ASPEN ART MUSEUM Summer Magazine 2021

ASPEN ART MUSEUM

DEC 03 2021 – MAR 27 2022

5

Warhol on Screen

Throughout his life, and into his afterlife, screen representations have been a major facet of Warhol’s image. With a new Ryan Murphy series in the works for Netflix, Charlie Fox scans through the icon’s representations on screen.

HE’S NOT THERE

and easy to mimic that they could plau- sibly recognize him without knowing exactly who he is. He’s been a cartoon— remember him throwing a can of his favorite food at Homer on The Simpsons (1989—ongoing)? ‘Soup’s on, fat boy!’ He’s been played by David Bowie in Basquiat (1996); he’s been played by Crispin Glover in The Doors (1991); he’s been a very special guest on The Love Boat in 1985. This would obviously be amusing too, for somebody who was sending an imper- sonator (RIP Allen Midgette) in his place when asked to give boring college talks—trolling before trolling existed. And the trick-or-treat dimensions of all this acting and imitation, they’re some of the big questions for his art, too: What’s the difference between the copy and original? What’s real, anyway? (Spooky, the thought that he could be reduced to just a costume, as if he were nobody.) Of course, it’s not just Andy’s look, both singular and oddly familiar, that makes him an attractive proposition for actors. There’s also his catalog of unique behavioral tics: the spaced-out but

also pulled off the Warhol-style stunt of creating a shot-for-shot color remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960): the same … and yet not. And, in 2021, he staged a musical in Lisbon about Warhol’s life: it’s just called Andy . Meanwhile, the fun and touching thing about Bowie’s performance in Basquiat is the absence of anything snakelike or super-creepy. Julian Schnabel’s brash and fantastic magic-realist biopic of the legendary artist and downtown comet is, in part, about the strange and tender relationship between the two mythic artists, white and Black, which seemingly flowed from father-and-son to kinda romantic and back again. Bowie’s Warhol is as dreamy as a heavily medicated unicorn. And it’s not like Bowie was rely- ing on the acid-tongued testimony of people in the shadows at Studio 54—he’d been up close with Andy a lot. There’s awkward footage on YouTube of them hanging out, c.1972, where Bowie looks like a confused Pre-Raphaelite dame. In an interview in 1997 for Belgian televi- sion, Bowie said, ‘It was impossible to go anywhere [in New York] without seeing him.’ Quizzed about his performance, Bowie responded that all he wanted was to capture Warhol’s previously unac- knowledged ‘little boy lost’ vibe. Maybe my favorite Warhol imitation is more cryptic and sinister. For his video TRUE LIFE (2013), the artist Alex Da Corte dresses up as the rapper Eminem and wolfs down a bowl of Life cereal while staring at you like a psychopath. Where’s Andy? Da Corte is actually making an oblique cover version of a 1982 video by Jørgen Leth called Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger , which documents that exact thing. (He eats it in meticulous little nibbles.) It kind of melts your brain that Da Corte is proposing Eminem and Andy as twins—somebody who was at least messing around with homophobia in their act and a gay man—and yet … two hot blondes, white mommy’s boys from industrial areas. Through his scary drag act, Da Corte is showing you how Andy haunts pop culture. Will the real Andy Warhol please stand up? Even when you can’t see him, he’s there.

A friend of mine once dressed up as Andy Warhol for Halloween. I mean, it’s a classic: just throw together a silver wig, black shades and a leather jacket, and you’ve got Andy, readymade! (It pays to be an ectomorph, if you really wanna nail it.) I think having an after- life as a Halloween costume would tickle Andy a lot—not just in a camp way because it would put this weirdly feline gentleman from Pittsburgh in the same league as Hannibal Lecter or the Joker, nor because it’s oddly fitting for somebody nicknamed ‘Drella’ (as in half Dracula, half Cinderella) by his disciples. But because it’s also the best measure of success in America: once you’re a Halloween costume, you’re really (to use one of Andy’s favorite phrases) ‘up there’—a big star. For an artist who was extremely into fame, brand recognition and image, and the ways they might be playfully distorted or rendered ghost- like—look at his Marilyns decay!— oh, the whole thing’s perfect … What really assures this uncanny afterlife is that everybody’s seen some version of Andy on screen—so famous

playful drawl, that friendly ghost pres- ence, the vibe of spooked delight at the whole world: ‘Aw, wow!’ Guy Pearce’s Andy in Factory Girl (2006) is the best, technically, in terms of eerie verisimilitude to the, uh, origi- nal. He gets all the Cheshire Cat hints that something sinister, puppet-master- like, might be happening behind Andy’s shades, or that he’s just a cute oddball, or maybe there’s nobody home at all. Read into him what you want: ‘I’ll be your mirror’, as The Velvet Underground once sang. One of the magical elders of queer cinema, Gus Van Sant has made a bunch of movies with and about great blondes like Nicole Kidman ( To Die For , 1995) and Kurt Cobain ( Last Days , 2005). He was plotting a portrait-of- the-artist-as-a-young-man movie about Andy with River Phoenix before the actor died of an overdose in 1993. Watch River’s woozy, mumbled performance as Mike, the hustler in Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), and you can imagine what he might have done with a young, out-of-focus Andy. In 1998, Van Sant

Bottom: David Bowie as Andy Warhol

in Basquiat , 1996 Courtesy: Everett Collection/ Bridgeman Images © Miramax

Charlie Fox is a writer and artist who lives in London, UK. He co-directed the video for ‘Long Road Home’ by Oneohtrix Point Never with Emily Schubert in 2020.

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