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Today I'd planned to do the Rothkos at Tate Modern and the Warhol exhibition at the Hayward - but trains meant that it was easier to do the South Bank first. I did have some trouble finding it, which shows how long it is since I navigated Waterloo and Waterloo East. This was perhaps the best part of the serious side of the day. I'd gathered the reviews were mixed, but I hadn't read, say, The Grauniad's write-up. Besides, what do they know?
To be fair, as we shall see, it is a lot of material for a tenner. I got in at less because of the Art Fund card. So bargain city.
It feels that I need to rant about galleries each time - here they demand we don't take photos (I never wanted to) and not use mobile phones. Fair enough - but perhaps they need to turn their walkie talkies down a tad.
The first room - Time Capsule - features several dozen looped four minute films on three screens. The brief for this was to get his mates (some of whom were dead famous or famous dead - and get them to stare, unblinking, into the camera. The results are played at 16 fps. The walls contain a dozen screen prints of Mick Jagger and of Marilyn Monroe, covers of Interview magazine, album sleeves, some pretty inept ("naive"?) drawings, videos for Nico and the Velvet Underground, and contents of the time capsule boxes. It took me a while to work out the labels for each column of art was to the right of each stack - and the top pictures were five or six metres up. Stiff neck, much. Around the corner on the ramp were more of the same, and aphorisms that - whilst being fun - are distinctly sub-Wilde. It's as if they cleared out a warehouse of his crap. A similar room of kipple for Francis Bacon had the illusion, at least, of casting light on his creative process. This just illustrates a dictum I'll come back to. And on the wall is a note which will provide me with my conclusion.
The second room was Factory Diaries - film diaries made by members of Warhol's entourage, driving around the homes of Hollywood stars, chatting with Liza Minelli, dressing a drag queen, and some of Warhol's early films with dubious technical quality. Along one wall was a series of booths, in which you can listen to tapes of conversations Warhol had with filmmakers, Truman Capote, Leni Riefenstahl and so forth. Of course, these are of poor quality, and voices are not necessarily recognisable, nor even identified in some cases. And they are hardly the Oval Office tapes of Nixon. One of them has an insight, to which I will return. In the centre of the room, curtained off by red, white and blue dangling chains, are something like forty tv screens. Once you find the entrance (an attendant points as you pay homage to the old Morecambe and Wise curtain stick) you can take your pick of screens, each of which has one of the many documentaries Warhol made for MTV and cable channels - interviews and chats with and depictions of rock stars, actors, politicians, dancers, drag queens, transsexuals, nobodies, wannabes and has beens. Again, value for money, but you'd be hard pressed to see all of them.
To be honest, in many ways the third room, Screen is both the best and the best value - and by god it's also the worst. Entitled Screen, it features nine films made by Warhol in the 1960s, the period when he had abandoned paint and presumably printing. The first illustrates the strengths and weaknesses: Bike Boy features a blue-collar twenty-something biker (allegedly) who takes a leisurely shower, then he is dressed in a boutique and regailed by members of the Factory gang, before retiring to a couch to talk to Viva and eventually make out. He's pretty enough, so there's the homoeroticism, but the piss is being taken out of him, so there's the archness, and the quality is poor - so you hear half of what is said. And it's just short of two hours long. Cut away, if you will, to the two shorts (ten mins in total, 16 fps) of the drag queen eating a banana. Elsewhere we have the camp of a house and an amateur variety show, the infamous Blowjob in which you watch the face of someone who is being sucked off (or waiting to be sucked off), a 26 minute film of a hair cut (16 fps, natch) and of course, Empire, a long take of the Empire State Building which - at 16 fps - lasts eight hours. Try watching all of that one.
Before the final room - which can be seen from the Screen room through a large window and at first appears to be an exhibit from the Screen section - an antechamber lists key events in Warhol's life. This might have been useful at the start, not the end.
So the final room - a cloud sculpture of silver inflatables wafted around by fans. Full of hot air, not doubt. You can bat these around, if you are gentle.
So, the summary. The title, by the way, comes from the Truman Capote novel of the same name. No, me neither. And Breakfast at Tiffany's presumably made no sense. In Cold Blood feels about right. The first room has a dictum that Warhol wanted to show that anyone can do art - and whilst he ends up signing works as his even if they are note, he played with the mass production of art so that lackeys would do the actual work of printing. Yes, anyone can do art.
Some people just shouldn't.
In the second room, the insight comes from Warhol's observation that he doesn't believe in editing. Too absofraggingluting right. That would involve quality control. Clearly we are meant to be interested in what he is interested in. Riefenstahl's opnions on photos of tribes. I think not. Watching paint dry. In black and white. The films are hypnotic. Or cures for insomnia.
Finally the conclusion. The note said that we probably think we know Warhol, but this exhibition would change our minds. Well, I used to think I liked and was interested in, Warhol. Not any more.
Afterwards I walked along the Thames to the Tate, having browsed the bookstalls, but it didn't give me time to do the Rothkos as I needed to meet up with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jkneale for coffee at 3.30. I was still late. This was pleasant, and we retired to a rather packed and got packedter Chandos. Much shop talk, of course, discussion of fan and audience studies, and reference to future projects. It's hard to believe we known each other for 17 years now. Oook.
To be fair, as we shall see, it is a lot of material for a tenner. I got in at less because of the Art Fund card. So bargain city.
It feels that I need to rant about galleries each time - here they demand we don't take photos (I never wanted to) and not use mobile phones. Fair enough - but perhaps they need to turn their walkie talkies down a tad.
The first room - Time Capsule - features several dozen looped four minute films on three screens. The brief for this was to get his mates (some of whom were dead famous or famous dead - and get them to stare, unblinking, into the camera. The results are played at 16 fps. The walls contain a dozen screen prints of Mick Jagger and of Marilyn Monroe, covers of Interview magazine, album sleeves, some pretty inept ("naive"?) drawings, videos for Nico and the Velvet Underground, and contents of the time capsule boxes. It took me a while to work out the labels for each column of art was to the right of each stack - and the top pictures were five or six metres up. Stiff neck, much. Around the corner on the ramp were more of the same, and aphorisms that - whilst being fun - are distinctly sub-Wilde. It's as if they cleared out a warehouse of his crap. A similar room of kipple for Francis Bacon had the illusion, at least, of casting light on his creative process. This just illustrates a dictum I'll come back to. And on the wall is a note which will provide me with my conclusion.
The second room was Factory Diaries - film diaries made by members of Warhol's entourage, driving around the homes of Hollywood stars, chatting with Liza Minelli, dressing a drag queen, and some of Warhol's early films with dubious technical quality. Along one wall was a series of booths, in which you can listen to tapes of conversations Warhol had with filmmakers, Truman Capote, Leni Riefenstahl and so forth. Of course, these are of poor quality, and voices are not necessarily recognisable, nor even identified in some cases. And they are hardly the Oval Office tapes of Nixon. One of them has an insight, to which I will return. In the centre of the room, curtained off by red, white and blue dangling chains, are something like forty tv screens. Once you find the entrance (an attendant points as you pay homage to the old Morecambe and Wise curtain stick) you can take your pick of screens, each of which has one of the many documentaries Warhol made for MTV and cable channels - interviews and chats with and depictions of rock stars, actors, politicians, dancers, drag queens, transsexuals, nobodies, wannabes and has beens. Again, value for money, but you'd be hard pressed to see all of them.
To be honest, in many ways the third room, Screen is both the best and the best value - and by god it's also the worst. Entitled Screen, it features nine films made by Warhol in the 1960s, the period when he had abandoned paint and presumably printing. The first illustrates the strengths and weaknesses: Bike Boy features a blue-collar twenty-something biker (allegedly) who takes a leisurely shower, then he is dressed in a boutique and regailed by members of the Factory gang, before retiring to a couch to talk to Viva and eventually make out. He's pretty enough, so there's the homoeroticism, but the piss is being taken out of him, so there's the archness, and the quality is poor - so you hear half of what is said. And it's just short of two hours long. Cut away, if you will, to the two shorts (ten mins in total, 16 fps) of the drag queen eating a banana. Elsewhere we have the camp of a house and an amateur variety show, the infamous Blowjob in which you watch the face of someone who is being sucked off (or waiting to be sucked off), a 26 minute film of a hair cut (16 fps, natch) and of course, Empire, a long take of the Empire State Building which - at 16 fps - lasts eight hours. Try watching all of that one.
Before the final room - which can be seen from the Screen room through a large window and at first appears to be an exhibit from the Screen section - an antechamber lists key events in Warhol's life. This might have been useful at the start, not the end.
So the final room - a cloud sculpture of silver inflatables wafted around by fans. Full of hot air, not doubt. You can bat these around, if you are gentle.
So, the summary. The title, by the way, comes from the Truman Capote novel of the same name. No, me neither. And Breakfast at Tiffany's presumably made no sense. In Cold Blood feels about right. The first room has a dictum that Warhol wanted to show that anyone can do art - and whilst he ends up signing works as his even if they are note, he played with the mass production of art so that lackeys would do the actual work of printing. Yes, anyone can do art.
Some people just shouldn't.
In the second room, the insight comes from Warhol's observation that he doesn't believe in editing. Too absofraggingluting right. That would involve quality control. Clearly we are meant to be interested in what he is interested in. Riefenstahl's opnions on photos of tribes. I think not. Watching paint dry. In black and white. The films are hypnotic. Or cures for insomnia.
Finally the conclusion. The note said that we probably think we know Warhol, but this exhibition would change our minds. Well, I used to think I liked and was interested in, Warhol. Not any more.
Afterwards I walked along the Thames to the Tate, having browsed the bookstalls, but it didn't give me time to do the Rothkos as I needed to meet up with
jkneale for coffee at 3.30. I was still late. This was pleasant, and we retired to a rather packed and got packedter Chandos. Much shop talk, of course, discussion of fan and audience studies, and reference to future projects. It's hard to believe we known each other for 17 years now. Oook.
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