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Birth chart of the artist who took the lead in pop art and set the final style of that great massive cultural movement.
Andy Warhol (08.06.28 Pennsylvania - 02.22.87 NYC, USA) was an artist inspired by the first pop art expressions, and later broadened the art as a worldwide movement. During the first years, he worked in advertising illustrations, before going fully into paintings, films, theater and music. He designed for magazines, shoes' companies, books and music albums covers, and was requested by numerous art galleries. And, throughout the years, he became the main reference for a lot of underground artists, intellectuals, aristocrats, celebrities, models, bohemians and urban people.
Straight out & daily stuff
His birth chart shows A GREAT FIRE, expressive element, dynamic, open, outdoors. The spirit of those times had offered products for massive consumption, and also a progressively more visible consumption of sex, drugs and rock n' roll. Warhol's Sun was in LEO, a personalistic sign, of centrality, authority, clearly standing out among the crowd and calling the attention: he experienced homosexuality openly in explicit and straight-out art, something quite different to the abstract expressionism of previous years. His works showed pop-culture subjects differently: in defined and contemporary objects, identified by a specific name and surname, as concrete acts or events, locatable in time and space.
uncertain birth time
Up to those times, pop art was based on cartoons and comics, but Warhol became interested in objects of much massive and daily usage, which set a deep trend inside of the movement. Those times were of a progressive greater equality among people, both in relations and in the access to products for consumption. In the same way, his art displayed food products (offered to everyone at daily stores) as well as worldwide referrals (from showbusiness to capitalist and communist politicians). They were all portrayed as icons of those times, aglutinating desire and identity: the famous Campbell soup cans, the Brillo box (a wide famous detergent, available at most of the stores in neighborhoods), Coca-Cola bottles, Lenin, Judy Garland, Natalie Wood, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, Richard Nixon, Mao Zedong, Liza Minnelli, among many others...
One of the famous Campbell soup cans (1961-62). A 32-canvas series displayed the different options the company offered.
COW (1966). Meat consumption and cruel cows killing inspired a work and several variations of it during the following years: the same subject, different contrasts.
MARILYN MONROE (1967). The base image was a photograph used for the promotional campaign of Niagara film (1953). Her name was Norma, had worked as a housewife and had been married to a soldier, who died in the Second World War.
YOU'RE IN (1967). Warhol used to paint for the watcher not to notice paintings were hand-made.
VOTE MCGOVERN (1972). The character represents the president back then, Richard Nixon. Warhol associated him to McCarthy and the 50's, the witchhunt decade.
"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are good, Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it."
Andy Warhol (1975)
Glamour was very present too, and his works have been many times considered as superficial and commercial art, which was a superficial critic: many of them actually represented and still represent cultural traits of production and consumption models, in which selling and buying really require to display artistic skills. There's just few abstractions in his works and, instead, many cultural definitions.
In fact, his own style was a whole trend: a leading influence in art transmission and relationships, and even his very presence as a massive pop art icon, were all echoes of the SUN, MERCURY, VENUS and NEPTUNE in Leo in his birth chart. Whereas music, theater, communications and audio-visual media were expressed through GEMINI and THE RULER MERCURY, tendencies of a karmic origin that easily make people inclined to commerce, contacts and entertainment, something quite present in Warhol's working environment.
Icons fixated with Taurus
Most of the films produced by the artist included explicit contents, leaving very defined states and impressions. In times of fixation, Warhol's films displayed desire in erotic and explicit scenes, in long duration only-one shots. The watcher remained looking at the same projection during several minutes or even for hours, whereas pleasure and sexual power were life itself reflected on films. In the artist's chart, physical sex and carnal satisfaction were great motifs, expressions of MARS and JUPITER in TAURUS: the bodies are sexual, they grow more and more, while FIRE takes them outside the door.
BLOW JOB. Film directed by Warhol (1963). During 35' it displays a man's face while he receives oral pleasure. His first films were mainly projected in undergound cinemas for homosexual audiences.
LOVES OF ONDINE. Film directed by Warhol and Paul Morrissey (1968). Ondine is homosexual and wants to change his sexual choice by meeting different women. After trying with three, he turns into a secondary character while other men, who call themselves as The Bananas, start a fight for food.
EMPIRE. Photogram of the film directed by Warhol (1964). It's the Empire State building in the night of July 25-26 1964, between 8:06 pm and 2:42 am, in a single shot taken from 16 blocks far away, at the Rockefeller Foundation offices in the 41 floor of the Time-Life building. Made in B&W, soundless, just one image is projected during 8:05 hs in slow-motion. During the filming, Warhol said: "The Empire State is a star!", cultural icon of the economic power by those times.
Warhol was surrounded by artists, especially in his studio The Factory, from where the Warhol "Superstars" came out. Underground characters in the 60's exposed taboo subjects, such as homo and trans lifestyles, free sex, drugs consumption, and critics to consumerism and authoritarianism after the 50's ideological chases. The 60's were revolutionary years if considering that sexual practices with no reproduction purposes were facing social reprobation, at the same time that civil rights were progressively conquered: The Factory worked as a kind of a shelter for all of those artists. The studio expressed Warhol's MOON and URANUS, matrix and innovation, both in ARIES the entrepreneur. But it also functioned as a way out of that home, since Warhol used to manage his superstars' careers, maybe an echo of a disciplinarian SATURN under the form of a SAGITTARIAN impulse to take a developmental path.
Icons seen through Gemini
Icons are very important to fixate developmental models and turn them into constant massive trends. For that purpose, they must remain motionless. It seems Warhol referred to that trend by making use of different techniques: blurring, creating variations, blackening and overlapping. His famous paintings of blurred shoes made stereotyped identities undefined, multiple Elvis evoked the classic American cowboy and showed different uses of a gun, and the car painting comissioned by BMW included motion in what is static.
DOUBLE ELVIS. (1963). Based on the film promotion Flaming star (1960). The clear left eye in the original image is not the dark central eye seen since the overlapping.
In 1977, Warhol himself painted a BMW car race for the fourth Art Car, with no miniature models nor assistants. He said: "I tried to portray speed pictorially. If a car moves really fast, all lines and colors are blurred".
For a "change", he first turned photographic images into portraits, so the object-icon was fixated. Then, he painted them with palettes of vivid colors to create different variations of a same object. So several series seemed to offer something different although the background base was always the same: one B&W image, later repeated with contrasts. Some variations were even made throughout the years, like the series of cow heads: repetition can be found over time.
MAO. (1972). Mao Zedong's original image can be found in the book Cites from Chairman Mao Zedong, of 1966 (better known as the little red book). The communist leader was quite present in Chinese media back then, and his photo could be seen on the walls of houses, stores and governmental buildings. It was like an advertising strategy, like those campaings focused on objects for massive consumption, as Coca-Cola did. Warhol made 199 variations of the motif.
Warhol also reflected the effects produced on the very icons when they're massively consummed: he overlapped repeated images and blackened all kind of variations, both in B&W and colored.
NATALIE. (1962). Natalie Wood was a child star since her character as Susan Walker in the film Miracle in 34 St (1947). He portrayed her as the classic American teen. Here, variations waste away the object (more white) and show explotation for consumption (more black): phantasmagoric faces, disfigured faces. Overlapping the variations partialises the object and, like in Double Elvis, it produces sinister effects, especially in the phantasmagoric Natalie in the right corner at the bottom, and in the central black area.
THREE MARILYNS. (1962). The base was a photogram from Niagara film (1953). Time passing by is read from right to left. There's no overlapping although color variations make blackened strokes stand out (here, the watcher may think on "niger" instead of "black"). The object is exploited, a slavered black one for consumption. After she became a widow, someone discovered Norma's "talent" and introduced her to stars producers: then she changed her name and became the famous actress, icon of desire (the base for consumption). She died in August 1962 (some people say she comitted suicide, some others she was suicided), and that was the time when Warhol started to make his famous paintings on photographic bases.
Karma, Leo & Aquarius
By starting from a superficial iconic image, playing with contrasts, repetitions, overlappings, blackenings, and especially the phantasmagoric and sinister usage of black and white, are all great GEMINI'S echoes, the karmic North in Warhol's chart: the effect of accumulated repetitions is visual, on the surface, and it can be seen by just looking at it, with no need to go deep, although it comes out from no single element.
Staying in the same sign, the artist played with combinations and overlappings in films and literature. Chelsea girls (1966) was a hard and wild film where the watchers saw and heard sexual pleasure and pain, and drugs consumption. For that purpose, two different movies were projected simultaneously on a multiple screen. And, from the projection booth, the sound volume of each film was sometimes high and sometimes low. Of course, the watchers had to make a choice, at least during some moments: what projection did they choose to look at? A total of four narrations could be attended, depending on the most audible sound and the visual choice (a watcher could look at a film while listened to the other film's sounds, or not, and vice-versa). Audiovisual contrasts displayed one of Gemini's main effects: learning by contrasting.
Strangely, for his book The philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and back again) of 1975, based on recorded phone conversations, he used tapes of other conversations previously recorded on them: so the last mentioned were lost then... no more simultaneity, the overlap overimpressed and covered, something was no more listenable and not even visible to the listener's imagination... (and of course not to readers, either). Besides, the very title of the work didn't match Warhol's concrete style he had set during the last decade: philosophy is abstract writing...
Nevertheless, the 60's had brought an enduring influence over the years: individuality-massiveness in daily life. Warhol overlapped singularity with massive industrial series, and he did it in several ways. The trend, of Warhol and those times, of the Warhol Age, was a classic characteristic of two zodiacal signs when combined: LEO & AQUARIUS.
From a global view, the personalistic Leo of the chart was always very present, which suggests to pay close attention to the opposite sign, AQUARIUS. There's no planet in the sign but it has to be remembered that zodiacal poles are expressed as unities: if planets in both signs, the expression mostly alternates from one pole to another, but if not (like in the artist's chart), the sign with no planets is expressed as an unspecific tone and as much as the more populated one.
Aquarius, sign of communities, society and difussion, is ruled by Uranus. In the chart, URANUS IN ARIES rises initiatives, unleashes impulses, excites and makes people desire, and always brings something new that even takes to new starts. And between 1955 and 1961, Uranus had transited Leo, the sign of Warhol! The transit might surely have been the impulse later expressed as a great renewal in arts and revolutionary movements taken ahead by leaders. And it surely might have been a great revolution in the artist's personal life, before his pop art was in boom.
Photo © Stephen Shore. Andy Warhol, owner of the pop art, in The Factory by the middle 60's.
More Warhol
The Factory
It was the name of his studio in NYC, a working and meeting place for numerous artists, drop-outs and famous people. The studio became a legend throughout the years, where "superstars" were born in different arts and occupations.
It was a place where bands played music, and people enjoyed parties, weddings and orgies. While someone was concentrated on a serigraphy, someone else was filming, there was always something new and a high dynamics all the time. Physically, the place was of an industrial style, while people worked in hand-drawings, paintings, engraves, photography, serigraphy, sculpture and films.
In 1968, during the French May protests and two months after Martin Luther King was murdered, the artist was shot at the studio's entrance. Warhol survived although since then his work style progressively fit "the market's demands"... which included a new approach on the objects-icons he had blurred, overlapped and criticized during the previous decade (iconic identities, weapons), remaining fixated on written texts, reprobing himself as a drugs consumer and forgetting about filming in order to join TV shows for mass consumption. In the 70's he had to visit nightclubs regularly to look for famous people and offer them single portraits. And in the 80's, along with the religious and openly homophobic Reagan, the "pink plague" and the exponential growth of all types of consumption, the controls and persecutions were extended in the name of sanitarian flags. The economic incomes of the artist mostly came from wealthy clients: since the murder attack in 1968, the 60's original pop art had remained in the past.
Films & TV
Between 1963 and 1968, he produced more than six hundred films, including shortcuts and documentaries. Of an erotic and sexual kind, they included nudity, explicit sex, drugs, trans, hetero and homo characters, and were mostly projected in underground cinemas. The first of them was Sleep (1963), where his friend John Giorno sleeps during more than 5 h (nine people were at the premiere, and seven of them stayed until the end). Other films were the aforementioned Blow job (1963), Empire (1964), Chelsea girls (1966) and Loves of Ondine (1968, 86'). In Eat (1964), a man eats a mushroom during 45'. The trilogy Flesh, Trash and Heat (1972) was of a controversial type, whereas Cocaine cowboys (1979) was not produced by Warhol although the photography was taken in his Summer house, and the artist played a role as himself! (the one who had not focused his sight on Elvis the cowboy, sixteen years before).
Warhol was invited many times to the popular TV show Saturday Night Live, and also had his own shows, Andy Warhol's TV (1982) and Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes (1986), based on his famous prophetic phrase: anyone will have 15 minutes of fame in the future.
Covers (music)
In 1964, he designed John Wallowitch's first album cover (This is John Wallowitch!!!), a composition gathering different variations of a same subject (a man's torso and face, wearing a suit). In 1965, he managed The Velvet Underground band, with Lou Reed as the frontman, and designed the album cover he produced in 1967: a banana with a fold out decal that, once removed, revealed pinky meat (it was like peeling a banana). In 1971, he designed the famous cover for Sticky Fingers album by The Rolling Stones, with a man's crotch whose jeans remarked a bulgy penis (a "sticky" finger). He also designed several other covers for well-known artists, including Miguel Bosé's portrait for his album Made in Spain of 1983 (Bosé was the son of a bullfighter, something strange if considering Warhol had made Cow, a critical work about cruelty in animal killing for consumption).
Books & theater
He firstly worked in advertising art during the 50's, and payed for impressing 190 copies of his illustrations. The impression was called 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, and included blurred hand-made litographies in watercolor (1954). When The Factory was in boom, he produced several theater performances, with multimedia shows in parties and public places, where he offered music, slides projections and BDSM representations. After the murder attack, he was fixated on texts. In 1969, he founded the famous fashion magazine Interview, and two years later wrote the theater play Pork, based on recordings of conversations with Brigid Berlin (they talked about other recordings, those of Brigid with her own mother). In 1975, Warhol published the aforementioned book The philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and back again), where he referred to businesses in art and the art of business. And in 1980 he published The Sixties of Warhol, a book written along with Pat Hackett (a retro view on the boom of pop art).
Some more...
Ondine was one of the regular visitors in the artist's studio, and in one occasion he made the very Warhol be expulsed from an orgy without knowing he owned the place. Later Ondine called him "Drella", a mix of Dracula and Cinderella.
In January 12 1985, Warhol, Joseph Beuys and Kaii Higashiyama sent a fax with drawings on it from Dusseldorf via New York to Tokyo, a message travelling around the world in 32'. The performance represented a peace sign during the Cold War, and was called "Global Art Fusion", as part of the project "Fax Art".
Rising sign and murder attack
We cannot be certain about Warhol's birthtime although he might be born when VIRGO was on the horizon.
some great effects, made on purpose, can only be appreciated by looking at the whole set of variations; the interest in daily stuff is another classic Virgo's characteristic ;
the daily dynamics of the legendary Factory was potentiated (VI h or Virgo's natural house in Aquarius, opposite to the stellium in Leo);
pop art was in boom during the 60's, when Uranus (VI h ruler) transited his I h (Virgo): self-expression and leadership went outdoors;
arts, communications, relations and definitions were massive (planets in XII or Pisces' natural house, Aquarius in VI h);
he was "invited" to talk about philosophy on likings and earnings, after growing in and tasted concrete, physical and sexual experiences (Jupiter and Mars in Taurus in IX h);
he made great image combinations and plays (karmic rising sign Gemini in X h);
all of the Fire, mostly in private houses (IV-VIII-XII), was taken to the communicative and changing laboral public area (kite pattern towards Gemini in X h): acquired knowledge (Sagittarius in IV), sexual conquest (Aries in VIII) and massive influence (Leo in XII);
he offered a home for his friends to stay, and hosted diversity (Cancer in XI h, or Aquarius' natural house);
he managed many artists' careers, who were attracted by The Factory, a place where they found hosting and joined social meetings, where resources were discovered and orgies were celebrated (ruler of the relational III h Pluto in Cancer, in XI h, or Aquarius' natural house).
In June 3rd 1968, his life was at risk: during bad aspectations to both karmic nodes and their rulers, and a key transit of the lunar nodes to Moon-Pluto natal square (VIII-XI houses).
SATURN transited the VIII h, bringing along with it a drastic karmic end for the communicational career he had developed (hammer pattern on the lunar North node in Gemini);
URANUS transited the I h (Virgo) although discontinued his evolutional growth (sesqui-square to Jupiter, South karmic ruler);
MARS, ruler of the VIII h of death, and transiting Gemini, blocked the vital restlessness to keep on moving (semi-square to Mercury, North karmic ruler).
06.03.68: key aspectations to lunar nodes, karmic rulers and Pluto
Due to these negative aspects, the nodes' transit was a key factor at the time of finding karmic alternatives. The karma of that date offered the chance to leave this world or, instead, choose diplomatic and harmonizing ways (South node's transit on the II h in Libra, opposite to Moon in VIII, which is the North node's transit conjuncted to Moon). PLUTO was definitory because it would have ruled a new beginning for a life that was about to end (it would have been the South node's ruler in his next time, from Sagittarius to Scorpio, such as the lunar nodes move during transits). In the chart, the planet squared the nodes in transit, so by the time of the murder attack Warhol had to make a choice about his future: going to the VIII h (Moon) or to the II h (Libra)
Moon was death if considering the transits at that moment. Saturn's hammer from the VIII, falling on the chart's North node, left no future ahead. And the North node was transiting on Moon; if Pluto moved closer to the satellite, it would have taken away any chance of life to be risen up... Warhol survived, moved away from the natal Moon and closer to the opposite alternative (South node's transit in Libra). Since then, the exciting Moon-Pluto natal dynamics wouldn't be the same anymore, and worked mostly like an opposition (see The Factory).
Other transits inclined him to move towards the South node in that hour, either. On the same day, Moon (seed) and Jupiter (life) were in exact conjunction to natal NEPTUNE: the impulse for a new life would be received by the ruler of the house opposed to the personal Ist one (Pisces). Whereas Venus, ruler of the "new" South node in Libra, transited in exact conjunction to the natal North node (Gemini): the future was the union of antagonisms, for gathering what was separated. Anyway, "the new chart" of that dire date indicated many obligations, limitations, and problems to find expression (mainly due to Saturn's aspectations).
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