ASPEN ART MUSEUM
ANDY WARHOL: LIFETIMES
20
Warhol in Private
this major, life-altering event into your vision for the exhibition. And how Warhol’s life experiences and, perhaps, just his experience of being alive, un- fold throughout the galleries. MM There’s something sacri " cial about the way Warhol presents himself in the photograph taken by [Richard] Avedon after he’d been shot. The pose that he struck ... it’s not Saint Sebastian, exactly, but there was something very … SK Homoerotic. MM Homoerotic, yes. But Warhol was obsessed with beauty. And it’s so interesting that he presented his body that way such a short time after the shooting. He referred to his body as a Dior dress. It was so spliced up, so dramat- ically recon " gured by the shooting, and of course, by the surgery. I think that’s a fascinating aspect to Warhol, that he was both cloaked and, at the same time, so generous with his image. It was striking to see his body be- cause he cut a pretty glamorous " gure in the 1960s—a radical change from the nebbish adman he was initially. He transformed himself into this cool guy with leather jackets and dark glasses, pointy boots, striped shirts. It was a hardening in terms of his image. It brings to mind the observation by Diane Arbus, cited in an article in Art in America in 2005, about the gap between intention and e ! ect. Not knowing whether or not he was delusional about his self-image. Warhol underwent such a physical trans- formation over the years. It seems like there becomes a battle for self-preser- vation through the image that he was creating. I think that resonates today in a way that it might not have resonated earlier; there’s such a sense of image- consciousness now, in part due to social media. But when I look at images of Warhol through the years, I see someone struggling for a sense of peace within his self-image and, potentially, a kind of dysphoria. Coming back to your question about what was surprising—what struck me was that it took a while for the public in the US to catch on to Warhol’s great- ness. It wasn’t until the show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia that he was fully acknowl- edged as a phenomenon. SK In 1964, yes. MM There was a resistance to Warhol. Before that, he was better received in Europe than he was here. In the later years of his life, after the shooting, he started doing a di ! erent kind of work — Interview magazine, Warhol TV— basically working with popular culture directly. Not so much a response to pop culture, but actively creating the material of popular culture of the period. The shooting resulted in a radical change. Essentially, he had a second life and that second life took place di ! er- ently—it had to do with society people and their portraits, portraits of celebri- ties. Due to a desire for safety, his studio life changed drastically. It shifted from drug addicts, people on the fringe, any- body stopping in—somebody like Valerie Solanas—to a business model. It became a Brooks Brothers lifestyle that allowed him a renewed sense of safety. At the same time, I think you can see a through-line between his early work and his late work. And even between his commercial art and his late work, which became very commercial in so many ways. He became a product himself. SK He shifts from the 1960s to the 1970s; he really mirrors the way that
familiarity with American culture— that we have shared reference points to Warhol’s world. So, when I’m thinking about reconceptualizing, I’m doing so for an audience already knowledgeable in a particular way—even if it’s just with American culture, as a lived experience. Because of our ‘comfort level’ with Warhol and how he’s almost invisible to us, I’m interested in the things that might make him more visible and more surprising to an American viewer. I think this could be partly by looking at di ! erent periods of his work, allowing projection, and considering how it might be about common themes. For example, in the ‘queer galleries’, it was a lot of fun for me to work with that material. I was, in a way, inhabiting his position as a gay man of a certain era. Making associations freely and with pleasure— like Camou ! age [1986]—I enjoyed work- ing with that painting within a queer context. I’m not sure what that would be camou # age for; it’s certainly not going to disappear into anything. It’s so camp. But, to me, as a gay person, it also relates to the homoerotics of the hypermasculine motifs that are often circulating in the gay masculine world. And that was interesting concerning the idea of the closet. At the same time, it points to Warhol as a cipher, disappear- ing, as he often seemed to want to do,
into a recorder or a camera. SK To become a machine.
MM Become invisible, blank, a screen for projection. Become a mirror, which is what, in so many ways, he was. Then there are the ‘Oxidation’ paintings [1977 –78], which suggest sexual activity in a bathhouse, a kind of orgy on the canvas —also dealing, of course, with [Jackson] Pollock and abstract expressionism. Imbuing these works with sexuality was particularly interesting to me as a queer person. SK During the 1970s, homosexuality was considered politically charged and under threat in American society. It only became legal as late as 2003 in the US for two consenting adults of the same gender to have sex. So, Warhol was a dangerous " gure because he was making and showing this explicit erotic work of men. You’re bringing a lot of sexually charged material into this show and your practice pictures queer bodies, foregrounding homo- sexual experience. I wanted to ask if you could talk more about your pro- cess in organizing and sifting through all of this deeply homoerotic material and how you chose to present it? MM With this show, you don’t have to start at one point; you can start any- where. In many ways, it is a collage. Part of what was interesting to me was the potential for someone to enter the ‘queer galleries’ " rst and have Warhol’s queerness facing the street. The gallery with the ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ series [1975] is an immer- sive experience—with the spectator’s re # ection in deeply saturated, mirrored plexiglass, joining with the color-infused " lters that Warhol placed on his sub- jects, the drag queens. Also, Warhol him- self in drag projected large. There’s potential for confusion within this queer, transformative context. SK We’ve spoken so often of Warhol’s body and his vulnerability, his desiring gaze, his awkward features that he was really embarrassed about and the scars on his torso, following the 1968 shooting by Valerie Solanas. I wanted to ask how you thought about bringing
“The shooting resulted in a radical change. Essentially, he had a second life.”
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