So, once again the SS Tate Modern sails for a new challenge, and this time the iceberg it has hit is Andy Warhol. The question is, will it sink?
There is no doubt that Andy Warhol is one of the twentieth century's legends. He is one of those artists everybody feels that they know, in a pithy sort of way, like everybody "knowing" Diana, Princess of Wales. And I'm sure Mr Warhol would like the comparison, as Tate Modern's Warhol gives an insight into this complex man that just knowing that he did some pictures of soup tins could not show. The Tate has flexed its mighty artistic muscle to gather together a collection that spans Warhol's career, from his early pencil sketches until his final retrospectives. When seen as one lifespan, the works force you to rethink the "usual" impressions of this great artist.
Everybody gibbers about Warhol being obsessed with image, and obsessed with fame. It's a statement about as profound as saying that he liked paint. Fame does not include a picture of Coke bottles, or row after row of dollar bills. Fame does not even incorporate soup cans. Seeing a greater range of the work in one place, together with a few select quotations, shows Warhol as a man obsessed with possessive symbolism. He said that his favourite image of the USA was the Coke bottle, as everyone drinks Coke. "The President drinks Coke," he said (though presumably he now chews it first). Coke was wonderful because "it doesn't matter how much money you have, the Coke you buy is no better than the one the bum on the corner has." And there's the rub. Warhol was not interested in the fact that the bum is like the President- he was interested in the way the President is like the bum. A type, a paragon, a symbol. Warhol's repeated images stretch out like hieroglyphics (and I think it's no accident that he paints Elizabeth Taylor in her role as Cleopatra) across the walls, named only by single words: Liz, Elvis, Marlon, Marilyn. Like the Coke or the all-pervading dollar, these can be anybody's. Anyone can possess these symbols - they have ceased to be people. When someone in 1960s America said "Marilyn", nobody asked "which one?" Everybody felt they "knew" her, "understood" her. Owned her.
Works like the experimental film Empire highlight the extent to which America was dominated by the symbol - the Empire State Building is filmed as one shot, for an hour, confronting the viewer with time. The building cannot be contained as an image because one aspect is changing, and the result is an awkward experience - you sit and want stuff to happen because the film is too real. Warhol shows his viewers that they are guilty of dragging reality down into bite-sized chunks: he does not raise soup tins to the level of "Art", but yanks "Art" down to the level of soup tins. These laments for a world that no longer contains unique and complex life is summed up in Thirty are better than one, where 30 Mona Lisas smile down at the viewer.
Fame interested Warhol, certainly, but death interested him more. From pictures of suicides to the late Skulls series and his self-portraits, mortality is never far away. The image exists as a half-hearted afterlife, living on as a picture, recycled into the American psyche. This is the art of the dying American dream: anyone can grow up to see their picture on everyone's wall, then die and have existed only as those pictures. The late paintings show this most clearly; the subversion of Da Vinci's Last Supper peels the image from the action, showing how the message of the doomed Jesus is lost if the image gets filed under "ordinary", unconsidered as anything more than a picture, you know the one, with Jesus doing "the big arms thing" (and no, Eddie Izzard doesn't know that I stole that description from him). The late art, in the Camouflage, Oxidation and Shadows series, defies being made into an image - they are big, awkward, maybe slightly ugly. One must investigate the pictures, not pack them away in some subconscious national memory bank.
Warhol, as has often been said, is a great democratic artist. Although he sometimes deeply regrets the repetition of images, he also loves it. This is why he is a great artist, capable of playing the insider looking out from and the outsider looking in at America in the latter half of the twentieth century. In his Cow Wallpaper, a work aimed at bringing the pastoral back into art, Warhol shows the lighter side of the image making machinery of his time. Tate Modern has devoted an entire room to this work, as it was displayed back in 1966, as they have done with Silver Clouds, next door. The Clouds are arguably the most uplifting of all Warhol's output. Truly disposable art from a time when such a concept was completely new, they are silver pillow-shaped balloons filled with helium. Warhol recommended launching them out of windows, but the Tate just has them floating around in a room. And everybody plays with them. Warhol's "death of painting" art, art for the (then new) TV generation, still appeals: it is easy to see that the artist is asking questions involving phrases like "lowest common denominator" and "not having to think" of his "democratic" art.
Warhol is a show you ought to see, given the chance. Andy Warhol himself gets too easily pigeonholed, defined, "understood", and thus, ignored. Given his subject matter, this is almost comical - an artist who, more than anyone, realises how the public boil away layers of meaning until they find universal simplicity has fallen victim to it himself. Go see Warhol, and do this complex, intelligent, vaguely morbid man justice.
Warhol is at Tate Modern until 1 April 2002. Tickets are £10, £8 concessions. Tickets can be bought at the gallery, or book online at www.tate.org.uk or call Tate Ticketing at 020 7887 8888.
Steve Penn's other art reviews are listed on the main reviews page.
