..winner. I hoped it would get better. But it didn’t. Whatever Weiwei turned his hand was boring. Uninspiring. Bloated. Very big and very pointless.
I had gone to the National Gallery of Victoria to see the latest blockbuster of Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei. I went with some trepidation as, whilst I think that Warhol was an interesting phenomenon whose workshop produced some striking and worthwhile bits of art, there are many other American artists of the same era of far greater ability and worth. Ai Weiwei was relatively new to me. I had read about his political activism but somehow I had not actually considered him an artist. After the exhibition I have no doubt that he is a very brave man and committed to the idea of political activism against the obfuscations and deviousness of the government of China but I don’t think that he makes good art.
Really the show is not worth the money you are being asked to pay to get in - even with a Senior’s discount.
What the earnest burghers of Melbourne were making of it I cannot guess – they seemed appropriately bemused - even entertained. Warhol is a terribly accessible artist – more a graphic designer really – and little brain power is required to get what’s going on. He certainly has enough visual smarts to merit his fifteen minutes of fame. You can wander around enjoying him making himself famous by making other people famous. If you compare him with the ghastly modern equivalent of art for get-rich-quick- social-climbers , we are talking about the obnoxious, execrable Jeff Koons specifically , he comes across as a model of moral integrity.
But to be honest there are a lot of Warhols around and there are very, very few solo masterpieces. If any. A lot of his screen-printed portraits are flashy and pretty much interchangeable. He is a well know entirely accessible artist with works that look almost as good in a reproduction as in real life. But what he was doing cheek by jowl with Weiwei could only have been as an idea that looked good on paper. They actually have very little in common – their social and artistic concerns are diametrically opposed.
The early comment that I made about Warhol having a workshop is pretty true – let’s face it he called it The Factory for a reason. I am sure that there are a great many Warhols out there which Andy’s only contribution would have been the original idea and an authentic signature as they left for his dealer. But, like Reubens four hundred years before him, he had some very talented people working for him and so there are no demerit points there. Mind you I don’t think they had the ability of a Frans Snyders, Jacob Jordaens, or Anthony van Dyck
But there is one image in the show which is so strikingly good you can’t help but think that he had nothing to do with it at all. Well it’s nice to be probably wrong.
Warhol created the ‘Hammer and Sickle’ series in 1976 after a trip to Italy where the hammer and sickle was a common form of graffiti. The communist party was, until recent times, a significant player in Italian politics. After returning to the United States, Warhol asked his studio assistant Ronnie Cutrone to find source pictures of this symbol. Existing images being found wanting, the hammer and sickle is an iconic and rather inflexible motif, Cutrone purchased a double-headed hammer and a sickle at a local hardware store and arranged and photographed the tools in many positions. Warhol used the Cutrone photographs for his silkscreened series. What is so different about this image is its painterliness, you could mistake it for a Jim Dines or Jasper Johns. It actually has a worked surface. It is bloody good. Thank you Mr Cutrone.
If there were more works of this quality you wouldn’t mind the cost, but there really is nothing else. Warhol’s few drawings in the show prove that he wasn’t much of a draughtsman. Serviceable but no medals to be handed out there.
So what does the show tell us? It tells me that the NGV is really good a publicity and really bad at content. The number of people who were at the show was to my mind quite amazing. Now there is a chance that public art education in Victoria has leapt ahead in the past twenty years but I think not.
I just think that we have gotten better at being conned into believing that the sizzle is the sausage.