Hello everyone,
The Andy Warhol show at the Musée des beaux arts got me to thinking about lots of things; and I’m going to say something about how it reflected on Eric Simon’s show at Division Gallery for me, but first I’ll make a few more general points. About the idea of uniqueness: Warhol philosophically identified uniqueness in the most existential possible sense with fame and that of particular individuals; but at the same time, much of his art seeks to erase the putative boundary between the real and the fake or duplicate. The more I parse the sense of this idea, the more it uncannily seems to lead to a series of thoughts about the nature of art and it’s impact on us.
It would seem that a painting with three images of Elvis overlapping each other conforms to the Structuralist belief that system, and not phenomenological individuality, is the paramount clue relevant to our understanding of the world; and also to identify with (perhaps to prompt?) the further and related Deconstructionist notion that every point contains it’s counterpoint, every argument (including the one making it?) its disproof. But in the first place, to be able to present this position, which concludes by suggesting that the idea of individuality obliterate itself, the argument must be buttressed against a wall of immovable individual stuff, if it can be said to even be capable of argument, much less of correctness.
Bizarrely, Warhol’s paintings seem to know all this. And another thing. The idea of the artist or the lover as mirror that Pops up everywhere in the show (and Warhol generally) reminds me of Hamlet and his “mirror up to nature”, which seems (to me at least) to draw a helpful analogy between Drella and the Prince of Denmark (hear me out). We never really know whether or not Hamlet is delusional, more or less because he’s too smart to pin down: same with Warhol, he can’t be trapped. It doesn’t matter if he made the Brillo Boxes by hand, and it does, but it doesn’t… so does it? Yes and therefore no and vice versa. Why can’t he act? But he does: it’s just that when he acts nothing happens, or what happens doesn’t definitively change anything. Is he a machine? Hamlet wrote to Ophelia and said of himself “While this machine is to him”, referring to his mind; Warhol, we can say, mirrored this attitude without question. His method in interviews, like Bob Dylan’s, was profoundly Hamletian. How pregnant his empty replies sometimes were. I’ll move on.
Elvis and Marilyn were presumably gifted in unique ways; to present multiple images of them as the point, the art content, of a painting is both to affirm that uniqueness, and to reverse the point by framing individuality as a thing impossible to perceive through the senses. Which one is real? OK fine, none are… even the real ones! A particular image of them is materially unique though, at least as an object; including the images of them created by themselves, by their actual bodies. Warhol seems to be leading us to the following insight: to make an image is already to duplicate it, if we can presume that something like it exists as an idea in the mind of the artist, before it actually appears in our visible world (which echoes, but reverses the polarities in terms of approval, the Platonic theory of Ideal Forms). There are even more esoteric interpretive possibilities here.
But, the artist’s mind is an illusion of stability and differentiation in the first place. In ‘reality’ (maybe) it’s a fragment of code. But then, reality really must be stable in the end – we can at least say ‘it’s this’ if ‘that’ is true. But no, we can’t trust our objectivity, even when we’re thrown back onto the last possibility of knowing anything. We can’t trust trust (a poignant notion applied to the collapsing securities market). Which brings me at last to Eric, who I feel is a profoundly Warholian artist. I’ve said that Eric has all his life explored different styles; but his way of doing so, I believe, is his style. The structure of art practice itself, and a given quanta of traits, are the point, the content of Eric’s work, along with the images’ ‘meaning’; this seems like an authentic duplication to me, by Eric of Andy, in performing this operation, this hiding in the open of philosophical questioning. The answer is the question. And since any argument does pragmatically constitute a truth claim after all, so does this. So, to conclude for now, it seems to me that Warhol has had a major influence on us all in the art world and beyond, and in particular, Eric Simon is a true son and protegee of Andy, in the best sense.
