Piss Artists 1: Andy Warhol (Piss and Oxidation Paintings)

Cover of the exhibition catalogue 

Gallerie Daniel Blau (Munich)

6 March - 13 May 1998

 

 

I. 

 

For most British people, a piss artist is one who likes to get drunk, act the fool, produce shoddy work and generally waste time. In other words, one who gets pissed a little too often; pisses around a little too much; and pisses people off more than is deemed acceptable. 

 

However, for some of us the term also triggers thoughts of Warhol, Chadwick and Serrano and here I would like to discuss a urine-stained series of works by the first of these three piss artists, Andy Warhol ...    


II.

 

In June 1979, none other than American pop artist Andy Warhol walked into 430 King's Road and purchased one of the newly designed T-shirts on sale featuring "a monochrome 1952 photographic portrait of a smiling Marilyn Monroe, with streams of urine spurting from red phalluses on the sleeves and pooling to form the words 'Piss Marilyn' across her face" [1].

 

One assumes that Warhol was amused by this punk tribute to his work by McLaren and Westwood, referencing as it did not only his famous images of the tragic Hollywood star, but also his most recent works which used urine as an artistic medium.

 

 

III. 

 

Warhol's works incorporating urine are divided into two separate categories in the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: (i) Oxidation Paintings and (ii) Piss Paintings, although both categories of work were produced in the same period (1977-1978) [2].  

 

Whilst the latter are simply primed canvases stained with urine, the former are canvases that have first been prepared with a metallic base, such as copper or gold-coloured paint, giving a far more beautiful (shimmering) effect after an assistant at the Factory has pissed on them at Warhol's direction, or once urine has been poured from a sample bottle by the artist himself.  

   

It's possible that Warhol was, on the one hand, giving a camp and gently mocking critique of Jackson Pollock [3] and the abstract expressionists who loved to splash and drip paint on to canvases with exaggerated machismo, whilst, on the other hand, producing work rooted in the gay club scene, where golden showering was almost de rigeur [4].

 

Either way, the piss and oxidation paintings represent a genuine break from his previous stuff which relyed on the transference of photographic images to canvas via silkscreening [5]. 

 

Art often involves far more hardwork - and far more suffering - than many people realise or wish to acknowledge, but it's nice to be reminded by Warhol that we can produce provocative works that rely upon bodily fluids other than blood, sweat and tears ...    

 

Notes

[1] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 427. 

      The shop at 430 King's Road was still operating as Seditionaries at this time. Warhol's visit to the store was noted in an entry dated 23 June 1979 in The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett (Warner Books, 1989). One of the Piss Marilyn shirts (sans sleeves) is in the Met Museum's Costume Institute collection: click here.

[2] Searching for a new approach via which he might reaffirm his radical credentials as an artist and counter the accusation that he was now merely a society portraitist, Warhol began working not only on his piss and oxidation paintings, but also a series of Cum Paintings for which volunteers agreed to ejaculate on to canvases. As seminal as the latter works may be, here I will only discuss the canvases that have been pissed on.  

 

[3] I don't believe Warhol was a fan of Pollock's work, but he may have enjoyed some of the stories that circulated about the latter; including, for example, that he would sometimes urinate on a canvas before giving it to a client he didn't like and allegedly pissed in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace when she requested he reduce the size of a mural he was producing for her.

[4] Warhol's homosexuality - and, at times, abstract sexuality - certainly shaped his work and he would, of course have seen how a younger generation of artists, such as Robert Mapplethorpe, weren't shy in breaking boundaries and documenting what was happening in the gay bars, underground clubs, and bathhouses at that time.   

 

[5] Of course, in Warhol's 1982 portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat, we get the best of both worlds. After taking some Polaroids of the much younger artist, Warhol then silkscreened an image of Basquiat's face on to a canvas coated with copper paint, before then pissed on it and allowing the uric acid to discolour the metal, creating pretty patterns of rust, black and green. It's the only known portrait exceuted by Warhol in the oxidation style and sold in 2021, at Christie's New York, for $40 million.   

 

 

To read the second post in this series - on Helen Chadwick's Piss Flowers (1992) - please click here. 

 

To read the third post in this series - on Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987) - please click here.

Banksy

Banksy: Girl with Balloon (London, 2002) 

 

(Note the chalked message on the wall; if that doesn't make you want to 

vomit, pop the balloon and shoot the artist, I don't know what would.)

 

 

I. 

 

There's a rather poignant moment in his interview with the Sex Pistols when Bill Grundy mourns the passing of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Brahms. Classical composers mocked by Rotten as wonderful people whom, as Steve Jones reminds us, are long since dead [1]. 

 

It's as if Grundy realises that his time too is over and that the world he knows and loves - in which the majority shared his values and musical preferences - is coming to an end. 

 

Strangely, I felt something similar when I recently discovered that Britain's favourite artwork (according to a poll of 2,000 people conducted in 2017) is Girl with Balloon (2002) by Banksy ... 

 

Turner, Constable, Blake and Bacon have all died and no longer turn anybody on it seems, apart from a few old farts, myself included, and it's just our tough shit if tastes have changed and people now want banal (because immediately accessible) images and naive political clichés - which, let's be honest, is mostly what Banksy trades in - instead of complex, challenging works.

 

 

II. 

 

Now, just to be clear, I've nothing against a former public school boy making millions from the art world with his (sometimes amusing) stencilled designs whilst posing as part cultural prankster, part urban guerilla. And if people want to regard him as a folk hero and put his prints on their walls, that's fine by me. 

 

But, having said that, I do tend to agree with Alexander Adams, who argues that when one compares Banksy with, for example, Jean-Michel Basquiat - "another artist who started in the streets and moved to art galleries" - we soon discover the former's limitations: 

 

"Basquiat's art is alive because we see the artist changing his mind, discovering, adapting and revising. We see the art as it is being made. While Basquiat's art is palpably alive, Banksy's is dead - it is simply the transcription of a witty pre-designed image in a novel placement. There is no ambiguity or doubt, no possibility of misinterpretation. There's no fire and no excitement." [2]

 

Ultimately, concludes Adams - himself an artist, as well as a critic and poet - "Basquiat's art is so much richer and more inventive than Banksy's, which by contrast seems painfully limited and shallow" [3].

 

I'm not sure I agree, however, that a century from now people will still be viewing Basquiat and will have forgotten Banksy. And, as regular readers of Torpedo the Ark might appreciate, I have a lot of problems with several of the terms used here:   

 

"Banksy lacks most of the characteristics of a serious artist: originality, complexity, universality, ambiguity, depth and insight into human nature and the world generally." [4]

 

Indeed, reading this almost makes me want to embrace Banksy and tell Adams to keep his opinions to himself. 

 

One also wonders if Adams isn't just a tad jealous of an artist who, like Damien Hirst, has achieved such astonishing fame and fortune (speaking personally, I know that I would love to wield even a fraction of Banksy's influence over the popular imagination and envy both his talent for graphic design and flair for self-promotion).   

 

But, then, just when I'm starting to feel a certain fondness and admiration for Banksy, I think again of the above image and its message of hope and realise that Adams is right to ultimately brand him nothing but a "cosy culture warrior and peddler of pedestrian homilies" [5].     

 

Notes

 

[1] Bill Grundy's infamous interview with the Sex Pistols on the Today programme took place on 1 December, 1976: click here to relive the moment on YouTube - one which is as significant and as memorable for those of the punk generation as the Kennedy assassination was for those who witnessed events in Dallas on 22 November, 1963.

 

[2] Alexander Adams, 'Banksy and the triumph of banality', essay in The Critic (Jan 2020): click here to read online. Adams is quoting here from an earlier article of his which appeared on the Spiked website comparing Banksy and Basquiat.   

 

[3-5] Ibid. 

 

 

On Black Dandyism (With Reference to the Case of Jean-Michel Basquiat)

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 - 1988) 

The New York Times Magazine (10 Feb 1985)

"Being a black man", says Ekow Eshun, "means being subject to the white gaze". 

But if that means becoming an object of prejudice, suspicion and negative stereotype, so also does it mean becoming an object of fascination and, indeed, admiration. Certainly when it comes to the crucial question of style, it would simply be churlish to deny that many black men possess it to a high degree and fully understand its importance as a politics of resistance.

Indeed, without wishing to appear full of self-loathing or a sense of racial inferiority, I know exactly what Adam Ant means in Kings of the Wild Frontier when he says that for those of us with pale skin - even when we're healthy and our colour schemes delight - down below our dandy clothes we remain a shade too white.        

And so, whilst there are plenty of good-looking, very elegantly dressed white men in the world, the dandyism of the black man always seems to have something extra; to be that bit sexier and more provocative; to be invested with attitude (which is why the idea of a black actor playing James Bond isn't as outlandish as some suggest - it could only add a certain frisson to the character). 

This is exemplified in the above photo of Jean-Michel Basquiat on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in 1985; arguably the greatest artist of the late-twentieth century, he was certainly the most fashionable.

Pictured here in one of the Armani suits in which he loved to work, Basquiat knows that dandyism is, at its most interesting, not merely a method of flaunting one's individual beauty, but of flouting social conventions governing ideas of class, race, gender and sexuality; a means of saying fuck me and fuck you at one and the same time. 

To be clear: it's not what he's wearing, but how he's wearing it that matters; with barefoot insouciance, completely unconcerned about the fact that the expensive suit is paint-spattered (for he knows he still looks clean) and "confounding expectations about how black men should look or carry themselves in order to establish a place of personal freedom: a place beyond the white gaze, where the black body is a site of liberation rather than oppression" ...

In other words, black styles matter ...

See: Ekow Eshun, 'The subversive power of the black dandy', The Guardian, (04 July 2016): click here to read online. 

See also: Shantrelle P. Lewis, 'Black Dandyism is Back, and It's Both Oppositional Fashion and Therapy at Once', How We Get to Next (30 Sept 2016): click here. 

To read The New York Times Magazine feature on Basquiat, 'New Art, New Money', by Cathleen McGuigan, click here.  

Note: the first large-scale exhibition in the UK of the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat is currently showing at the Barbican (London) and runs until 28 Jan 2018: click here for details.