Other Voices, Other Rooms
Films, screen-tests, videos and Polaroids
Hayward Gallery, London
Until January 18 2008
"Mr Land invented this great camera called a Polaroid. And it just takes the face of the person. There is something about the camera that makes the person look just right. They usually come out great. I take at least 200 pictures and then I choose. Sometimes I take half a picture and a lip from another picture. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's easy." – Andy Warhol
What's to say? A must-see from the inventor of '15 Minutes of Fame'. See Jonathan Jones' Guardian review below.
Below: Polaroid pictures taken by Andy Warhol: O.J. Simpson, Robert Rauschenburg, Joseph Beuys, Truman Capote. Photographs: Founding Collection, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh © 2008 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc
Video: Andy Warhol photographing Joseph Beuys
The Polaroid production line
© Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, Monday October 6 2008
"Mark Rothko was once at a party in New York when Andy Warhol walked in, with his entourage of superstars. Warhol heard Rothko complain bitterly to the host: "How could you let them in?" The two great American artists were not exactly drinking buddies - so it's a strange twist that a Warhol exhibition should open in London this week, coinciding with a retrospective of his antithesis, Rothko.
Rothko thought Warhol represented the worst things about America: consumerism, celebrity, superficiality, you name it. But the two artists may have had more in common than you might think. In the early 1990s, New York's MoMA put on a great display of abstract paintings from the 1940s and 50s. At the end, some curator put Warhol's Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963). It was totally right. Warhol's tragic subject matter, held in a saturated field of colour, shared the pathos and power of the abstract expressionists, but with less introspection, and more interest in others.
This was abstract reportage, and its compassion, its determination to bear witness, was almost unbearable.
Other Voices, Other Rooms was a novel by Warhol's favourite writer, Truman Capote. The Hayward's Warhol retrospective has adopted this as its title, as if to underline the artist's readiness to listen to, and look at, other people. It features Warhol's films, screen-tests, videos - and his Polaroids, which it rightly hails as works of art in their own right, even though they were actually used by Warhol as aids for painting portraits. They are strangely compelling images: one of the great humanising threads running through his factory-like output is his fascination with portraiture. The Polaroids provide a fascinating insight into this man who wanted to capture the world like a camera.
The Polaroids are, however, the most difficult of his works to reconcile with any lofty view of Warhol's output. In the early 1970s, he started to do society portraits. His subjects were stars and high-society types, from Chris Evert to OJ Simpson, Grace Jones to Joseph Beuys. Sitting for Warhol simply meant letting him take Polaroids of you. These were converted into silkscreen templates, printed on to canvas and painted over in lurid smears of bright colour that take the contrasts and saturations of the photographs as their starting point. In the Polaroid, Capote has bright blue eyes; in the painting, these become electric circles of sky blue within a pink face.
Just to make that observation is to home in on how precisely and intelligently Warhol's portraits work. Capote's eyes are not just eyes - they are the eyes of the great Truman Capote, whom Warhol revered and whose book In Cold Blood looks unshakingly into the worst elements of US life, just as Warhol did when he painted the electric chair. There's an emotional choice in the decision to heighten his eyes: a man becomes a myth, a face becomes an image.
The fact that Warhol liked famous people does not mean - as is usually assumed - that he worshipped celebrity for its own sake. In his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he gives celebrities this advice: you shouldn't value your fame in itself; you should "always have a product that's not just 'you'". An actress should count up her performances, a model her photographs. This way, "you always know exactly what you're worth, and you don't get stuck thinking your product is you and your fame". This is the opposite of the famous-for-being-famous ethic he often gets the blame for.
In the Polaroids, it's noticeable that no one is "just" a celebrity. These people do things: there are artists Warhol sincerely admires (Robert Rauschenberg, Max Ernst), pop stars, sports heroes. And many of the portraits are far from flattering. The camera does no one any favours, producing oddly lumpen, gross images of bright, damaged flesh - the raw facts, the rude material. Warhol said he deliberately miscast his films because the wrong person is always funnier and stranger. In these Polaroids, the stars, famous as they are, look miscast in their own lives.
Warhol's quest for the ungainly, even the freakish, reaches its fascinating climax in these Polaroids. Warhol thought himself ugly. He also thought of himself as a mirror. In front of the camera, as if in front of the mirror, he tries out disguises: drag, wigs, lipstick. He even poses as himself, plain Andy Warhol. The more you look at his work, the more you feel there really was such a person, who was not just an empty mirror but a dark, reflective lake - with hidden depths that have still not been fully charted."
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