ANDY WARHOL'S PHILOSOPHY
No moral,aestheti,or metaphysical issue is more important for Warhol than the question of how to get rid of pimples."If someone asked me,"What's your problem?",he tells us,"I'd have to say,'Skin."And he's right,of course.Everything that matters is already out there,right on the surface."Don't think,but look!" as Wittgenstein said.Faced with trauma of an acne outburst,or with the heartbreak of psoriasis,I must learn not to bother with searching out deep structures and root causes.For such disorders can only be treated topically and symptomatically:that is to say,only on the level of surfaces and effects.It's impossible to dig down to the origin;the best solutions for skin problems are always aesthetic or cosmetic ones.As my trusty old Home Medical Guide puts it:"Since the cause of acne is frequently misunderstood,the 'victim' may be accused of being responsible for his or her condition.Parents often blame their youngsters for eating too much junk food,eating too little,eating too much,not washing properly,not getting enough sleep,sleeping too much,being obsessed with the opposite sex,having no interest in the opposite sex,ad infinitum.
The truth is,none of these things has anything to do with acne,and if there is any 'blame' attached to the disorder,it may well belong to the parents' genes...No exact cause is known."Parents are all too likely to read acne as a sign of deviance:of not being properly heterosexual,most likely.But a careful,patient attention to image and surfaces undoes all such imputations of guilt.As Nietzsche says in a similar contex,"that no one is any longer made accountable..this alone is the great liberation-thus aloneis the innocence of becoming restored."Warhol scrupulously abstains from pejorative judgments:"It's so nice,whetever it is.I approve of what everybody does:"it must be right because somebody said it was right.I wouldn't judge anybody."Instead,he dispenses expert advice on skin care "I dunk a Johnson and Johnson cotton ball into Johnson and Johnson rubbing alcohol
and rub the cotton ball against the pimple.
"Or again:"if you have a pimple,put on the pimple cream in a way that will make it really stand out."Or yet again:"Haven't you heard about those ladies who take young guys to the theater and jerk them off so that they can put it all over their face?...It sort ot pulls it tighter and makes them younger for the evening."If one remedy doesn't work,then simply try another.In the end,Warhol says,"I've never met a person couldn't call a beaty.Each person has beaty at some point in their lifetime."
Warhol,too,shows us how to "have done with the judgment of God";but in a fat gentler manner than Nietzsche or Artaund.
I suppose that's why it's no big deal than he went to church every Sunday.For Warhol has none of the anxieties that plagued his great Modernist forbears,none of their transgressive urges or buried ressentiment.Why worry,if nothing is true,and everything is permitted?Lacan says somewhere that the real formula of atheism is not,'God is dead,'but rather,'God is unconscious.'If that is os,then Warhol--whatever his private observances--was undoubtedly the least pious of men.When everything's just an image,there's no Symbolic Order left to transgress.And that goes not only for God,but for all the other fetishes of modernist faith as well:sex,money,and politics.They all come down to appearances,and nothing but appearances.Sometimes a penis is just a penis,is what Freud ought to have said.Think of it not as Phallus,but as a convenient dispenser of facial cream.Castration is a matter merely of local and passing significance.The organ is nothing in itsel;it's all a question of how you use it.An where are as many different idea of love,"Warhol writes."One girl I know said,'I knew he loved me when he didn't come in my mouth.”
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