Pop Trickster Fool: Warhol Performs Naivete (review)

David Bowie sang about him even before he met him. Michigan teenagers Destroy All Monsters lived as if they were superstars in his underground films. A bookstore owner who hosted him said he was the dullest person she ever met. Andy Warhol cut a contradictory figure in society, from the Pop Art Sixties until his surprising, untimely death in 1987, cultivating a hazy naivete each step of the way. Author Kelly M. Cresap reads both Warhol's aesthetic and persona as rooted in his homosexuality, and his jester-like naivete as a well-chosen strategy for maximum freedom in a circumscribed world.

Cresap contrasts fey Warhol with the mythic macho of the New York school, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and other two-fisted action painters boozing it up and slugging it out at the Cedar Bar and other smoky, manly dives. These tough guys cast a pall on the next generation of artists: witness the trepidation and delicacy of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, gay artists only slightly older than Warhol, who kept the sissified fact that they had decorated store windows as secret as their relationship. A former commercial illustrator, Andy Warhol created his Factory studio, where he directed assistants serigraphing imagery on paper and canvas. They joined Warhol for evenings out on the town, attending parties, snapping Polaroids, shooting movie footage almost at random, projecting films behind the noisy band the Velvet Underground. Warhol's colleagues called him "Drella," a name containing his unique mix of Cinderella, awestruck at her good fortune, and Dracula, the scheming nocturnal vampire. In the musical tribute performed at Warhol's funeral, Songs for Drella, the Velvet Underground's Lou Reed and John Cale sang of his compulsive productivity.

In universities in the early 1980s, some gay and lesbian painting students (Robert Morgan at San Francisco State, among the best) depicted domestic "gay genre" scenes of themselves and their friends that no longer read as particularly transgressive. Twenty years before, Warhol created gallery pinups of macho figures such as Marlon "Wild One" Brando and the gunslinging cowboy Elvis Presley and tragically overdetermined female stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Warhol's quickly eradicated Most Wanted Men mural at the 1964 World's Fair used mug shots from the "Wanted" posters seen in post offices, and the subtext may have been that Warhol craved the bad men's passions. A near-fatal shooting in 1969 may have weaned him from dangerous company, for after that he seemed to prefer celebrities, safely illuminated by flashbulbs.

The book's least-successful chapter is a panoply of contradictory quotes on Warhol that the author calls the "Free Andy" Open Forum. Here readers are given brief items from myriad sources on aspects of Warhol's persona and career, including the artist's relationship to the artistic legacy of Marcel Duchamp. The chapter seems to aspire to be a theater piece rather than an entr'acte in this otherwise clearly argued book. To this gripe the author might reply that a lack of a centered thesis is more Warholian. What Cresap calls an "anti-cogito" locates Warhol in various currents of anti-intellectualism in American society. When I encountered The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975) in college, I was struck by its celebration of triviality and subjectivity. Why, one musters a case for or against something with evidence, not on the whims of a moody schoolgirl! To read a middle-aged artist going on like that was amazing. Meanwhile, Warhol's cool-looking Interview magazine was like a big bowl of ice cream with sprinkles, so mind-bogglingly vacant and agape that it almost gave one a headache to read it.

Cresap builds the case that the most significant historical current in which to locate Andy Warhol is that of camp—the ironic sensibility crackling through much urban gay male discourse...