The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

"My version of Warhol is very different from others’. So often he is seen as the artist most at ease with the iconicity of celebrities and products, and with the image-world of consumer society at large. I focus instead on how distressed his works are. They show how difficult it is to project an image and sustain a brand, no matter who you are – star, criminal or average Joe. My work on Warhol looks to the complexity of his work rather than to its superficiality. There are many layers to Warhol so I don’t stop at the surface, even though his most famous line – from this book and other statements – declaims that he is all surface and there is nothing behind the surface. In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol he adopts the persona of idiot savant . He says idiotic things that are weirdly deep. For example, at one point he ponders death for a moment and then asks, “How can any of us know what it is? We are the last people to know about death because we never experience it as such.” He was shot in 1968 by a crazed hanger-on at his studio and almost died. When he came out of his coma he thought he was watching his own funeral on television in his hospital room. It turned out to be the funeral of Bobby Kennedy, who was shot a couple of days after Warhol. This prompts an extraordinary meditation on mortality, perhaps the grandest subject of philosophy, even though Warhol says he has absolutely nothing to say about it."

"In the history of inkblots, the experiment of Hermann Rorschach [1884-1922] is the most famous moment: a controversial attempt to establish a scientific personality assessment based on ten standard Rorschach inkblots. Then comes Andy Warhol, who in the 1980s reconnects inkblots with the art that came before. He did these huge, very sexual, strange, hieratic paintings which he called ‘Rorschach Paintings’ – although they were, in fact, entirely of his own invention. At the opening a journalist asked him what they meant and Warhol – in that amazing, neutral, “I’m a mirror” way of his– said, “Oh, I made a mistake, I got that wrong. I thought the idea was that you make your own inkblots and the psychiatrist interprets them. If I’d known, I’d just have copied the originals!” Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Partly because of his idea of an artist – in this case, an abstract artist – in an age of mass reproduction. He was a great believer in the American Dream. It didn’t matter who you were, you could still drink the same Coca-Cola or eat the same hamburger as Jackie O., say, so there was something very utopian about his images of iconic consumer objects , of which the Rorschach Test was one by then. Yes. Well, Warhol is also a very extreme example of what can happen to the self in a consumer culture. He can’t stand anything as direct, or messy, as emotional intimacy, or even sex really. Like Oscar Wilde , but even more so, he rejects nature, only accepts the artificial, worships technology, and is amazingly complexed about the body: I mean, talking about sex he makes Philip Larkin look like a love machine. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I think so. Warhol said he didn’t know if he was capable of love, but that he stopped even thinking in terms of it when he got his first tape recorder. Instead of having relationships, he’d just go round interviewing people. When he talks about anyone, it’s always in terms of their problems ; it’s the beginning of confessional as well as celebrity culture, of reality TV. It’s all in this line of his – When people are talking to me, I don’t know, and they themselves don’t know, if they’re performing or if they’re being authentic."