July/August 08
An Ever Expanding Universe (WA) > WA
Because of its title, my initial reaction to this exhibition was one of curiosity. Read More
Art Deco 1910 - 1939 (VIC) > VIC
With its Bakelite radio, Tamara De Lempicka painting and luxurious dressing table complete with intricate ivory inlays, the opening room of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Art Deco show says it all. Read More
Melbourne Art Fair (VIC) > VIC
With 80 commercial galleries, 10 project spaces, two specially commissioned installations and anticipated sales at the $10.5 million mark, the Melbourne Art Fair isn’t the sort of place to play things down. Read More
Puberty Blues
To stay sane in this world it is sometimes necessary to step back and laugh at the sheer nonsense that follows in the wake of a moral scandal. Read More
Robert Jenyns (NSW) > NSW
Pop psychologists and armchair analysts are masters of the succinct and the obvious. Read More
The enchanted forest: new gothic storytellers (VIC) > VIC
Curiouser and curiouser... a new approach to gothic. Read More
Turn, Turn, Turn: the past talks to the present (NSW) > NSW
Nick Waterlow is the only person to have curated more than one Biennale of Sydney. Read More
VIVID National Photographic Festival (ACT) > ACT
Australian photography festivals are seemingly multiplying at a rapid pace, with VIVID being the latest member to join the growing team. Read More
Pop Heritage > Off track with Andrew Mackenzie
By Andrew Mackenzie
My art school days caught the tail end of Andy Warhol’s career, so I 0am not quite old enough to think of him as a direct influence on my own youthful art practice. Yet in different ways Warhol’s influence was everywhere in the 80’s, from the brash visual aesthetics of Gilbert and George to the polished banality of Jeff Koons, from the heady theories of ‘appropriation’ to the studied ambivalence of rising Brit Art stars, Warhol and his Pop era had been thoroughly infused into a scene that I once called contemporary art (can we, in all seriousness, still use the word ‘contemporary’ to describe art from twenty odd years ago, when the only thing that was online was the laundry?).
Thus walking into Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art to see the major Andy Warhol retrospective, I was beset by memories of the old days. For French writer Marcel Proust, it was the taste of tea and a slice of Madeleine cake that would famously send him into a spin of reverie and youthful memories. For me it was seeing the monumental face of Chairman Mao, splashed irreverently with layers of black, canary yellow and commie red. As unreliable as memories are, this Warhol portrait took me right back, not to a 70’s Greenwich Village, but to the mid 80’s and to Goldsmiths Art College, South East London.
As I continued to wander around the new gallery’s spacious halls, I encountered other iconic over-printed portraits; mouthy Jagger, dreamy Marilyn and butch Brando. Jackie O, who I always thought looked rather smug, did not, when subjected to an extreme makeover of puce. Warhol, the society flirt and effete New York flaneur knew everyone, and everyone he knew was somehow or other a subject of, or subjected to, his world of art. And so this exhibition is as much a celebrity cavalcade as it is a retrospective of his work.
But this is only part of the reason why the exhibition, finely curated as it is, all feels so locked in a time and a place that is no more. Not unlike Warhol’s own Time Capsules (over 600 brown cardboard boxes filled with photo booth pics, drawings, bills, notes, invitations and other Warholian paraphernalia), this whole Andy Warhol exhibition feels like a huge air-conditioned, polished concrete time capsule. As these gaudy coloured celebs have all retired from public life, if not life, Warhol’s Pop art too has taken its place in the great retirement institution called art history. Time passes.
Warhol was only too aware of the ephemeral nature of time, and everyone knows his ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ quote, but a more profound observation on time and art came from an aging Marcel Duchamp, in an interview with Richard Hamilton. Hamilton asked Duchamp how he felt about being considered, late in life, a ‘classic’ French modernist. Duchamp reacted with typical ambivalence, saying ‘I really don’t care what I am, I haven’t thought about that’, but admitted nevertheless that all art has a lifespan. He called it, casually, twenty years.
Andy Warhol, United States b. 1928 d. 1987, Mao-Tse-Tung 1972, Colour screenprint, 10 sheets: 91.6 x 91.6cm each. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1973© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.After twenty years all art dies and then becomes art history, or posterity; a curated, consecrated and conserved shadow of its former self. Despite the irony of creating an artwork that would only be realised posthumously (Étant Donnés) Duchamp had no interest in posterity. For Duchamp, as for Warhol and indeed many radicals of the twentieth century, to worry about posterity was to deny the vibrancy of today, of now.
Warhol’s subjects were thoroughly of the now, drawn from newspaper headlines, from advertising boards, from consumer products and from contemporary culture. His entire oeuvre was born of a fascination with the now, the contemporary, the faddish, disposable, the topical. There was no future vision or past projection in his work. The idiom, the materials, the imagery, to pose, was all of his own time.
This is what makes the experience of seeing a major Warhol exhibition so profoundly odd and anachronistic. As a retrospective it is necessarily an historic celebration, of an artist who displayed little if any interest in history. You might even say his work denies history. And like all good retrospectives it comes with all the usual trappings of critical essays and intellectual appraisals – and this, for an artist who not only resisted theoretical self-analysis, but deliberately tried to short-circuit the intellectualizing of his work, by remaining so precisely, pervasively ambivalent on absolutely everything. Warhol may have provoked his audience on issues such as homosexuality, fetishistic consumerism, the emptiness of celebrity, the brutality of capital punishment etc, but he always held himself aloof from their political charge. He, like Duchamp practiced and perfected the art of ironic distance.
Yet there is something in the ‘major retrospective’ treatment that requires of art that it makes sense and takes its place in the canon. And, as it is just over twenty years since Andy Warhol died while recovering from a gall bladder operation, perhaps Duchamp was not too far off the mark with his stopwatch. Perhaps twenty years is when art dies and art history is born. If so, there was something uncanny about experiencing Andy Warhol as a contemporary artist for myself, just over twenty years ago; an artist who was out there, everywhere, in every art mag, in the galleries of dozens of capital cities, and bang on the contemporary pulse. But who has been transformed in the last twenty years, into a part of modern art’s history.
But this is how it is. Both iconoclasts have now taken their place within art’s heritage. And this, like all good Proustian melancholy, makes me sad. Pop was born to be ‘now’ not ‘then’. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the exhibition itself per se, it’s the fact that sooner or later, all great iconoclasts get put in their place, the museum, where time, as we all know, drags.
Andy Warhol is at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane until 30 March
Andrew Mackenzie is an art critic and Editor-in-Chief (Inside) Australian Design Review and (AR) Architectural Review Australia.
