Warhol

The Last Picture Show, Take One. Roll Tape:



Andy Warhol, and video-tape. I'm not sure which seems most removed from the world in which we currently live, and sometimes I'm completely astounded by how far technology has come in the last decade or so. Maybe too far. Maybe it's just me, but the small, smooth silvery disc of a DVD lacks the charm of a clunky video-cassette. Lacks any charm, in fact. Like CD's and records. Tapes and CD's. Mix CD's are just nowhere near as enderaing as the humble mixtape - I should know, I made enough of them in my day. . .

But back to Warhol. Or should we call him Warhola? 'Andy Warhol, he's a scream', as a great man once wrote. . .

When I was eighteen, in art school, we had a Monday class for the latter half of the morning where we discussed different artists and movements. Our tutor was called Louise, she wore a lot of very close fitting natural fibres, had a very short haircut and had the misfortune of being allocated a store-room to teach in because all the other groups had been given the free rooms. We'd be crammed into this store-room, more than 20 of us, hunched together, it was awful - though it was certainly better than the preceding art history lectures with Julia DeLancey who spoke in such a broad American accent that I think most people were too busy trying to listen to herm, they forgot to take notes - something which bit them in the ass when the exam came the following June.

At times, we were asked to write papers on the artists and read them out. One Monday in November of 1994, Stephen Dorrance, a tall, overtly butch guy who looked no more artistic than a bank manager and I were gven Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein respectively. I had struggled over the weekend to come up with five minutes worth of a talk on the subject that didn't focus on either the Factory or his involvement with The Velvet Underground too much (which were my primary interests in him), and had even gone so far as to borrow Kevin Beetlestone (the class's obligatory tartan trouser wearing, feather-haired gay man's) book on the artist, scribbling notes which i later didn't even consult. Something I make a habit out of even now. I can't tell you how many shopping lsist I've scrawled, only to completely ignore.

Anyway. Warhol's work doesn't lend itself to over-analysis, really. I don't know that any form of art does, or should be over-anallysed, but in this case, I think it kind of speaks for itself. It's bold, solid and image based, as all Pop Art is. You know what it's about, it doesn't need to be picked apart.

Principally, you can love him or hate him, but what Warhol and Pop Art did - and I spoke mostly about this during that excruciating talk - was to promote the graphic arts AS an art form, particularly illustration since Warhol had BEEN an illustrator. You know, here's a soap powder box, and it's art. And to a degree, there is art in more than the average person is aware of. People go shopping and don't stop and think of such things as packaging design as ART, and yet it involves creativity and thought and a particular kind of artistry.

And of course, he has that great quote about everyone in the future being famous for fifteen minutes, which alas proved prohetic, since we now live in a world with really dumbed down culture, and people who are 'celebrities' for absolutely no reason. Whatsoever.

My first awareness of Andy Warhol stems somewhat bizarrely not from either his work, or larger than life personna, but from his - rather random, and somewhat surreal - appareance in this music video from 1986, very shortly before his death, and regardless of having gone to art school, and studied his work, written an essay on him in my first year. . . it's still what I kind of associate him. Ghostly, bewigged and out of place.



And carrying a ghetto blaster, probably about a thousand times the size of an Ipod.

Which again, is somehow far more charming anyway. . .