[Sue Karnet] “I don’t like big moments like weddings and funerals. I like to play things all at the same level”, this quote from Andy Warhol is very revealing. It expresses his deadpan sense of humor and realist philosophy, which we currently have the pleasure to experience at the Brooklyn Museum. Nearly 50 works of the last ten years of Warhol’s life make us wonder where was the American cultural icon of the second half of the 20th century heading.
Andy Warhol arose from a first generation immigrant working class family. It was his mother, Julia Warhola, who persistently encouraged him to make art – even by promising a chocolate bar if he would make a drawing. After embarking on a career as an illustrator in New York City, Warhol took the “a” off his last name in order to Americanize it. Clearly, his early experiences in the small immigrant community shaped his attitude and sharpened his perception and ability to capture the zeitgeist. Warhol always said that he loved everything American. And we can see that he absolutely saw and understood America.
“Andy Warhol: The Last Decade”, on display in the Brooklyn Museum, certainly qualifies among the very few exhibitions that aim at providing a comprehensive view of at least part of Warhol’s creative life. Surveying the final ten years of his career, the exhibition begins with the elegant and sensual paintings from the Oxidation Series, which Warhol started in 1977, unique not only for their expressionistic appearance but also for the way they were created. Warhol had asked one of his factory assistants to urinate on canvases that had been primed with copper-based paints. The uric acid oxidized the metal in the copper ground, causing it to discolor and create unique but arbitrary patterns. It may appear that this series diverged from his hard-edged Pop Art style because of their expressionistic surfaces. They have, nevertheless, several things in common with Warhol’s earlier works – the teasing deadpan humor and the interest in using the accidental. Warhol often stated how he liked the “mistakes” that occurred while printing his silk-screens, allowing identical images to transform arbitrarily through the inking process. This is clear in “Detail of The Last Supper (Christ 112 Times)” from 1986 where no two of the 112 images of Christ are the same, and in many of his earlier silkscreen paintings. It is the creation of uniqueness via mass production that fascinated Warhol as he saw that mass production inadvertently creates unique items by trying to make exact copies.
Oxidation Painting (in 12 parts), 1978, by Andy Warhol, acrylic and urine on linen, 48 x 49 in. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. © 2010 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The Last Supper, by Andy Warhol © 2009 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visuals Arts inc.
The Rorschach paintings, which Warhol started in 1984, have a connection with his earlier subject matter of celebrity portraits, electric chairs and car accident photos. The entire series of Rorschach paintings had been put on view in a massive show at the Gagosian Galleries in 1996. The series experiments with images used in the psychological test created by a Swiss Freudian psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach. The projective test, which became known as the Rorschach’s inkblot test, gives insight into an individual’s psychology through responding to ambiguous stimuli, presumably revealing hidden emotions and internal conflicts. The subject is asked to say what each inkblot signifies to them. Many of Warhol’s cast of characters from American popular culture like Marilyn, Jackie, Mickey Mouse, and electric chairs could be viewed as Rorschach images. We respond and relate to them on a very personal level. On the surface, they appear factual, reflecting an objective reality taken from newspapers and other photographic sources. However, as in the title of the song by The Velvet Underground “I’ll be your Mirror” suggests, they can signify different things to each viewer.
Rorschach, 1984, acrylic on canvas, 158" x 110", by Andy Warhol / © 2010 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Mitro Hood
Despite Warhol’s seemingly nonchalant attitude about his art, and his reputation as a social butterfly, it is clear from his body of work that he was very diligent and dedicated to his art. The wide variety of styles and ideas at play in this exhibit also demonstrates that the 1980’s was a transition period for him – a time to experiment and grow. Although MoMA gave Warhol a retrospective two years after he died in 1987, it was more a tribute than a real assessment of his life’s work. “Andy Warhol: The Last Decade” suggests that it might be time to mount another comprehensive Warhol retrospective – almost 25 years after his death.
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Sue Karnet is a painter and sculptor living in New York City. She has been teaching art history for the past ten years at Parsons the New School for Design, The School of Visual Arts, Kean University and Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. She loves the design of Arabic lettering, and she doesn’t miss an opportunity to sew a headband, a dress, or another headband.
contact: skarnet-at-nyc-dot-rr-dot-com / www.suekarnet.com
Filed under: Art, New York City Tagged: | Art, New York City, Review
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nice post. thanks.