by Franklin W. Liu

"Artists’ Visions of Artists” was all about enigmatic Pop Artist Andy Warhol. It was the third and the last of a series of short films and videos presented by Branka Bogdanov, director of media, at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

These short films and videos provided a stimulating one hour and twenty minutes of subtext to an ongoing, major exhibition of over 50 artworks “Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists” mounted for view in ICA’s main gallery space.

Jonas Mekas, an avant-garde filmmaker who met Warhol in New York City produced a 12-minute long, black & white visual diary in 1964 “Scenes from the life of Andy Warhol.” 

It was set to the music of a NYC band called Velvet Underground whose material like “Heroin” dealt with the seedy underbelly of lower Manhattan; junkies, homosexuals, transvestites and a mix of artists. 

Like Pablo Picasso, Warhol’s persona had become larger than life, and it shined with overt eccentricity as it did for surrealist painter Salvador Dali.

Even now, one is not quite sure to what degree Warhol’s mysterious, public persona was genuine or self-promotion to sell art.

When Warhol said: In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, his own reputation was already in full tilt.

He was dubbed one of the beautiful people in society as he ventured beyond painting, to film making and sponsoring multi-media extravaganza of Velvet Underground and Nico, featured in Ronald Nemath’s 1967 “Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” a 12-minute long film.

These short films and videos are not meticulously edited documentaries with a discernable beginning, middle and end. They are fragmentary at best, presented as a collection from casual observers rambling, making no particular point.

The camera work was unsteady, sometimes out of focus, often shot from odd angles contributing to an impression of a run-on experiment and finally settling as an unintentional forerunner of X-generation’s MTV music videos.

The films retain the feel of a family’s Super-8 film, found years later gathering dust in the attic; a low-key, visual diary of a fleeting moment in time.   
   
To fully appreciate the psyche that drove Warhol’s art, one needs to begin with some understanding of the context and the social convention of the 1960s and beyond, as society moved in rapid transition from using rotary phones to touch-tone phones to cell phones.
    
Andrew Warhola was born 1928 in Pittsburg. He earned a bachelor’s of fine arts from Carnegie Institute in 1949. Soon after, he worked as a successful commercial artist and illustrator in New York City.
   
In the 1960s, Warhol began to paint images derived from advertisements. Repetition of commercial images to sell a product intrigued him. He did silkscreen images of the classic, green Coca-Cola glass bottles and Campbell soup cans.
    
These images resulted in a 1962 show titled: “Commodities.” First exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, then later as a 1963, a one-man show at the Stable Gallery in NYC.

Warhol the fine-artist was launched.
   
Next, in 1963, he curiously produced a series on disaster scenes; “Tuna Fish Disaster,” showing news photos of smiling faces of two Detroit women who died from eating botulistic tuna-fish from cans. Above the two women’s head was the image of the can of A & P chunk light tuna with batch code clearly visible.

In “Orange Disaster #5”, produced later that year, the identical image of an electric chair was repeated 15 times appearing like a photographic contact sheet. Warhol said, “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it really doesn’t have any effect.”

In his 1964 “Race Riot,” another news photo inspired crowd scene show policemen letting loose a snarling, lunging police dog attacking fleeing blacks.

By then, Warhol had become preoccupied by news images of violence showing car crashes, executions, assassinations, riots; death and destruction in general.

Even in his photo-silkscreen, celebrity on canvas series, few people realize that Warhol had a morbid, numbing connection to his subjects. It was noted in Edward Lucie-Smith’s book “Movements in Art since 1945” that Warhol’s pop-art portraits of Marilyn Monroe were done after her suicide, as those of Jackie Kennedy were executed only after President Kennedy’s assassination.

Warhol’s iconic treatment of celebrity portraits also ranged from the likes of Chairman Mao, Elvis, Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli and Mick Jagger.    

The irony of pervasive consumerism as subject of his work manifested when a Neiman Marcus department store catalog offered the opportunity for
anyone to be famous for just 15 minutes by sitting for a photo-silkscreen session by Andy Warhol in his studio for a fee. The advertisement read: Become a legend with Andy Warhol.   

Yet, in the general public’s mind, the serious thoughts driving the commentary of Warhol’s art, cautioning that our all-consuming culture soaked in selling, in branding, in packaging of goods has lost its sting and had receded into the background. Somehow, his enduring signature work is now mostly framed by the static, almost boring images of Campbell soup cans.

Many artists treat art as an opportunity for oblique examination of societal ills, buoyant with a higher purpose than simple distillation of beauty, bringing pleasure to the eye. Thus, compelling, relevant art has always been driven by thought-provoking content.

It is an aggregate, foreboding reminder that can lead to an enlarged and a more profound understanding as we navigate through life; all things considered, Andy Warhol has unabashedly enhanced that journey.

His works are in the permanent collection of major museums worldwide; his reputation as a major American artist and his place in art history are solid.

Warhol died on Feb. 22, 1987 when he was only 59-years-old, a full decade prior to a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, Internet-shopping became a routine, worldwide reality.

Our Feb. 2 review on “Portrait of Artists by Other Artists” can be accessed through our Web site: TheSomervilleNews.com.

This ICA exhibition runs through May 1. More information is available at (617) 266-5152