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.

Passion Ends in Fashion: Notes on SEX

 

Malcolm outside his notorious boutique 

at 430 King's Road (1976)

 

 

I. 

 

When it comes to the band's name, there's an argument to be made that the Sex Pistols should have been stylised as the SEX Pistols, thereby emphasising the fact that their origins lay in the shop at 430 King's Road and Malcolm's penchant for the kinkier aspects of sexual activity and experience.

 

For Malcolm, as for Foucault, sex is best understood not as a natural function, nor as something to be scientifically studied in order to discover an essential truth about human identity, but, rather, as a sophisticated ars erotica - i.e., a form of pleasure which needs to be creatively cultivated and via which the subject might, in fact, lose (or reinvent) themselves. 

 

And for Malcolm, sex always needed to be thought in relation to two other terms beginning with the letter S: style and subversion (i.e., fashion and politics). Add these three elements together et voila! you produce a pair of bondage trousers.      

 

 

II.

 

McLaren's store at 430 King's Road - run in collaboration with his partner Vivienne Westwood - underwent a series of radical transformations and name changes during its history. 

 

It originally opened (in 1971) as the Teddy boy hang out Let It Rock, before then briefly becoming Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die (1973-74), selling a range of fashions for rockers who preferred to wear black leather jackets and biker boots, rather than drape jackets and blue suede shoes.   

 

In December 1976, the shop was reinvented as Seditionaries and it continued trading under that name until September 1980. As Seditionaries, the boutique adopted a brutalist aesthetic and attitude and stocked the clothes that are now considered the epitome of punk fashion (and sell for thousands of pounds at auction).  

 

In late 1980, the store was relaunched under the name World's End and resembled - as per Malcolm's design instructions - a cross between an 18th-century galleon and the Olde Curiosity Shoppe; punks had been superseded by pirates, Apaches, and buffalo gals. 

 

Each of these shops has a unique fascination and history and each has secured a place in the pop cultural imagination. But, for me, it is Sex that continues to most excite my interest ...

 

 

III.   

 

Quickly bored even with his own projects and uncomfortable with the idea of commercial success, in the spring of 1974, McLaren radically refurbished 430 King's Road and rebranded the shop as Sex: '"That is the one thing that scares the English. They are all afraid of that word.'" [1]

 

The façade included a 4-foot sign of pink foam rubber letters spelling out the new name in capitals. The walls of the interior of the boutique were also lined with pinkish foam rubber and covered with graffitied lines taken from erotic literature and Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto (1967). Latex curtains, red carpeting, and various sexual paraphernalia used decoratively helped to create the sleazy (somewhat intimidating) look of an authentic sex shop.

 

Sex sold fetish and bondage gear supplied by existing specialist labels, as well as designs by McLaren and Westwood which were intended to be provocative rather than seductive. These included T-shirts printed with images of a nude adolescent smoking a cigarette; homosexual cowboys, bare female breasts; and - perhaps most notoriously - a leather mask of the kind worn by the Cambridge Rapist. 

 

Lines taken from pornographic texts were also often added to the designs, as were various Situationist slogans from May '68 - Sous les pavés, le plage, etc. - and references to some of Malcolm's heroes, such as the playwright Joe Orton.    

 

Pamela Rooke - known as Jordan - was hired as a sales assistant and quickly became the shop's face. 

 

In fact, Jordan embodied the spirit of the store better than anyone; better than the extraordinary clientele (which included members of the Bromley Contingent as well as the newsreader Reggie Bosanquet); better than members of the band; better even than Malcolm and Vivienne (though it can't be denied how great the latter also looked wearing her own designs) [2].  

 

Sex was far removed from the retro-revivalism of Let It Rock - although arguably Too Fast To Live possessed some of the same sense of danger and fetishistic appeal - and the customers who hung out at Sex were not the ageing Teddy boys who had so quickly bored and disappointed McLaren. They were, as mentioned, kids who had come out of glam and liked to dress up to mess up and weren't shy about challenging sexual and social conventions.

 

Paul Gorman provides an excellent summary:

 

"As an environmental installation, Sex was sensational; it literally assaulted the senses. The hectoring tone of the scawls on the 'soft' madhouse walls, the heavy jersey of the T-shirts showing severe images and text in queasy colours, the lack of natural light which produced a dull shine on the clinical black rubber garments and the powdery looking drapes, the clammy atmosphere, the 1960s garage-punk blasting from the BAL-AMi, all combined to make the experience unsettling, commanding commitment - a big Sex word - on the part of the visitor. When the door was closed, one felt less like a customer than a client entering a well-appointed dungeon, particularly when coolly appraised by the stern-faced Westwood." [3]  

 

Sex was, thus, a truly magical space aligned with McLaren's own artistic, sexual, and political obsessions. Whilst a million miles away from being what we now term a safe space inhabited by those who describe themselves as woke, it neverthless demanded that customers one day wake up and realise which side of the bed they were lying on [4].

Photo by David Dagley taken inside Sex in 1976 featuring (from L-R):

Steve Jones, Unknown, Alan Jones, Chrissie Hynde, Jordan, & Vivienne Westwood

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Malcolm McLaren, quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, (Constable, 2020), p. 220.

 

[2] As Paul Gorman notes, in 1975, aged 34, Westwood "cut a stunning figure stalking the streets of west and central London, with her shock of blonde hair complemented by such Sex designs as rubber knickers and stockings and a porn T-shirt or a studded Venus top". See The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 251.

 

[3] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 226. 

 

[4] I'm referring here to the famous T-shirt conceived by Bernie Rhodes and known (by its abbreviated title) as 'You're Gonna Wake Up'. See the post published on Torpedo the Ark on 16 Dec 2012 on the political importance of making lists: click here.    

Reflections on a Photo of Two Young Punks

Debbie Juvenile and Tracie  O'Keefe
(Seditionaries 1977) 

There are two reasons why I like this photograph ...

Firstly, there are the clothes: McLaren and Westwood's idiosyncratic designs looked fucking amazing back then and they look even more astonishing now. One forgets just how romantic and swashbuckling punk fashion was - and just how queer (using that word in its fullest sense, to mean strange and outlandish as well as sexually deviant in some manner). It was never really a style that came from the streets; it came, rather, from the extraordinary imaginations of Malcolm and Vivienne and made very little sense outside of the world of 430, Kings Road. Clothes for heroes - and clothes for weirdos.         

Secondly, there are the two girls: Debbie Juvenile and Tracie O'Keefe.* They seem unable to contain their pride and joy at looking so fabulous as they pose for the camera lens and actively transform themselves into an image. The fact that each is smiling - such a rare thing for a punk to do - provides the picture with a warmth and a charm that makes me love it and love them.   

If they look so young, it's because they were so young. And their youth - the freshness of faces, the whiteness of hands - also illuminates the image and arouses great affection in me (almost a kind of tenderness). But what gives it a special poignancy is the distressing knowledge that both girls are no longer living.

I look at this photo and see two lovely - if unconventional - young women, dressed in their punk finery; they would appear to have their whole lives ahead of them. But in the back of my mind is the thought: they are going to die ... This, of course, is the challenge and the scandal of every photo. Indeed, it might even be said death is the very essence of photography; that every snap is to some degree or other mortifying: A second of your life ruined for life.

However, as Roland Barthes points out, the photograph also powerfully attests to presence and to the reality of lives that have been. It doesn't merely remind us of the past, or preserve what was abolished by the passing of time. It forms an actual bridge between ourselves and the dead. Thus, you look at Debbie and Tracie and - although they are no longer physically with us - they manage nevertheless to affect those of us who are still here in the flesh; not as ghosts, but as tiny suns that continue to shine long after they have burned out.

To paraphrase Susan Sontag, the presence of the absent being touches me like the delayed rays of a fading star.


Notes

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, (Hill and Wang, 1981).

*Both girls were early fans of the Sex Pistols and part of the so-called Bromley Contingent; both worked as sales assistants at Seditionaries; and both were arrested during the Sex Pistols' Jubilee gig on a Thames riverboat. Tracie, however, was the only one to be given a prison sentence (for assaulting a policeman), although she was later acquitted on appeal. Shockingy, she died the following year, from cancer, aged 18.

As for Debbie, she embodied the look and spirit of punk: it was Debbie who sold programmes on the Anarchy in the UK tour and it was Debbie who can be seen singing backing vocals on stage with the Sex Pistols auditioning for a new frontman in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. Post-punk, she apparently drifted into the world of vice. Then she simply disappeared and is presumed dead.  

On the Ecstasy of Forms: A Note on Punk Fashion and the Sex Pistols as Pure Event

Vivienne wearing a Seditionaries Destroy shirt  

as designed by herself and Malcolm (1977)

For me, the reason that the punk fashions created by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood still astonish and disconcert is because they perfectly illustrate what Baudrillard terms the ecstasy of forms. That is to say, a phenomenon in which objects are seduced by their own self-enchantment and run wild according to an anarchic (and often ironic) kind of logic beyond aesthetics, politics, or morality.

The above shirt, for example, modelled here by Westwood, is one that invites but paradoxically resists any formulation or judgement, becoming a fascinatingly ambiguous garment worn at the wearers' own risk. For who who can predict how it will be perceived by those who are confronted by it and how they'll react: with laughter ... confusion ... violence?

It's obviously offensive. But no one can quite say how, why or to whom it's offensive. It's inexplicably provocative, just as other designs - such as the bare tits t-shirt - are inexplicably obscene. Ultimately, zips, straps, swastikas, safety pins, sex organs, postage stamps, inverted crosses and slogans from May '68, don't convey anything; those who foolishly look for the meaning of punk are wasting their time.

They have failed, as Baudrillard would say, to grasp the fact that punk fashion "expresses a situation in which people no longer even believe in signs as a real difference but are playing at difference", just as they are playing with identity and gender.

The queerness - and the energy - of these (empty) forms seems to come from our culture, our history, our reality, but at the same time provide an escape from such. Which is why the Sex Pistols were an event, rather than just another boring rock band; they came like a fatality, without explanation or cause, and remain an event that no one has been able to rationalise or fully exploit and from which it's impossible to conclude anything.

As it said on the front of the tour bus, the Sex Pistols were going nowhere - but they were going nowhere fast. For punk was an accelerated moment, a pure speed, not a progressive movement leading us by the hand into a rosy future: there was No Future and so, ultimately, they could only succeed by imploding (Baudrillard speaks of events absorbing their own continuity), leaving no trace apart from the secondary effect of parody which occupied the space they left behind.

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'Dropping Out of History' and 'Catastrophic, but Not Serious', interviews in The Disappearance of Culture, ed. Richard G. Smith and David B. Clarke, (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 36-45 and 46-65. The line quoted is from the latter interview, with Robert M. Maniquis (55), but I have utilised Baudrillard's thinking throughout the post.