Andy.

I LOVE ANDY WARHOL!

Okay Okay, I know I'm an art major and should be discussing more obscure artists then the ever so popular and mainstream Andy Warhol. But before everyone starts freaking out about how cliche I'm being, let me tell you a few things that I bet you didn't know about everyone's favorite artist.

Okay, so first of all, he was born in Pittsburgh, which I'm sure a lot of people know, and his birth name was Andrew Warhola. He came from a very strict Byzantine Catholic family and lived in a Czechoslovakian enclave totally shut off from the rest of the city.

He remained fairly religious, attending church on Sunday's and he lived with his mother until her death.

As a child, he was diagnosed with a skin condition called St. Vitus disease which effects the nervous system and made it painful for people to touched him. This left him bedridden for much of his childhood and his brother would bring him Campbell's soup to his bed. Foreshadowing what was to come? I think so.

All of this isolation that resulted from his disease allowed Andy to become quite the observer; you know, gave him way greater insight.

Even as a child Warhol was completely obsessed with celebrities. He wrote Shirley Temple letters over and over again until she finally sent him an autographed picture just so that he would stop writing.

Andy was obsessed with his appearance and totally superficial. He had a nose job, which was botched, and in spite of his painful disease, had his skin sanded down. He loved plastic and was not afraid to admit it. He felt no remorse for being shallow.

"I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic."

Although he was gay, he was quite asexual. He really did not have much sex which may surprise people who know the title of any of his movies such as Blow Job. The movie showed nothing except for the man's face the entire time. Here is part of it:




"Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet."

Andy was shot on June 3, 1968 by a woman name Valerie Solanas. The story had always went that Solanas had wanted Andy to produce her film, Up Your Ass, which he had refused to do because he claimed that it was basically pornographic and he would get arrested. When Solanas went to pick up her film, she claimed that Warhol had said he lost it, but she believed that he had stolen it. Therefore, she shot him.

However, in an article in last month's Interview Magazine, Margo Feiden revealed what really happened that day. Fieden was a playwrite prodigy producing her first Broadway play at the age of sixteen. Therefore it was no surprise that someone so desperate to have a play produced would go to her for help, which is exactly what Solanas did. __ came home to find her standing at her door, and eccentric that __ was, she let her in.

In the article, Feiden said that, "Valerie explained this play, this manifesto, and what she said was absolutely shocking. She had decided that the right way for society to go forward was to keep only the males who were absolutely necessary and commit genocide on the largest scale that ever could be imagined. And she said something so interesting to me . . . This was before, uh, test-tube babies . . .She said that there would come a time in our lifetimes when men would not be needed for procreation—that you could take the sperm and store it and you would never need males to be alive to contribute this. She said this will happen in our lifetimes."

Anyways, that article went on to say that Varlerie told Feiden that she was going to leave now and go shoot Andy. Valerie told her, “I’m going to shoot AndyWarhol now, because when I’m famous and when my play becomes famous, you’ll produce it.”

In any case, Valerie did end up shooting Andy. Feiden finally let this forty year old secret out because she was upset that she accused Andy of being a thief:

"...she did that shooting as a publicity stunt to be famous, so that I would produce her play. Why should Andy Warhol’s name, in any way, be sullied? Why should people think that she had any justification for what she did? He gave her none."
-Margo Fieden

Regardless, Andy was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead. Then someone in the emergency room told the doctor, "hey you gotta save this guy. He's Andy Warhol, the greatest artist of our time!" So, the doctor cracked open his chest and massaged his heart and revived him.

For the full article: http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/history-rewrite/ You should probably read it because it explains the story much more clearly than I did...even if you could completely care less, you should still read it if only for Margo's fantastical eccentric way of wording her thoughts.

People may think of Warhol, as they may think of most Pop artists, as someone who simply took an everyday object, and reproduced an image of it. But in the end, Pop Art is so much more than that. Warhol saw objects in an entirely different perspective. He realized that nothing was new, everything had already been produced. It was now his job to take something that existed, and portray it in a way never before imagined. A new view.

For example, his Marilyn Diptych is hardly just a reproduced image of the icon done in bright colors. The dyptich iself is reminiscent of his Byzantine background. If you have ever gone into a grand and ornate Byzantine cathedral, you could only imagine the great tryptich alters Warhol must have have encountered and been awestruck by as a child.