[Mb-civic] The Down Side of Pop - Blake Gopnik - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

The Down Side of Pop
At the Corcoran Gallery, Andy Warhol's Comment On a Sold-Out Society

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 24, 2005; Page C01

Some museum exhibitions put up disclaimers about sex. Others warn about 
violence in their art. The impressive Andy Warhol show that opens today 
at the Corcoran Gallery of Art ought to begin with a big sign that reads 
something like this: "The following exhibition may cause depression or 
anxiety in visitors -- viewer discretion advised."

For all the bubble gum colors and crisp commercial graphics in much of 
Warhol's art, its larger vision is profoundly grim. It's that austere 
underpinning to the Warhol glitz that gives this exhibition so much 
weight and depth.

"Dollar Sign" (1981): Most of the 150 works in the exhibition point up a 
decayed consumer culture. (The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Founding 
Collection)

People talk about Warhol's art as ironic, or cynical or maybe as 
satirical -- all of which implies a certain good humor, or at least a 
distance from the things it talks about. I think his project goes much 
further than that. I think there's profound, considered despair in it. 
Taken as a whole, Warhol's art seems to portray a world so thoroughly 
sold out that there's no hope for it.

"Warhol Legacy" was chosen from works in the Andy Warhol Museum in 
Pittsburgh, filled out with a few loans. Most of his signature series 
are represented. The early Campbell soup cans are there, along with a 
stack of his giant Brillo boxes. There are his trademark silk-screen 
paintings of Marilyn, Liz, Jackie and Warhol himself. A gallery titled 
"Death and Disaster" shows Warhol riffing on news photos of suicides, 
car crashes, the electric chair and botulism-laden cans of tuna. Other 
galleries concentrate on fascinating works -- some of Warhol's best -- 
that may not be well known to the general public: his grim little 
Polaroids of guns and knives; his "abstract" images derived from 
shadows, Rorschach blots and camouflage; his gripping "Screen Tests," in 
which one subject after another stares into a movie camera's lens for 
four long, uneventful minutes.

And almost all of the more than 150 works in the exhibition seem to 
point to a culture of consumption that, in one way or another, has 
broken down.

As art historian Thomas Crow pointed out in a famous article, the "Pop" 
side of Warhol's art, which can feel like a celebration of American 
consumerism, is more than counterbalanced by a tragic side. There are 
the crashes and suicides and executions, even that lethal tuna, that 
suggest not everything is right in big-box America.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/23/AR2005092302023.html?nav=hcmodule
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