Ground control

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Paul Sietsema

I HAD NOT YET TAKEN MY FIRST PICTURE WHEN A STRANGE, low-flying object glided ominously over my family's suburban house. I was in my front yard trying to figure out which plant or shrub or pet to immortalize when the object, a large, bright yellow, near-perfect triangle, passed silently overhead. I craned my neck to see the bottom of the gargantuan shape forty or so feet above, I tightly gripped the camera, with one finger on the shutter button. Only later did I realize I could have taken a picture of the strange craft and thus proved its existence to all those who doubted my story.

It was my first camera. The plastic-bodied and plastic-lensed 35 mm model had come free as a promotion, with a bucket of fried chicken. I don't recall what I took pictures of or even if I took any pictures at all, but I do remember that in 1975 the camera was for me an object of fantasy, the artsy equivalent of Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum. I'd seen numbers of guns on television and in the movies and glamorous depictions of cameras being used as well--but when it came to cameras, I had no idea what their ultimate function was: I made no connection between the images I was surrounded by daily and the object I held in front of me.

Ten years later, shortly before taking my first and only photography class, I remember seeing an episode of The Love Boat in which a strange man with spiky white hair burst into the dining area of the Pacific Princess with a group of followers, all of them snapping pictures of each other and everything around them, the photographic equivalent of a massacre. Despite his curious physical appearance, Andy Warhol came across as stilted and pedestrian, especially compared with the actors I was used to seeing on the show. I could tell, though, that this group of people lived in a special world. Photography seemed an essential activity for them, like breathing, eating, and sleeping. The camera in Warhol's hands seemed to be his center of gravity.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I still had no idea what kind of an artist Warhol was, and only a vague idea that contemporary artists existed at all, when his newly published Diaries began to appear on the bedside tables of nearly all my friends' parents. That was 1989. I had, of course, seen Warhol's sage appearances on MTV several years earlier, but to me these cameos made him look more like a postapocalyptic Mister Rogers than an important artist.

Not that I really knew what an important artist was. For many years a Picasso print of brightly colored abstracted flowers hung in my mother's house--chosen for its sunny disposition and how well it matched that of the kitchen. Given the context, there was little chance of my spotting the avant-garde underpinnings of Picasso's work. Because it preceded my exposure to contemporary art, this image, and to some extent Picasso in general, will forever bring to mind the smell of food being prepared and the sound of dishes being washed.

Generally, I think subjects of history are transformed into or eventually reborn as functional objects, tools for different types of intellectual or actual commerce. The more such commerce multiplies, the more the subject is obscured or blurred, emptied out (becoming the historical equivalent of a cliche). This certainly seems true of Warhol. His project has been described and explained so many times, put to so many uses, as to make Warhol himself hard to see. (Although I am not convinced that this type of diffraction was not part of his plan in the first place. It is in fact the reflexive nature of the relationship between his early work, when his own experimentation at a kind of emptying out of media subjects was the product of a homespun media machine made up of his paintings and films, and his later career, when he himself was a common subject of the mainstream media, that helped spur my interest in Warhol as a subject.)

My recent project Empire, 2002, has been misunderstood as an homage to Warhol, when, in fact, the use of the title (Warhol's affiliation with the word "empire" was only one of many I was interested in) and some aspects of his aesthetic could probably best be described as incidental. It was mainly Warhol's status as "historical cliche," along with his ability (owing to the various contexts the artist's particular historicization activates) to materialize a system of social, cultural, and artistic aesthetics occurring at a particular point in history (1964, the year in which a particular photograph of Clement Greenberg's apartment was taken, the date of Warhol's Empire, and the point at which the possibility of an "avant-garde" was lost completely), that led me to want to make Warhol and his ideas, his project, part of my project. But by the time Empire was nearing completion, there was a peak of interest in Warhol, which had the effect of perceptually moving him to the foreground even though I intended him to be a little less visible, to blend in a bit more, to be one of many similarly weighted references.