Taking its title from a novel about the journey from alienation to self-acceptance by Truman Capote, of whom Warhol was a fan, Other Voices, Hidden Rooms, is an attempt to “do” Warhol as he has not been “done” before. As such, we don’t get the Elvis’ or the Mau’s or Jackie O’s.
Instead, we get the letters, postcards and party invites of the time capsules, the magazine covers and record sleeves, the Polaroids, the Factory diaries, the tape-recorded interviews, the TV shows, the screen tests and the films in an attempt to demonstrate the entirety of Warhol’s zygotic output from which no subject was either too trivial or to be excluded or too grand to be transmuted into something shiny and pop, death included.
We get Warhol’s Polaroids of Duchamp, Burroughs and Jimmy Carter alongside those of Sly Stallone and Debbie Harry – politicians and pop stars, great artists and cult legends, each buying into the other’s myth in a mutually beneficial transaction of endorsement and adoration.
And we get footage of Warhol’s elderly mother in bed and interviews with Truman Capote in Trader Vic’s. We get his one-shot films of the Empire state building, of Candy Darling singing and of artist Nekke Carson painting a portrait of Warhol with a brush held between the cheeks of his bottom, as all the stuff that usually ends up on the cutting room floor is put back in as the main event.
Much of this is the aesthetic equivalent of watching paint dry – only this paint is no ordinary paint but what happens to paint when you put a camera in front of it; paint which becomes trashy and glamorous and disturbingly compulsive all at once. But then, “I like boring things,” Warhol claimed. If the producers of Big Brother haven’t already studied this footage to death for tips, then surely they should.
The famous screen prints of flowers and accidents, by contrast, seem almost superfluous next to the borderline obsessive compulsive project of the diaries and films, as if they in fact were the side show.
Throughout, there is the sense of Warhol’s short attention span and of his whimsically wanting to photograph, then film, then make a magazine, or a TV show, or whatever else might have taken his fancy that morning, suggesting a rapid assimilation of media and equally speedy production of it. But there is also a woozy, dream-like quality to the screen tests and their extension of a split second photograph into long, drawn out minutes along with their suggestion of the impossibility of ever gazing too long upon the turned up nose of Edie Sedgewick as if it were one of the great mysteries of the universe. But most of all, there is the sense amongst all the perpetual performing, producing and recording, of reality itself being staged and broadcast to the world as Brand Warhol. For if Andy meant one thing, he meant business.
It might be said that his 1966 installation, “Silver Clouds” – a room filled with floating air-filled foil pillows – and currently on show as part of the exhibition, is a metaphor for Warhol’s entire oeuvre.
Indeed, there is the feeling with Warhol, that behind the brightly-coloured screen prints of Elvis and Jackie O, the celluloid screens and the smoke and mirrors of his gnomic persona, he is nothing but a frail little man pushing a few buttons and flicking a few switches, just like that other fairy tale of the Great American Dream where anybody can be a somebody, “The Wizard of Oz”.
How little or much we value Warhol’s contribution to art and culture comes down to the question of his sincerity. Was he being ironic when he said: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and my films and me, and there I am. There is nothing behind it.” Or did he really mean it? In which case, is the joke ultimately on us?
Reviewing the show in The Observer, Rachel Cooke believes the latter. “Has ever an artist turned out so much boring and banal work, and in such incredibly vast quantities as Warhol? The answer is emphatically no – and the more you see, even of the better stuff, the less interesting he becomes.” Cooke goes on; “In the 1960’s when Warhol was telling people that all he wanted was to be rich and famous, the critics made the fatal mistake of refusing to take him at his word.” Adding; “Four decades on, this show makes a similar error.”
On one level it could be said that Warhol’s output is indeed all hot air dressed up as silver clouds. But that is his point. Warhol understood as well as any political spin master, marketing genius, advertising guru or city trader that what we take for truth these days, is largely perception. If we believe it to be real, or can make it seem so, then to all intents and purposes, real is what it becomes.
Gavin Turk, whose work plays with the idea of copying other artists, including the great copyist Warhol himself, says this; “He was only able to make that statement about only being interested in the surface of things because he understood the full implications of what he was doing. Talking glibly about art was radical in that day. Art needed to be backed up by intellectual rhetoric. Warhol wanted to break that somehow to short circuit the idea that there might have been a complex reason behind the work. He wanted to say, “I did it because I like it” which in a way is the right answer.”
So what do the films and the screen prints and the surfaces of things presented in this exhibition tell about Warhol? The answer, of course, is everything and nothing. They tell us how he mythoglogised outsiders, bohemians and the borderline insane, himself included, as superstars. But they also tell us – as the screen tests do – of how Warhol jettisoned any “packaging” in the form of story, acting and plot in order to deconstruct the very same mythology and show it for what it is. “People usually just go to movies to see the star to eat him up,” he said. “So here at last is your chance to look only at the star for as long as you want.”
They tell us how a camp young man of immigrant descent from Pittsburgh infiltrated the American star system to become one of the brightest within it. But they also tell – via the mannered feyness and controlled detachment of the dressing up and role playing and drag, that in order to achieve this, Warhol put that young man to death in favour of the mirror he necessarily became. And finally, they tell us – in the fawning over all those briefly successful eighties pop groups while in his seventies, that Andy Warhol was first and foremost a fan. They tell us that the real product he was selling was the star system itself, without which “Andy Warhol” as we know him would have been unable to exist.
The more we see of these “other voices and hidden rooms” of Warhol’s, then, the less it would seem we know. As Susan Sontag – herself a Warhol screen test subject – wrote in “On Photography”, “The camera’s rendering of reality always hides more than it discloses.”
In seeking to demonstrate the Factory environment from which he created and the American culture of stardom and TV which in part created him, if we might understand one thing about Warhol from this exhibition, we might understand this; that the mask was him, the package, the thing and insincerity, his truth.
RN.
Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Hidden Rooms.
The Hayward.
Until 18th January 2009.