Andy Warhol at the AGO: the art not the celebrity - MyGayToronto
Andy Warhol at the AGO: the art not the celebrity
11 - Aug 2021-
Andy Warhol is so inextricably entwined with popular culture that the descriptive phrase 'warholesque' (and yes it is in official dictionaries) instantly conjures a visual. The meaning will be slightly different for everyone as Warhol's prodigious output of art and product is breathtakingly varied. He was a restless artist, always exploring and pushing boundaries, but also possessed of a canny ability to create a trend or a market. For someone who lived so much of his life in the glare of the paparazzi's flashbulbs, he also remains, probably deliberately, a contradictory enigma. No biography agrees on much. So the rare chance to wander through an overview of Warhol's art is reason enough to visit the Art Gallery of Ontario's Andy Warhol exhibition.
The art is spectacular. The effect of a Marilyn, or the infamous soup cans, or multi-coloured electric chairs, is magnified by size and scale. Prints, copies and online images do not do Warhol's work justice. Arranged in a chronological thematic structure, Andy Warhol also attempts a loose historical structure. The very first curator note includes the sentence: "The view of Warhol as a celebrity obsessed with fame has overshadowed the struggle that affected this shy gay man, the son of working-class, Catholic, Eastern European immigrants, as he worked to become an artist." From there we are invited to, as in any biography, peruse family portraits and childhood photographs. Those lead to the first collection of artworks, Warhol's delicate sketches for the exhibit Sketches for a Boy Book.
The sketches ache with longing and feature an innocent abundance of male nudity. Shocking at the time, the late 1950s, they now have a wistful sweet quality, contrasting a penis with seashells, intricate swirls of pubic hair. Shockingly romantic for the Warhol who pushed sexual boundaries later in his career. At the end of the exhibit are his Torso (based on Polaroids taken in a bathhouse) and Male Nude series which while far more explicit, and with the latter being photographs, sexually charged, retain that same slightly removed and wistful quality. The same quality of a playful invitation to private arousal that much beefcake photography creates. Look and don't you wish you could touch. While the bookends of Andy Warhol may echo each other while showing artistic growth and daring, the journey from one to the other is anything but linear.
Warhol's use of line and colour may have been distinctively consistent, but the detours are wildly divergent. The progression from soup cans and dollar bills to portraits and then to the self-satire of the cow and Mao wallpaper makes perfect sense. The diversions into death and disaster are tonally different but somehow dovetail. The curators quote Warhol saying, "When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have an effect." Except of course it does. The electric chair paintings are viscerally disturbing, no matter how long one stares at them. Treating an instrument of death as a celebrity puts a cruel spin on the multitude of celebrity portraits. A cruel spin that Warhol turns on himself as the evolving self-portraits included illustrate pointedly.
We travel directly from Warhol designed album covers to a group of portraits that are, tragically, new to me. The Ladies and Gentlemen series, also a commission, consists of glamorous and vivid portraits of drag queens and trans women. Of course those terms mean quite different things today and post-Drag Race are far less confrontational. But to see Marsha Johnson, Wilhelmina Ross and other gender warriors given the Warhol treatment with all the fabulousness that bestowed, is a powerful contradiction to history. The duality continues with Warhol's last works as the photographic 'stitched' works alternate the "Male Nude" with pieces titled "Cadaver" and "Dissection Class." It is dizzying, a dark thread woven into a celebration of innocence, the male form and sexuality.
Warhol also dove into many other mediums and they too are represented. It is riveting to see Sleep projected on a wall, with John Giorno at the height of his allure. The many other films are represented by artifacts in glass cases and they supply an insight into Warhol's inspirations, sense of humour, and desire to break taboos while still staying commercially viable (a display case containing some of his wigs and wig boxes evokes much more complicated emotions). There is a display wall of Interview magazine covers that is pure nostalgic glow and a reminder of just how deeply into mainstream culture Warhol penetrated without ever losing his edge or otherness. Selections from the MTV series Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes and his notorious New York late night cable show, mix Warholian stars with unknowns with established stars with many who would go on to become stars. Or to disappear. On one video monitor Warhol gossips about Faye Dunaway's performance in Mommie Dearest while being done up in drag. It is riveting and impossible to tell if it is performance or cinema verité or some new gleefully gay hybrid.
Elvis is given a homoerotic makeover and Robert Mapplethorpe is immortalized with a simple but heartbreakingly gorgeous portrait. The famous Silver Clouds float in a side room as does footage of The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. That would be my only quibble with Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed's distinctive droning vocals are meant to be played loud, as in your face and powerful as the other art works hanging mutely on the gallery walls. And finally, the room that Warhol would probably have enjoyed the most: the gift shop. Prints, books, kitschy tchotchkes, even an Andy Warhol rag doll, are arranged in a garish shrine to Warhol's pronouncement that "Making money is art, and working is art, and good business is the best art."
Andy Warhol was my first visit to the AGO, to any art venue, since the pandemic began. The protocols in place created some trepidation but the art soon distracted and transported me away from the last year and a half of artistic engagement only through a computer screen. Each visit is timed at 15 minute intervals and as I arrived early, I wandered into the adjacent gallery which just happened to feature The Group of Seven and Norval Morrisseau. Being confronted with the sheer size of those magnificent and maligned works reminded me of how disconnected the last period of time has felt and how those works formed my earliest sense of what it means to be Canadian. Andy Warhol created a reconnection as well, reminding me of what it means to function in popular culture, as a gay man within a predominantly heterosexual culture that needs desperately to be subverted and upended, of my relationship to celebrity and how creating art is a separate goal from chasing that celebrity. It felt very warholesque.
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