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Before heading up to The Baltic in Newcastle to interview and screen test the artists in The Dazed Vs Warhol exhibition I thought a lot about what Andy Warhol's legacy actually meant. Having read Robert Montgomery's scathing polemic in Swan Nationale about Warhol heralding a death of sensitivity and politics in American art, I found myself wondering whether an artist in a parallel 21st century, one that had never experienced Warhol's coldly detached celebration of the shallow artefacts of mass culture, would really be any better off?
After all, if Andy hadn't appropriated certain stark signifiers into the uber-pretentious arena of high art would we ever had to have faced up to their ubiquitous existence, and therefore had to consider the possible multiplicities of their meaning, or if you prefer, their non-meaning?
In a way didn't the sheer vacuity of Andy's Campbell's Soup cans and Brillo Pads change the way we think about the whole notion of 'art' forever? If so then surely for any contemporary cultural agent provocateur such a legacy can be viewed as no less than a brilliant fait accompli.
Watching Andy onscreen I always get the sense that he was an idea machine, an instigator who would immediately remove himself from his creation upon it's birth, hide behind his shock of blonde hair and dark glasses and just wait to see what happened next. |
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He was in this sense the ultimate detached spectator to his own life and the ensuing effect that had on the world around him, and well, why not? This de-sensitized emotional detachment informed everything he did, everything he was, and his celebration of our facile and meaningless consumer culture gave us all a very real sense of it's brutal empty core.
Yeah sure, of course the screen-prints are throwaway, some of the films are terrible and none of the work is in any sense emotionally precious, in all it's simply the pinnacle of an originally British trend The Independent Group coined as 'POP' in the 1950’s but I'm not sure it’s impact has been in any sense negative.
Warhol's take on the shit heap known as humanity just co-exists with everything else out there and it holds up an increasingly dark mirror to celebrity culture. Over and above that his vision helped to give the world Edie, The Velvet Underground and The Sticky Fingers album cover, a CV that's pretty hard to beat.
As for the impact Warhol had on Dazed, well the best person to answer a question about that is Jefferson Hack who is just one of the people that we asked to do a Warhol inspired screen test, before firing a bunch of difficult questions at them, enjoy.
Baltic Web Site |