Visualizing Death

Andy Warhol, Orange Car Crash (5 Deaths 11 Times in Orange) (Orange Disaster), 1963 

 It is as a further result of his ability to travel in the supernatural worlds and to see the superhuman beings (gods, demons, spirits of the dead, etc.) that the shaman has been able to contribute decisively to the knowledge of death. In all probability many features of "funerary geography," as well as some themes of the mythology of death, are the result of the ecstatic experiences of shamans. The lands that the shaman sees and the personages that he meets during his ecstatic journeys in the beyond are minutely described by the shaman himself, during or after his trance. The unknown and terrifying world of death assumes form, is organized in accordance with particular patterns; finally it displays a structure and, in course of time, becomes familiar and acceptable. In turn, the supernatural inhabitants of the world of death become visible; they show a form, display a personality, even a biography. Little by little the world of the dead becomes knowable, and death itself is evaluated primarily as a rite of passage to a spiritual mode of being. In the last analysis, the accounts of the shamans' ecstatic journeys contribute to "spiritualizing" the world of the dead, at the same time that they enrich it with wondrous forms and figures.

—Mircea Eliade, Shamanism

With Warhol, we encounter the radical de-spiritualization of death, its banalization. The flat orange background showing through the transparent photographic reproductions arrests attention on the surface: the painting is formally and connotatively superficial. Repetition transforms the image into visual noise.

The genius of Warhol was to have intuited that the profanation of the world facilitated by photography and its mechanical reproduction is best conveyed by reproducing reproduction. To the extent that one can find elegance, if not beauty, in Warhol's work, it derives from his having discovered the perfect means to frame banality, to make modern vacuity palpable.

In a descralized world,

the sacred persists, tenuously, under the guise of the aesthetic. Therefore, the work of sacralizing the world becomes an effort to aestheticize it. Paradoxically, this is why the banal comes to dominate art from Dada onwards. A great deal of what seems like provocation (anti-art) is a test of art’s sacralizing capability, that is to say, a test of art's ability to aesthetically redeem the most abject material. The artists themselves may not understand what they are doing. Very often they pose as nihilists eager to wallow in degradation (Duchamp, Warhol, et al). The discourse of “appropriation” is fixated on the destruction of aesthetic hierarchies (high and low, art and nonart) because this covers up an otherwise inadmissible (unmodern) nostalgia for the transcendent. But appropriation is at bottom a last-resort form of aestheticization, its limit. That is the real meaning of the readymade: at once an abject surrender to the banal and a last-ditch attempt to dignify it. So the readymade becomes, effectively, the closest postmodern analogue to the sacred object.

Duchamp had shown the way,

but his readymades remained for a long time encapsulated and quarantined within the transgressive aura of Dada. With Warhol, the integration of the artist into the market becomes overt: "Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art." From this point on, the untenable model of the avant-garde artist operating on or outside the margins of society survives only in fantasy. The critics, rightly fearing that in the age of Pop, their hieratic expertise was becoming irrelevant, did their best to ironicize Warhol's perfectly explicit celebration of crass consumerism. Intuitively (and unintellectually) understanding the logic of commodity fetishism, he produced work whose allure proceeded directly from its vacuity, which became something like an aesthetic singularity drawing in the attention of legions of hipsters eager to display their exceptional acuity.

Photography had threatened to make even the most uncommon objects common, at least as representations. Warhol turned this photographic devaluation of the uncommon on its head. He was able to turn the most debased photographic representations into objects of uncommon consumption. Cans of soup, bottles of Coke, the over-familiar image of Marilyn, all these and others became superlative luxury items via the performative magic of Factory appropriation.

Warhol was famous for saying that he made a painting of Coca-Cola bottles because the popular drink was something that he and the queen could equally enjoy. What he left unsaid was that after the transformation of Coke into Coke Art, only royalty could afford the latter. High and low, art and groceries, remained as far apart as ever but the cultural elite could now enjoy a new commodity called irony.