Your 15 minutes has begun
Brisbane’s
Gallery of Modern Art has scored quite a coup with the opening
of its summer blockbuster exhibition, Andy Warhol, this month.
The exhibition is the result of a collaboration
between the Queensland Art Gallery and the Andy Warhol Museum
in Pittsburgh, designed to present one of the most comprehensive
Warhol exhibitions ever mounted and Australia’s first major
Andy Warhol retrospective. The exhibition marks 20 years since
the artist’s death in 1987.
Warhol, of course, once famously said that everyone
would be famous for 15 minutes. It seems with the explosion in
mass media, particularly non-traditional media such as the Internet,
Warhol’s prediction is coming true. When a distraught Britney
Spears fan can gain worldwide recognition (and reportedly a movie
deal) by posting a whiny video on YouTube, Warhol’s statement
seems scarily prescient.
Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh in
1928 to immigrant parents from north-eastern Slovakia. He lived
there until 1949 when he graduated from the Carnegie Institute
of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in pictorial design.
After graduating, he moved to New York and established a highly
successful career as a commercial artist and designer for some
of Manhattan’s major fashion magazines and advertising agencies
in the 1950s.
In the early 1960s he made his foray into fine art
and began making the now-iconic paintings that used as their source
ordinary objects from daily life such as televisions, bathtubs,
soup cans, cars and Coca-Cola bottles. At the time, his art was
derided by many outside the somewhat closeted art world. After
all, where was the “art” in reproducing something
as prosaic as a soup can? But his “discovery” of the
artistic in the everyday was to provide a public face for the
movement known as pop art.
Warhol wasn’t the inventor of pop art. Indeed,
some historians argue its roots go back to the 1920s; and even
within Warhol’s own generation, Jasper Johns was producing
what is recognisably pop art before Warhol was opening cans of
Campbell’s soup.
But what Warhol did do was to synthesise pop art
into a readily recognisable and easily digestible form. His paintings
and screen prints of actors like Marilyn Monroe and icons like
Jackie Kennedy (Onassis) tapped into the public’s seemingly
insatiable pursuit of glamour and celebrity. Ironically, he made
pop art actually popular.
He
was also one of the earliest multi-media “stars” of
the art world. He didn’t see himself just as a painter,
but also as a filmmaker, a record producer, an author and ultimately
– like so many of his subjects – a “celebrity”
in his own right.
In 1961–62 he developed his photographic silkscreen
method of producing works, for which he became renowned. From
the time of his first solo exhibition in 1962 until his death
in 1987 he was seen as the figurehead of the pop art movement.
The exhibition brings together more than 300 works
spanning all aspects of his practice from the 1950s onwards —
paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, photographs, films, videos
and installations.
The exhibition includes his important ‘Death
in America’ works; iconic images of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie
Onassis, Mao Zedong and Elvis Presley; and his Campbell’s
Soup Cans. The exhibition will show, for the first time in Australia,
Warhol’s early commercial work as well as his late monumental
paintings. Andy Warhol will investigate how the artist
represented himself through his art practice, including his self-portraits,
time capsules, drawings, films and videos.
In addition to works from The Andy Warhol Museum,
the exhibition includes loans from the National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the National
Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and private collections.
The Gallery’s Children’s Art Centre
will present ‘The Silver Factory: Andy Warhol for Kids’,
which will include a display of rarely seen works for children
by Warhol, as well as a number of interactive activities. Admission
to the Children’s Art Centre is free.
The Australian Cinémathèque and the
Gallery of Modern Art will present a major program of restored
film prints from the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The program
will be one of the largest and most comprehensive surveys of the
artist’s film works to be screened in Australia.
David Edwards
