicity means lucre.
Warhol learned this lesson well, and early, when he was told of an incident involving Salvador Dali, who’d been arrested in New York for a minor fracas. Suddenly, people flocked to, and wallets emptied at, his show, Prior to the Spanish artist’s arrest public response had been underwhelming. Like Dali, Warhol pursued publicity with Ahab-like monomania.
When he landed his Leviathan, he paid dearly for it
On June 3, 1968, another partially-wrapped woman, actress/feminist Valerie Solanis, arrived at Warhol’s studio packing heat. Guns surfaced regularly in the Factory. as his studios were known. On separate occasions, two members of his entourage pulled the trigger, managing each time to blast the ceiling. Armed robbers also visited the premises.
Solanis held no grudge against Warhol’s paintings or his poor ceiling. She aimed at the artist’s chest, and scored a bull’s-eye.
Clinically dead at one point, he was saved only by expert medical attention quickly delivered: Warhol was on the emergency operating table within half an hour of being shot.
Only one day after Warhol caught his bullet, Sirhan B Sirhan sent a slug smashing into the skull of Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, brother of the assassinated President — and a lover of Monroe.
At the time, Marilyn’s links with Robert Kennedy, and with John for that matter, were not widely known. The first big splash came with the publicity surrounding the 1973 biography of the actress by Norman Mailer.
Mailer theorised that the actress might in fact have been murdered, possibly by US government agents. But he provided little support for these dark intimations: he had a tight deadline to meet, you see, so he wrote the book “in great haste.”
The biography’s enormous publicity did not initially derive from Mailer’s sensationalistic linking of Marilyn, the Kennedys and murder. That was due, instead, to a massive plagiarism lawsuit that was eventually settled out of court.
Wide media coverage produced a fanfare that the book would not have enjoyed solely on Its merits. And fanfare meant sales.
With Warhol, publicity had similarly immediate and insignificant economic consequences. According to his biographer, Victor Bockris, after the artist was shot, price tags on his paintings immediately soared; a leap from $200 to $15,000 wasn’t unusual.
Warhol and Mailer have more in common than Marilyn. Both were artists turned celebrity, both became film-makers, both courted publicity shamelessly, both were provocative, and both attracted more than their share of violence.
As a film-maker, Mailer’s improvisatory style was supposedly influenced by Warhol, who nonetheless rendered harsh judgment:
“Norman did it wrong. He thought film-making was easy. I thought he’d be smart, and since he was so famous, I thought he was God.”
For his part, Mailer thought JFK was God. The President was his alter ego, and he wrote often, and ardently, about him and other members of the Kennedy clan. Warhol also portrayed the Kennedys, in an unreleased film about the President and in a disaster painting of his widow.
Violence was constant for Mailer, in his life and in his novels and journalism. He created a furore in 1957 by advocating the “philosophically psychopathic” violence of hipsters; his Executioner’s Song is a biography of Gary Gilmore, a murderer whose firing-squad execution reinstated capital punishment in America.
Notorious often buffoonishly, for his fistfighting and headbutting, Mailer moved up in class on one drug-and-alcohol crazed night when he stabbed his wife in the chest. Not seriously injured, she might have been had the knife pierced her heart, which it almost did. Like Warhol, she nearly perished.
Mailer didn’t fight only with girls, and he sometimes got the worst of it. While making his improvisatory film Maidstone, actor Rip Torn beaned actor-director Mailer in the brain with a hammer. ‘The last 10 minutes was kind of the loaded gun of the thing,” Torn later said, “and of course there were people out there who had real guns.
Mailer was also instrumental in springing murderer-cum-writer Jack Henry Abbott from jail. Abbott promptly stabbed a young waiter to death on Second Avenue in New York’s lower East Side.
“Make love, not war” was flower power’s creed, even as many of its adherents drug-sizzled their brain -- or took their own lives. In Warhol’s entourage alone, suicide was a common occurrence. And many people played at being artists and film stars without paying their dues. Superstardom is what the artist promised, not necessarily ironically.
But Warhol’s Marilyns also signify the tremendous energy and achievement of that era. If much was meretricious, much was also meritorious. In his biography, Mailer contends that Marilyn could have tackled Cordelia. That buffoonish he isn’t. Rather, this is the literary equivalent of Warhol releasing films with demented sound and incorrect exposure. The non-political equivalent to épater le bourgeoisie, such outlandishness aims to provoke, and Mailer and Warhol were both content to pay the price of looking foolish, or producing shabby work, if more public attention is the result.
Much of Mailer’s writing is undeniably brilliant. Warhol’s achievement is savagely debated, but many have been converted from scepticism to appreciation after viewing the retrospective.
Referring specifically to “Gold Marilyn,” Thomas Hoving, former head of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, recently wrote: “It takes artistic genius to transform a Hollywood cliche of beauty’ and sex appeal into the universal image of feminine vulnerability.”
So if Warhol’s Marilyns convey mischief and mayhem, drugs and death, they also speak of daring and drive, of the aggressiveness inherent in the American character.
“Let’s do it” were Gary Gilmore’s final words, and all he had to do was stand there and let his body gather bullets.
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