Page 37 - Studio Internationa - March 1971

3 Andy Warhol he is picturesque and colourful and completely
Self-Portrait cipher-like as a presence. Everything about him
1964 suggests a fantastic and grotesque caricature of
Polymer silk-
screened on the celebrity type, as opposed to a living,
canvas 4 panels, breathing being. He is a muffled institution, a
each 20 X 22 in. walking conundrum, an untouchable. Whenever
Coll : Mr and
Mrs Barron, he appears, it is as if he is accompanied by a
Detroit physical vacuum.
If Warhol is the man who defines himself—as
much as the term can ever be applied to him—as
the person who likes everything, Reinhardt
announces that he is the man who likes nothing.
Reinhardt is less famous than Warhol; in fact,
he claimed that he was the only unacceptable
abstract artist around. Author of several
almost non-stop monologues, he drones on,
dedicatedly negative: 'anti-anti-art,
non-non-art, non-expressionist, non-imagist,
non-primitivist, ... non-objective,
non-subjective, non-romantic, non-naturalist,
non-nationalist, ... non-super-naturalist,
non-sub-human ... non-vitalist, non-violence,
non-organic ... non-decorative... anti-chance,
... anti-brute, junk, pop-folk art,
non-ready-made, non-entertainment,
non-commercial... etc.' On the contrary, if one
can ever call such a contrary figure positive, this
is how he defines his objectives : `aestheticist,
negativist, intellectual, cold, conscious, empty,
dull, sterile, monotonous, meaningless,
repetitious, extremist, rigid, formal ...formless,
timeless, spaceless, lightless, colourless...
perfectionist, puritannical, mandarinist,
byzantinist, classicist, ... iconoclast,
transcendant.' One almost gets the impression
that Reinhardt, if he be transcendant, is so
should be able to do all my paintings for me. I instant, indiscriminate gratification in the things because he cancels out everything worldly, that
haven't been able to make every image clear and and baubles in the world; these are allusions he wants to portray himself as someone not of
simple and the same as the first one. I think it which have been dimly acknowledged, yet this earth. For a man so ostensibly devoted to
would be so great if more people took up pervasively felt in the popular reception of his silence, to affectlessness, this deluge of words
silkscreens so that no one would know whether art. In a large sense, he has become famous would seem inappropriate—if they did not also
my picture was mine or somebody else's.' because in his art and his life he symbolizes the level out into a kind of lovely spite—the calling
What conclusions might be drawn ? For overthrow of the Protestant ethic—in terms forth of a plague on all houses, on all
Warhol, to be a professional artist is to be far understood by all: its Western time neurosis, meaning-mongering. He reminds you of
more obvious, more corny and tasteless, but its lack of charity towards others, its awe of Stendhal's remark that 'speech was given to
also, more impersonal than a commercial one ! property and ownership, its worship of the man so that he could conceal his thought'.
(Something comparable happens in the individual, of the original, and its manipulating, Warhol refuses to be understood by accepting
mentality of Roy Lichtenstein.) Warhol draws spoliating attack on naturalness. everything; Reinhardt rejects interpretation by
the furthest implications of commercial art to But there is a true ambivalence in the despising everything, or more precisely, the
their logical consequences—something from phenomenon of his notoriety. For Warhol is not insatiable quest for content in itself. In the end,
which the commercial artists themselves shy so much a culture hero, like the American the supreme indifference of the one artist tends
away in horror. For they long for the 'creative' con-man or crook, but a freak. In some respects, to equal the supreme contempt of the other.
as he longs for the 'uncreative.' And yet, he to accord fame is also to project derision, But Reinhardt does not abandon the idea of
knows that this is a fantasy, from which no lack hostility, to separate from the mass of his fellow an existent value, he merely claims that he alone
of commitment will deliver him. He therefore human beings an individual whose life now is in possession of it, and that it defies any
dedicates himself to the flight from becomes the woeful, wretched object of every attempt to break it down into analysable parts :
responsibility, and to say that he would like to voyeuristic impulse of humanity. And Warhol, `There is just one image, one imagelessness, one
bring everyone along with him is to say through his very contradictions, his sensational plane, one depth, one flatness, one colour,
something significant also, about his wide neutralism, makes himself vulnerable, and lives one colourlessness, one light, one space, one
appeal, or rather, his fame. in a dangerous zone where he can get shot. No time, one timelessness.' The important thing to
If art is a ritualization of wish and desire, one can tell whether he is young or old, male or notice in this rhetoric is that the actual nouns,
then Warhol purveys, actually, a vision of female, wise or innocent. His masterpiece is his repeated in contradictory pairs, make it
infinite beauty (though not necessarily in his persona which floats disquietingly, without any impossible to determine what Reinhardt is
work)—the descent into a passivity so absolute density of character whatsoever. Like Oscar saying. He wants to be nothing all at once. It's
that the individual's subjective will quite Wilde, he can say that he puts his talent into his the articles, and pre-fixes, the 'antis,' the 'nons',
vanishes away with his moral conscience. To be art, but his genius into his life. He is an the 'ones', which reiterate his meaning, and
exorcised of our guilt in not working, to find enthusiast, and practically uncommunicative; provide the constant. Also to be observed is that
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