Filmscape’, part of Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms at London’s Hayward
GIANT WHO CHANGED THE WORLD
In art, even the recent past is another country. To experience a frisson of how it felt when art started to be made, felt and understood radically differently in the early 1960s, walk along the South Bank from Rothko at Tate Modern to Warhol at the Hayward. Here two American postwar art giants are displayed through a series of big, dark rectangular screens: Rothko’s melting purple-black veils of paint in the Seagram murals and late brown-grey series (1959-69) and Warhol’s monochrome films (1963-68) shown together in a gallery decked out with enormous biomorphic-formed sofas and swirling midnight-blue carpets. It is a brilliant dramatisation of the crash point of postwar culture: Rothko’s sublime straining for effect and transcendence versus Warhol’s shimmeringly cool, affectless, levelled images – “Sleep”, “Blow-Job”, “Haircut”, “Kitchen” – of everyday life.
In 1961 Warhol was a commercial artist with painterly ambitions – asked by a dealer why his works were smudged, he replied, “But you have to drip. Otherwise they think you’re not sensitive”. Then, in 1962-63, all at once, he depicted his first Campbell’s soup cans, produced his first “Disaster”, “Elvis” and “Marilyn” paintings and made “Sleep”. Two years later Barnett Newman complained that his abstract expressionist generation was already being “treated as if we were all dead”.
By then, the Great White Father’s influence was hypnotic, pervasive, irritating, inestimable, urgent. It is still all those things, which is why retrospectives – Tate Modern’s in 2002, Edinburgh’s in 2007 – keep coming, trying to pin down the impossible: an aesthetic so powerful that it saturated high art and mass culture and collapsed the difference between them. The battle lines are clear: Rothko changed lives, but Warhol changed the world.
The Hayward’s lavish “Other Voices, Other Rooms” is a mixed show visiting from Amsterdam and Stockholm. Lined with the silk-screened cow wallpaper Warhol made for Leo Castelli and culminating in a room full of air-brained “Silver Clouds” – “I thought that the way to finish off painting for me would be to have a painting that floats, so I invented the floating silver rectangles that you fill up with helium and let out of your windows” – it is a theatrical, original installation at once transforming and empathetic towards the Hayward’s 1960s brutalism. However, its claims to “shed new light”, “make us look afresh” and “introduce us to a whole new world of extraordinary images” are vainglorious nonsense.
The crammed galleries of soup cans, Brillo boxes and golden nudes, electric chairs and spooky, pallid self-portraits are compelling but familiar, as the best Warhol always is. Much else – time capsule memorabilia, excerpts from the “Factory Diaries”, a TV-Scape room featuring all 42 television programmes, mostly on fashion and gossip, made from 1979 to 1987 – is interminably tedious, as late Warhol often is. The premise of curator Eva Meyer-Hermann, that Warhol’s moving images is the key to all mythologies, is narrowing. Yet it has produced, in “Filmscape”, the section devoted to 48 hours of simultaneously screened films, a must-see exhibition that is the best showing of film in a gallery context that I have seen: alluring in comfort and lighting, generous in space, canny in its juxtapositions, practical in the clock with each film enabling you to know where you are in it.
The range is superb: from the five-hour epic “Sleep” – Warhol positioned his camera to gaze steadily at the naked body of his slumbering boyfriend, filmed at 24 frames per second but projected at 16 frames in eerie semi-slow motion – and the eight-hour “Empire”, consisting of a stationary shot of the Empire State Building as the sun sets, to both iconic and lesser-known shorts. “Haircut” is a brief, unexpected choreograph of desire. The exquisitely camp four-minute “Mario Banana” features a drag star munching the suggestive fruit. “Outer and Inner Space” meditates on the nature of screen identity, as a discomfited silver-haired Edie Sedgwick watches herself on video. Reality and artifice, celebrity and the underworld, a culture without hierarchies of image or thought, the subtle eroticisation of almost anything he touched: here is a visual and conceptual overload which emphasises that, inescapably and from all sides, Warhol is our contemporary.
FINANCIAL TIMES
7 October 2008 - 18 January 2009
The Hayward
Southbank Centre,
Belvedere Road,
London, SE1 8XZ
