Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

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Olivia D. Laurel

 

Julia Zay

 

Fashioning the Body

 

2 November 2007

 

Andy Warhol’s Most Wanted Men

 

 

 

Andy Warhol created the mural ‘The 13 Most Wanted Men’ for the New York City World’s Fair in 1964.  He could have stuck to making a mural of Campbell’s soup labels, but instead he used his artwork as an agency to make a political statement. This political statement however was made up of many different components. I feel he wasn’t trying to make just one bold statement; he was speaking to his audience on various different levels of politics.  I would like to share each observation I found to show his possible motives for this particular art piece, and in doing that I have decided to use the texts of Michel Foucault and Mary Douglas to support my thoughts and ideas in this matter.

            Looking at his past art pieces like Electric Chair, Green Burning Car, and 129 Die in Jet, to name a few, he loved shock value in his work (Sanders 35-38).  He seemed to be driven through tragedy.  This behavior might have been sparked when his father passed away from peritonitis when he was a young boy in 1941(Greenberg 12).  It was tradition in the church for his family to hold a wake for three days in the home.  Having the dead body of his father lay in the house devastated him so much that he would refuse to come out of his room and would hide underneath the bed until the wake was over (11).  Years

 

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later as an adult, when President Kennedy was shot and killed in 1963, he was inspired to do a whole series on  Jackie Kennedy called ‘Twelve Jackies’ with photographs showing 

the expressions on her face coping with the trauma of her husband’s death (Sanders 126).  Warhol did the same thing when Marilyn Monroe died.  He was motivated through tragedy and as a result it created shock value to his art.  The tragedies portrayed stirred up many emotions within his audience on each of his art pieces.  ‘The 13 Most Wanted Men’ stirred up anger amongst the World’s Fair officials because Warhol was instructed to take the mural down within 24 hours from when it was put up on the state building.  His reaction to this rejection was quite rebellious and gutsy because he proposed that he substituted the criminals’ faces to a repetition of ferociously smiling faces of the World’s Fair president Robert Moses who made the decision to take the mural down (Greenberg 70).  He was rejected with this idea as well.  So the mural was just covered in silver paint.

Mary Douglas writes in her book The Two Bodies, “The human body is always treated as an image of society and …there can be no natural way of considering the body that does not involves at the same time a social dimension” (79).  Every person creates an image to society, and when Andy Warhol used criminals in this mural, it created a shocking reality of what an image could look like amongst the people of New York City.  Most of these men were murderers from New York and from an Italian descent.  As we know, at this time in history, there were many Italians coming to America, and there was a big rise in crime associated with the Mafia. When Warhol showcased these wanted men on a 20x20 foot mural and grouped them together as a collective, it created a whole new

 

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meaning of what social dimension can look like.  They were each labeled a criminal before the mural existed, but coming together as ‘The 13 Most Wanted Men’ gave this

piece so much more power for his audience to see.  It was as if he multiplied the fear 13 fold, and created a new gang of power.

Andy Warhol also took the time to invest in these bodies and placed them strategically on the mural.  He clumped them together, left spaces, and also used patterns with it.  He turned these men into objects of knowledge.  Michel Foucault states in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, “One would be concerned with the ‘body politic’, as a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge” (102).  Warhol used these bodies as tools to display knowledge of a harsh reality.  With this utility, he was able to communicate to his audience how his art became strong by mere arrangement.  The statement he was trying to convey was always left for the viewer to decide; Warhol was never very clear with his artwork.  He said it himself, “Artists are never intellectuals, that’s why their artists” (Greenberg 16).  As an artist, it was part of his individual being to create a whirlwind of thoughts for his audience to mull over.  Having that freedom and power to speak to his audience on this level must have been quite gratifying to Warhol throughout his art career.

So what does a criminal look like?  Foucault writes an example regarding soldiers and about how “the soldier has become something that can be made; out of formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a

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calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit; in short, one has ‘got rid of the peasant’ and give him ‘heir of a soldier’” (102).  Andy Warhol uses these wanted men as formless clay to make his shocking statements.  But before Warhol shaped them, the criminals formed themselves first.  These criminals were not born criminals, they made themselves who they were by the choices they made in there own individual lives.  So these men were formed by themselves to begin with, and when Warhol molded them together it created a much stronger meaning.

There is also the factor that Andy Warhol was a homosexual and how his lifestyle was portrayed in society at that time.  I see a connection that he might have made personally with these men because they were labeled as criminals for their crimes which automatically moved them into being categorized as outcasts within the public.  Maybe Warhol was also feeling somewhat of an outcast with his homosexuality and projected his personal feelings on to these men in the mural.  I think it’s so easy to deny the cruel reality of a crime, and most people prefer to sugar coat the truth when they do try to actually face it.  I believe that homosexuality was taken in the same manner; it was out there but people didn’t want to talk about it or accept it as a lifestyle.  Lynne Tillman writes in her essay Like Rockets and Television II about how “Most Wanted Men’s other provocation is sexual, challenging the state with an outlawed, unspeakable love, homosexuality.  …Warhol, queer-American, gives new meaning to the phrase ‘self-made man’.  A self made into any man, bad, good, as random an end as the flip of that coin” (Tillman 147).  That flip of the coin, was that of a silvered destiny that was created with

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these criminals to show the various facets of how institution can shape images in societies by events that take place.  Warhol changed the status of these criminals into somewhat of a celebrity status when he showcased them in this mural.  These mug shots were meant to portray obscenity within the state, but Warhol shaped the photographs to expose knowledge and truth about the different lifestyles that amongst societies.

To conclude my thoughts, Andy Warhol’s mural of ‘The 13 Most Wanted Men’ opened up many layers of politics for the people of New York City to see.  I talked about how Warhol was motivated through tragedy to do his artwork, and he loved to expose a reality that shocked the public.  When he used the criminals to create social dimension, he used labels, categories, and status these men carried on their own.  Warhol also did his own shaping of these images to create a new interpretation to the mug shots.  The way he grouped and arranged the photographs brought on more power to the mural.  Even the projection of his personal life brought on a new level of meaning to the mural.

Though Andy Warhol laid all these aspects within his artwork for the viewers to see, he left the mural subjective for his audience to make their own conclusions.  In doing that, he succeeded in created shock value in this mural to stir up his audience and get them to start talking about their own political perspectives regarding ‘The 13 Most Wanted Men’.

 

 

 

 

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WORKS CITED

Douglas, Mary.  The Two Bodies.  London and New York: Routledge, 1996 (1970).

 

Foucault, Michel.  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison.  New York : Random

      House, 1979.

 

Greenberg, Jan, and Sandra Jordan.  Andy Warhol: Prince of Pop.  New York: Delacorte

      Press, 2004.

 

Sanders, Edward, Ernst Beyeler, Georg Frei, and Peter Gidal.  Andy Warhol: Series and

      Singles. Germany: Yale University Press, 2000.

 

Tillman, Lynne.  “Like Rockets and Television II.”  Who is Andy Warhol.  Pittsburg,

      Pennsylvania: The Andy Warhol Museum, 1997.