andy warhol a biography (wayne koestenbaum)

Wayne Koestenbaum’s biography of Warhol is an incisive account which blends fact and theory. As well as recounting the Warhol story from childhood though to untimely death, the author also explores the logic and inspiration behind the creative work of an artist almost as famous for being famous as he was for his art. The art was received in his lifetime as something between genius and kitsch, with no-one all that certain which was which. I wonder if Warhol’s fame is quite what it was when I was growing up. Warhol, both the name and the work, was an omnipresent point of reference in the late twentieth century, in part because of his association with some of the most cultish pop stars in the universe, in part because his art had an iconoclastic freshness. It feels as though the likes of Koons, Hirst, Emin and Holzer have to a certain extent displaced his position within the zeitgeist, just as they are waiting to be replaced now.

Koestenbaum’s biography is so telling because it takes the reader back to the work itself, both pinpointing why it was so radical and also offering an artistic vindication of the pieces. He notes how Warhol’s sensibility reflected the gay NY world he inhabited as a young man when homosexuality was still a crime, a locus where “rigorous conceptual artists, (were) pioneers in understanding how perverse sexuality interrupts the distinction between public and private space.” Warhol’s private/public working space, The Factory, emerged from this consciousness, a place where the outrageous could flower in private, where societal norms and aesthetic criteria could be reinvented. Koestenbaum is also great on the way that Warhol’s fascination with fame was paradoxical: “His goal was to make everyone famous—the creed of “Commonism”; a Foucaultian recognition of the previously repressed role of narcissism in the human psyche which now blooms in the world of Instagram. These days anyone can put a filter on their portraits, following in the footsteps of Warhol, the first person to really grasp the iconic power of distortion, reframing and idealisation in the age of mechanical (later digital) reproduction.

One can’t help thinking there ought to be a play about Warhol and Foucault hanging out together in a NY sauna, because Koestenbaum’s text highlights the way in which the artist was a visionary whose sexuality was fundamental to his ability to reimagine the world, as was perhaps the case with Foucault. There’s also a lovely moment where the book notes a connection between Warhol and George Grosz, who voted to include the young artist’s work in an exhibition. The links between Warhol’s portraits and Grosz’s caricatures seem retrospectively obvious, both using human features to comment on the socially determined vanity of the human species.