Photo Credit: Andy Warhol
United States b.1928 d.1987
Screen Test: Lou Reed (still) 1966
16mm film, black and white, silent, 4 minutes at 16fps
© 2007 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved
Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum
The Seattle Art Museum is winding up their big Alexander Calder show next weekend and preparing for two new BIG shows set to open May 13th both starring huge Pop icons. love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death — Andy Warhol Media Works (yep, the lowercase title is intentional) focuses on the acclaimed artist’s media work and features Polaroids, photo booth strips, sewn photographs and Warhol’s film series “Screen Tests” which will screen in two of the galleries. Marisa Sánchez, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art describes the show as:
love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death includes works that compel us to consider the artist’s fascination with all things ephemeral, from beauty and youth to celebrity status. Including photographs and videos dating from the 1960s through the early 1980s—two decades in which the artist’s work had tremendous impact on contemporary art production and culture—the exhibition encourages readings of powerful themes such as fame, desire and identity construction, as well as anxiety and isolation, which often accompany stardom. In a series of self-portraits, with props or disguises such as wigs and women’s clothing, Warhol exposes his obsession with his own image and his desire to probe and push the boundaries of identity and self-invention.
This is a must see show for lovers of contemporary art and Warhol fans specificly who consider Warhol the Master of Pop Art AND Culture, both good and bad…(Warhol really did forsee that we WOULD all be famous for at least 15 minutes…so, do we blame him for “Jon & Kate”, “The Kardashians” and the morons from “Jersey Shore”?)
Photo credit: Elizabeth Peyton, Kurt (1995)
And, running concurrently with the Warhol show will be Kurt a celebration of art influenced and inspired by the legendary Seattle musician Kurt Cobain and his impact on rock music, the birth of “Grunge” and his importance in the rebranding of Seattle from a sleepy provincial metropolis to a world class city on the cutting edge of relevance in art and commerce. As Michael Darling, The Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art describes it:
Kurt Cobain symbolized the ideals, aspirations and disappointments of the ’90s generation, and a diverse array of artists have incorporated his image into their work to comment on those issues. International in scope, the works on view in Kurt range from straightforward portraiture to pieces that show a more subtle assimilation of Cobain’s ethos and idealism in a broad range of media. With works from the early 1990s to the present, by artists such as Rodney Graham, Douglas Gordon and Elizabeth Peyton, among others, this exhibition will cause viewers to question why and how Kurt’s visage and his gestures came to mean so much to a generation.
Both these shows sound fascinating and both are sure to be crowd-pleasers. You can pre-order tickets HERE. I was hoping we’d get a big scene if Courtney Love were to show up for the opening of this show, since there could be a possibility that Puget Sound resident Krist Novocelic of Nirvana might show up, or Kurt and Courtney’s daughter Frances Bean and Courtney is estranged, to a degree, from both of them, AND she is famous for her meltdowns but alas, Courtney is going to be on tour with the newly resurrected HOLE and doing a concert in Copenhagen that day so I guess we won’t get a chance to see HER “Celebrity Skin” in attendance…Still, both these shows sound great and will probably keep SAM full throughout the summer. Check it out.
-Michael Strangeways
About the Author: Michael Strangeways
