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Review: ‘Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, drawing, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, illustration, installation art, intimacy, Melbourne, memory, National Gallery of Victoria, New York, painting, photographic series, photography, Polaroid photography, portrait, printmaking, psychological, reality, sculpture, space, street photography, time, video and works on paper
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Exhibition dates: 11th December 2015 – 24th April 2016

In collaboration with The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, USA

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
Mao (Facing Forward)
1986
Oil on canvas
233.6 x 193.0cm
Private collection
Image courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

Time lapse

This mega-exhibition has been a popular success for the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, with over 300,000 visitors during its run. But does that make it an interesting, or even memorable, exhibition? Personally, I think this is an exhibition based on a curatorial concept, an interesting concept, that does not then lead to a memorable exhibition. I will explain why.

The idea behind the exhibition, to compare and contrast the work of Andy Warhol (one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century) and the work of Ai Weiewei (that denizen and superstar of contemporary art and free speech, in China and around the world) is sound but in reality, on actual viewing, the relationship between the ideas of both artists seems rather forced.

While the synergy of ideas between both artists is present – “a vocabulary which celebrates freedom of speech and, at the same time, the wisdom of pop culture” – evidenced through the symbology of popular culture and the specificity and uniqueness of the original, the installation of the work does neither of the artist’s work justice. In this game of comparisons (where Andy Warhol’s photographs of New York sit opposite those of Ai Weiwei’s, where Andy Warhol’s portraits of Chairman Mao sit diagonally opposite Ai Weiwei’s) neither artist’s work can be contemplated as a whole… and it is Warhol’s work that comes out a poor second best in this artistic exchange. Why? Mainly because both artist’s are talking about completely different things from completely different eras and it is Ai who dominates the conversation. As Monica Tan observes in an article on the Guardian website, “In their art, Ai aggressively engages with politics and current affairs… while Warhol was forever occupied with consumerism, pop culture iconography and celebrity.”1

With regard to the work of Ai Weiwei there is the key word, aggressively. His brazen installations simply overwhelm the sophistication of the work of Andy Warhol, and this should never have happened, should never have been allowed to happen. The exhibition does not do Warhol’s work justice. Ai Weiwei comments, “We’re dealing with different societies, Andy Warhol and I. We are involved with very different social and political circumstances. But we’re both trying to face out reality honestly and to give a better illustration of our time.”2 While the last sentence is true, facing out reality honestly does not mean that both mens work can be understood or compared in the same breath, which is what happens in this exhibition. For each artist’s work I felt there was no space to breathe in the whole eight galleries. The visitor needs at least three hours, and a couple of visits, to get through all of the work and at the end of it all you feel is rather exhausted and only a little enlightened. After the forced curatorial concept of the whole exhibition, this is my second major criticism of the show: the unnecessary “noise” of the installation. Everything and the art kitchen sink (preferably teamed with an ancient Chinese sink with ceramic flowers growing out of it) has been thrown at the installation of the exhibition, not necessarily to its benefit.

Susan Sontag despairs of the “ambience of distraction” that pervades contemporary museums – less room to contemplate, more rooms for noise. The NGV seems particularly adept at this distraction and this exhibition is just another example of the phenomenon. Room after room is filled to the brim with artefacts which are then placed on more noise – busy, repetitious wallpaper! Andy Warhol’s silkscreen portraits of Mao (1972) are hung on his Mao Wallpaper (1974, reprint 2015), on the exterior of Ai Weiwei’s Letgo room (2015) meaning that you can’t really “read” the colours of the silkscreens properly as they are subsumed amongst this mass of wallpaper noise. A similar thing happens with Warhol’s Electric Chairs (1971) silkscreens and his Electric Chair (1967) painting which are hung on Warhol’s Washington Monument Wallpaper (1974, reprint 2015). This means that the luminosity of the colours of the silkscreens and painting completely loose their impact if you were viewing the works against a plain wall. They just blend into the gallery wall. It’s as though the curators at the NGV are frightened of empty wall space, both in the number of objects in a room and the lack of negative space (plain coloured walls) behind the art works. And this is not a singular occurrence of this phenomenon at the NGV… the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me featured this installation technique while the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great was nearly ruined by garish wall colourings and patterned floors. Less is more.

Speaking of which, some of superstar of the contemporary art world Ai Weiwei’s work was, dare I say it, woeful. When he hits the mark, such as in bodies of work like the photographic series Study of Perspective (1995-2011, below), his incisive commentary on freedom and surveillance With Flowers (2013-2015) or his installation of S.A.C.R.E.D. Maquettes (2011), which depicts scenes from the detention cell where he was held without charge by the Chinese government for eighty-one days -– he is masterful as an artist, in complete control of his visual and symbolic language. But then you have pieces of work such as the dire Letgo (2015) (focusing on Australian activists, advocates and champions of human rights and freedom of speech) made of pseudo-LEGO which is just a hideous and ugly art work that has very few redeeming features. There also seems no logical reason to remake the famous photographic triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995, below) in children’s building bricks. To no particularly good effect, why is this statement, this re-imagining being made? Similarly, when Ai remakes a pair of handcuffs in jade and wood, Handcuffs (2015), other than the historic qualities of the materials in relation to the history of China and issues of freedom of speech, where does the work actually take you? Not very far. Noise, noise and more noise, just a symptom and comment on our social media society.

The third major criticism of this exhibition and the most crucial to its failure to be a memorable exhibition: is its lack of TIME.

Lumping both Warhol and Ai Weiwei side by side, cheek by jowl, gives neither artist’s work the time to breathe and the viewer no time to contemplate, to IMAGINE, the relationship between the two artists. Two artist’s from different eras separated by time. Here, time (and space) is conflated as though the intervening period between them never existed. My idea was this: first, have the first four gallery rooms full of Warhol’s work so that you could understand the ambience of his colour and subtlety, yes subtlety, of his visual language. Then a dark passageway before emerging into four galleries of Ai Weiwei’s work. In this way, you could have understood each artist’s work independently of each other in a holistic way, and then made you own linkages between the two artist’s works… instead of, oh look, here’s Warhol’s photographs of NY and, oh, there’s Ai Weiwei’s photographs of NY! This simplistic, popularist, comparative curatorial strategy never allows these major artists work room to breathe or the time and space to exist in the sphere and realm of each other. Warhol’s work is denuded by Ai’s aggressive, contemporary take on politics and freedom of speech. Warhol did not deserve that. A sense of TIME and SPACE is what this exhibition needed in its installation in order for the viewer to be able to fully contemplate and IMAGINE the relationship between the two artists. To trust the intelligence of the viewer to make the connections, not treat them as some number walking through the door. Less noise and more imagination.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Word count: 1,313

Footnotes

1/ Monica Tan. “Ai Weiwei interview: ‘In human history, there’s never been a moment like this’,” on The Guardian website, 10th December 2015 [Online] Cited 23/03/2016.

2/ “Max Delany in conversation with Ai Weiwei,” in Gallery magazine, January-February 2016. National Gallery of Victoria, 2016, p. 29.

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Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Gao Yuan
Ai Weiwei
2012
Image courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio

This major international exhibition features two of the most significant artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei.

Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, developed by the NGV and The Andy Warhol Museum, with the participation of Ai Weiwei, explores the significant influence of these two exemplary artists on modern art and contemporary life, focusing on the parallels, intersections and points of difference between the two artists’ practices. Surveying the scope of both artists’ careers, the exhibition at the NGV presents more than 300 works, including major new commissions, immersive installations and a wide representation of paintings, sculpture, film, photography, publishing and social media.

Presenting the work of both artists, the exhibition explores modern and contemporary art, life and cultural politics through the activities of two exemplary figures – one of whom represents twentieth century modernity and the ‘American century’; and the other contemporary life in the twenty-first century and what has been heralded as the ‘Chinese century’ to come.

Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei premieres a suite of major new commissions from Ai Weiwei, including an installation from the Forever Bicycles series, composed from almost 1500 bicycles; a major five-metre-tall work from Ai’s Chandelier series of crystal and light; Blossom 2015, a spectacular installation in the form of a large bed of thousands of delicate, intricately designed white porcelain flowers; and a room-scale installation featuring portraits of Australian advocates for human rights and freedom of speech and information.

Text from the National Gallery of Victoria website

“Marilyn Monroe, the electric chair, Mickey Mouse, Mao Zedong, wallpaper, disasters, comic books, the Empire State Building, dollar bills, Coca-Cola, Einstein – no one knows how many works he left behind; they are varied and miscellaneous, touching upon almost all the important personalities and things of his time, and encompassing almost any possible means of expression: design, painting, sculpture, installation, recordings, photography, video, texts, advertising … Andy Warhol’s creations have rebelled against traditional, commercial, consumerist, plebeian, capitalist and globalised art… no matter when or where he was he was always taking photographs and recording; he was several decades ahead of his time. …

Andy Warhol was a self-created product, and the transmission of that product was a characteristic of his identity, including all of his activities and his life itself. He was a complicated composite of interests and actions; he practiced the passions, desires, ambitions and imaginations of his era. He shaped a broad perception of the world, an experimental world, a popular world, and a non-traditional, anti-elitist world. This is the true significance of Andy Warhol that people aren’t willing to accept, and the reason that he is still not recognised as a true artist by everyone.”

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Ai Weiwei. “Ai Weiwei: A tribute to Andy Warhol,” in Gallery magazine, January-February 2016. National Gallery of Victoria, 2016, pp. 31-32.

“Warhol is someone I think of as a unique treasure from the past century, which I call the ‘American Century’. His work has all the qualities of that time and reflects all its mythologies. Warhol’s value has always been underrated. He was many evades ahead of his time. I think, even today, he is still one of the most important figures in contemporary art.”

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Ai Weiwei quoted in “Max Delany in conversation with Ai Weiwei,” in Gallery magazine, January-February 2016. National Gallery of Victoria, 2016, p. 27.

Ai Weiwei in conversation with Virginia Trioli

Icons and iconoclasm

Andy Warhol is among the most influential artists of the twentieth century. He was a leading figure in the development of Pop Art, and his influence extended to the worlds of film, music, television and popular culture. Warhol created some of the most defining iconography of the late twentieth century through his exploration of consumer society, fame and celebrity, media and advertising, politics and capital.

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist, social activist and one of today’s most renowned contemporary artists. His provocative work encompasses diverse fields, including visual art, architecture, curatorial practice, cultural criticism, social media and activism. Ai’s practice addresses some of the most critical global issues of the early twenty-first century, such as the relationship between tradition and modernity, the role of the individual and the state, questions of human rights and the value of freedom of expression.

In this gallery we are introduced to the artists through their engagement with self-portraiture and self-representation, and through some of their most iconic, performative and iconoclastic works. These works not only attest to both artists’ transformation of aesthetic value through artistic innovation and experimentation, but also reference their shared interest in cultural heritage and vernacular expression in the United States and China, respectively.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Mao
1972
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen
208.3 x 154.9cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution Dia Center for the Arts
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

The source image for Warhol’s numerous portraits of Mao Zedong is the frontispiece to the Chairman’s famous Little Red Book of quotations. Mao’s image was in the media spotlight in 1972, the year US President Richard Nixon travelled to China, and his official portrait could be seen on the walls of homes, businesses and government buildings throughout the country. It was also extremely popular among literary and intellectual circles in the West. Warhol’s repetition of the image as pop-cultural icon underlines the cult of celebrity surrounding Mao, and the ways in which the proliferation of images in media and advertising promotes consumer desire and identification.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Cultural revolutions

Andy Warhol’s Mao paintings, based on a photograph of Mao Zedong taken from his famous Little Red Book of quotations (1964-76), adopt the subject matter of totalitarian propaganda to create pop portraits of the communist leader. Created in 1972, the year US President Richard Nixon travelled to China – signalling a thawing of relations between the two nations after almost three decades of intense political rivalry – Warhol’s paintings address the cult of personality surrounding Mao. Warhol’s Mao paintings, prints and wallpaper highlight not only the status and influence of the Chinese leader at the height of the Cold War, but also the instrumental role the repetition of images played in establishing his fame.

In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, avant-garde artists in China embraced a wide range of aesthetic positions, including Pop and postmodern critiques of Socialist Realism, sometimes known as cynical realism, to recalibrate historical Chinese images and propaganda. These deadpan critiques of official state imagery are apparent in Ai Weiwei’s large-scale, hand-painted images of Mao produced in the mid 1980s in New York. Ai’s representations of Mao subject the communist leader to various distortions familiar from television signals and screens and painterly gestural abstraction.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Self-Portrait with Skull
1977
Polaroid™ Polacolor Type 108
10.8 x 8.6cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Gao Yuan
Ai Weiwei
2009
Image courtesy Ai Weiwei studio

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
Illuminations
2014
Digital lambda print
126.0 x 168.0cm
Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

This self-portrait was shot by Ai in an elevator while being taken into police custody in 2009. On the night before the trial of a fellow political activist in Chengdu Ai was preparing for, Chinese police officers forced their way into his hotel room around 3 am and arrested him. This candid, documentary-style snap plays on the tradition of the ‘selfie’ in contemporary social media, transforming the form into a political tool. Illumination is a defiant expression of personal autonomy.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Gun
1981-82
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen
177.8 x 228.6 x 3.2cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Images of death and disaster were a recurrent theme for Warhol from the early 1960s onwards – a preoccupation fatefully realised at a personal level in 1968 when he was shot and seriously injured by the radical feminist writer Valerie Solanas. The gun in the painting is similar to the .22 pistol that Solanas used. While it may be read as autobiographical, Warhol’s Gun series can also be considered in the tradition of still life. It reflects on the ubiquity of violence in popular culture and the media, as well as the role of guns in US culture.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Jackie
1964
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen
50.8 x 40.6 x 1.9cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Cat in Front of Church
c. 1959
Ink, graphite, and Dr. Martin’s Aniline dye on Strathmore Seconds paper
57.5 x 45.1cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Cat Collage (from 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy)
c. 1954
Ink, Dr. Martin’s Aniline dye, and collage on Strathmore paper
73.7 x 58.4cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Julia Warhola (American, 1892-1972)
So Happy
1950s
Ink, graphite and aniline dye on paper
24.8 x 31.8cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Early drawings

Andy Warhol’s and Ai Weiwei’s practices, like those of many artists, began with a strong interest in drawing. Following art school at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, Warhol relocated to New York and worked as a commercial illustrator throughout the 1950s. His professional success was largely due to a simple yet sophisticated style and his ability to create art quickly using the ‘blotted line’ technique – a signature style which combined drawing with very basic printmaking. One of his best known advertising campaigns in the 1950s was for I. Miller Shoes; other clients included book publishers, record companies and fashion magazines. These early drawings are of a more personal nature and reveal Warhol’s interest in themes explored in later paintings, screen-prints and films, such as beauty, celebrity, commodities and urban life.

Ai’s early drawings display the poetic sensibility of a young artist whose childhood was largely spent in western Xinjiang Province, a remote desert area where his father, the eminent poet and intellectual Ai Qing had been sent for manual labour and ‘re-education’ during the Cultural Revolution. Made in the late 1970s, when Ai became involved in burgeoning democracy movements and the avant-garde artists’ collective the Stars group, the drawings – while classical in appearance – are marked by an individualistic world view and artistic experimentation at odds with the officially sanctioned aesthetics of Socialist Realism.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
You’re In
1967
Spray paint on glass bottles in printed wooden crate
Crate: 20.3 x 43.2 x 30.5cm
Bottles (each): 20.3 x 5.7cm
Diameter: 18.7cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
Neolithic Pottery with Coca Cola Logo
2007
Paint, Neolithic ceramic urn
27.94 x 24.89cm
Private collection
Image courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Three Marilyns
1962
Acrylic, silkscreen ink, and graphite on linen
35.6 x 85.1cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Warhol’s paintings of Marilyn Monroe were made from a production still from the 1953 film Niagara, and are among his first photo-silkscreen works. Warhol recalls that he began using this process in August 1962: ‘When Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make silkscreens of her beautiful face – the first Marilyns’. The repetition of Monroe’s image can be read as a memorial for the deceased American icon as well as a reflection of the media’s insatiable appetite for celebrity and tragedy.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Self-Portrait No. 9
1986
Synthetic polymer paint and screenprint on canvas
203.5 x 203.7cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the National Gallery Women’s Association, Governor, 1987
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

It is perhaps surprising, in view of his self-consciousness and fondness for the anonymity of silkscreen printing, that Warhol produced many self-portraits over a twenty-year period. In Self-Portrait No. 9 his gaunt, disembodied image floats against a starry black background, partially concealed by a fluorescent camouflage pattern – an eloquent reflection on the nature of fame and privacy in an age of mass media. Produced only months before Warhol’s death from surgical complications, this haunting self-portrait is sometimes interpreted as a postmodern death mask.

Nine months before his untimely death due to complications after gall bladder surgery, Warhol undertook a large series of iconic self-portrait paintings. Many viewers and critics alike regard these gaunt staring faces as memento mori, or reminders of human mortality. Each work centres on a levitating head surrounded by a halo of spiky hair. Monumental in scale, the works have a melancholic, haunting quality created in part by the use of dark tones and a dense black ground, and in part by variations across the series in the ghostlike negative photographic reproduction.

Text from exhibition wall panels

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Silver Liz [Ferus Type]
1963
Silkscreen ink, acrylic, and spray paint on linen
101.6 x 101.6cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

The first series of Warhol paintings on a silver background – the Electric Chairs and Tunafish Disasters of 1963 – suggest that the artist’s silver paintings are related to death. Even in the Liz paintings, which appear to highlight Elizabeth Taylor’s Hollywood career, there is an underlying theme of mortality. Warhol created this portrait when Taylor was at the height of stardom, but also very ill with pneumonia. He later recalled: ‘I started those a long time ago, when she was so sick and everyone said she was going to die. Now I’m doing them all over, putting bright colours on her lips and eyes’.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Fabis Statue of Liberty
1986
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen
127.0 x 177.8cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Warhol returned to the Statue of Liberty image many times during his career, repeatedly adapting the iconic form from different stylistic angles. In this work, Warhol focused on Lady Liberty’s face to produce a heroic celebrity portrait. The painting was created in 1986 – 100 years after the statue arrived in New York as a gift from France. The Fabis logo in the painting’s left corner is that of a French cookie company. Warhol played with all sorts of brands and logos in large-scale paintings of this period, often juxtaposing brands on top of images in contradictory and humorous ways.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia
2006
From the Study of Perspective series 1995-2011
Type C photograph
Various dimensions
Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

The Study of Perspective series of photographs depicts Ai defiantly raising his middle finger to architectural monuments symbolic of state and cultural power. Measuring the distance between the artist and his subject, the composition of these works invokes the spatial relationship between the individual and the state while also echoing the unforgettable image of a lone demonstrator blocking the path of a military tank at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China
1995
From the Study of Perspective series 1995-2011
Type C photograph
Various dimensions
Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

Christopher Makos (American, b. 1948)
Andy Warhol in Tiananmen Square
1982
© Christopher Makos 1982, makostudio.com

Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei at the NGV maps out where the two artists intersect. Works such as Ai’s neolithic urn defaced with a Coca-Cola logo seem to echo Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans. But it would be reductive to call Ai “the Andy Warhol of 2015”. He says the show is interesting because it simultaneously highlights how close but also “so far away, so far apart” the artists are in their respective cultural backgrounds.

In their art, Ai aggressively engages with politics and current affairs (such as his moving roll call of the more than 5,000 students that died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake) while Warhol was forever occupied with consumerism, pop culture iconography and celebrity.

A frisson is created by their respective portrayals of Mao Zedong hung in tandem. Ai says Warhol was a “very keen and very sensitive” artist, but portrayed the chairman as “no different to Marilyn Monroe or a Coca-Cola sign – purely a sign or signature of that time.”

The Chinese artist has a very different relationship to the ruthless political leader who he says was “very responsible” for damaging the nation, the destruction of so much Chinese tradition and so much personal, family crisis (Ai’s father, the notable poet Ai Qing, was exiled to Xinjiang as part of the late 1950s anti-rightist campaign).

In another room Warhol’s photographic impressions of China during a 1982 visit face Ai’s photos of his life in New York. Ai finds it strange Warhol visited the country since it was “every bit” the opposite of what he believed. “He said China was not beautiful because it didn’t have McDonald’s yet.”

Extract from Monica Tan. “Ai Weiwei interview: ‘In human history, there’s never been a moment like this’,” on The Guardian website, 10th December 2015 [Online] Cited 23/03/2016.

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Self-Portrait
1981
Polaroid™ Polacolor 2
3 3/8 x 4 1/4 in. (8.6 x 10.8cm)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Edward Wallowitch (American, 1933-1981)
Andy Warhol Holding Kitten
1957
Gelatin silver photograph
13.3 x 17.5cm (sheet)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. (1998.3.2810)
© 2015 Estate of Edward Wallowitch, all rights reserved

Edward Wallowitch (American, 1933-1981)
Andy Warhol with Siamese Cat
c. 1957
Gelatin silver photograph
14.9 × 21.6cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 Estate of Edward Wallowitch, all rights reserved

AW: Contemporary art always changes its own form; it is always questioning its own condition. Social media is a way to connect and, for me as an artist, it is also a way to connect to reality and search for new expressions and ways to communicate. This has become essential because contemporary art is not a series but a practice. It is connected to our inherent human need to express our inner world, and to make that association possible with others. Social media is the best for this purpose.

MD: Warhol’s Polaroids and portrait paintings not only document his social milieu but also constitute a form of history painting. You recently embarked upon two major portrait projects, including Trace, 2014, and Letgo, 2015, focusing on Australian activists, advocates and champions of human rights and freedom of speech. Can you expand on the relationship between portraiture, celebrity, dissidence and political authority?

AW: These things differ a lot and they form different sections of human expression. As humans, our feelings relate to our desires, fears, anxieties or inner needs for justice and fairness. Above all, we have the idea of right or wrong, but we also make aesthetic judgements about proportion, light, colour, shape and sound. All these aspects have to work together to express ourselves.

Our values are not abstract. They are really about out wellbeing as humanity. We’re dealing with different societies, Andy Warhol and I. We are involved with very different social and political circumstances. But we’re both trying to face out reality honestly and to give a better illustration of our time.

Ai Weiwei quoted in “Max Delany in conversation with Ai Weiwei,” in Gallery magazine, January-February 2016. National Gallery of Victoria, 2016, p. 29.

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
Ai Weiwei with cat, @aiww, Instagram
2006
Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Screen Test: Edie Sedgwick [ST308]
1965
16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 4.6 minutes at 16 frames per second
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved

Steve Schapiro (American, b. 1934)
Andy Warhol Under the Silver Cloud Pillow, New York
1965
© Steve Schapiro; Andy Warhol artwork
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

A major international exhibition featuring two of the most significant artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei – will open at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne, in December 2015, and The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, in June 2016.

Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, developed by the NGV and The Warhol, with the participation of Ai Weiwei, will explore the significant influence of these two exemplary artists on modern and contemporary life, focussing on the parallels, intersections and points of difference between the two artists’ practices. Surveying the scope of both artists’ careers, the exhibition at the NGV will present over 300 works, including major new commissions, immersive installations and a wide representation of paintings, sculpture, film, photography, publishing and social media.

Presenting the work of both artists’ in dialogue and correspondence, the exhibition will explore modern and contemporary art, life and cultural politics through the activities of two exemplary figures – one of whom represents twentieth century modernity and the ‘American century’; and the other contemporary life in the twenty-first century and what has been heralded as the ‘Chinese century’ to come.

Ai Weiwei commented, “I believe this is a very interesting and important exhibition and an honour for me to have the opportunity to be exhibited alongside Andy Warhol. This is a great privilege for me as an artist.”

Ai Weiwei lived in the United States from 1981 until 1993, where he experienced the works of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, among others. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) was the first book that Ai Weiwei purchased in New York, and was a significant influence upon his conceptual approach. Ai Weiwei’s relationship to Warhol is explicitly apparent in a photographic self-portrait (taken in New York in 1987) in which Ai Weiwei poses in front of Warhol’s multiple self-portrait, adopting the same gesture.

Each artist is also recognised for his unique approach to notions of artistic value and studio production. Warhol’s Factory was legendary for its bringing together of artists and poets, film-makers and musicians, bohemians and intellectuals, drag queens, superstars and socialites, and for the serial-production of silkscreen paintings, films, television, music and publishing.

The studio of Ai Weiwei is renowned for its interdisciplinary approach, post-industrial modes of production, engagement with teams of assistants and collaborators, and strategic use of communications technology and social media. Both artists have been equally critical in redefining the role of ‘the artist’ – as impresario, cultural producer, activist, and brand – and both are known for their keen observation and documentation of contemporary society and everyday life.

Andy Warhol (born Pittsburgh 1928 – died New York 1987) was a leading protagonist in the development of Pop Art, and his influence extended beyond the world of fine art to music, film, television, celebrity and popular culture. Warhol created some of the most defining iconography of the late twentieth century, through his exploration of consumer society, fame and celebrity, media, advertising, politics and capital.

The NGV will present over 200 of Warhol’s most celebrated works including portraits, paintings and silkscreens such as Campbell’s Soup, Mao, Elvis, Three Marilyns, Flowers, Electric Chairs, Skulls and Myths series; early drawings and commercial illustrations from the 1950s; sculpture and installation, including Brillo Boxes 1964, Heinz Tomato Ketchup Boxes 1964, and Silver Clouds 1968; films such as Empire 1964, Blow job 1964, and Screen Tests 1965, among others from Warhol’s extensive filmography; music and publishing; alongside a selection of previously unseen work. The exhibition will also bring together a wide range of photography including over 500 Polaroids documenting Warhol’s friends, colleagues, artistic and social milieux.

Ai Weiwei (born Beijing 1957) is an artist and social activist who is among the most renowned contemporary artists practicing today. One of China’s most provocative artists, his work encompasses diverse fields including visual art, architecture, publishing and curatorial practice, cultural criticism, social media and activism. Ai Weiwei’s work addresses some of the most critical global issues of the early twenty-first century, including the relationship between tradition and modernity, the role of the individual and the state, questions of human rights, and the value of freedom of expression.

For the NGV exhibition, a suite of major commissions will be premiered, including a new installation from the Forever bicycles series and a new monumental work from his Chandelier series, among others. These will be presented alongside key works by Ai Weiwei from his early drawings in the 1970s, readymades of the 1980s, and painting, sculpture and photography of the 1990s and 2000s. New and recent installations, including new configurations of major works such as S.A.C.R.E.D. 2013 and Trace 2014, will sit alongside a wide range of photography, film and social media from over the past four decades. It will be the most comprehensive representation of the artist’s work in Australia to date.

Three major illustrated publications

The Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei exhibition will be accompanied by a suite of three dynamic and visually-led publication formats: a deluxe collectors’ book in a presentation case, including an original limited-edition print by Ai Weiwei; a prestigious hardback edition; and sumptuous paperback volume. The major publications will explore the conceptual, formal, strategic and historical resonances between both artists’ work.

Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria

The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) gallery
© Abby Warhola

Andy Warhol’s expanded cinema and multimedia performance the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI), featuring legendary rock group The Velvet Underground and Nico, debuted in April 1966 at The Dom, a Polish meeting hall in New York City. In the context of Warhol’s own practice, the EPI evolved from his work as a filmmaker, the social environment of his studio and earlier performances known as Andy Warhol, Up-Tight, in which members of Warhol’s entourage antagonistically confronted the audience while The Velvet Underground played onstage.

The EPI was a sensory assault – an immersive sound-and-light environment involving numerous collaborators. Warhol shot new footage that was projected simultaneously with older films as part of the show. Danny Williams helped orchestrate light effects, including strobes, spotlights and assorted coloured gels and mattes; Jackie Cassen created psychedelic slides; Gerard Malanga, Mary Woronov, and Ingrid Superstar staged dance routines with sadomasochistic theatrics; and The Velvet Underground performed their proto-punk songs and avant-garde rock improvisations at ear-splitting volume.

This evocation of the EPI is the result of detailed research by The Andy Warhol Museum into the original performances. It includes films that were projected during the shows, digitised copies of the slides, mattes that were used and live recordings of the Velvet Underground and Nico.

Text from exhibition labels

Steve Schapiro (American, b. 1934)
Andy Warhol Blowing Up Silver Cloud Pillow, Los Angeles
1966
© Steve Schapiro; Andy Warhol artwork
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Ai Weiwei at National Gallery of Victoria exhibition Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, 11 December 2015 – 24 April 2016
Ai Weiwei artwork © Ai Weiwei
Photo: John Gollings

Ugo Mulas (Italian, 1928-1973)
Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga and Philip Fagan in New York
1964
Image courtesy Ugo Mulas Archive
© Ugo Mulas Heirs. All rights reserved. Courtesy Archivio Ugo Mulas, Milano – Galleria Lia Rumma, Milano/Napoli; Andy Warhol artwork
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
Coloured Vases
2006
Neolithic vases (5000-3000 BC) and industrial paint
Dimensions variable
Image courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

In Ai’s series of Coloured Vases, ongoing since 2006, Neolithic and Han dynasty urns are plunged into tubs of industrial paint to create an uneasy confrontation between tradition and modernity. In what might be considered an iconoclastic form of action painting, Ai gives ancient vessels a new glaze and painterly glow, appealing to new beginnings and cultural change through transformative acts of obliteration, renovation and renewal.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Campbell’s Soup II: Tomato-Beef Noodle O’s
1969
Screen print on paper
88.9 x 58.4cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Warhol’s paintings of Campbell’s Soup Cans were first exhibited at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1962, and he returned to the subject repeatedly throughout his career. The works’ readymade commercial imagery, mechanical manufacture and serial production ran counter to prevailing artistic tendencies, offering a comment on notions of artistic originality, uniqueness and authenticity. The familiar red-and-white label of a Campbell’s Soup can was immediately recognisable to most Americans, regardless of their social or economic status, and eating Campbell’s Soup was a widely shared experience. This quintessential American product represented modern ideals: it was inexpensive, easily prepared and available in any supermarket.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
1983
From the New York Photographs series 1983-93
Silver gelatin photograph
Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Brillo Soap Pads Box
1964
Silkscreen ink and house paint on plywood
43.2 x 43.2 x 35.6cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

First created in late 1963, Warhol’s Brillo Soap Pads Box recasts the Duchampian readymade through the lens of American popular culture. Warhol produced approximately 100 of these boxes for his exhibition at Stable Gallery, New York, in March 1964, where they were tightly packed and piled high in a display reminiscent of a grocery warehouse. Unlike Duchamp’s use of real objects as readymade works of art, Warhol’s Brillo Soap Pads Boxes are carefully painted and silkscreened to resemble everyday consumer items. For philosopher Arthur C. Danto, Warhol’s Brillo boxes marked the end of an art-historical epoch and represented a new model of how art could be produced, displayed and perceived.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
Forever Bicycles
2011
Installation view at Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Image courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

The assembly and replication of readymade bicycles in Ai’s Forever Bicycles series, ongoing since 2003, promotes an intensely spectacular effect. ‘Forever’ is a popular brand of mass-produced bicycles manufactured in China since the 1940s and desired by Ai as a child. Composed from almost 1500 bicycles, this installation suggests both the individual and the multitude, with the collective energy of social progress signalled in the assemblage and perspectival rush of multiple forms.

Forever Bicycles disconnects the bicycles from their everyday function – reconfiguring them as an immense labyrinth-like network. The multi-tiered installation also achieves an architectural presence, much like a traditional arch or gateway to the exhibition.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Flowers
1970
Screen print on paper
91.4 x 91.4cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Experimenting with decoration – one of modernist painting’s most controversial subjects – Warhol’s Flowers prints were exhibited in tight grids at his first show at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York City, in 1964. A subsequent series was exhibited in Paris, where more than 100 works were hung almost edge to edge, mimicking the decorative effect of wallpaper. The source photograph, taken by Patricia Caulfield, appeared in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography magazine. Caulfield sued to maintain ownership of the image, and while the suit was settled out of court, the issues of authorship and copyright it raised remain relevant to contemporary art debates.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Flowers

Flowers in Western art history have symbolised love, death, sexuality, nobility, sleep and transience. In Chinese culture flowers also carry rich and auspicious symbolic meanings; from wealth and social status to beauty, reflection and enlightenment. The flower is a repeated motif in Andy Warhol’s work, from his earliest drawings and commercial illustrations to his Pop paintings and prints, first shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, in 1964. While the production of Warhol’s Flower paintings and silkscreens through the 1960s and early 1970s coincided with the burgeoning Flower Power movement, their bold plasticity, mechanical reproduction and seriality also suggested a more commercial undercurrent to the counterculture.

Flowers feature repeatedly in the work of Ai Weiwei, from his celebrated Sunflower Seeds, 2010, to a new installation, Blossom, 2015, composed of thousands of delicate white flowers created in the finest traditions of Chinese porcelain production. Along with poetic ideals of beauty, remembrance and renewal Ai directs the symbolism of flowers towards political ends in projects such as With Flowers, 2013-15, a daily act of placing fresh flowers in the basket of a bicycle outside Ai’s studio, for the benefit of surveillance cameras trained upon it. The act was a form of protest against the Chinese authorities’ confiscation of the artist’s passport and restriction of his right to travel freely.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Debbie Harry
1980
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen
106.7 x 106.7cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Self-Portrait
1966-67
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
55.9 x 55.9cm
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Ai Weiwei (Chinese 1957- )
At the Museum of Modern Art
1987
From the New York Photographs series 1983-93
Silver gelatin photograph
Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei; Andy Warhol artwork © 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

New York / Beijing

Andy Warhol fanatically recorded his everyday life on audiotape, celluloid and photographic film. He moved effortlessly between underground, avant-garde and glamorous social circles and his photographs of the 1970s and 1980s provide an intimate insight into his social world. They also show his keen observation of the urban life, architecture, advertising, popular culture and personalities of his adopted New York City. When Warhol visited China in 1982, he turned his photographic gaze to the people and significant sites of a culture in transition.

Ai Weiwei lived in New York for a decade from 1983 onwards, and his New York Photographs document the young artist’s social context as part of the city’s Chinese artistic and intellectual diaspora community. The images also show his participation on the margins of the New York art world; his commitment to social activism; his involvement with influential poets, such as Allen Ginsberg; and his identification with the work of Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Warhol.

In one photograph, taken at the Museum of Modern Art in 1987 – the year of Warhol’s death – Ai, in his late twenties, identifies himself explicitly with Warhol by adopting a Warholian pose in front of the Pop artist’s multiple Self-Portrait of 1966.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Steve Schapiro (American, b. 1934)
Andy Warhol Factory Portrait, New York
1963
© Steve Schapiro

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Electric Chair
1967
Synthetic polymer paint screenprinted onto canvas
137.2 x 185.1cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1977
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

This stark, singular image of an empty electric chair is one of Warhol’s most austere works. It is based on a 1953 death chamber photograph taken at New York’s notorious Sing Sing Prison, where the convicted Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been executed in January 1953 at the height of the Cold War. Warhol used this image for all of his Electric Chair paintings and prints, varying the cropping and background colours. As Warhol noted: ‘You’d be surprised how many people want to hang an electric chair on their living-room wall. Specially if the background colour matches the drapes’.

The Electric Chairs series of prints from 1971 employ imagery first developed in Warhol’s paintings of 1967. The repeated single image derives from a photograph of the electric chair in New York’s Sing Sing Penitentiary released by the press service Wide World Photo on the day two Soviet spies were executed in 1953, at the height of the Cold War. Warhol’s treatment, using pastel decorator colours applied in a painterly manner, contrasts with the macabre scene devoid of human presence.

Text from exhibition wall panels

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
S.A.C.R.E.D. (detail)
2011-13
6 dioramas; fibreglass, iron
377.0 x 197.0 x 148.4cm (each)
Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

Ai’s major installation S.A.C.R.E.D., [is] a series of architecturally scaled dioramas depicting scenes from the detention cell where he was held without charge by the Chinese government for eighty-one days in 2011. The work consists of six parts to which its acronymic title refers: Supper, Accusers, Cleansing, Ritual, Entropy and Doubt. The maquettes serve as archaeological evidence of the denial of personal freedom and dignity that Ai and many other dissidents have experienced, and cast him in the dual roles of rebel and victim of oppression.

Text from exhibition wall panel

The individual and the state

The relationship between individual freedom and state power is a relevant subject for both Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei. Warhol began exploring the electric chair as a motif in 1963, and the image remains a potent symbol of state disciplinary power. The artist’s celebrated Death and Disaster series – including representations of political assassinations, guns and knives, the hammer and sickle and most-wanted men – also explores the glamourisation of violence in the United States. These works, as well as the spectacular images of capital itself in Warhol’s Dollar Signs series, might be seen as a grand narrative of his time.

As an artist and human rights activist committed to freedom of expression, Ai Weiwei has been a longstanding advocate of individual acts of resistance against state, political or corporate power. Ai’s irrepressible impulse to defy the authority of the state is illustrated through his art and political activism. Vocal criticisms of Chinese government policy made by Ai on his blog led to its shutdown by authorities in 2009, and he was detained without charge for eighty-one days in 2011. Ai regained the right to travel only recently, in July 2015, when his passport was reinstated.

Text from exhibition wall panel

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn
1995
3 silver gelatin photographs
148.0 x 120.0cm each (triptych)
Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (details)
1995
3 silver gelatin photographs
148.0 x 120.0cm each (triptych)
Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Elvis
1963
Synthetic polymer paint screenprinted onto canvas
208 x 91cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1973
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Warhol’s full-length portraits of Elvis Presley were first shown in 1963, accompanied by a series of portraits of film star Elizabeth Taylor. These large-scale screen-printed paintings show Warhol’s innovative painterly approach in the early 1960s. The image of popular American singer and actor Elvis Presley – derived from a publicity still for the film Flaming Star (1960) – captures him at the height of his acting career. The painting references the power and transience of fame while also highlighting violence in the cultural mythology of America.

Text from exhibition wall panel

NGV International
180 St Kilda Road

Opening hours for exhibition
10am – 5pm daily

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Sep

Exhibition: ‘American Cool’ at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, space, time, video and works on paper
Tags: Abstract Expressionism, American Cool, American culture, American stoicism, Aram Avakian, Aram Avakian Miles Davis, Arnold A. Newman, Arnold A. Newman Jackson Pollock, Audrey Hepburn, Beat literature, Beat writers, bebop, Being cool, Benicio Del Toro, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Billie Holiday Strange Fruit, Bix Beiderbecke, Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan Singer New York City, Bob Willoughby, Bob Willoughby Billie Holiday, Bonnie Raitt, Carl Van Vechten, Carl Van Vechten Bessie Smith, Cass Bird, Cass Bird Benicio Del Toro, Charles H. Stewart, Charles H. Stewart Muddy Waters, Chrissie Hynde, Clint Eastwood, Cool and the Counterculture, Cool and the Counterculture 1960-79, cool jazz, David Byrne, Deborah Harry, Duke Ellington, Eli Reed, Eli Reed Tupac Shakur, Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley Jailhouse Rock, film noir, Frank Sinatra, Frederick Douglas, Gene Krupa, Gene Krupa at 400 Restaurant, Gerard Malanga, Gerard Malanga Lou Reed, Herman Leonard, Herman Leonard Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, Jack Kerouac, Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, jackson pollock, James Dean, jazz, jazz ballad style, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Didion, John Cohen, John Cohen Jack Kerouac, Julian Wasser, Julian Wasser Joan Didion, Kurt Cobain, Leaves of Grass, Leo Fuchs, Leo Fuchs Paul Newman, Linda McCartney, Linda McCartney Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed, Lynn Goldsmith, Lynn Goldsmith Patti Smith, Marcia Resnick, Marcia Resnick David Byrne, Mark Seliger, Mark Seliger Kurt Cobain, Marlon Brando, martin schoeller, Martin Schoeller Tony Hawk, Michael O'Brien, Michael O'Brien Willie Nelson, Miles Davis, Minton's Playhouse, Muddy Waters, New York City, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Patti Smith, paul newman, Peter Hujar, Peter Hujar Susan Sontag, Philippe Halsman, Philippe Halsman Clint Eastwood, Philippe Halsman Humphrey Bogart, Philippe Halsman Marlon Brando, Prohibition, Richard Avedon, Richard Avedon Bob Dylan, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Mapplethorpe Deborah Harry, Roger Marshutz, Roger Marshutz Elvis Presley, Roy Schatt, Roy Schatt James Dean, Samuel Hollyer, Samuel Hollyer Leaves of Grass, steve McQueen, Susan Sontag, The Birth of Cool, The Birth of Cool 1940-59, The Roots of Cool, The Roots of Cool: Before 1940, Thelonious Monk, Thelonious Monk at Minton's Playhouse, Tony Hawk, Tupac Shakur, William Claxton, William Claxton Steve McQueen, William Paul Gottlieb, William Paul Gottlieb Duke Ellignton, William Paul Gottlieb Gene Krupa at 400 Restaurant, Willie Nelson

Exhibition dates: 7th February – 7th September 2014

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled from the Brooklyn Gang series
1959
Gelatin silver print

Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942)
Crossing the Ohio River, Louisville, 1966
1966
Silver gelatin print

This exhibition does not reflect our opinion of who’s cool. Each cool figure was considered with the following historical rubric in mind and possesses at least three elements of this singular American self-concept:

an original artistic vision carried off with a signature style

cultural rebellion or transgression for a given generation

iconic power, or instant visual recognition

a recognised cultural legacy

.
Every individual here created an original persona without precedent in American culture. These photographs capture the complex relationship between the real-life person, the image embraced by fans and the media, and the person’s artistic work.

What does it mean when a generation claims a certain figure as cool? What qualities does this person embody at that historical moment? American Cool explores these questions through photography, history, and popular culture. In this exhibition, cool is rendered visible, as shot by some of the finest art photographers of the past century.

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Anonymous text from the ‘American Cool’ National Portrait Gallery website [Online] Cited 13/06/2021

When less – less famous, less obvious – is more

I don’t know about you, but the photographs chosen to represent American “cool” in this exhibition – 39 of which are shown in the posting out of a total of 108, but the rest are mainly of the same ilk – seem to me to be a singularly strange bunch of images to choose for such a concept. Personally, I find very few of them are “cool”, that is a mixture of a social charge of rebellious self-expression, charisma, edge and mystery with a certain self-made sense of style.

The only images that I find definitely “cool” among this bunch are, firstly Bob Dylan, closely followed by Jackson Pollock (notice the skull lurking behind him) and Susan Sontag. There is no proposition of cool in these three photographs, the people in them just are. The rest of the photographs, and there really are some atrociously plain and boring portraits among this lot (including a poor portrait of James Dean), really don’t speak to me of cool, don’t speak to me of anything much at all. How you could ever think that the portrait of Willie Nelson, 1989 (printed 2009, below) is cool is beyond me… and what is it with the reprints of the photographs, not originals but modern prints made years later? Perhaps the National Portrait Gallery needed to look beyond their own collection for a more rounded representation of American cool.

The two photographs I have included above are my top picks of American cool, and neither are in the exhibition. These iconic American images don’t feature famous people, they are not “posed” for the camera, and yet there is that ineffable something that makes the people in them absolutely, totally cool. THIS IS AMERICAN COOL: their own style, their own rebelliousness and mystery without possibly realising it = a naturalness that comes from doing their own thing, making their own way. Perhaps that is the point that this exhibition misses: you don’t have to be famous to be “cool”. A portrait is not just a mug shot. And an original persona does not have to come with fame attached.

This exhibition just doesn’t cut the mustard. The whole shebang needed a bloody good rethink, from the concept (does a generation have to “claim” someone is cool? is it necessary or desirable to portray American Cool through media images? do they have to be famous or instantly recognisable people to be “cool”) to the choice of images which could better illustrate the theme. Surely the qualities that person embodies changes from moment to moment, from photographer to photographer, from context to context (just look at the portraits of a haggard James Dean). To attempt to illustrate three elements in a single photograph – good luck with that one!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS I have added the videos to add a bit of spice to the proceedings… in them you can, occasionally, feel the charisma of the person.

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Many thankx to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Bob Willoughby (American, 1927-2009)
Billie Holiday
1951 (printed 1991)
Gelatin silver print
25.2 x 35.3cm (19 15/16 x 13 15/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Rare live footage of one of the first anti-racism songs.

Roger Marshutz (American, 1929-2007)
Elvis Presley
1956
Gelatin silver print
Sheet: 40.6 x 50.8cm (16 x20″)
© Estee Stanley

Elvis Presley Jailhouse Rock 1957 colour
Colourised version of the song from the film

Herman Leonard (American, 1923-2010)
Frank Sinatra
c. 1956
Gelatin silver print
16.5 x 24.1cm (6 1/2 x 9 1/2″)
Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University

Marcia Resnick (American, b. 1950)
David Byrne
1981
Gelatin silver print
21.8 x 32.5cm (8 9/16 x 12 13/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Julian Wasser (American, b. 1938)
Joan Didion
1970
Gelatin silver print
24.3 x 34cm (9 9/16 x 13 3/8″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation.

Roy Schatt (American, 1909-2002)
James Dean
1954
Gelatin silver print
34.7 x 42.2cm (13 11/16 x 16 5/8″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

William Claxton (American, 1927-2008)
Steve McQueen
1962
Gelatin silver print
40 x 58.7cm (15 3/4 x 23 1/8″)
Fahey Klein Gallery

Martin Schoeller (American, b. 1968)
Tony Hawk
1999 (printed 2010)
Archival pigment print
58.5 x 58.6cm (23 1/16 x 23 1/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

What do we mean when we say someone is cool? Cool carries a social charge of rebellious self-expression, charisma, edge and mystery.

Cool is an original American sensibility and remains a global obsession. In the early 1940s, legendary jazz saxophonist Lester Young brought this central African American concept into the modern vernacular. Cool became a password in bohemian life connoting a balanced state of mind, a dynamic mode of performance, and a certain stylish stoicism. A cool person has a situation under control, and with a signature style. Cool has been embodied in jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and Billie Holiday, in actors such as Robert Mitchum, Faye Dunaway, and Johnny Depp, and in singers such as Elvis Presley, Patti Smith, and Jay-Z. American Cool is a photography and cultural studies exhibition featuring portraits of such iconic figures, each of whom has contributed an original artistic vision to American culture symbolic of a particular historical moment. They emerged from a variety of fields: art, music, film, sports, comedy, literature, and political activism. American Cool is the zeitgeist taking embodied form.

American Cool is captured by a roll call of fine-art photographers from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Annie Leibovitz, from Richard Avedon to Herman Leonard to Diane Arbus. This exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essays by Joel Dinerstein, the James H. Clark Endowed Chair in American Civilization and Director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, and Frank H. Goodyear III, co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and former curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery.

Unidentified Artist
Jack Nicholson in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
1975
Gelatin silver print
17.3 x 25.1cm (6 13/16 x 9 7/8″)
The Kobal Collection

John Cohen (American, 1932-2019)
Jack Kerouac
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 15.9 x 24.1cm (6 1/4 x 9 1/2″)
Sheet: 20.2 x 25.4cm (7 15/16 x 10″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Leo Fuchs (American, 1911-1994)
Paul Newman
1959 (printed 2013)
Modern archival print
Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14″)
© Alexandre Fuchs

William Paul Gottlieb (American, 1917-2006)
Thelonious Monk at Minton’s Playhouse, New York City
1947
Gelatin silver print
Sheet: 25.4 x 20.3cm (10 x 8″)
Estate of William Gottlieb

Thelonious Monk Quartet – Round Midnight
Thelonious Monk(p) Charlie Rouse(ts) Larry Gales(b) Ben Riley(ds)
Recorded in Norway 1966 dvd “LIVE in ’66”

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Susan Sontag
1975
Gelatin silver print
37.1 x 37.6cm (14 5/8 x 14 13/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Michael O’Brien (American, b. 1950)
Willie Nelson
1989 (printed 2009)
Chromogenic print
38.1 x 38.1cm (15 x 15″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Introduction

What do we mean when we say someone is cool? To be cool means to exude the aura of something new and uncontainable. Cool is the opposite of innocence or virtue. Someone cool has a charismatic edge and a dark side. Cool is an earned form of individuality. Each generation has certain individuals who bring innovation and style to a field of endeavour while projecting a certain charismatic self-possession. They are the figures selected for this exhibition: the successful rebels of American culture.

The legendary jazz saxophonist Lester Young created the modern usage of “cool” in the 1940s. At first it meant being relaxed in one’s environment against oppressive social forces, but within a generation it became a password for stylish self-control. This exhibition does not reflect our opinion of who’s cool. Each cool figure was considered with the following historical rubric in mind and possesses at least three elements of this singular American self-concept:

an original artistic vision carried off with a signature style
cultural rebellion or transgression for a given generation
iconic power, or instant visual recognition
a recognised cultural legacy

Every individual here created an original persona without precedent in American culture. These photographs capture the complex relationship between the real-life person, the image embraced by fans and the media, and the person’s artistic work.

What does it mean when a generation claims a certain figure as cool? What qualities does this person embody at that historical moment? American Cool explores these questions through photography, history, and popular culture. In this exhibition, cool is rendered visible, as shot by some of the finest art photographers of the past century.

The Roots of Cool: Before 1940

The stage was set for the emergence of cool as a cultural phenomenon in the early 1940s by a series of sweeping transformations in the first decades of the twentieth century. The figures in this first section were not called cool in their day but were leading exemplars of new energies that were changing the social contours of American life. A fresh rebelliousness was revealed in the new film capital of Hollywood, in modernist literature and art, in emerging youth entertainments, and in a new music called jazz. The advent of technologies such as radio, film, and the automobile and the increasing diversity in America’s booming cities accelerated the pace of change. Though Prohibition in the 1920s sought to regulate American morality by ending the consumption of alcohol, this period saw the expression of a new independence among young people and others historically on the margins of public life. In particular, both African Americans and women sought and began to attain freedoms long denied. Cool has long denoted a person’s sense of calm and composure. Charismatic individuals such as those featured here contributed greatly to the changing mores in American society before World War II. Cool would ultimately serve as the term that would describe this new rebel.

The Birth of Cool: 1940-1959

Being cool was a response to the rapid changes of modernity: it was about maintaining a state of equipoise within swirling, dynamic social forces. The legendary jazz saxophonist Lester Young disseminated the word and concept of cool into jazz culture in the early 1940s, and it quickly crossed over as a rebel masculine sensibility. When Young said, “I’m cool,” he meant, first, that he was relaxed in the environment and, second, that he was keeping it together under social and economic pressure as well as the absurdity of life in a racist society. This mask of cool emerged as a form of American stoicism and was manifested in jazz, film noir, Beat literature, and abstract expressionism. In jazz, a generation of younger musicians rejected big-band swing entertainment to create bebop, a fast, angular, virtuosic style that moved jazz out of dance halls and into nightclubs. In Hollywood, film noir represented postwar anxiety through crime dramas shot through with working-class existentialism and the fear of women’s sexual and economic power. Among Beat writers and abstract painters, cool referred to a combination of wildness and intensity in men unconcerned with social conformity. Starting from jazz, cool was a rebel sensibility suggesting that an individual’s importance could be registered only through self-expression and the creation of a signature style. By 1960 cool was the protean password of a surging underground aesthetic.

Cool and the Counterculture: 1960-1979

In the 1960s and 1970s, to be cool was to be antiauthoritarian and open to new ideas from young cultural leaders in rock and roll, journalism, film, and African American culture. Cool was a badge of opposition to “the System,” by turns a reference to the police, the government, the military-industrial complex, or traditional morality. Using drugs such as marijuana or even LSD was an indicator of risk taking and expanding one’s consciousness; not experimenting with drugs suggested a fear of opening one’s mind or perspective, of being “uptight” or “square.” The same was true of sexual exploration, social protest, and ethnic politics. The aesthetic of stylised understatement still held power, yet cool itself morphed under the era’s social upheavals. The counterculture valued being authentic and emotionally naked: being cool meant a person was “out-front” with others and comfortable in his or her own skin. For African Americans, what had once been suppressed under the mask of cool transformed into defiant civic engagement in music, sports, and politics. “Cool” meant to communicate a set of emotions without losing control, and rock and roll was the art form (and forum) best suited for this shift, especially for women. Patti Smith, Bonnie Raitt, Deborah Harry, and Chrissie Hynde all carved out new iconic stances, styles, and voices for independent women who were sexy on their own terms. Cool became the supreme compliment for creative public figures who broke new cultural ground and maintained their personal integrity over time.

The Legacies of Cool: 1980-Present

In 1980s America, the selling of rebellion as style became ingrained in cool. From highbrow fashion to mass-culture video games, product designers, advertisers, and consumers embraced the cool aesthetic. For many during this era, selling out was no longer a curse, as youth culture increasingly embraced the pursuit of wealth. And though some might proclaim that cool was dead, the concept stayed alive and grew in many quarters. From hip-hop to Seattle grunge, from skateboarding to the Internet, from street graffiti to MTV, cool became central to many of these new cultural forms. While its popularisation tended to whiten this phenomenon, African American culture remained central to its growth. By the 1980s cool also had an easily recognisable history, and many figures from its past – like heroes from a bygone era – continued to resonate widely. Indeed, new icons of cool often built careers that owed much to these earlier exemplars. Throughout the twentieth century, cool was America’s chief cultural export. With the rapid growth of global communication and markets, it plays an even larger role both in the world’s understanding of America and in Americans’ own sense of national identity. The figures in this final section are representative of the legacies of cool as a distinct form of American expression.

Press release from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery website

Martin Munkacsi (Hungarian, 1896-1963)
Fred Astaire
1936
Gelatin silver print
24.1 x 19cm (9 1/2 x 7 1/2″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Swing Time – Rogers and Astaire

In this Swing Time clip, Lucky, Astaire, saves Penny’s, Rogers, job by showing how much she has taught him.

Philippe Halsman (American, 1906-1979)
Audrey Hepburn
1955
Gelatin silver print
Image/Sheet: 34.9 x 27cm (13 3/4 x 10 5/8″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Dmitri Kasterine (British, b. 1932)
Jean-Michel Basquait
1986
Gelatin silver print
38.3 x 37.7cm (15 1/16 x 14 13/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Cass Bird (American, b. 1974)
Benicio Del Toro
2008 (printed 2012)
Inkjet print
45.3 x 35.3cm (17 13/16 x 13 7/8″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880-1964)
Bessie Smith
1936
Gelatin silver print
Image/Sheet: 25.2 x 18.6cm (9 15/16 x 7 5/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

ST. LOUIS BLUES. Blues Legend Bessie Smith’s only film appearance. Uncut 1929

This is not only a landmark because it contains Bessie Smith’s only known film appearance but also for being one of the very first talkies ever made. This is the complete film co-starring Jimmy Mordecai as her gigolo boyfriend.

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Deborah Harry
1978
Gelatin silver print
Image: 34.9 x 34.9cm (13 3/4 x 13 3/4″)
Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Philippe Halsman (American, born Latvia 1906-1979)
Humphrey Bogart
1944
Gelatin silver print
Image: 11.3 x 8.6cm (4 7/16 x 3 3/8″)
Mat: 45.7 x 35.6cm (18 x 14″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Samuel Hollyer (British, 1826-1919)
Leaves of Grass, 1st Edition
Copy after: Gabriel Harrison
1855
Book (closed): 28.9 x 20.6 x 1cm (11 3/8 x 8 1/8 x 3/8″)
Private Collection

Unidentified Artist
Frederick Douglas
1856
Quarter-plate ambrotype
Image: 10.6 x 8.6cm (4 3/16 x 3 3/8″)
Case (open): 11.9 x 19.1 x 1.3cm (4 11/16 x 7 1/2 x 1/2″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Linda McCartney (American, 1941-1998)
Jimi Hendrix
1967 (printed later)
Platinum print
51.3 x 35.3 cm (20 3/16 x 13 7/8″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

An incredible live performance of Voodoo Child (Slight Return) by Jimmy and his band in Stockholm, 1969.

William Paul Gottlieb (American, 1917-2006)
Duke Ellington
c. 1946 (printed 1991)
Gelatin silver print
34.1 x 26.7 cm (13 7/16 x 10 1/2″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Duke Ellington & His Orchestra live in Tivoli Garden 1969

Fantastic performance footage of one of Jazz’s greatest stars – Duke Ellington.

Duke Ellington may have turned 70 in 1969, but he was never short of energy, creativity and innovations. At the time of this Nov. 2, 1969 concert in Copenhagen, Ellington had been leading his orchestra for 44 years, but he still never really looked back in time or sought to recreate the past. Even when he performed older favorites, they were rearranged and full of surprises, and Duke’s own piano playing was modern, percussive and unpredictable. Twelve soloists are heard from during this 83-minute set including such veterans as trumpeters Cootie Williams and Cat Anderson, trombonist Lawrence Brown, altoist Harry Carney and Paul Gonsalves on tenor. Along with exciting versions of “C Jam Blues,” “Rockin’ In Rhythm” and “Take The ‘A’ Train,” the highlights include a three-song Johnny Hodges medley, a haunting “La Plus Belle Africaine,” and a tenor battle among Gonsalves, Harold Ashby and Norris Turney on “Diminuendo And Crescendo In Blue.” Filmed in colour and with close-ups that give listeners the experience of being onstage with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

Mark Seliger (American, b. 1959)
Kurt Cobain
1993 (printed 2013)
Platinum Palladium print
46.7 × 35.5cm (18 3/8 × 14″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit (Official Music Video)

Philippe Halsman (American, 1906-1979)
Marlon Brando
1950 (printed later)
Gelatin silver print
34.4 x 26.8cm (13 9/16 x 10 9/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Charles H. “Chuck” Stewart (American, 1927-2017)
Muddy Waters
c. 1960
Gelatin silver print
25.4 x 18.4cm (10 x 7 1/4″)
Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University

Muddy Waters – Got My Mojo Workin’

Alfred Eisenstaedt (American, 1898-1995)
Lauren Bacall
1949 (printed 2013)
Pigmented ink jet print
40.3 x 27.9cm (15 7/8 x 11″)

Kate Simon (American, b. 1953)
Madonna
1983 (printed 2013)
Gelatin silver print
33.7 × 22.9cm (13 1/4 × 9″)
© Kate Simon

Madonna – Papa Don’t Preach (Official Video)

Aram Avakian (American, 1926-1987)
Miles Davis
1955 (printed 2012)
Modern print made from original negative
34.6 × 24.1cm (13 5/8 × 9 1/2″)

Miles Davis – So What (Official Video)

Unidentified Artist
Bix Beiderbecke
c. 1920
Gelatin silver print
19.1 x 11.4cm (7 1/2 x 4 1/2″)
Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University

At the Jazz Band Ball – Bix Beiderbecke and His Gang, 1927

Royal Garden Blues – Bix Beiderbecke 1927

Leon Bismark “Bix” Beiderbecke (March 10, 1903 – August 6, 1931) was an American jazz cornetist, jazz pianist, and composer.

With Louis Armstrong and Muggsy Spanier, Beiderbecke was one of the most influential jazz soloists of the 1920s. His turns on “Singin’ the Blues” and “I’m Coming, Virginia” (both 1927), in particular, demonstrated an unusual purity of tone and a gift for improvisation. With these two recordings, especially, he helped to invent the jazz ballad style and hinted at what, in the 1950s, would become cool jazz. “In a Mist” (1927), one of a handful of his piano compositions and one of only two he recorded, mixed classical (Impressionist) influences with jazz syncopation.

Leon Bismark “Bix” Beiderbecke (March 10, 1903 – August 6, 1931) was an American jazz cornetist, jazz pianist, and composer. A native of Davenport, Iowa.

Bix Beiderbecke was one of the great jazz musicians of the 1920’s; he was also a child of the Jazz Age who drank himself to an early grave with illegal Prohibition liquor. His hard drinking and beautiful tone on the cornet made him a legend among musicians during his life. The legend of Bix grew even larger after he died. Bix never learned to read music very well, but he had an amazing ear even as a child. His parents disapproved of his playing music and sent him to a military school outside of Chicago in 1921. He was soon expelled for skipping class and became a full-time musician. In 1923 Beiderbecke joined the Wolverine Orchestra and recorded with them the following year. Bix was influenced a great deal by the Original Dixieland Jass Band, but soon surpassed their playing. In late 1924 Bix left the Wolverines to join Jean Goldkette’s Orchestra, but his inability to read music eventually resulted in him losing the job. In 1926 he spent some time with Frankie Trumbauer’s Orchestra where he recorded his solo piano masterpiece “In a Mist”. He also recorded some of his best work with Trumbauer and guitarist, Eddie Lang, under the name of Tram, Bix, and Eddie.

Bix was able to bone up on his sight-reading enough to re-join Jean Goldkette’s Orchestra briefly, before signing up as a soloist with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra. Whiteman’s Orchestra was the most popular band of the 1920’s and Bix enjoyed the prestige and money of playing with such a successful outfit, but it didn’t stop his drinking. In 1929 Bix’s drinking began to catch up with him. He suffered from delirium tremens and he had a nervous breakdown while playing with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, and was eventually sent back to his parents in Davenport, Iowa to recover. It should be noted that Paul Whiteman was very good to Bix during his struggles. He kept Bix on full pay long after his breakdown, and promised him that his chair was always open in the Whiteman Orchestra, but, Bix was never the same again, and never rejoined the band.

He returned to New York in 1930 and made a few more records with his friend Hoagy Carmichael and under the name of Bix Beiderbecke and his Orchestra. But mainly, he holed himself up in a rooming house in Queens, New York where he drank a lot and worked on his beautiful solo piano pieces “Candlelight”, “Flashes”, and “In The Dark” (played here by Ralph Sutton; Bix never recorded them). He died at age 28 in 1931 during an alcoholic seizure. The official cause of death was lobar pneumonia and edema of the brain.

Lou Reed – Sweet Jane – live in Paris, 1974

Arnold A. Newman (American, 1918-2006)
Jackson Pollock
1949
Gelatin silver print
46 x 36.7cm (18 1/8 x 14 7/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Lynn Goldsmith (American, b. 1948)
Patti Smith
1976 (printed 2012)
Digital inkjet print
Image: 46.9 x 30cm (18 7/16 x 11 13/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Philippe Halsman (American, 1906-1979)
Clint Eastwood
1971
Gelatin silver print
34.3 x 27.3cm (13 1/2 x 10 3/4″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Bob Dylan, Singer, New York City, February 10, 1965
1965
Gelatin silver print
25.4 × 20.3cm (10 × 8″)
© Richard Avedon Foundation

Bob Dylan – Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (Live)

From the Hard to Handle concert film. Bob Dylan, backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers during their Australian tour in 1986.

Eli Reed (American, b. 1946)
Tupac Shakur
1992 (printed 2013)
Digitally exposed chromogenic print
34.6 x 27.3cm (13 5/8 x 10 3/4″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

William Paul Gottlieb (American, 1917-2006)
Gene Krupa at 400 Restaurant, New York City
June 1946
Gelatin silver print
Sheet: 35.6 x 27.9cm (14 x 11″)
Estate of William Gottlieb

Eugene Bertram “Gene” Krupa (January 15, 1909 – October 16, 1973) was an American jazz and big band drummer, actor and composer, known for his highly energetic and flamboyant style. In the 1930s, Krupa became the first endorser of Slingerland drums. At Krupa’s urging, Slingerland developed tom-toms with tuneable top and bottom heads, which immediately became important elements of virtually every drummer’s setup. Krupa developed and popularized many of the cymbal techniques that became standards. His collaboration with Armand Zildjian of the Avedis Zildjian Company developed the modern hi-hat cymbals and standardised the names and uses of the ride cymbal, the crash cymbal, the splash cymbal, the pang cymbal and the swish cymbal. One of his bass drums, a Slingerland inscribed with Benny Goodman’s and Krupa’s initials, is preserved at the Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C. In 1978, Krupa became the first drummer inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame.

Gene Krupa having A good time

Gene Krupa – Big Noise From Winnetka

Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
8th and F Sts NW
Washington, DC 20001

Opening hours:
11.30am – 7.00pm daily

Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery website

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Jul

Review: Polixeni Papapetrou ‘A Performative Paradox’ and Daniel von Sturmer  ’After Images’ at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Melbourne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 24th May – 14th July 2013

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
Drag queen wearing cut out dress
1993
Gelatin silver photograph
28.5 x 28.5cm
Courtesy the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Two solid if not overly memorable exhibitions are presented at the Centre for Contemporary Photography.

Polixeni Papapetrou A Performative Paradox is a bit of a dog’s breakfast. While it is wonderful to see early work by this artist – work that features Marilyn and Elvis impersonators, circus people, body builders and drag queens – too many bodies of work are crammed into too small a space with too few images. Some of the later series are represented by just one image giving a hotch potch feel to the whole exhibition ensemble. Perhaps it would have been better to concentrate solely on the early black-and-white images and colour images, work that is rarely seen and informs the staged work that followed. Having said that the black-and-white photographs are a joy to behold, documenting as they do performative identities. The photographs have an intangible presence. There are strong elements of the frontality of Diane Arbus in the photographs of circus performers and drag queens, coupled with a intrinsic understanding of light and texture. The photographs of drag queens are the highlight of both exhibitions and Drag queen wearing cut out dress (1993, below) reminded me of an early black-and-white photograph by Fiona Hall (Leura, New South Wales, 1974) in its use of patterned wallpaper. Let us hope there is a large retrospective of Polixeni’s work (at NGV or Heide for example) in the future, one that can do justice to the depth and complexity of her vision as an artist.

Daniel von Sturmer  After Images is an interesting conceptual experiment, one that investigates the splitting of the image (shadow) from its referent (object). “The images propose a kind of transference; the object itself may be insignificant but its subjective meaning carries weight, and its shadow leaves a space the viewer fills with their own reading.” In their black-and-white fuzziness the work looks impressive when viewed in the gallery space (see installation views below) but upon close inspection the individual photographs fail to hold the viewers attention. Personally, I found it difficult to impart any great meaning to any of these works and the investigation certainly does not produce memorable images, ones that will stay with the viewer months and years later. For me the exhibition became an exercise in guessing what shadows were which objects, a game that grew quickly tiresome. The work then became an exercise in the importance of captioning an image, as I constantly looked around the room trying to match the titles of the works with the images themselves. As abstract images they imparted little metaphysical poetry as ghost images (an afterimage or ghost image is an optical illusion that refers to an image continuing to appear in one’s vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased). As images that investigate the link between text, object, shadow and language they started to become what the artist sought to enunciate: shadow objects bound to the realm of signification in some amorphous play, shadows that have the potential to become ‘Other’.

PS. As an analogy you could see these images as the equivalent of Jung’s human “shadow aspect” where, according to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to projection (as these shadows are projected by their objects). The shadow represents the entirety of the unconscious, ie. everything of which a person is not fully conscious, and is the seat of creativity. “Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” (Jung, C.G. (1938). “Psychology and Religion.” In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. p. 131). Hence the potential halo/cination of these images.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to the CCP for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
Suzie, Elvis fan at home, Melbourne
1989
Selenium toned gelatin silver photograph
40.7 x 40.7cm
Courtesy the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
Indian Brave
2002
Pigment ink print
85 x 85cm
Courtesy the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
Three young men paying homage to Elvis on the 13th anniversary of Elvis’ death, Elvis Memorial Melbourne
1990
Selenium toned gelatin silver photograph
40.7 x 40.7cm
Courtesy the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne and Stills Gallery, Sydney

This exhibition focuses on the performative in the work of Polixeni Papapetrou, from her early documentary work through to her directorial work with her children since 2002, regarded internationally as some of the most powerful and provocative works in the field of perfomative photography. Papapetrou’s enduring interest is in how the ‘other’ is represented and how the ‘other’ performs in reinforcing our own identity.

Polixeni Papapetrou is one of Australia’s leading contemporary photomedia artists. She has been exploring relationships between history, contemporary culture, landscape, identity and childhood through her photographic practice since the mid-eighties. In this exhibition, selected by Professor Anne Marsh in consultation with the artist, a particular thread has been selected across Papapetrou’s practice – that of the performative – from her early documentary work through to her directorial work with her children from 2002 to the present.

Her images are informed by her own experience as ‘other’, growing up as a Greek immigrant in a white, Anglo-Saxon, male-dominated culture in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. Marilyn Monroe impersonators, Elvis Presley fans, body builders, circus performers and drag queens have all taken their turn in front of Papapetrou’s camera. All of these people are, one way or another, performing i dentities.

In 2002 Papapetrou turned her focus to the experience of childhood, using her children as the performers in her pictures. There is a challenging confusion between fantasy, mythology, archetype, animism and theatricality present in these works, ranging from the playful to the transgressive, wrangling with the question of identity and stressing the embodied nature of experience.

Text from the CCP website

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
Fortune teller (detail)
1989
From the series Ashton Circus, Silvers Circus 1989-1990

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
Levitation, Silvers Circus (detail)
1989
From the series Ashton Circus, Silvers Circus 1989-1990

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
Ashton Circus, Silvers Circus series (installation view)
1989-1990
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation views of Polixeni Papapetrou A Performative Paradox at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Daniel von Sturmer (New Zealand, b. 1972)
Production Still for After Images
Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney

In After Images the shadows of a set of subjectively ‘important artefacts’ (a business card, a phone, a letter…) are presented alongside generic objects from the studio, for example: a bin, some tape, a ruler… Presented at 1:1 scale, the images propose a kind of transference; the object itself may be insignificant but its subjective meaning carries weight, and its shadow leaves a space the viewer fills with their own reading.

Photographed using a specially constructed ‘set’ to enable the separation of an object from its shadow, the resulting image stands alone, separated from its object yet inextricably bound to the realm of signification from which it has been cast.

Text from the CCP website

Installation views of Daniel von Sturmer  After Images at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Centre for Contemporary Photography
404 George St, Fitzroy
Victoria 3065, Australia
Phone: + 61 3 9417 1549

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Sunday 11am – 5pm

Centre for Contemporary Photography website

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Apr

Exhibition: ‘Karlheinz Weinberger: Intimate Stranger’ at Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum for Gegenwartskunst

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 21st January – 15th April 2012

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Hardau, Zürich
1962
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
50.7 x 58cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Another relatively unknown artist, people whose work I like promoting on this blog. I certainly had never heard of this photographer. A self-taught part-time photographer who worked as a warehouseman most of his life, Weinberger published photographs in the homosexual magazine “Der Kreis,” the same early gay magazine that George Platt Lynes submitted photographs to in the last stages of his life.

While their might seem to be a dichotomy between the desirous photographs of male youth and the city toughs and “rowdies” gay men have always been drawn to rough trade: from Oscar Wilde who was more sexually drawn towards the swarthy young rough trade to contemporary iconography of gay skinheads and punks, still a prevalent culture in London for example. Tattoos, shaved heads, braces, Docs – in Weinberger’s case rockabillies. Notice how in the photograph of the male reclining with candlestick, the form of the candlestick mimics the spidery tattoo on the hand in the photograph above. Notice also how the crouching nude lad looks almost identical to the lad in the photograph below, with his hands thrust into his pockets emphasising the crutch area. And the earlier crutch photograph with the mating of Elvis and Vince over a skull and cross bones which has delicious, subversive homosocial overtones. Toughs or not, there is always the desire for the dangerous and different.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to the Kunstmuseum Basel for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Knabenschiessen, Albisgütli, Zürich
1961
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
50.5 x 60.5cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Fisherman with Hat, Sicily
c. 1960
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
18.5 x 24cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Drei zusammen (three together)
c. 1965
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
50 x 53.5cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Untitled, Zürich
c. 1962
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
23.8 x 30.4cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

The exhibition presents the rarely shown work of the photographer Karlheinz Weinberger (1921-2006). Together with magazines and a selection of vintage apparel, the pictures document a youth culture in Zurich that emerged after World War II whose members sought to subvert contemporary notions of “Swiss correctness.”

Weinberger spent the largest part of his life working as a warehouseman for Siemens-Albis in Zurich. In his free time, he was a self-taught photographer, portraying his lovers and people he met in the street. From the late 1940s on, he frequently published his pictures in “Der Kreis,” a homosexual magazine produced in Zurich from 1943 until 1967 that garnered international attention, pseudonymously signing his work as “Jim.” In 1958, he launched a major project for which he would photograph a group of teenagers, the city’s so-called “Halbstarke,” over an extended period of time. Weinberger’s unfailingly respectful approach allowed him to capture the non-conformism of these “rowdies” with regard to social convention and their play with stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, most readily evident in the way they dressed.

Wearing embroidered denim jackets and oversized belt buckles adorned with the likenesses of idols such as Elvis or James Dean, Weinberger’s adolescent subjects present themselves to his camera in public settings like members of a gang. Photographs such as those taken at the Knabenschiessen, a target shooting competition held at Zurich’s Albisgüetli, show them sprawling on the ground between fairground stalls and compact vans, illustrating the “Halbstarke”‘s refusal to fit in with the traditions surrounding this Zurich folk festival. In addition to the photographs in public settings, Weinberger also took pictures in the improvised studio in his living room. Scantily clad, some of his subjects, mostly young men, strike confident poses showing off their denim shorts and hats, while others cower, their eyes glancing at the camera with a vulnerable expression. Weinberger’s role is that of an Intimate Stranger: he records the attitudes of a generation and its marginal social position in unvarnished pictures and develops the photographs capturing the objects of his fascination in his own photo laboratory.

In an oeuvre that spanned many years, Weinberger portrayed what lay behind the curtains of 1960s bourgeois Switzerland, finding ways to document deviancy without ever putting his protagonists on display.

Press release from the Kunstmuseum Basel website

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Untitled
c. 1969
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
30.4 x 23.8cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Untitled
c. 1961
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
24 x 18cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Untitled
c. 1960
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
39 x 29cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Zürich am Limmatquai
1962
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
30 x 24cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Milchbuck, Zürich
c. 1962
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
60.5 x 49cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Kunstmuseum Basel
St. Alban-Graben 16
CH-4010 Basel
Phone: 0041 (0)61 206 62 62

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 10am – 6pm
Closed on Monday

Kunstmuseum Basel website

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Dr Marcus Bunyan

Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, an art and cultural memory archive, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy from RMIT University, Melbourne, a Master of Arts (Fine Art Photography) from RMIT University, and a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne.

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bunyanth@netspace.net.au

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Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: ‘Orphans and small groups’ 1994-96 Part 2

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: 'Orphans and small groups' 1994-96 Part 2

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Posts Tagged ‘Elvis Presley

Exhibition: ‘American Cool’ at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC

Exhibition dates: 7th February – 7th September 2014

When less – less famous, less obvious – is more

Introduction

The Roots of Cool: Before 1940

The Birth of Cool: 1940-1959

Cool and the Counterculture: 1960-1979

The Legacies of Cool: 1980-Present

Review: Polixeni Papapetrou ‘A Performative Paradox’ and Daniel von Sturmer  ’After Images’ at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 24th May – 14th July 2013

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Posts Tagged ‘Elvis Presley

Review: ‘Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 11th December 2015 – 24th April 2016

In collaboration with The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, USA

Time lapse

Footnotes

Icons and iconoclasm

Cultural revolutions

Early drawings

Three major illustrated publications

Flowers

New York / Beijing

The individual and the state

Exhibition: ‘American Cool’ at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC

Exhibition dates: 7th February – 7th September 2014

When less – less famous, less obvious – is more

Introduction

The Roots of Cool: Before 1940

The Birth of Cool: 1940-1959

Cool and the Counterculture: 1960-1979

The Legacies of Cool: 1980-Present

Review: Polixeni Papapetrou ‘A Performative Paradox’ and Daniel von Sturmer ’After Images’ at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 24th May – 14th July 2013

Exhibition: ‘Karlheinz Weinberger: Intimate Stranger’ at Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum for Gegenwartskunst

Exhibition dates: 21st January – 15th April 2012

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Art Blart Email Subscription

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: ‘Orphans and small groups’ 1994-96 Part 2

Art Blart RSS feed

Blog Stats

Recent Posts

Lastest tweets

Top Posts

Archives

Categories

Art Blart Email Subscription

Interesting Links

Review: Polixeni Papapetrou ‘A Performative Paradox’ and Daniel von Sturmer  ’After Images’ at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Melbourne