Warhol_Teuber

Warhol's "Saturday Disaster"** Commentary by Andreas Teuber

Imagine yourself to be in Andy Warhol's shoes.

Imagine you are standing before a blank canvas.

Imagine you are Warhol before "Saturday Disaster."

Warhol before his Warhol.

What was he thinking before he made "Saturday Disaster"?

If we start with Andy Warhol rather than the Warhol, because, certainly, before "Saturday Disaster" there was Warhol, we may have heard him say, I am quoting Warhol now:

"I like things to be exactly the same over and over again."

Look at the painting: what do you see?

The same thing again, no? the same thing twice.

A disaster? Doubled.

A double-disaster.

A news photo of a tangle of machinery, of arms and legs, repeated, stacked one above the other or one below the other, depending on how you look at it,in black and white.

The painting declares itself to be a painting of a disaster.

A "Saturday Disaster."

But the disaster it depicts pre-dates the painting, having appeared earlier in a newspaper account.

But there, there it is in the painting, no?

Or is it?

What is Warhol's "Saturday Disaster" a painting of?

What is it about? What does it mean?

Ordinarily for a thing to mean something, to be about something, it has to point away from itself to something outside it.

The belief that the capitol of France is Paris is about something because it directs us away from itself something else, to Paris and the capitol of France.

A table is not about anything.

A table is a table is a table.

Warhol's portrait of a disaster remains in a stubborn grip of its subject, putting the very thing it purports to represent into the picture, putting the very "disaster" it purports to re-present into its representation of it.

Come back to Warhol, to being Warhol before the Warhol

Warhol: "I like things to be exactly the same over and over again."

And look at the painting, again.

And now come back to Warhol, again:

"I do not want it to be essentially the same. I want it to be exactly the same."

"Exactly?"

To which Warhol says: "yes . . . exactly the same."

"But, but," you may wonder, "why want THAT?"

To which Warhol gives the answer:

"I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away. . ."

. . . which may prompt you to wonder all the more. ..

To which Warhol (again) will say:

"If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and at me and there I am. There's nothing behind it."