Andy Warhol as puzzle

Every Sunday when [Andy] went to church,
He’d kneel in his pew and he’d say, ‘it’s just work…
All that matters is work.’”            

– Lou Reed, “Work”

Slowly you restore / The fractured world.

– A.E. Stallings, “Jigsaw Puzzle”

The story of how I ended up with one missing piece from my 1,000 piece Warhol Selfies puzzle goes like this:

My youngest, my daughter, is a difficult 3rd grader. Not difficult, exactly, but impossible. Also, obviously, she says the darndest things. By that I mean she asks whether most people she hasn’t seen recently (or ever)–relatives, mere acquaintances, but also artists and celebrities–are dead. 

My cousins? No, they live in Maryland. Uncle Dan? Arizona, etc., etc. It’s not too concerning, I suppose, and can even be cute, like when she asks if Bob Dylan is really still alive and won’t take yes for an answer. 

Back to Andy the Puzzle. Call it an old Covid parenting hack, but kids really dig puzzles; so, inspired by Blake Gopnik’s monumental and magnificent biography, Warhol, we spent one fall into winter with the Galison Andy Warhol Selfies puzzle (five stars), working slowly through its repetitions and beguiling differences. 

Of course, Andy himself became a bit of a puzzle during the Covid years. At precisely the moment each one of us, alone and atomized, streamed and dreamed about what connected us, what might we (or ought we) share in common (anything?), Warhol the prophet of pop transfigured into something more and less–something more mysterious, something less superficial, which is to say, he became messy, inscrutable, human. Groundbreaking exhibits like “Andy Warhol: Revelation,” with its focus on Warhol’s Catholicism, for example, asked us to take another look at the artist who, as Lou Reed sang, was a churchgoer after all. Even places like Artforum, in articles on Andy with titles like “Mass Appeal,” asked what we ever really knew about the man whose mother called him, in 1966, “a good religious boy.” Sometimes, the more you learn, the poet A.E. Stallings reminds us, all you don’t know–absences, a gap–snaps into place: a white wig here, an immigrant’s son there, a person beneath the persona, and maybe a little faith.

Andy, our puzzle, was for my daughter and me an undertaking, but also maybe an ending of something. Call it our post-Covid icon. Representing, who knows?, something we learned before: how to connect, how to endure. If love is the felt experience of unity, you can do much worse than slowly–very slowly–working on a Warhol puzzle with your daughter.

“Working” of course, is the wrong word. I agree with Andy-logic here: “I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of ‘work,’ because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don’t always want to do.” The puzzle was something we wanted to do. We calmed down. We bonded. We attended. We didn’t want it ever to end. 

Especially Lulu Lemonseed–my daughter of many names: she went to work naming, like Eve given half a chance, all of the Andys across the puzzle’s forty years of selfies: there’s Grandma Andy, Aunt Andy, Skeleton Andy, Twisted Sister Andy (that’s mine), Handsome Andy, Backwards Andy (literally), Turtleneck Andy, Halloween Andy, Beat Up Andy, Uncomfortable Andy, L.L. Bean Andy (also mine), and 80s-Mom-Glasses Andy (a combo effort there).

Now, with Wayne Koestenbaum, probably my favorite writer on Warhol, I believe we commit a cruelty against existence if we don’t interpret it to death. And I don’t mean here the obvious wonder of Andy’s portrait-poesis, his selfie-making that makes every selfie both homage and elegy. Rather, I mean my daughter’s Whitmanic catalog, the sheer proliferation of Andys by which she sought to redress–what, exactly? Who knows? The slings and arrows? Death’s blows?

Is Grandma Andy dead? (She looks up to ask me.)

– Probably. She looks pretty old. Well, how would you answer, reader?

Sad Andy? You think Sad Andy’s Dead? 

– (...)

Turtleneck Andy? 

– I don’t know. 

Handsome Andy? 

– Hard to imagine, that…

Reader, I grew reluctant, I admit. Maybe, in a real sense, I wasn’t quite sure. The only death I knew of happened on February 22 (2/22: o, repetition), 1987, in a hospital room, a heart attack, after something called “routine,” gallbladder surgery, though I always imagine his internal organs by that time had a rather enlarged Claes Oldenburg quality about them.

Oldenburg, the pop artist, who wrote that he was for an art of “slightly rotten funeral flowers.” Do you tell your daughter about that? About the myriad things that kill us? That life is a cup, and then it spills us? Do you tell your daughter that?

Warhol, of course, died for the first time twenty years before. Not unlike Karl Ove Knausgaard in his 3,600 page My Struggle, Gopnik starts his portrait of an artist, too, with the stopping of a heart. An Italian immigrant, Dr. Giuseppe Rossi, trained “in the new field of open-heart surgery,” just happened to be staffing the ER when Warhol was shot point-blank in June 1968. “Rossi cut open the sac around Warhol’s heart, untouched by the bullet, and massaged the organ by hand.” Top docs, realizing who he was, told Rossi: “He cannot die.” A command, but maybe a bit of belief there, too. He didn’t. Gopnik notes: “They left scars [on Warhol] that could have passed for stigmata in the arms of this lifelong churchgoer.” 

As if we are all and only doubting Thomases, Warhol’s body, jigsawed, would testify in its own way to the challenge of Simone Weil’s words: “Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.” Resistance, indeed. Here, in the country of here below, is the problem and the puzzle: it’s where hearts stop, and bodies are wasted, like Weil’s, like Warhol’s own. 

But what to make of the artist’s pledge to take this body to church regularly after the shooting, a promise he was true to, in his own fashion? Gopnik poo-poos it, more or less; to Paul Elie, “the full significance” of Warhol’s churchgoing is “hard to make out.” To whom, precisely? Is the full significance of anyone’s religious practice–anyone’s life–easy to make out? What about the lack of such practice? Is that easy to make out? I’ve stood in the back of churches, bouncing screaming babies, wondering, wondering–Why am I here? Annoyance, spectacle, or sign? Can you tell me: What was the full significance of that? And to whom? We are puzzles to each other, to ourselves. Andy’s scars wept fluids for a while after the shooting. What did that mean to him as he daydreamed during a homily? Did he recall St. John Chrysostom’s, the Byzantine Catholic church of his childhood he attended for long stretches on weekends with his mother, a woman whose first child died in her arms, a pieta in Slovakia, a woman with a colostomy, who wore her insides on her outsides? Why, when it comes to the artist, when the absences align, do we presume to know? Gopnik admits, at last, after starting with it in the ER, that maybe we can’t actually look into Andy’s heart after all. Indeed. Much less is known than unknown. 

Do you tell your daughter that?

No. Instead, I tell her of Andy Morningstar, nine years old.

That Andy is my favorite Andy of all the Andys in Gopnik’s story of Andy. 

No way he’s dead. He is, in some real sense, still with us. 

“When I was little I was going to take [the name] ‘Morningstar.’ Andy Morningstar. I thought it was so beautiful. And I came close to actually using it for my career,” Warhol said near the end of his life.

Actually, he began his career with it. 

Warhol tells a charming tale of when Andy first broke into the big leagues of window displays at the Bonwit Teller department store in 1955–department store windows at the time a place for a truly street-level modernism, “perfectly respectable venues for art exhibitions,” and cutting-edge ever since Dali brought Surrealism to the same store’s windows in 1939. 

“I thought department store windows were the new museums,” Warhol told audiences later in his life, though everyone of course thought he was joking. About everything. (He wasn’t.)

For his first commission, Andy was asked to come up with something during the slow summer months while the windows were boarded up for maintenance. Tasked with decorating the boards that were used to show off a few high-end perfumes, Andy Morningstar turned the scene, writes Gopnik, into a “sort of scrappy front-yard fence,”

His solution was ingenious. He ‘advertised’ the perfumes on these boards in fake-graffiti that imitated a school kid’s scrawl…. [H]is imaginary kid went to work, scribbling pictures of cats playing cards and signing the work “IMiLDA AGE 3”.... and sure enough Warhol’s fence is covered in goofy birds, this time signed by one “andy morningstar AGe 9.

What to do with a boarded-up display window? “Art is a series of problems that needed to be solved” sums up, in short, Andy’s career approach, instilled in him by an inventive, Dewey-inspired education at the Carnegie Institute of Technology: those chapters should be required reading for today’s educators, aspirants of the experiential and the applied. Tasked with deadlines and challenges, the young Warhola showed a gift for getting to the heart of the matter–whether it was illustrating Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, or a Willa Cather story in which a young man dies in the snow beneath a train. Warhol seemed to understand something intuitively about art and presence, how life can spill out at any moment: he “presented his puzzled instructor with a blank white sheet with one big splat of blood-red paint in the middle.”

Art, for Andy, is a problem to solve, but his work abides, I think, because he reminds us to remain puzzled, searching, open to “all things counter, original, spare, strange,” to quote Hopkins. In short: open to revelation. Revelation 22:16: “I am the morning star,” says Jesus (of course, Satan gets the title, too, “Son of the dawn, cast to the earth,” Isaiah 14:12.) Maybe we should revisit Warhol as a religious artist not because he was a churchgoer, but because of this radical openness. What was it he remembered about Pope Paul VI’s visit in 1965? “When the reporters asked him what he liked best about New York, [the Pope said] ‘Tutti buoni’ (‘Everything is good’) which was the Pop philosophy exactly.” To praise–to sing “Everything is Awesome!” as my children used to, the chorus of The Lego Movie–is also part of Andy’s legacy. Call it naïveté; some call it faith. 

To say everything is good, ultimately, is to mind the gaps, to know the puzzle is not yet complete, but will be. Andy the Puzzle puts me in mind of another Pittsburgh (at times, Catholic) artist, Annie Dillard, a prose poet of searing absences and spiritual presence who draws on Ezekiel to teach us: “The gaps are the thing, the gaps are the spirit’s one home…. The gaps are the clifts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God…. Go up into the gaps…. Stalk the gaps.” 

To say everything is good, too, communicates something the early Christians sensed about the parousia–the presence: the coming of the Christ is always “already” and “not yet,” to quote Jeroslav Pelikan’s memorable formula. And art, in its highest liturgical calling, enacts something of that, doesn’t it?, and by doing so embodies our longing. Really: how else to understand a work like Camouflage Last Supper (1986)? How else to read it but as the playful solution of the eternal child who called himself Morningstar? Part of an enormous riff on the work of Leonardo da Vinci exhibited in Milan–it would be Warhol’s final show–call it the last will and testimony of Andy the Puzzle. Gopnik calls it “unworshipful.” But why? For the puzzled believer in the country of here below, for those puzzled by belief, by life, by the question of what, if anything, we share: the work suggests communion is possible, still, even now, at the end of a century that took a lot of dying to end, still, even now, in this new century, even now, communion is possible.

It’s a childish stunt. It’s camouflage. It’s a puzzling parousia. 

Does it remind you, I ask my daughter, of our puzzle? Doesn’t it? A little?

I could’ve done that, she says.

She’s right. Maybe she could. Maybe we all could. Maybe we did.

Point is: I’m pretty certain Andy Morningstar is still alive. And I tell Lulu that. I tell her I see him in the doodles on my walls that go unsigned, uncredited, and, upon fatherly interrogation, disavowed (elves?). 

She smiles.

Point is: Lulu loves life, and love loves to love love. Absence to her is a kind of death. Is she wrong? 

Andy, too, needed others. His never-ending telephone calls. His never-ending selfies. Was he wrong?

Point is: a puzzle piece went missing. One. No one knows where. But I have my suspicions. I tell Lulu: thus is life. We must love what we make in spite of this. Or because. 

She gets it. Love the world. No matter what comes. (Art is how we love the world.) 

She gets it. I tell her to choose her material and get to work. She draws, no surprise, a star. Puts it where the missing Andy should go. Andy who is never complete. Andy the Puzzle. 999-piece Andy. (It’s how the light gets in.)

You can try it, you know. Andy would want you to. Choose your material. And get to work. Doodle, dawdle. Create. Try it. It’s fun. Be Andy Morningstar. AGe 9. Live. Anybody can. Everybody. Everyone. “Tutti buoni.” Choose your material. You have some.