University Times

Love his work or hate it; think he’s a kook or a genius (or both), Pittsburgh native Andy Warhol, nee Andrew Warhola, is undoubtedly a true American icon, one who is even more popular today than he was in his heyday as the foremost pop artist of the 1960s.

Two decades after his death, the man who made famous the quote, “Everybody will be famous for 15 minutes,” is one of the world’s top-earning dead celebrities, along with Elvis, John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe and Einstein. In certain markets, some of his artworks command a higher price than Rembrandt’s.

Warhol also is enigmatic, even contradictory, someone who courted fame and money in the extreme and created a prolific array of multi-media art works — many of them profane and some of them pornographic — while remaining a steady church-goer and volunteering in New York City soup kitchens, a Pitt author said.

In his “poetic serial portrait” of the pioneer of serial portraits, Peter Oresick lays out the essence of the myth behind the man in “Warhol-o-rama,” a collection of 53 poems conceived and executed in Warholian style.

“The rules of the game for the project were that it would be research-based and for each poem to try to illuminate a perspective of Warhol, each one slightly different. In short I wanted to create a serial portrait in verse using Warholian techniques of appropriation and repetition and parody,” said Oresick, a widely published poet who is adjunct professor of English at Pitt and coordinator of Chatham University’s master of fine arts program in creative writing.

The titles of nearly all the poems begin with “Andy Warhol for …” as in “Andy Warhol for Surrealists”; “Andy Warhol for Short Attention Spans”; “Andy Warhol for Interviewers”; “Andy Warhol for the FBI” — in deference to Warhol’s penchant for repetition and as a demonstration of Warhol’s mass appeal, superficial though it may be.

The poems are clustered in made-up Warholisms, such as WARHOLEVISION, WARHOLANOMICS, WARHOLAFATIGUE and WARHOLASTALGIA.

“The groupings move from the somewhat biographical, to the hullabaloo about him on the art scene to after his death when that kind of nostalgia sets in,” Oresick said.

“If nothing else, you have to give him some credit for creating a persona that’s a little like a trinket or ball you keep turning and it keeps changing. He’s not static. He kept changing the story. That’s the nature of pop art: Nothing lasts. And I think post-modernism is friendly to that, because we do feel fragmented,” which partly explains Warhol’s continuing popularity, he said.

Oresick caught the Warhol bug early on, right at his mother’s kitchen table.

“In grade school I read about Warhol and his soup cans in ‘My Weekly Reader.’ I used to come home for lunch and my mother would usually serve me a bologna sandwich and a bowl of Campbell’s soup,” a case of life imitating art, he said.

But what piqued Oresick’s life-long fascination with Warhol was that his mother claimed Andy was a cousin traceable to her side of the family tree from their ancestral village in the Carpathian Mountains.

“My mother compounded my sheer amazement with pop art by boasting that Warhol was po nashomu, our people — Carpatho-Russian, as we were then known. Moreover, she claimed Andy as a distant cousin,” Oresick writes in the poetry volume’s notes.

He added in this interview, “When we were watching him as we grew up, to us he was one of us, but he had this public persona that was anti-Pittsburgh, anti-ethnic, you know, he was Andy Warhol. We kept thinking, how does someone do that? How do you shed your past and create this persona and become world-famous? How can working-class ethnic people do this? Just deny it all, say you’re something else and be endlessly fascinating. It was just amazing.”

In 1995, Oresick traveled to the two villages where his ancestors had lived only to discover that the Warholas who were related to him were not Andy’s Warholas.

“The reality is these surnames that we think are unique in Pennsylvania really aren’t unique in these regions. There was no evidence of any family connection,” Oresick said.

But his interest in Warhol by that time was embedded too deeply. Following his mother’s death in 2006, Oresick launched his ambitious project: to write 100 poems in a nod to Warhol’s 1962 “100 Campbell’s Soup Cans.”

He procured permission to mine the Andy Warhol Museum’s archives for his research and immediately struck pay dirt.

“I opened one of his time capsules. The first few layers were just Julia Warhola’s, his mom’s, things and it was just like me packing up my mother’s house after her funeral: the doilies, the white linens that cover Easter baskets, all this stuff, the same stuff,” he said. “Then I found this notebook that Warhol called ‘Ideas for Paintings.’ That sounds cool, I thought. The first one was a newspaper clipping about this person dropping a watermelon out of a window and hitting her boyfriend and then she gets arrested.”

Oresick used the clipping as the basis for his first “Warhol-o-rama” poem, “Andy Warhol for Beginners.”

The time capsule also contained a personal treasure for Oresick.

There was a booklet titled “Seminary Days, 1962,” he said. Warhol’s nephew had gone to the same Byzantine Catholic seminary on the North Side that one of Oresick’s (genuine) cousins attended.

“I have this memory of my mother taking me there one Sunday. It was very hot, and on the asphalt they had this makeshift altar and they had an outdoor service. I remember sweating and not wanting to be there. And then we lined up for family pictures with my cousin.

“I looked at this book and it’s autographed: ‘To Uncle Andy from your nephew Pauly,’” Oresick said. He then spied a photo of his cousin standing next to Pauly in the photo. “I’m thinking: ‘This is weird.’ That kind of sealed the deal for me with this project,” he said.

Oresick said Warhol’s continuing presence in the public consciousness stems from a number of factors.

“One of the reasons he’s so popular today, some 22 years after his death, is that the character of Andy Warhol is absolutely iconic: It’s Mickey Mouse, it’s Elvis, it’s James Dean. It does pull to itself this moment in time of American pop art. Pop art itself is a little older than Warhol and there were other American pop artists, but somehow he’s the embodiment,” Oresick explained.

“And what is pop art if not a sampling of popular culture, a slicing and dicing and collaging of popular culture? In that sense Warhol prefigures to me what our whole post-modern experience is like. In other words, it all makes more sense to us now,” he said.

“Therefore I think we project genius onto him for being the pop artist of the ’60s who then gave it up to make films and work in other media, repeatedly re-inventing himself, and he prefigures what is so common today in post-modern culture: channel surfing among 300 channels, lack of attention, focus on the surface, obsession with what’s attractive. I think he would have loved all the new media, by the way. He’s the someone pointing the way we were going, even though we didn’t know it at the time.”

But to understand Warhol’s appeal, his religious, cultural and social background also has to be taken into account, Oresick maintained.

“Going back to our common Byzantine Catholic roots, an icon in Eastern tradition is a divine image that creates a window for you into the divine experience. We say an icon is a window to heaven. It is not representational, it is flattened, it’s elongated, it’s darkened, it’s made mysterious. It’s a mystical portal. That’s why the word really fits Warhol,” he said.

“Warhol grew up that way. If I show you the religious icons in lower Greenfield that he was looking at as a child, what’s the difference: A dozen Marys stacked, or a dozen Marilyns stacked? It’s not a creative leap if you understand his roots. I think that’s really a part of his power.”

For non-Americans, Warhol is a kind of shorthand for American culture. “I think that’s fair. But what do people know from abroad? They know the fright wig, the soup can, Marilyn, but obviously his range is really crazy. I go monthly to the Warhol Museum and they change it all the time, and you take it in and you think, what didn’t he do?” said Oresick.

“If you really study Warhol, he’s prolific beyond belief. He also delegated a lot of work, which is very controversial. Many people would say he did very little of his own work. When you say he’s such a genius, the art critic would focus on those things that are iconic, but it wasn’t hard for him to get lucky if you’re going to silkscreen every famous person that you or your buddies can think of,” he said.

“That’s what it came down to in his later years, in the 1970s and ’80s. People said he was washed up and just re-doing the same thing,” Oresick said. “He loved the factory system that allowed his assistants to execute his vision, which is a kind way to put it. In some instances I think he would have admitted that they did better than he might have done carrying that out.”

While Oresick never met Warhol, his intense research for the poetry volume left him with some sharp opinions.

“If you read the diaries, he comes across as incredibly superficial. He sounds like a gossipy teenager or an old crone. It’s celebrity driven, money driven, status driven,” Oresick said.

“So psychologically speaking, who knows? But based on the evidence in the diaries, he clearly was a needy person. He needed attention, needed to be in the limelight, showing up at 10 parties on a weekend, getting into the headlines. I think of him as being deeply unhappy. Celebrity was like a drug: What do I have to do next to get back in the headlines? His methodology of overcoming that is interesting. ‘I’m bald, I’m aging, so I’ll wear this fright wig,’” he said.

“To be generous to Warhol, he was amazingly undiscriminating about his friends and his close inner circle. Over the years, he had a range of crazies, but it was democratic. In the early years he left the door open and people could just walk in and a lot of people did. He had more than his share of leeches,” Oresick said. “But he also was extremely private and didn’t have a lot of contact even with people who were close to him. Obviously, he had attachment issues. He loved his tape recorder. He called his tape recorder his wife. He said ‘I never married until 1964 when I bought my first tape recorder.’”

Then there was Warhol’s political behavior, or lack of it. “Clearly, if you were a student leftist of any stripe in the ’60s, you would have no use for him. When everyone else was jumping on the bandwagon of the anti-war movement, he wasn’t there. I think he was fairly apolitical. I don’t have any great sense of his personal politics. In fact, he was flagrantly capitalistic during the ’70s, trying to make a gazillion dollars with his celebrity portraits and so on,” Oresick said.

Rarely, Warhol created art with a political theme, some drawn from the day’s headlines, such as the 1960s race riots.

“There were various things he painted, like a famous silkscreen of Nixon in 1972. He made Nixon green, like the Wicked Witch of the West, and it said ‘Vote McGovern’ on the bottom. But you have to look far and wide to come up with examples like that,” Oresick said.

“The other issue is his homosexuality, which very few people except maybe his family contest. He never came out to people, but he seemed obviously homosexual,” Oresick said. “Now if you read some biographies, they say he never made personal attachments, he was asexual, blah, blah, blah. But if you talk to people in the know, they say he did have a series of boyfriends and relationships. But he certainly didn’t put that out there. He was there in Manhattan when there were the Stonewall riots, so he had opportunities to make some statements and chose not to.”

Oresick composed 100 Warhol-themed poems, but he whittled the number down to 53 for the “Warhol-o-rama” volume. “As Andy said, ‘Always leave them wanting less,’” he joked.

—Peter Hart

***

Andy Warhol for Beginners

by Peter Oresick

UPI, Los Angeles, August 25, 1972—

A 29-year-old man was hospitalized

with multiple injuries today

after he was struck

A 29-year-old man was hospitalized

by a 51-pound watermelon dropped

after he was struck

from a window by his girlfriend

by a 51-pound watermelon

police said O.C. Henry was leaving

from a window by his girlfriend

his home following an argument

police said O.C. Henry was leaving

over a welfare check with Offna Jones

his home following an argument

when he heard her call

over a welfare check with Offna Jones

from an upstairs window as he looked

when he heard her call

the melon came hurtling down

from an upstairs window as he looked

Henry suffered a broken right shoulder

the melon came hurtling down

two broken ribs and other injuries

Henry suffered a broken right shoulder

the melon which survived intact

two broken ribs and other injuries

was impounded as evidence

the melon which survived intact

with multiple injuries today

was impounded as evidence.

—UPI, Los Angeles, August 25, 1972