Warhol, Punk, Postmodernism, and Magic

Finished reading Gary Indiana’s book, Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World (Basic Books, 2010) and feel a whole lot smarter (whether or not that's the case, Indiana certainly did all he could do) Wonderfully written, mordantly funny, it’s crammed with insights on every topic it treats: not only Warhol and the Factory, but modern art, underground film, and postwar American history and culture. “The single most devastating lesson of the late 1960s and early 1970s was that progressive institutional change in American society would not be permitted to happen”--think about that one, and you’ll start to see the cultural landscape of 1960s music, film, and literature differently, as well as discern some links between art and politics that you might have missed.  

I was especially struck by Indiana’s observations on Warhol’s celebrity artist-persona, as a means to “[indict] boredom, apathy, emotional emptiness, partial autism, and ugliness by exhibiting those negative qualities in his own persona.” In this respect, Warhol also provided a blueprint for 70s punk rock, with its various devices for confronting aspects of a world that you feared, despised, or wished to change.

The result of Warhol, and punk rock’s, sophisticated play with personae was mostly an absence or lack: the glamorizing of blankness. Indiana realizes that a large part of Warhol’s legacy was the flattening of culture, remarking that the artist “functioned as one of the progenitors of a corporate monoculture and greatly assisted the liquidation of the double culture of below versus above.” The world that Warhol envisioned, that he gestured toward, would eventually replace the one the world that pre-existed his art work. The blank persona began as a mode of critique, but the world did the unexpected, and became the critique.

Was the ascent of postmodernism what Warhol and the punks had in mind with their cultivated acts of negation? My sense is that something more ancient, and more ritualistic, was going on: an attempt to embody evil, with a mind to capturing, and thereby controlling, it. Both Warhol and the punks utilized strategies that resembled magical or occult thinking. These modern magic acts, however, seem prompted by the utopian wish to imagine art, to quote Indiana, “absent the brutal realities of capitalism.”  

Maybe it’s not that Warhol, and punk rock, created postmodernism, but that the failure of their various ritual practices brought postmodern culture in its wake.