Andy Warhol/John McKinnon—going full circle

"I am a deeply superficial person."

- Andy Warhol

John McKinnon, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Milwaukee Art Museum, spoke last Thursday at Lawrence University about the recent MAM exhibit "Andy Warhol: The Last Decade," which featured works made by Warhol between 1977 and his death in 1987.

Unfortunately, I did not see the exhibit while it was showing at MAM so I am reticent to offer too much commentary on the work, but others have said that McKinnon's slideshow followed the works in the exhibit almost verbatim. McKinnnon's dry, unengaging lecture did little to convey the importance of this show, the first American museum exhibit to examine this era of Warhol's oeuvre as a whole. Many 0f the points made were pretty basic romantic clichés about artists' twilight years (e.g. "He became fascinated with his own mortality," "He turned back towards his Catholic faith for inspiration," etc.), that I felt warranted a deeper exploration than McKinnon offered.

What interested me the most about the works in the presentation were the growing importance of materials in some of these final Warhol works. McKinnon discussed the infamous "urine paintings", which explored the ways in which human urine affected copper paint and created unpredictable, organic patterns on their canvases. Warhol also created a series of Rorschach test-style inkblot paintings, some on enormous canvasses, in which the final result of the creative process was largely unpredictable.

This artistic approach stands in glaring contrast to the mass-producible silk-screening processes used in Warhol's Factory to create the Soup Cans and Marilyn Monroes that made him famous in the 1960's. Each of the works is completely unique and nonrepresentational, depicting nothing other than the processes used to create them.

What does it mean when an artist who embraced hyper-representationism as an aesthetic turns to aleatoric process-driven abstraction late in life? I see this as Warhol's way of going full-circle. If things get representational enough, they become abstract, and if things get abstract enough, they start to represent themselves more purely than works tainted with any hint of representation. As a proto-media artist, Warhol embraced the superficiality of a culture obsessed with images of its celebrities or heads of state from the other side of the world and made these ultimately empty images the central subjects of his work. Substituting inkblots or urine for these images isn't really such a fundamental change. What I take most from Warhol's work—especially after considering these late abstract works—is that the Marilyns aren't really Marilyns and the Soup Cans weren't really soup cans. The Marilyns are silkscreen ink on canvas and the piss on a canvas is piss on a canvas.

Deeply superficial, huh? Whoa.

Images:
Warhol, Self-Portrait (Strangulation), 1978. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, ten parts, 16 x 13 in.

Warhol, Oxidation Painting, 1978. Copper metallic pigment and urine on canvas.