DIA'S ANDY: THROUGH THE LENS OF PATRONAGE
Dia:Beacon
Riggio Galleries
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, NY 12508
845 440 0100
May 15, 2005- April 10, 2006
By SANDRA SIDER
Installation view of the exhibition "Dia's Andy: Through the
Lens of Patronage" at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries.
showing Andy Warhol Portraits 1969-1986, acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas; each portrait 2 panels, each 40 x 40 inches, and Washington Monument wallpaper 1974.
Portraits collection The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and Dia Art Foundation, New York.
Wallpaper collection The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Photo: Bill Jacobson.
Nowadays, when Internet fame can be achieved in fifteen seconds, Warhol's dictum about fifteen minutes seems a bit old-fashioned. His art, however, is timely as ever, especially when it is given the kind of breathing space of Dia's Andy: Through the Lens of Patronage (May 2005-April 2006) in Dia: Beacon's Riggio Galleries. Warhol would have loved having this commemorative exhibition in the former Nabisco printing plant, which has an incredible 240,000 square feet of gallery space. To reach the Warhol display on the main floor, visitors pass by John Chamberlain's garishly beautiful automobile sculptures and subtle grids by Agnes Martin, uncannily appropriate preludes to Warhol's riot of color, stacked imagery, and gridlike repetitions.
Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (the largest museum in the world dedicated to an individual artist), Dia's Andy features the Disaster series, Skulls, Last Suppers, Portraits, Brillo Boxes, Time Capsules, Wallpaper, Screen Tests, his Interview magazine displayed to show the covers, and films. Warhol's monumental installation Shadows, originally commissioned in 1978 for the Lone Star Foundation (now Dia) is on permanent display in its own spacious room at Dia: Beacon. Showing 72 of 102 paintings, each 75 x 52 inches, Shadows has the paintings displayed adjacent to each other, all at the same height, as the artist meant for the series to be experienced. One of these pieces displayed alone would be inexplicable, but as an installation they confirm the promise of Warhol's genius. Taking an insignificant motif, a pointed shadow, the artist used texture, color, and scale to create much more than what he christened "disco décor." The cinematic quality of Shadows is intensified by flickers and flashes of white, gray, and neon colors that glow and dance along the mostly black walls. This is Warhol in his baroque phase, flamboyant and mysterious.
Classic early Warhol can be seen in eight paintings of the Disaster Series, as powerful today as when they were created in 1963-64. A woman who jumped to her death, crashing into a car, is immortalized in 1947 White. Repeated seventeen times, the silk-screened image of her violent death is resolved in the bottom register, where overprinted edges obscure her body and produce a series of abstract curves. Seen from a distance, the shapes look like flowers. In Gangster Funeral, printed on hot pink linen, each rectangular image is stacked a little to the left of the one below it, producing a slightly top-heavy monument to banality.
Standing in front of a wall of Warhol's portraits, each in double panels of acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, visitors may recall the hefty $12.6 million paid at Sotheby's in May for the 1963 square "Liz" portrait. Celebrity portraits continue to be the most enduring form of figural art, and Warhol knew it. The human touch has never been far from contemporary consciousness, whether that meant the hand throwing the paint or the body presented on the wall or floor. Warhol's double portraits lock each human figure into a duet with itself, leaving the viewer to reflect on the definition of identity and other contemporary conundrums. Warhol insisted on maintaining the same 40- x 40-inch format for each double portrait, hoping that eventually they might be gathered together and fitted over several walls. While it would have been interesting to have experienced this presentation at Dia: Beacon, the curator, Lynne Cooke, instead displayed the portraits staggered along the walls. With Warhol's vaguely phallic black-on-white "Washington Monument" wallpaper behind the portraits, each one pops out dramatically from the wall. Seeing thirty double portraits in one setting, viewers have the opportunity to study notable differences within several of the pairs.
Repeated images from the "Washington Monument" wallpaper unfortunately do not work well for Warhol's two large paintings of the Last Supper. The smaller version, ca. 116 x 225 inches, partially claims its pictorial space with the addition of color and the vibrancy of overlaid imagery. The larger version, however, 116 x 393 inches, fades back into the wallpaper. Its black lines run into visual confusion with the vertical lines of the Washington Monument, with the table legs particularly entangled. This painting would have been much more effective against the purple-and-yellow "Cow" wallpaper that was relegated to a dark corner of the lower level. My other criticism involves the Brillo Boxes, sixty of them placed in formation on the floor to fill a small room. This is how the boxes were placed for painting and silk-screening, but documentary evidence from exhibition photos suggests that the artist meant for most of them to be stacked for exhibition, as they would be found in the storage room of a warehouse.
Andy Warhol Gangster Funeral 1963
silkscreen ink, acrylic, and graphite on linen, 105 x 75 5/8 inches
Collection The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
(c)2005 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Paul Hester
Between the two major Warhol exhibition spaces on the main floor of Dia: Beacon, large-format cibachromes by Louise Lawler illustrate individual works by Warhol displayed in private settings. In her artful photographs, the totemic effect of a single image neatly balances the abundant display of Dia's Andy. The exhibition is documented by a 104-page catalogue, Dia's Andy, in the format of a magazine presenting essays by Lynne Cooke as well as by earlier critics. These reprinted reviews, which provide historical context for much of Warhol's work, include commentary by Arthur Danto (1989), Lawrence Campbell (1964), Carrie Rickey (1979), Peter Schjeldahl (1980), and Amy Taubin (1994). Warhol's early cinematic explorations of space and time can be seen in Dia: Beacon's summer film program, running through September 4. The schedule is available online at www.diabeacon.org.
SANDRA SIDER is an artist, critic, and independent curator who occasionally teaches art history and visual culture in the New York area. Her web site is www.sandrasider.com.
