Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Visiting "Andy" Today

I'm always trying to unite the critical faculty with the poetic one, but they're not easily seduced by each other, often preferring opposite sides of the bed. It's too bad criticism's a 'talking head,' and poetry is, well, simmering with passion, and, let's not forget angst and deep meditation on the paradoxes and ambiguities and fleetingness of love, life...

Today I expect the collusion of the critical and the poetic to be further clarified. I'm going to the Andy Warhol show at the Art Gallery of Ontario which should be interesting - I find his work, despite its elevation of the commercial icon to art, cerebral. It requires a critic as go-between, as intercessor, a body of theory to explain it. Commercialism figures highly in Warhol's art. He was a successful commercial artist before becoming a 'fine artist,' and he became hugely successful at that, too. He took cultural icons, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy/Onassis, and made us aware of our deifying tendencies. Or elevated the ordinary to the status of high art, like a show of packing boxes, filming the Empire State Building for 8 hours, filming a man sleeping through the night... I had no use for Warhol's aesthetic or artistic mentality when I was an art student many years ago, he never 'spoke' to me on any level about the possibilities of art. He was the showman showing the showmanship of our society. But then as now, I'm not a conceptual artist. Thanks to this show, though, I am already revisiting my biases and am beginning to even think he was a prophet - of the internet/media driven world that we live in, and that puts him in a whole other category. I may even end up liking him.

I'll let you know.


(Here's a link to an article, Andy Warhol's Smirking Genius, on the PBS 4-hour documentary on Warhol.)

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous7:10 PM

    I like how you put that Andy Warhol [quote]"...was the showman showing the showmanship of our society."

    I never cared for his Art, either and too many people ended up dead or addicted around him. I'm not a big one on understanding conceptual Art.

    You know, though, he may have been a prophet after all. Was it not he who said: "Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes?" More like a curse, really.

    I like how you are revisiting the Artist and how you once viewed him and how you might begin to view him.

    Blessings~

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  2. Laurieglynn, now I have had to revise my superficial views of Warhol... sigh. Thank you for your commiserating comment: he's still not what I would call a 'fine artist' but something of a voyeur/commercial artist... none of the images were his own, he simply took moments from the culture and blew them up or offered them on film. A review of sorts follows this post. xo

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A Pulsing Imagination - Ray Clews' Paintings

A video of some of my late brother Ray's paintings and poems I wrote for them. Direct link: https://youtu.be/V8iZyORoU9E ___