More about the Exhibition

More than any other artist, Andy Warhol (1928�1987) merged the public with the private, the glamorous with the mundane, celebrity with anonymity, and ravenous voyeurism with seeming indifference. Well before the proliferation of media culture, he famously predicted that everyone would have their 15 minutes of fame--virtually foretelling the advent of American Idol and YouTube. Drawing on the quite radical impulses coursing through American culture in the 1960s, Warhol captured and reflected much that would mark a sea change in the social fabric of that time--and continue with potent ramifications since.

The visitor experience of Other Voices, Other Rooms begins with a red carpet welcome, including introductory material and music by The Velvet Underground, the band that Warhol launched from his famous Factory. From there, the exhibition unfolds in sections:

At the heart of the exhibition is the COSMOS, which highlights the artist's ways of thinking and working and his imperturbable eye for detail. Here one finds iconic works of art and objects, a Time Capsule, and the Factory Diaries--in which Warhol captured his life in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s--that feature glimpses of such luminaries as Edie Sedgwick, John F. Kennedy Jr., and David Bowie. In addition, drawings, photos, and rare archival material are presented alongside audio fragments of Lou Reed, Truman Capote, and others.

In the FILMSCAPE, visitors explore a cinematic landscape that includes films made between 1963 and 1968, including the Screen Tests, Sleep, The Chelsea Girls, Kitchen, and Mrs. Warhol. These films were Warhol's experiments. Secluded behind the camera, he depicts--without intervening--behavior in all types of situations, using time and observation as his ingredients.

The TV-SCAPE section of the exhibition presents, synchronously, all 42 television episodes that Warhol created between 1979 and 1987, along with a selection of rarely screened videos. In this section of the exhibition, the artist projects his voyeurism onto everyone--stars and ordinary people, alike--in the medium that seemed best suited to the job. Here, just as in his magazine, Interview, Warhol used his keen eye for detail and trivia to exercise a specific influence on the development of both television and video art.

Notes curator Eva Meyer-Hermann, "Andy Warhol once wondered about how it would be if one mirror would reflect another. He declared that everything which we want to know can be seen on the surfaces of him and his works. I thought I had to look behind these surfaces, but realized that what we are looking for is not behind but in front of them. Warhol�s surfaces reflect the world; his works are about you and me."

Other Voices, Other Rooms will be on view simultaneously at the Wexner Center and at the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Art Centre in London, England.


image credits

Andy Warhol
Self-Portrait (Fright Wig), 1986
Polaroid Polacolor ER, 10.8 x 8.6 cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection
Copyright The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Andy Warhol
Self-Portrait in Drag, 1980
Polaroid, transfer print, 10.8 x 8.6 cm
Collection The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
copyright 2007 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. All rights reserved

Andy Warhol
Cow, 1966
Screenprint on wallpaper, 115.6 x 75.6 cm vertical repeat
Refabricated for The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, 1994
copyright 2007 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. All rights reserved

Andy Warhol
Truman Capote, 1982, 1986
Gelatin silver prints sewn with thread, 69.9 x 54.3 cm
Collection The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
copyright 2007 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. All rights reserved

Andy Warhol
TDK, commercial, 1982
Collection Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, USA


More about Andy Warhol

One of the most influential and prolific American artists of the 20th century, Andy Warhol is closely associated with the emergence of pop art in the 1960s. His importance as a key figure in the history of art comes from the way he forces us to question that which we think is most familiar, from the brand-name goods we consume daily to our cherished belief in art�s originality. He also embraced a radically different concept of the role of the artist and of celebrity in daily life, foreshadowing many recent developments in contemporary culture.

Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928. His parents were immigrants from Czechoslovakia, and his father was a coal miner. When he was six, Warhol began collecting autographed photographs of movie stars, signaling two lifelong obsessions: celebrities and collecting. He attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology, majoring in pictorial design. During this time he experimented with many technical processes that he would later introduce into his work.

During the summer of 1949, Warhol and his friend Philip Pearlstein moved to New York. Warhol became a successful illustrator for several magazines--Glamour, Vogue, the New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar--and he continued to work as a commercial artist through the 1950s. He also created window displays and designed record covers and advertisements for commercial products. One of his first "public" exhibitions consisted of five canvases placed as backdrops to mannequins in a display window at Bonwit Teller in 1961.

About 1960 Warhol began using imagery from advertisements and cartoons in his paintings. By 1962 he was concentrating on mages from American consumer culture--Campbell's soup cans, Brillo boxes, and Coca-Cola bottles. He also demonstrated his fascination with celebrities and glamorous lifestyles through a series of portraits featuring such stars as Marilyn Monroe, Truman Capote, and Elizabeth Taylor. In the Disaster paintings of 1963, as in the portraits and consumer objects, Warhol used the device of repetition to underscore the overpowering influences of mass media. Perhaps the most telling and successful of the Disaster images is the series based on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

At first Warhol painted his commercial icons by hand, in the earliest works combining quotations from advertisements with relatively painterly brushwork. Soon, however, he gave increasing attention to replicating the flat, mechanical appearance of his sources. He began to use mechanical reproduction processes, especially silkscreen, to remove any indication of the artist's physical "touch" from the canvas. After moving to The Factory--his new large studio--in 1963, he frequently had followers and assistants execute the silkscreen paintings, further reducing his personal involvement in the painting process.

Warhol's exploitations of the banal and his indifference to subjectivity challenged essential ideals of avant-garde modernism, and his explorations of mass culture and industrial society were instrumental in the development of pop art. In 1962 and 1963 he participated in many of the exhibitions that defined and popularized pop art, such as the Sidney Janis Gallery's New Realists (1962). Solo exhibitions in 1962 at the Stable Gallery in New York and in 1962 and 1963 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles featured his silkscreen "painting" of commercial objects and movie stars.

In November of 1964 Warhol had his first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Here he exhibited a new series of works, Flowers, which consisted of images taken from magazines. Six months later, during an exhibition of the same series at Galerie Sonnabend in Paris, he announced his intention to retire from painting.

Over the next years, Warhol redirected his obsessive interests towards filmmaking, frequently working with the denizens of The Factory (among them, Ultra Violet, Ingrid Superstar, Lou Reed, Ronnie Cutrone, and the Velvet Underground rock and roll band). Early films such as Sleep (1963), Couch (1964), and Empire (1964) attracted the attention of Jonas Mekas and other avant-garde filmmakers; later Warhol produced a number of commercial features--Flesh (1968), Trash (1969), Bad (1971) and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1974)--often with Paul Morrissey.

In June of 1968 Warhol was shot and seriously injured by Valerie Solanis, who frequented The Factory. During the fall of the same year he began the publication of Interview magazine, which continues today.

Despite his professed "retirement" from painting, Warhol's works continued to be sought by collectors and widely exhibited throughout the 1960s. He had his first retrospective in 1965 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. In 1972 Warhol renewed his interest in silkscreen painting, mostly in the form of commissioned portraits. These as well as photographs claimed much of his attention in the later 1970s and the 1980s. During the 1980s, he also made some large-scale works, notably the Shadow Series, and befriended younger artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente, with whom he collaborated.

Warhol died in February 1987 after gallbladder surgery. During the same year the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts was established to support cultural organizations dealing with art. A major retrospective was organized by The Museum of Modern Art in 1989 and numerous subsequent exhibitions have investigated varied aspects of his work and his oeuvre as a whole. The Andy Warhol Museum opened in 1994 in Pittsburgh and houses many of his films, videos, and visual artworks, as well as an extensive archive of ephemera.