Views of "Pop Life"

Damien Hirst Andy Warhol Tracey Emin Takashi Murakami Keith Haring Jeff Koons Martin Kippenberger Fernand Leger

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Andy Warhol was a Buddha on the make. By combining detachment with hustle, he embraced the world of things and brought the curtain down on what was left of the aesthetic distinction between high and low. The label on the soup can still said Campbell’s, but the man who took over the brand did not sell in supermarkets.

For Warhol, the mechanisms of production needed to be in motion. If a little was good, more was much better. Multiple Marilyns topped one, and multiple electric chairs took up more space in the memory bank.

What mattered to him was a conveyor-belt version of flow. In his 1975 book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), he articulated his idea of the zone:

"When you see each other and you don’t even lose a beat, that’s when it’s best. You don’t say, 'What have you been doing?' — you don’t try to catch up. Maybe you mention that you’re on your way to 8th street to get a frozen custard and maybe they mention which movie they’re on their way to see, but that’s it. Just a casual check-in. very light, cool, off-hand, very American. Nobody’s fazed, nobody’s thrown out of time, nobody gets hysterical, nobody loses a beat. That’s when it’s good. And then when somebody asks you whatever happened to so-and-so you just say, 'Yes, I saw him having a malted on 53rd street.' Just play it all on one level, like everything was yesterday."

Like a water bug, he rode the surface, and yet his work has depths only infrequently guessed at during his lifetime — and then mostly by other artists.

In any case, he lived long enough to dispute his own version of events. After being shot in 1968, he wasn’t the same person whose blithe grace turned consumerism into art. He no longer aspired to be pure camera. His wide angle was gone, along with his tolerant love of the rich, witty, beautiful, and (above all) famous. After 1968, he brooded over the bent world and looked backward. He tapped into the tragedy of existence with late self-portraits that rest on the eroded edge of his days.

"Pop Life: Art in a Material World" opens at the Tate Modern on October 1 after an economic collapse that rivals the Great Depression’s. Warhol’s observation that "good business is the best art" is no longer easy to swallow.

Literalists may demure, but Warhol’s work has a face value that constantly changes its face. What he learned in the shoe trade and what he grasped from Duchamp he brought to bear on the continuous creation of his public personality, his evolving interest in publishing, and his determination to rework, plunder, and/or self-mythologize his earlier hits — sequels he titled Retrospectives and Reversals, which are in this show.

Former Interview editor and Warhol booster Bob Colacello wrote in his 1990 book Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up:

"Andy swung to the other extreme with his next big series of paintings [after the Shadow series]: the Retrospectives and Reversals of 1979. like the aging Giorgio de Chirico, [Warhol] plundered his own past, cynically dragging out his old silkscreens from the sixties — a nightmare every Warhol collector had always feared. Then he inked the Soupcans, Marilyns, Electric Chairs, and so on across the canvases prepainted by mop, some in combinations of various famous images (Retrospectives), others in negative of their famous originals (Reversals)."

"Pop Life" begins with late Warhol but doesn’t linger there. It gets its traction from artists who came after, including Jeff Koons, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Martin Kippenberger, Takashi Murakami, and Richard Prince.  They’re a roundup of usual suspects, but still worth every inch of the space they command.

In an interview in the 1997 TV series American Visions, a hostile Robert Hughes was unable to dent Jeff Koons’s implacable serenity. Hughes possessed superior rhetorical skills, a mastery of fact, and shrewd surmise as well as an ability to bully. Koons was beaming not because he’d had a lobotomy but because Hughes couldn’t touch him where he lives. Koons produces the most dazzling banalities on the face of the earth, wrapped in simpering slogans from the American self-help movement. Hughes was offended. In being offended, he bought into a binary concept he did not realize was in play: a bag of sweets vs. a cranky critic with a wobbly chin.