8.31.06 kulturnatib

Andy Warhol

I don't remember now why I was there but I can't forget what I saw when I got there. I had just arrived in Manila to try out the proverbial greener pasture on the other side of the fence. I was boarding at a house on campus, in UP Diliman, Quezon City. I think I had been asked to do or get something at the College of Fine Arts. So, I went.

At this time the College of Fine Arts was still at the third floor of the Arts and Sciences Library. It was midmorning. There were few students about. Though I was told to expect the worse of what is always known to be the weirdest college in the entire university, I was totally unprepared.

There was no weirdness. Only ghostly silence accompanied with bond paper signs hastily scribbled with pentel pen and scotch-taped on the stairways all the way to the third floor that said: WARHOL IS DEAD.

Almost two decades after his death, Warhol has come alive for me as he never had in all my years of art school in an exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, titled, "Andy Warhol/Supernova: Stars, Death and Disasters,1962-1964."

In art school then, as it is mostly now, a class in art history is exclusively a study of western art right up to the American movements. As happened, we had less than a semester left to take up this period. Warhol is among the central figures at this point.

When he appears on the scene, the western art world's shift to New York is all but completed and the nascent American imperial triumphalism is facing challenges abroad, in Vietnam, and domestically, in the civil rights and then the anti-Vietnam war movement.

While affirming some of what we learned about Warhol at that time, this exhibit introduced the deeper cultural influences that contributed to his work.

The crucial element that we missed in school was Warhol's film work. This provides the critical link in the development of the silkscreen, mass production, collaborative, appropriative technique of Warhol's paintings.

Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, guest curator for this exhibit, makes this point trenchantly by juxtaposing the films with the paintings. Incidentally, he also narrates the audio tour of the exhibit, with contributions from actor Dennis Hopper and others who were witness to and sometimes subjects for Warhol's works of this period.

Cronenberg makes the observation that Warhol's multiple silk-screened images, especially the ones with the silver or white backgrounds mimic film's picture frames. Far from being static or mere duplications, no two images in Warhol's works are the same.

It is only fitting then that the exhibit opens with the film 'Empire.' This is Warhol's infamous eight-hour-and-five-minute-long movie that features nothing but the uppermost part -- the most famous -- of the Empire State building in New York at night.

Right away, one sees the beginnings of the themes that informed Warhol's art: celebrity, fame, commodity and tragedy.

At this time, the Empire State dominated the New York skyline, the brightest star in New York's firmament. Warhol would aspire to be as that star. Along the way, as the exhibit shows, he created his own star system with himself in the middle of it all, strangely with his very absence, or his voyeuristic presence.

Naturally, Warhol also gravitated towards Hollywood, the pre-eminent American star factory. He did this not by becoming an actor but by appropriating images of famous stars -- Elizabeth Taylor, most notably -- and recasting these images in the way that confirms or extends the commodification of those same stars as art, as a result blurring to the point of erasing the line between entertainment and art.

Also featured in this exhibit are some works that are taken from newspaper pictures -- like, indeed, many of Warhol's images -- of the brutal dispersal of protestors during a civil rights march in Alabama, USA.

But, as Cronenberg explains, these, to Warhol, were simply another time-bound record of the tragic and not a social comment. Warhol wasn't into this. This was not his art.

While Warhol continues to provide a critical element to the understanding of American art, it should be noted that American art has moved on beyond New York and the blatant and extremely profitable narcissism of that period, even as in many places, it should be added, art continues to be nothing more than entertaining commodity.