A squid to remember

[sdcrdcf!stephen@LOCUS.UCLA.EDU]

The 1960's showed a peculiar acceptance of numerous bizarre
enthusiasms, for reasons which do not necessarily relate accurately to
their actual implications.  Pop art attracted a raft of trends: art of
the people, anti-Academicism, neo-Dada and other doctrines which
sought to explain public response to visual images fashioned from the
hitherto ignored commercial disintegration of our society.

So why did Andy Warhol, no more or less serious an artist than
Lichtenstein, say, or Rosenquist, seize the public imagination so
completely?  Because he was, first and foremost, an entertainer.  He
quietly produced images of what middle-America liked, Campbell soup
for instance, in the middle of a cast of characters whose extreme
enthusiams accurately reflected, as extremes will, the unexpressed
urges of more inhibited normal people.  In his book of reminicences,
Popism, he revealed that his apparently effortless trendiness was a
result of a carefully cultivated attitude of complete passivity.  He
recognized from in the center of an unpredictable tangle of crazy
activity the current of excitement in the drug-oriented Bohemia of the
1960s.  By a simple exercise of logic, he realised that such a crowd
could assume a mystique.  He took them to parties and they all became
famous.  Sure enough, each revelation of a novel audacity emanating
from the Warhol factory (drugs, transvestism, homosexuality,
lesbianism, sadism) was greeted with such horror by the establishment
that their teenage children could hardly be expected to do otherwise
than greet them as enjoyable revolutionary events.

The band he sponsored, The Velvet Underground, responded to the 60s
need for the bizarre by extending their allusions to the kinkier forms
of sex and drugs.  They attracted both those in search of "degeneracy"
and those who genuinely shared such obsessions.  Venus in Furs and All
Tomorrows Parties became the classics in this genre.  The Velvets
spawned a whole sub-culture of imitators revelling in urban alienation
and a feeling of being misunderstood.  The kinkiness of Lou Reed and
John Cale, drug habits, and an egotism hinting at serious poetic
tastes (Reed was a disciple of Delmore Schwartz, Cale a student of
John Cage), reveal the confused but brilliant characters suggested by
the perverse masks.  Heroin, the Velvets most famous song, is
recognizable as autobiography only once its mythic thrust is overcome.
 This creation of pop archetypes is the great contribution of Warhol
to modern life.  The Velvets made their debut album under the seal of
a Warhol cover design: the famous peel-off banana which revealed -- a banana.


Andy Warhol
1928-1987
A hero to squids of all ages
RIP


--------

b. head