Repressed Identity And Aesthetic Censorship In 'Thirteen Most Wanted Men'

An Analysis of Repressed Identity and Aesthetic Censorship in Andy Warhol and Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1964)

Brianna Christie

ARTH 341

Professor Jaleh Mansoor

March 23, 2023

Pop provocateur Andy Warhol is notorious for being controversial. The late and great idiot savant was seemingly hell-bent on challenging the notions of art and society which he did exceptionally well in the mural Thirteen Most Wanted Men, 1964 (Fig. 1, 2). This piece does a stellar job of uncovering how Andy puts his Warhol on. In close analysis Thirteen Most Wanted Men reveals the man, the myth, and the legend of Andy Warhol in the respective socio-political context of 1960s America. The mural was commissioned for the New York World’s Fair

The mural was ordered to be taken down by Robert Moses and in response to this Warhol suggested to cover the project with images of Moses. Moses did not like this idea. This suggestion functioned as a double entendre making light of both Moses in the literal as a representative of the authoritative state and in the figurative biblical sense as the Moses who was told by the Lord that man should not lie with man. Even further contextualized, the humour lies in the fact that Warhol did not want the removal of his work in the first place. The offer to cover the work with something more ‘acceptable’ such as Moses’ face is a figurative and literal act of repression brought about by the authoritative bodies that envelop Warhol in shame. The shame that had initially manifested itself in a rather conservative manner by equating homosexuality and criminality by exposing that “law enforcement agents are not the only ones who ‘want’ men”. The project was further problematized and ultimately suppressed beyond its original indignant display, which was in the context of the public sphere, subject to unconscious censorship in the first

Bradford Collins believes there to be two core inspirations behind the mural one of which is that it functions as an homage to Marcel Duchamp’s WANTED/$2,000 REWARD (1923) which places Warhol in the subject position of wanted, of the criminal by conceptually acknowledging, through his subjects being that many of them were booked for larceny, that this project was theft of Duchamp’s idea. In another respect there is a rather subtle inflection to the position of the authority figure, the police, and homosexual desire. When prying for ideas at a party, Warhol was presented with a thought for most wanted by the host who was sleeping with a policeman at the time who “often showed him mugshots and other visual materials”. Depending on the audience “the photos were either mugshots or pinups”, officers spend their time combing through pictures of men and searching for them dubbing them their most wanted which is ironic given that at the time homosexuality was still a crime in New