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He’s the father of pop art, a muse, a pioneer of celebrity culture – the man who first said “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”, and the reason anyone still buys Campbell’s soup. He’s in the South African school syllabus and in every university programme for art students, locally and worldwide. He’s a visionary, and (weirdly) more relevant than ever before. He is, of course, Andy Warhol.
For one of the biggest names in the history of art, the first major exhibition of his work on the continent has been a long time coming, and the Wits Art Museum, in partnership with the Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has put together another show that, after a walkabout, feels well worth the wait. It’s taken five years of planning, so go figure.
I’ve seen major works by Warhol on three different continents, and each of them is a reminder of the man’s seminal place in the production of not just art, but of media as well. Our ideas of iconic figures in history – Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Muhammad Ali – have been informed by his multiple recreations of them using rows of their most famous images, repeated often enough to drive home that sense of celebrity that he helped to create.
To see his images in real life is to come full circle and understand the physical material that it takes to make something, or someone, famous. The surprisingly large images take you back in time, to the decadent days of Studio 54, and to the architectural “New York loft” typology, which his famous Factory studio was so intrinsic in forming. It takes you back to Edie Sedgwick, his own muse, to Grace Jones, and to a time in history when photography was new and when the idea of multiples in art was a novelty that was expected to fade away.
This particular show is the first full museum show I’ve been to that’s been dedicated to his oeuvre, and it is quite a thing to be immersed in. When you’re surrounded by so many of his images, you really get a sense of Warhol’s immense, extraordinary capacity to engage with colour. The Sunset series, on display at the exhibit, was originally reproduced in more than 600 colourways. They become more than images, elevating themselves to pure experiments in how different colours can fight and marry each other. His diamond dust drawings almost suck the forms out of their frames, sparkling with a glitter that speaks as much about the glory of American pop culture as they do about its hollow, vapid emptiness.
The show is called Unscreened, which is fitting. For a man so synonymous with the medium of print, it’s hard to actually disassociate him from his work.
We are shown the man behind the image as, along with books written by the artist, there are copies of Interview magazine – which Warhol founded – and a series of his endangered animal prints. Andy, the human being who cared about stuff.
To write about him and the work he produced today, is, however, a little pointless. There’s been so much written, so much made in response, so many books, films, postcards, exhibitions, monuments, high school art projects ... To add to the corpus is a little unnecessary. Andy has become more than what he made – a myth larger than any newspaper article could consolidate.
Like the curators and organisers have done for the thousands of school children due to attend the show, we can now only each ask ourselves what his immense influence on our lives has done to us.
“Do you think it’s okay for musicians and artists [like Andy Warhol] to appropriate other people’s work?” one poster asks. “How does Andy Warhol inspire you?” begs another. “Why do you think Andy Warhol is relevant in South Africa?” asks the last.
It’s this that the show leaves you with: questions that you probably already know the answer to, but have never had to fully engage with before.
As you leave the exhibition, an original image of the artist by Robert Mapplethorpe glares down at you. In it, Andy’s head floats in black space, without a neck, in dreamy black and white. His head is left without context, lost in the void, without a sense of a place or orientation in this new globalised, industrialised art world.
It’s a really once-in-a-liftime sort of exhibition, so go and see if it does anything to you. But, either way, make sure you take a selfie with Marilyn – a requisite of the #artselfie trend a while ago. By posting it on Instagram, or anywhere online, we become living tributes to his life’s work, great cogs in his marvellous art machine.
You will also become horrible clichés, but, really, I think he would approve.
