BRIAN APPEL

John LeKay: Can you please tell me about the first time you saw an Andy Warhol painting and the kind of impact it had on you?

Brian Appel: I'm from Winnipeg, Canada, so there wasn't a lot of opportunity to see 'actual' Warhol paintings when I was growing up.  Seeing copies of the images -- whether in print or on television didn't really have an impact on me.  The first time I really got an opportunity to meditate on Warhol was in art school in the early 70s when I was introduced to CHELSEA GIRLS.  It had a seismic effect on me.  I saw it back to back with Michael Snow's WAVELENGTH.  Seeing those movies in my own home town, in the format it was intended by the artists shook me to the core.  It was the first time that I was really challenged by any picture-making process.  I got instantly that Warhol and Snow were was up more than just depicting things.  It was my first experience with the 'avant-garde'.
 

JL: What exactly was it about Warhols work that you felt challenged by his picture making process?

Brian Appel: Warhol was the first artist in my memory to make pictures from pre-existing pictures that came out of the modern media culture.  A painting from a photograph of a supermarket soup can is still seen by the vast majority of 'art-loving enthusiasts' as incomprehensible.  Fifty years after this image was created, museum-goers find this work fiercely out of whack from expectations of what should be seen in a public institution devoted to the housing of the nation's finest cultural treasures.  Getting it 'exactly wrong' in terms of just about every aspect of fine-art image-making including choice of subject matter, the factory-like multiple aspect of production, and the recipe and application of materials were all politically and morally addressed to challenge previously accepted artistic activity.  It was an orgy of anarchy! 

 

1) Andy is looking at the world through a set of eyes that is not typically "male".  Traditional film is heterosexual.  Warhol is so-o-o not typically hetero.  But, at the same time he is neither typically gay.  Warhol's sexual gaze is homoerotic, but not in the way that suggests he wants to engage in any physical act.  It's a homosexualized gaze -- but it's primarily voyeuristic.  You get the feeling he'd rather watch than participate.  There is never any 'climax' in a Warhol movie -- they just go on forever.

 2) Watching Warhol using any medium is always a hybrid experience.  When you are watching his films you feel a painterly sensation as much as you do grain and edits and close-ups and tracking shots and all the other elements of film language.  He purposely s-l-o-w-s down the filming process by shooting fewer frames per second which kind of functions to distance the viewer slightly -- like you were looking through a translucent screen or experiencing his world on a mind-altering drug.  You are often looking at vast amounts of information presented in 'real time' -- no cutting to the action -- the narrative unfolds with the most banal and the most dramatic information presented as if equal in value.  

 3) There is no such thing as typical time duration in a Warhol film.  They can be 2 minutes or six hours.

 4) The main action in a Warhol film can be off-camera.  You 'know' what's going on but it's outside the frame (Blow-Job).

 5) Warhol is a 'democratic' film-maker.  He'll shoot a speed-freak street person with the same loving gaze as a celebrity artist or movie star.

 

JL: A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos — at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power,

Warhol said " I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and the soup can was it".

Would you consider Warhols work to be nihilistic?

Brian Appel:  Absolutely not.  Andy loved life.  He would work all day and then go out all night because he was so interested in people and the things they dreamed up. 

 

JL: Where do you think this came out of? 

Brian Appel:  Andy always played with interviewers who were searching for the answers.  He was b-o-r-e-d with academics and intellectuals -- he thought they were pretentious.  Andy would often say things to upset people or play them so they would get emotional.  Nothing made Andy happier than to see someone confused or shocked -- he loved to watch the unpredictable and besides he understood that being controversial made excellent press -- and excellent press brought home the bacon.   Playing the idiot savant / stupid was his specialty -- it would disarm people and make them put down their guard.  He was a creative psychoanalyst prodding the interviewer as much as the interviewer was prodding him. 

JL: Was it the time, his philosophy in general or do you believe he had other beliefs? 

Brian Appel: Warhol was very complex.  He was really out there but at the same time he was extremely conservative.  He bought real estate when he got his first big payday as a commercial illustrator.  Andy went to church at least once a week.  He volunteered in soup kitchens.  He gave a lot of money to charity.  The Andy Warhol Foundation still gives millions to not just artists but to victims of Katrina, etc.
 

 

JL.  Andy said  An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he – for some reason – thinks it would be a good idea to give them.   Do you think this statement is true and what are your thoughts on this? 

Brian Appel:  Andy was, if anything a good reader of the unconscious needs and conscious needs of his audience.  He would 'borrow' images from the mainstream and re-introduce them to his audience in a way that would force them to look at it twice.  He always pulled the 'right' images out of the mix.  He was one of the first to understand what America did best.  Americans kill more, fuck more and buy more than anybody on the planet.  He loved America -- its good, it's bad and it's ugly.  His re-visitation of soup cans, car crashes, the electric chair, America's film stars, guns, knives, crosses, the front pages of newspaper tabloids, the dollar sign, the camouflage motif, 10 most wanted pictures, the Empire State building, The Statue of Liberty, Presidents, President's widows, political figures, animals, race riots and Christmas decorations are as quintessentially American as you can get.  The best thing was he depicted these things in a way that allowed the viewer to look at it as either a homage or a criticism -- Warhol provided both audiences with what they wanted. 
 

JL: He also said:  Paintings are too hard. The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine, wouldn't you?   I want everybody to think alike. I think everybody should be a machine.

Brian Appel:  Paintings are too hard.  Ha, ha, ha.  That's why Andy was the most prolific painter of the 20th century.  He ALWAYS painted different versions of the same painting... different colored backgrounds, different scale, and he always underpainted and over-painted under and over the silk-screens.  If you look at a Warhol painting through a computer image (JPEG) or on television or in a magazine or a newspaper you will never 'get' a Warhol painting.  His paintings are layered and extremely painterly.  Warhol was a closet Abstract-Expressionist.  Yes... his paintings were instantly recognizable.  The silk-screen rendering from a photograph made them easy to read - like the largest type on the front page of the newspaper -- RACE SLAY TEENAGER GETS 5-TO-15 YEARS -- but look again -- if you are standing in front of it, one-on-one, it will move in and out -- back to front -- the lines and colors are out-of-registration and your retina gets a work-out!  Even his black and white graphic images are illusionary -- when you get up close it's like looking at a Franz Kline!  He loved de Kooning!  He worshipped Pollock's drips!  Andy's Shadow paintings, Rorschachs, Camouflages, Piss paintings were all unique -- as one-of-a-kind as any Hans Hofmann or Helen Frankenthaler.  He used the silkscreen as abase line and layered the guitars and the drums and the harmonica on top.  200 people can have a MAO painting -- but everyone of those MAO paintings has their own unique painting.   It's like living in a luxury condo.  Everyone is in the same prestigious building but everyone has their own unique view - their own unique layout.

 

JL: What is that about a particular artist that maintains their market value or appreciates in value where in most cases this does not happen?

Brian Appel: The TRUE artist is an individual who creates works that call into question the most fundamental underlying systems of language employed historically by that medium.  They are often hybrids that blurr the boundaries of traditional efforts.  The innovative artist will often be initially seen as a 'prankster' or a 'demented idiot' because of the flaunting of those pre-existing rules or baselines that curators and art historians have been worshipping for years.   Additionally, and this is key -- there is still something very compelling about the work formally that makes people still want to put it up on their walls or install it in their spaces.  You will find that often the first people to embrace brilliant 'avant-garde' work are art students who tend to mention the artist's name in reverential terms or start to emulate them..  These innovators have a very long shadow in terms of influence. 

 Great artists instill their aesthetic, philosophic and political leanings into the veins of their viewers and traces show up later -- eventually ending up on television, on the backs of models in fashion shows, in the windows of upscale department/specialty stores, on the pages of comic books, newspapers, advertisements, in movies, in dreams and ultimately as patterns on dinnerware.  We are talking one percent of one percent of one percent of all artists here -- looking at it another way -- you've got Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp now -- in the 50s it was Marlon Brando and James Dean or the female equivalent.
 

 

JL: Who's work do you feel will still be popular in 30 years from now?

 

Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Andreas Gursky, Richard Prince, Thomas Struth, Cindy Sherman, Robert Frank, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, Clifford Still, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Gerhardt Richter, Alexander Calder, Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cy Twombly, Christopher Wool, Thomas Ruff, Walker Evans, Richard Avedon, Alfred Stieglitz, Garry Winogrand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Mapplethorpe, Weegee, August Sander, Elizabeth Peyton, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Karen Kilimnik, Berndt & Hilla Becher, Louise Lawler, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Carl Andre, Robert Mangold, Dan Flavin, Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko, Pablo Picasso.
 

For more writing by Brian Appel please visit

www.artcritical.com/archivebyauthor.htm#appel