Ausstellungsansichten / Exhibition views (ANDY WARHOL EXHIBITS a glittering alternative)
Few people know that Andy Warhol prohibited the exhibition of his early work, prior to 1962. The floor 0 of the mumok the spacious room that receives the visitor, will be dedicated to her until January 31. Marianne Dobner is responsible.
"Warhol would be pissed off at you, wouldn't he?"
"I'm afraid so," laughs Dobner, curator of the exhibition. ANDY WARHOL EXHIBITS a glittering alternative . She has worked on the show for more than four years. Her hair has gone short and silver, parted on one side, almost a spontaneous homage to the wig he started wearing. the totem of pop art as a sign of identity in the 1960s.
Ausstellungsansichten / Exhibition views (ANDY WARHOL EXHIBITS a glittering alternative)
The mumok is a colossal graphite-colored bunker located in the MuseumsQuartier square , the museum district of Vienna. It is the largest space dedicated to modern art in Central Europe. is located at 552 kilometers by road from Miková, in Slovakia where they emigrated from the Warholas to the United States during World War I when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was beginning to disintegrate. They settled in the industrial city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania , 600 kilometers by road from New York, where he arrived Andy Warhol in 1949 at the age of 21 . After dropping the 'a' along the way, he began a successful career in the 50's What illustrator and graphic designer working for magazines like Glamor Y fashion and clients like Tiffany & Co. , with whom he earned a lot of money and creative independence from him. He is the most primitive Warhol, the one of ink and paper, the least familiar, an almost exotic figure, the commercial artist that Warhol himself—who did not hesitate to consider art as business and business as spectacle—would obscure the rest of history. career of him.
"It's hard to find the reason," explains Dobner sitting on the mumok coffee –. But I think Warhol soon realized that such an unglamorous medium as drawing would never catapult him to international success. He invented a character without a past. A myth. As a researcher and art historian, my obligation is to show it.
On that floor 0, under a dim light that creates an intimate atmosphere, are exhibited the drawings of Warhol's first exhibition in Manhattan . It was the summer of '52 in the Hugo Gallery (26 East 55th Street), 'Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote' . Warhol admired the author of Other voices, other spheres , his main homoerotic intellectual reference. In these drawings the methodological principles that characterized his later career, such as serial production, are forged. Some were only shown to a small circle of people, such as 'Cock Drawings' , the series of drawings of his penises (among other things, because homosexuality was classified as a crime).
Andy Warhol, In the Bottom of My Garden, ca. 1956
On the second floor, between supermarket electric lights, appears in all the splendor of him the Warhol recognizable by all , the fact that raised the consumer society to the category of art, that of the industrial production of works of art. The genius who made us see a poetic act in a serial reproduction of soup cans or a sensual image in a bottle of Coke.
Andy Warhol Cow Wallpaper [Pink on Yellow], 1966, Reprint 1994
The room welcomes you with the walls papered with series of fluorescent colored cow heads , which gives way to his famous installation of silver clouds floating in the air ('Silver Clouds '). It is the antechamber of a monumental dark room: the space dedicated to the underground filmmaker. Warhol's film output filled 4,000 reels . In total, he filmed 150 films of different length Y 472 Screen Tests , the 4-minute 16mm tapes in which he placed a celebrity in front of a still camera.
His experimental cinema, which dazzled the directors Jonas Mekas and Agnes Varda , had no place in commercial theaters. Here the feature film of 3 hours and 24 minutes is shown at the same time The Chelsea Girls , partially shot at the famous Chelsea Hotel in New York; silent medium length blow-job , where the camera points in a single shot at the face of actor DeVeren Bookwalter during fellatio (this film would have a sequel: Eating Too Fast, eating too fast ); or the movie Empire , lasting more than 8 hours, a perpetual black and white shot of the New York skyscraper filmed from the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation.
Andy Warhol, Michelle Loud. Mick Jagger, ca. 1978, 1986
Pure avant-garde cinema , and everything happens while listening to the background Lou Reed's screams and Nico's Teutonic-accented voice from beyond the grave . A separate room is reserved for the multimedia show Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966-1967), devised by Warhol to exhibit it during the tour of the band of which he was manager, The Velvet Underground . Shortly after he was fired by Lou Reed, who would go on to kill Nico and later John Cale, but the initial collaboration was fruitful.
Warhol only shot in the 1960s, in a short period of time between 1963 and 1968, the year in which he suffered the attempted murder of Valerie Solanas, disseminator of the SCUM Manifesto , a project to castrate men. Solanas was a retarded artist who fired three shots at the door of her studio The Factory for refusing to collaborate with her and left him on the verge of death.
Although at the end of his life he lifted the veto, Warhol, as he had done with his pioneering work, also withdrew all of his films from public circulation in 1972.
Ausstellungsansichten / Exhibition views (ANDY WARHOL EXHIBITS a glittering alternative)
On the upper floor the mumok presents a second exhibition, DEFROSTING THE ICEBOX , an experiment that mimics the traveling exhibition RAID THE ICEBOX 1 with Andy Warhol , which the American artist curated in 1969. With one caveat, the artworks selected by Marianne Dobner They are different: the hidden treasures of the antiquities collection of the Vienna Museum of Art History and the World Museum.
The great reference of modernity died of a heart attack in 1987. He was only 58 years old. Too young to leave much of his artistic legacy in the shade. Almost as if it were a last installation, his museum in Pittsburgh maintains a real-time webcam that focuses on his grave 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Installation view of Raid the Icebox in NOMA's Great Hall, 1969-1970 Museum of Art