The Andy Warhol Diaries

 It's hard to know what to make of the Netflix limited series documentary, The Andy Warhol Diaries (2022, written and directed by Andrew Rossi).  This is because the subject of the diaries is elusive himself.  Warhol remains hard to "see" -- you can't quite grasp him.  In part, this is due to Warhol's carefully cultivated persona; the artist embodied bland indifference, projecting an aura that "there's nothing to see here" -- of course, an affectation that encourages viewers to look with even more intense scrutiny at the object of their gaze.  (What is the man concealing?  What hidden depths hide behind the white fright-wig and the curiously mask-like features?)  The Diaries, a six part documentary, posits that Warhol was, in fact, a deep and passionate soul and makes it argument to this effect by chronicling the artist's sundry love affairs.  Although Warhol was famously guarded, he dictated diaries to an associate, Pat Hackett -- originally, these laconic diary entries were intended to document expenses incurred for tax purposes.  (Warhol starts by listing cab fares).  But, gradually, the diaries expanded in scope and, in the end, they present a portrait of the man and the rarefied New York milieu that he inhabited (and, indeed, came to embody).  Whether Warhol was any good as an artist remains debatable -- the film presents both admirers and detractors.  (Robert Hughes in particular abuses Warhol in terms that would be inadmissible today, remarking dismissively that he's just a "Catholic and a homosexual" -- in his own way, Hughes, who was almost as famous as Warhol in the seventies, was America's "official art critic", writing for Time magazine and publishing several highly acclaimed books, and he could be as bitchy and imperious as Pauline Kael.)  It's obvious that Warhol was too productive to maintain the highest standards and his "factory" ground out hundreds of dull reproductions of the artist's best ideas, but, I think, there's no doubt that the man was supremely ingenious, fantastically alert to the leading cultural issues of his time (issues that he not only astutely observed but, in large part, framed) and that many of his most famous works are not only iconic but also philosophically important and groundbreaking.  (I also think that much late Warhol remains in the hands of wealthy collectors and, perhaps, is not generally on exhibit -- an evaluation of these final works will have to await their accession to museum collections where they can be better studied, something that may require another generation or so.)  At the end of one program, Andy muses in deadpan tones:  "I thought:  what is art?  Does it really come out of you?  Or is it a product?  It's complicated."  In characteristic faux-naif terms, Warhol poses a central question -- is art a form of self-expression. dependent on the genius and passion of the artist?  Or is art genre-based -- that is, the repetition of forms that have found favor with buyers that can be reliably reproduced for the market.  It's an ancient distinction:  in Dutch painting, we have Rembrandt who seems to make art out of his own experiences and reactions to the world (the strange grubby religious scenes, the nude paintings of Saskia, the many self-portraits) and his genre contemporaries like Jan Steen (jolly topers), Aelbert Cuyp (sunsets and ships at sea), or Pieter de Hooch (serene interiors).  Of course, the greatest painters synthesize self-expression and genre and Warhol, sometimes achieved this sort of incandescent brilliance:  consider for instance, the famous 1964 painting, Warhol's Nine Jackies -- this is a profound image that combines Warhol's obsession with fame as well as his homosexual identification with a glamorous woman with an acute sense of commerce -- the silkscreened  image seems infinitely reproducible and the rank of three photographs each reproduced three times suggests by its very means of production that the work is generic, that is, an image made to be consumed.  Somehow, Warhol manages to make the picture both a revelation of self, an overt object of commerce, and, even, a meditation on the notion of history and history-painting.  In this image, the distinction between art as product or art as something that "really comes out of you" is transcended.  

German critics of a certain type categorize the works of Goethe in terms of the female muse who inspired the poem or essay.  The great man is said to have various phases in his aesthetic development that are named after his girlfriend of that period.  Picasso is often studied in the same way -- there are works inspired by Dora Maar, paintings influenced by Francois Gilot, and about a dozen others.  The Netflix series on Warhol's diaries uses a similar approach -- the documentary is as scandalous as a Mexican telenovela and, essentially, an account of Warhol's relationships with different boyfriends.  The melodramatic romantic material suggests that Warhol was either an ardent, fiery spirit who pretended to be a machine or a machine programmed to periodically act in an ardent, fiery and lovelorn manner.  (It's the nature of the diaries which are revelatory about Warhol's love-life that channels the documentary into this narrative.)  Warhol is seen pursuing and wooing Jed Johnson, a much younger interior decorator.  After that relationship collapses, Warhol becomes involved with a young Paramount executive, Jon Gould.  (Curiously, both men were twins -- there's something a little spooky about Warhol's interest in reproducing ready-made images and his boyfriends who were, as it happened, duplicates of someone else.)  Later, he seems to have been obsessed with the young and doomed Haitian-American artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat.  The series features lots of speculation about the exact nature of these affairs but there's no doubt that the artist was intensely emotionally engaged with these men,  (Whether these amorous encounters were chaste or sexual is the subject of lots of feverish conjecture -- Warhol claimed to be asexual but whether this was true is anyone's guess.)  In any event, the film argues that Warhol's romances were fundamental to his work and central to his creativity.  This gives the film a sort of tabloid character which enhances it's interest, but, perhaps, is unfair to Warhol's work.

The documentary uses AI to simulate Warhol's voice, a bland, monotone.  (Warhol was famously swishy and, it seems, he developed a pattern of speech that was intended to disarm those who expected him to talk with overt effeminate inflections -- instead, he always sounds a little like a nonplussed public service announcement.)   Critics have railed against this computer simulation -- I don't find it offensive and, in fact, think its rather effective in conveying the essence of the man.  An artist who said he wanted to be a machine is here made to speak through a computer program, that is, a machine.  The series is flashy with lots of quick cutting, plenty of excellent disco music along with a mournful melody (harp and violin) that sounds like Erik Satie and that is deployed to represent Andy's loneliness and melancholy.  There are some soft-focus reenactments -- mostly just images of Andy played by a double reading letters or reviews or dictating his diaries.  (These reenactments seems weirdly superfluous -- Warhol documented every aspect of his life and hoarded souvenirs by the tens of thousands:  he seems to have been more photographed than Ronald Reagan and there must be millions of feet of film footage showing the man and his associates.  But, curiously, this fantastic wealth of imagery adds to Warhol's mystery -- the more pictures we see of him, the less we seem to understand his motives and personality.  Warhol is always retreating into invisibility.)  The fast-cutting is not to my taste.  Warhol is an artist and we need some time to contemplate his works -- but the movie just keeps cutting away from things we want to see more closely:  if you have a good shot of a fist stuck up someone's rectum, then, we should be given more than a second or two to enjoy the image.  In a way, the movie seems a little prudish fast forwarding through all of the debauchery when we would like the picture to linger a little to let us see what's going on.  But the documentary is generally successful and I certainly enjoyed watching it.  There's a host of talking heads ranging from Bob Colacello (who edited Warhol's magazine Interview) to Jerry Hall (she has a charming southern accent and remains vivid as a wholly depraved southern belle)  and Rob Lowe.  These scene-makers are now long-in-the-tooth but many of them are articulate, opinionated, and provide interesting perspectives on the artist.  The film is weak on Warhol's works and days prior to the inception of his diaries -- in other words, the documentary begins, as it were in media res, with Warhol already world-famous and an arbiter of taste in New York's downtown scene.  For this reason, we don't see or learn much about the Brillo Box objects or the Campbell's Soup can series -- two of the artist's most important inventions.  The early silk-screens including the work showing Jacqueline Kennedy and his "Death and Disaster" series -- car-crashes, electric chairs, and the like -- are given scant attention because this art was produced before Andy began keeping the diaries on which the documentary is based.  Furthermore, the documentary shows us almost nothing of the film projects like Empire,  Chelsea Girls and Blow-job that made Warhol famous in the world of movies.  (The documentary posits that Paul Morrissey was the director of films produced under the Warhol imprimatur during the diaries period -- something that is certainly true but that doesn't excuse the void where Warhol's film work should be.)

The fifth episode of the six part series is affecting -- the show chronicles the rise of AIDS as the gay cancer and details Jon Gould's death from that plague.  Warhol is portrayed as steadfast and loyal in this part of the series:  despite his horror of hospitals (which turned out to be prescient), Andy visits Gould every night for thirty days when he is hospitalized.  Gould succumbs, blind, scabrous, weighing only 70 pounds -- and, also, denying that he is dying from HIV.  All of this is grim material and the show's tone darkens from the 24-hour party-people aspects of the earlier episodes to a memento mori   In my view, the fifth show is probably the documentary's apogee -- that is, its most compelling and interesting episode.  However, the sixth episode is also extremely interesting, although not as emotionally gripping.  The scope of the last show in the series is expansive.  We learn about Andy's failing health, his piety, and his death at 58 as a result of medical negligence in a New York Hospital -- a gall bladder operation (cholecystectomy) is botched, Warhol is provided too much fluid, and essentially drowns.  The show doesn't end with Warhol's death but expands to comprise a sort of elegy for the New York party culture of the early and mid-80's.  The filmmakers describe Jed Johnson's death in the fiery crash of TWA 800 -- this was after Warhol was dead himself and, so, strictly speaking is irrelevant to the film.  However, the crash at sea provides an opportunity for somber sea-scapes and tearful testimony from both Smith's lover and his brother.  (They carry a cut flower to plant in the sand at the edge of the sea off Long Island.)  The broad focus, particularly after Warhol's death, suggests that the show's ambition has become epic, a kind of cultural history of New York City in the decade of the 80's.  The episode is death-haunted -- Basquiat perishes from an overdose and Keith Haring dies as well.  Oddly, the avatar of Manhattan in the early 80's is Rob Lowe, then, a beautiful boy with "eyebrows so perfect" (Andy says) that they seem to be penciled-on".  New York City, from our current perspective, is viewed as a sort of grungy lost arcadia, a vanished paradise.  The old witnesses, now debilitated by age and suffering, testify to the specious grandeur of the epoch and quarrel about Warhol's significance.  Much of the final episode is devoted to several disputes about Warhol's legacy.  Was he a great "gay artist" or, rather, simply a great artist?  That is, to what extent does Warhol represent the gay community and to what extent did he repudiate his sexuality?  Most of his elderly disciples, the people who worked with him, argue that Warhol was emotionally closeted -- he viewed himself as a pervert and would have strenuously opposed the claim that he "represented" or advocated for the gay community.  Others, however, are anxious to claim Warhol as a covert, but, nonetheless, effective exponent of gay imagery and thematic material reflecting the plight or condition of gay men in 1980's America.  This debate must be considered in the context of the larger question of whether Warhol's art has "meaning."  In the film, the crucible for this controversy is Warhol's late "Last Supper Series", a hundred of so objects and paintings in which the artist repurposes imagery from the fresco by Leonardo da Vinci.  (Characteristically, Warhol modeled his work not on Leonardo's immensely degraded actual fresco in Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, but on a cheap-looking three-dimensional model of the work that he purchased  in Times Square -- Warhol had admired the ceramic artifact in an uptown store but it was priced at $2500 and he thought that was too expensive; so he went down to the flea markets and second-hand places around 42nd Street to buy the model.)  Warhol produced the series of paintings as a commission from a gay Greek gallery-owner, a man named Iolas (he was suffering from AIDS and had to be cabbed from the hospital where he was dying to the gallery opening in Milan.)  The imagery in the Last Supper paintings assumes an eerie significance in light of Warhol's death soon after executing the works -- but it is a fallacy, of course, to impute too much meaning to canvases on the basis of the artist's death; needless to say, he didn't expect to die due to medical malpractice a few weeks after the gallery opening.  (Warhol's trip to Milan was a nightmare for him -- he was suffering from abdominal pain due to gall bladder complaints probably referable to some extent to his injuries from being shot by Valerie Solanas.  A germophobe, Warhol's diaries record that people around him in Milan were all sick and that one woman, a Italian gallery owner who appears in the series as a witness,  had the flu and repeatedly coughed in his face -- she denies that aspersion.)  The question raised by the Last Supper works is integral to all of Warhol's major paintings -- is the work intended as an expression of piety and religious aspirations toward forgiveness and sanctity?  Or is the work ironic, an example of homosexual camp in its  repurposing the kitsch ceramic model of the Last Supper?  Or is the series of paintings simply a commercial exercise, the more or less efficient and competent execution of a contractual obligation.?  In general form, these questions can be posed about all of Warhol's major works:  is he making a serious thematic point? or is he promoting a homosexual satire on straight culture? or is the work just naked commerce?  Curiously, Warhol's associates seem committed to the view that the artist's works have no thematic meaning and are simply money-making gimmicks.  One of his closest friends, Chris Makos is shown an impressive and, apparently, exemplary late Last Supper-themed canvas called "The Big C".  It's seems pretty apparent that the canvas has something to do with AIDS.  Makos denies the evidence that is directly before his eyes, saying that Andy was completing a contractual obligation when he made the painting and that he never publicly admitted to being gay and, certainly, didn't intend to produce a parable of sin, redemption and forgiveness in the context of AIDS.  He seems offended by the mere notion that the painting might have any sort of meaning.  "What does "the Big C" mean?" Makos asks.  "Well," the documentarian says, "C clearly refers to Christ and cancer, the gay cancer, as it was called."  Makos replies:  "I don't see any 'G' for "gay"?"  But the director flashes a close up of the inscription "the Big C" and we can clearly see that the "g" in "Big" is drawn emphatically and, in fact, positioned right next to the letter "C".   To an objective observer, Warhol is obviously using the painting to advance complicated ideas about AIDS, gay sexual practices (the fetishized motorcycles that dominate the picture), and the idea of redemptive suffering and forgiveness.  The fact that the point is even arguable relates to Warhol's public contention that his art was about making money and nothing more.  And this assertion is founded in Warhol's methodology, the way that he made his pictures.

The core of Warhol's artistic practice was to detach the signifier (to use the jargon au courant in the 80's) from what it signified.  Warhol's Campbell Soup cans don't reference soup but, instead, abstract ideas about art as commerce, something manufactured and, therefore, almost infinitely reproducible.  The fact that Warhol's objects are signs stripped of their significance or referent (the signified) explains the artist's feckless refusal to explain the meaning of the things he made -- Warhol simply deflected questions as to significance by saying that his art "had no meaning."  But as the series shows, people make meaning.  If you release a signifier from what it signifies, that is, cut the sign loose from its reference, the sign doesn't become meaningless -- to the contrary, the sign floats free and is liberated to reference any number of things.  Warhol's detached signifiers are alienated objects, but, perversely, only alienated from their original meaning.  His signs represent the failure of signifiers, their ambivalence, their nostalgia for concrete and fixed meaning -- if I say my art is without meaning, I am necessarily making a claim about the world; I am exhorting my viewers to consider the meaninglessness of certain modes of being.  Warhol's bland declaration that his art has no meaning, accepted at face-value by many of his disciples, is, in fact, a statement about a crisis in meaning.  

Other ambiguities in interpreting Warhol's life and work arise in the context of Pat Hackett's diaries, the source for the documentary.  Hackett appears in the documentary wearing a large crucifix and there is some surmise that she may have edited from Warhol's telephone narrative certain important things.  (The fact that the woman is wearing a large crucifix suggests that she now may be ambivalent, if not actively, hostile to much that was integral to Warhol's life-style.)  Hackett deepens the mystery by saying that Warhol often told her things with instructions to not write them down -- that is, to not transcribe them in the diaries.  Furthermore, at certain key moments in his life, Warhol says "I don't have to tell the diary about this" or "I won't mention any more to the diary."  So Warhol's carefully cultivated aura of inscrutability remains intact.  Hackett says that some things that the artist told her were just between "Andy and myself" and "I'm not going to say any more about them."  

At his funeral, the famous critic John Richardson said that Andy pretended to be a voyeur but that he was really a recording angel -- an interesting formulation in that it begs the question as to what is the difference between these two types of transcription.  (Was Hackett Andy's 'recording angel'?)  In a secular universe, where God is absent or, at least, indifferent, how is a recording angel different from some sort of voyeur?  Look at the majestic opening of Wim Wenders Himmel ueber Berlin (released in English as Wings of Desire) -- the two angels perched over the city record everything and are privy to the thoughts of all the humans swarming below, but for whom are they gathering this infinite stream of impressions, fears, and desires?  This is a question also posed by Warhol's vast body of work.

I recommend The Warhol Diaries although I think it traffics in a sort of specious Schadenfreude.  The film shows us a man who had everything -- fame, fortune, the love of beautiful objects of desire, and an immeasurable creativity.  But you, dear reader, are undoubtedly happier than he was in your prosaic, middle-class, financially constrained existence.  In your life, nothing glamorous ever happens.  But Andy's life was devoid of glamour as well, because he was sad and lonely and emotionally indifferent to the glamour with which he was surrounded.  There's something glib and meretricious, something superficial and phony at the core of the documentary, a curiously reactionary and problematic equation between Warhol's life and his art.  But, ultimately, this hollowness is central to Warhol's work as well -- it's a Pop Art sensibility, a cliche reproduced on a heroic scale like one of Andy's silk-screened celebrities or soup cans -- it's the emperor who purports to have no clothes but isn't really naked; rather he goes abroad cloaked in ambiguities, a man who has everything but really nothing at all.

At the Pittsburgh Warhol Museum, a big brooding 19th century warehouse downtown, a video feed shows Andy's grave located across the river and in the suburban hills overlooking the city.  The day that I was at the museum, it was cold and rainy and the video showed a slick-looking granite headstone glistening in the rain, a few votive offerings (notes and soup cans and a bottle of Coke -- Warhol said that "all Cokes are the same and all are good'"), an expanse of winter-killed grey brown grass.  Later that afternoon, I found the grave, a difficult exercise in the claustrophobic ravines and hollows of the west Pittsburgh suburbs.  I parked the car at the hillside cemetery but couldn't find the grave.  A man was walking a small poodle among the tombs.  The man was in his seventies, wearing a cap bearing the name of an American battleship.  No doubt the fellow was a Trump supporter.  I asked him where Warhol's grave was located.  He was happy to tell me and seemed proud that this landmark was in the cemetery where he walked his dog.  He said:  "If you look up at that pole --" and he pointed to a utility pole, "you'll see a camera.  Just follow the angle of the camera down to the ground and that's the grave.  The camera is filming Warhol's grave."  I thanked the man and his directions were accurate.  I saw the camera poised on the utility pole and followed the vector of its gaze to locate the grave -- the granite was wet with the rain and there were some votive offerings on the stone:  a few handwritten notes that the rain had rendered illegible, a trinket-shaped like a heart, a Campbell tomato soup can, and a bottle of Coca Cola.