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thursday, november 11 , 2010

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MUSIC REVIEW CA R O LY N H AX THE RELIABLE SOURCE

Instrumental dialogue
Gabriela Monteros piano and Gautier Capuons cello conversed powerfully in their concert at the Library of Congress. C9

A young childs grief

She was told about her stillborn brother, and it left a deep impression. C5

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A RT R E V I E W

of a salesman
Last Decade reflects how much Warhol turned sellout into high art
by Blake Gopnik n the last 10 years of his life and career, Andy Warhol sold out. He jumped headfirst into the crassest of pop culture: He appeared on junk TV such as The Love Boat, turned out junk TV himself (Andy Warhols Fifteen Minutes for MTV), applauded and created celebrities in his Interview magazine and then made junk portraits of any of them who would pay. This junk turns out to have made Warhol one of the most important and compelling artists of the 20th century. Thats the artist now on display in a show called Warhol: The Last Decade, on tour to the Baltimore Museum of Art from the Milwaukee Art Museum. By the time he died in 1987 at age 58, Warhol had turned selling out into his principle art form. He held a mirror up to our sold-out commodity culture by selling himself as a cultural commodity. This launched a major movement in art. (Last year, an excellent show called Pop Life, on tour from the Tate Modern in London, made this argument in detail.) Warhol on

DEPTH

PHOTOS COPYRIGHT THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY

B O O K WO R L D

Plenty of room for diversity at the I Hotel California

by Marcela Valdes

he building at the center of Karen Tei Yamashitas colossal new work of fiction, I Hotel, is a creaky hotel that once stood on the edge of Chinatown in San Francisco. Built after the great quake that nearly destroyed the city in 1906, it had rusting plumbing, dangerous wiring and rats the size of cats in the basement. But for the aging workers and young radicals who found shelter within its deteriorating walls, the International Hotel was both a fortress and a beacon. For Yamashita it is also the girder in a tremendous feat of creative engineering, because I Hotel is no ordinary work of fiction. As original as it is political, as hi-

I HOTEL By Karen Tei Yamashita. Coffee House. 612 pp. Paperback, $19.95

larious as it is heartbreaking, I Hotel is the result of a decade of research and writing that included more than 150 personal interviews. Its also a finalist for this years National Book Award in fiction, which will be announced on Nov. 17. Whether or not I Hotel wins the prize, it will be dog-eared and underlined and assigned to college reading lists for generations. Oddly enough, the novel began with a request from Wisconsin. Provoked by a questionnaire for Asian American writers that she received from a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yamashita decided to write a book about the Asian American movement in Calibook world continued on C3

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River water show & tell

Dinner guests were asked to bring Potomac water . . . and talk about it. C2

Recycled joke
Steve Martins line at the Mark Twain Prize ceremony sounded familiar. C2

The Love Boat leads to Jeff Koonss radical experiment with hard-core shots of his wedded bliss with porn star Cicciolina. The diamond dust that Warhol sprinkled on the most sold-out of his portraits foreshadows Damien Hirsts diamond-studded skull, price-tagged at $100 million. Warhols ads for Coca-Cola and Absolut Vodka are just a step away from Takashi Murakamis purses for Louis Vuitton. The Baltimore exhibition gives a hint of what Im talking about but you have to hunt for it. At the very tail end of the show, theres an extra little room that curators are calling the Last Decade Lounge. It is dolled up with beanbags, Lucite chairs, copies of Interview and a vintage television that loops a 1985 episode of Warhols Fifteen Minutes, featuring Debbie Harry, Bryan Adams and a throng of lesser lights. The walls are lined with photos of Warhol schmoozing his famous fans and clients, while a timeline records the rest of Warhols public presence in this era, from his nights at Studio 54 to when he paints a race car at Le Mans. art review continued on C10

TRUE TO HIS FORM: Warhols 1978 Self-Portrait (above) and 1986 Camouflage are among the works included in Warhol: The Last Decade, currently on tour to the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Wardrobe diplomacy: The first lady dresses for success in India.

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by Robin Givhan

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Guyton\Walker tap into Warholian flux

Front Room exhibit reflects the pop artists contemporary impact
by Blake Gopnik When the Baltimore Museum of Art scheduled Andy Warhol: The Last Decade, its curators also programmed a companion show, of sorts, that demonstrates the pop artists overwhelming influence on the art of today. It features a one-room installation by Guyton\Walker, the name used by New Yorkers Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker. At the last Venice Biennale, they were given one of the festivals most prominent spaces and came off as some of its most promising talent. In Baltimore, the duo have papered one corner of a gallery in a distorted checkerboard pattern, and in front of it theyve set a big, spare table, laminated in brightly colored, op-arty swirls. Theyve completely filled the space beneath that table, and odd corners of the gallery as well, with new one-gallon paint cans, their normal labels replaced with more of the same cheery patterns, often overlayed with low-resolution scanned photos of bananas. Similar banana/design mash-ups, printed onto vinyl, cover huge canvases hung across the gallery wall; they also cover sheets of drywall stacked upright off to one side. Finally, a head-high wax slab, also checkerboarded, sits on a shipping pallet in the middle of the room, which itself sits on a banana-checkerboard canvas. Wicks set here and there into the cube allow it to work as a candle. Guyton\Walker has left much room for viewers to participate in the ongoing flux of making visual meaning, reads a wall text. That is the understatement of the year. Its the flux a distinctly Warholian flux rather than any meaning you might pull from it, that is at the heart of this art. When Andy Warhol billed his artmaking self as the most crucial work of art he made, he was able to collapse distinctions between all kinds of objects and images. Silkscreens of movie stars and car crashes; bad TV shows and pee-covered canvases; pithy aphorisms and a tousled blond wig all were leveled to become small parts of the larger project of Warhols life and career. It was a profoundly radical move, and as such seemed to come with existential and aesthetic implications. No matter how cheery a Warhol show may look, it always also feels important, even grim: Its mash-ups imply an unsettled world. But now, as almost always happens in art, what was once radical and profound has settled down to seeming an aesthetic and a style, as seen in the Warholian art of Guyton\Walker and of many of their peers. And still, those Guyton\Walker installations, in Venice or in Baltimore, feel as though theyve got depths beneath their superficialities. The duo let us watch Warhols experiment become pleasant decor and thats as unsettling a sight as any Warhol himself might have conjured. gopnikb@washpost.com

Andy Warhols final masterstroke

art review from C1 All this is meant as postscript to the exhibition, but I think it needs to be seen first, if were to understand the 50 straight, fineart paintings that come before it. Those paintings big, imposing and often very strange feel like Warhols reaction to the creative sellout that was going on around them in his studio and life. Its almost as though the artist himself couldnt quite get a grip on where his most important, most radically performative art was leading. So, like many more traditional artists, he made paintings to help him work through his feelings and thoughts. The show opens with two big 1978 self-portraits, in Warhols classic photo-silkscreen style, that superimpose the same image of the artist several times, until hes lost in a swirl of himself. Its not a bad metaphor for how he might have felt at the time, overwhelmed with the person and persona hed become, and aware that that ever-multiplying, massproduced persona, however baffling it might be to him and others, was the real subject and stuff of his art.

The artist as work of art

It feels like Warhol realized that his paintings had come to matter less, as important contemporary art, than the fact that they were by him. And that very fact of artist-as-the-work-of-art that metafact, if you like comes to be what his later fine-art paintings address. Near those blurred self-portraits sits another work from that same year: one of the famous Marilyns that Warhol conceived at the start of his career, but now reproduced four times across a single canvas, in negative, in barely distinguishable charcoals and blacks. The original movie-star image has become barely legible,

Front Room: Guyton\Walker

runs through Jan. 16 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr., Baltimore. Call 443-573-1700 or visit www.artbma.org.

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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2010

BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART

COLLECTION OF THE ANDY WARHOL MUSEUM, PITTSBURGH/BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART

ARTIST AS ART: Warhol pushed the boundaries of artmaking in his last decade, producing this 1984 Rorschach (left) and 1985-86 Repent and Sin No More!, as he explored his own stature as an artist.

and fourfold repetition has diluted any uniqueness it might once have had and yet it still has the same talismanic power as when Warhol first presented it, because its still by him. In fact, the image seems to have almost more power than before, because we know that, repeated and nearly invisible, it really ought to have none at all. Warhol recognizes that he has arrived at a place where everything he makes or does even an appearance on The Love Boat will come to count as significant art. He tests that proposition by trying to cancel out an iconic early work, and watches as he fails and realizes that, by failing in his canceling, hes succeeded in making art as good as any hes made. The following year, Warhol ran

the same test on a doubly iconic work: his own 1963 rendition of the Mona Lisa, this time reproduced 15 times in disappearing white on white. Same result: A Leonardo touched by Warhol, however wan and bleached-out, is an unstoppable force. So, for that matter, is the pee of a great artist, or even of his studio assistants. Warhols Oxidation Paintings, which he began to make in 1978, started life as an even field of metallic paint laid down on canvas. That bronze- or copper-colored paint then got oxidized to greens and browns when it received the urine of denizens of Warhols studio mostly men, but with the occasional woman squatting for the sake of art. These works are a successful, fine-looking riff on the splashy

last-gasp abstraction being made in paint at that same time, by erstwhile superstars such as Jules Olitski and Larry Poons. Despite their origins in bathroom humor, that is, Warhols pictures manage to function perfectly well as fine art. Once again, Warhol pushes against the boundaries of artmaking, and finds himself crashing through to the other side. You can hate the oxidation paintings, but it doesnt make much sense to deny their status as art. They come from the hand and mind or at least the body and studio of a certifiably great artist. Something similar happens in 1983, when an Italian yarn manufacturer pays Warhol to make a series of images of its goods. Warhol first photographs a tangle of yarn, then silkscreens those images into what seems to be a spoof of Jackson Pollock as a salable product. The silkscreens are that, but they arent merely that: They also read as excellent new pictures that take Pollock forward into Warhol land, where theres simply no gap between the salable and art. Incredibly, the Warhol magic goes on to do its work even on much less promising of materials.

Un-camouflaged
In 1986, Warhol takes on camouflage, a pattern whose sole function in life is to remain absolutely unseeable. In Warhols hands, it stops melding in with anything at all. Instead, it pops into the cultural foreground as Camouflage, an important work of abstract art by a great artist the most to-be-seen object imaginable. The formless Rorschach blots that got squeezed out huge in Warhols studio in 1984 undergo a similar transformation. The whole point of such a blot is that it functions as a blank screen, with so few significant properties of its own that we can fill it with any we choose. But as Warhols Rorschach, its not empty at all. Its full of artfulness, worthy of being taken in for precisely what it is, and only for that: Once its on the museum wall, you read it, you dont read into it. You couldnt change an inch of its surface without doing violence to a great artists great creation and ruining your investment as well. Under all these droll experiments in pushing art as far as it can go, and beyond, there is a scream of pain. This show may look cheery or goofy at first sight, but much of its work leaves the impression that Warhol, who had a conservative streak a mile wide, cannot believe what hes wrought. The Rorschachs could as easily be cross sections through a diseased brain. The camouflage inevitably conjures warfare and hunting and death. Near those two blurred self-portraits at the beginning of the show is another doubled portrait of the artist, with a skull: The jester knows what is in store for him, and thinks that maybe he deserves it. And then theres one other take on self: a 10-silkscreen grid by Warhol, of Warhol . . . but with another mans hands around his throat, squeezing. Warhol does his best to kill himself off. But he knows, deep down, that he has become the undead of art. gopnikb@washpost.com

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Warhol: The Last Decade

runs through Jan. 9 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr., Baltimore. Call 443-573-1700 or visit www.artbma.org.

MORE PHOTOS To see more pictures from the Warhol exhibit, go to washingtonpost.com/ style.