Mikey Georgeson

A poem about Andy Warhol (painter/artist/film-director)

 It’s all there on the surface
The death of the gesture
The end of the phony quest for authenticity
End of
Full stop.

Another Poem about Andy Warhol (painter/artist/film-director)

Expression was the legacy of the Renaissance
What Andy did was give us back the felt intensities (liking things)
That the mainly manly Mannerists had replaced with a science of emotion
(file under Bill Viola is a manly Mannerist)

One More Slightly Longer Poem about Andy Warhol (painter/artist/film-director)

 Everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes in the future
Andy Warhol once famously said
And we imagine ourselves passively queuing,
Waiting to reach the end of the line
Where the fresh-faced director’s assistant will greet us
And pointing to the glow in the middle of the studio floor
Say the words you’re on
You’re up!
Despite his love of futuristic shiny silver balloons
Andy still thought the world was a stage
With people in the wings
(And wigs)
When instead here we all are
All constantly on air
All filing our reports
All bathing in the gossip-column glowing strip-lights
Of our reflected celebrity behind-the-scenes lives
Hi, I’m Truman Capote and I’m here at the rustic retreat
Of social media-user Judy Vicarious
I’ll have whatever she’s having
I’m on air
I’m always on air
Less famous definitely
Was his announcement that if you want
To know Andy Warhol
Just look at the surface of one of his paintings
One of his films
It’s all there
everything you need to know.
This, when the art of the airbrush was still
wet behind its nip hiding ears.
And Andy’s foundation barely concealed his
Dry, reddened by childhood illness skin
And the wig? Well it was always a wig wasn’t it?
A shock of felt intensity. Of liking things.
No disguising the disguising,
No studied science of emotion.
Funny how certain uber rich now feel this authentic artifice is invisible.
Yes you mister designer jeans, dyed-black hair.
I like to imagine that as a Catholic
Good, bad, ugly, lapsed or otherwise
Andy knew it was all only ever about the surface
There is nothing to be decoded
Nothing to be read
No meaningful tail pinned to the devil
In the detail
Because liking things with felt intensity
Means that meaning is always immanent
When there is meaning to be felt.
Just look at the throbbing silvery shadow
of that homemade electric chair.
When you do something exactly wrong
You’re really onto something
Or do you see nothing?
Nichts, niente, rien de tout?
Just an empty Pittsburgh-less void of a cosmos
But maybe baby-nihilism is just the place where you
know that understanding is on the surface?

Coda to a poem about Andy Warhol (painter/artist/film-director)

O I went looking
For Andy in his diary
But I found out he was dead by then
And those 10 or so years
Were just a purgatorial spell
Spent looking under rocks
For a misplaced dream
Of silver nitrate splendour
Bianca is sad so we all must be too
So then I looked in A, a novel
Thinking that perhaps he would be there
In the erratic transcriptions of conversations
With a man, who would later become

An after-dinner speaking
Former factory super-star.
But then I found out that
One of the transcriber’s mothers
Removed all the expletives
And someone else had removed all the words
Leaving only the punctuation;
History leaves its residue in punctuation marks,
Said Adorno
And there I found Andy
In the inconsistent punctuation
Of the collaborative transcriptions
Scattered like glitter ashes
Along the New Jersey shoreline
Neon-non-subjective art words,
Sugar sprinkles on the x-ray milk,
Rice crispy surface of the morning.

Text and drawings © Mikey Georgeson 2020