L
& M Arts
45 East 78th Street
New York, New York 10021 USA
212 861 0020
ANDY WARHOL: SKULLS AND HAMMERS & SICKLES
Perry Rubenstein Gallery
526 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
212 627 8000
The eighteen Mao
paintings on loan here from private collections, all synthetic polymer paint
and silkscreen ink on canvas (or in four cases linen) propel you into a
kind of “surrender mode” the instant your eyes hit their surface. You are
subject to the intense gaze of the Chairman of the most populous Communist
country on earth. The sublime savagery of Mao’s Mona Lisa smile, sleekly
designed to control and protect the flow of the currency of ideas in China,
was one of the world’s most resonate propaganda images, accompanying “The
Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse Tung” with 2.3 billion reproductions
circulated. But the image is turned on its head by Warhol’s strategic re-contextualization.
In one of his most radical and subversive turns, Warhol re-shaped the visual
codes of the all-powerful, all-knowing Mao portrait “freeing it” from its
original function of eradicating vestiges of bourgeois consumerism lingering
in society. Applications of a bright undercoat of paint and sensual Ab-Ex
brushstrokes on top of the silkscreened “aura” made the dictator/ Chinese
leader look as if he were wearing lipstick and eye shadow: The impact of the
macho leader’s propaganda image is made to stand on its head. Through the
eyes of the homosexual artist—daringly provocative and subversive for his
time—Warhol explores sexual mutability with its implications of
self-transcendence transforming the severe high-collared militaristic
Chairman into a foppish, middle-aged queen.
The official
photographic image of Mao is not only stripped of its propaganda meaning by
Warhol’s “feminization” of his surface, but in the process, the visage of
the Chairman of an autocratic social system that cost of lives of tens of
millions of people is placed into the world of fine art. Warhol re-cycles an
image of pain and power and uses it like advertising agencies use A-list
celebrities to sell everything from clothes to perfume.
1972 was the year
Warhol re-entered the arena of painting—he had ceremoniously given up the
medium for film and ‘happenings’ in 1966 with the infamous release of his
silver pillows/clouds in front of the press—and it was also the year the
Twin Towers opened in an almost bankrupt New York City. As importantly,
President Richard M. Nixon decided to go to Beijing in a historic overture
that would lead to full open diplomatic relations with China. From February
21 - 28, Nixon broke through a quarter century of mutual antagonism between
the United States and China. In what he later referred to as “the week that
was”, millions of Americans got their first glance of life behind the
“Bamboo Curtain”. Both the Chinese government-controlled media and
America’s corporate television stations and print media outlets followed the
many events that Chairman Mao and President Nixon witnessed together, with
extraordinary pictures that overrode the printed word.
Warhol showed uncanny
acuteness in introducing the Mao image into his art at a time when the
artist himself was just coming to enjoy the full-scale benefits of Western
‘decadence’. In 1972, Warhol shifted into high gear – Fred Hughes had come
on board playing a key role in connecting the artist with Bruno
Bischofberger, a Zurich-based art dealer and Warhol collector who
commissioned the Mao paintings and arranged for the first exhibition of the
work that fall in Basel, Switzerland. It was at Hughes’s instigation that
Andy’s return to painting was characterized by two important changes: from
that point on, all Warhol artworks would also be reproduced as prints to be
sold in signed portfolios and he would work mostly on commission.
Warhol’s provocative
mix of symbols of commercialism and Communist authority are still embraced
by contemporary Chinese artists who play with fusing military uniforms with
symbols of consumer culture like Coca-Cola, Nike and McDonalds: Yu Youhan,
for instance, paints Chairman Mao’s visage alongside Whitney Houston's.
Materialism, politics, economics and media will continue to be arenas of
exploration for contemporary Chinese artists who are still living in a
country where ten thousand people are executed every year . Denying freedom
of speech and the right to a fair trial is still commonplace thirty years
after the Chairman’s death in 1976.
Warhol took the
despot’s public image—which was thriving on the extremely public persona of
the man who was notorious for his grip on power—and defused it as
efficiently as JFK did the Cuban missile crisis. He took a man who had
regulated content and banned anything that would endanger China’s national
security, reputation and interests and drained his image of its totalitarian
associations— this was no mean feat during the cold war. What other artist
in 1972 or, for that matter today, could “empty” the revolutionary spirit of
a man responsible for the incarceration or death of seventy million people?
The installation of
Andy Warhol's fourteen individual synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink
"Skull" (1974-1976) works on canvas in two horizontal rows of seven and "Six
Sculls" of 1976, a work comprised of six canvases butted together into a
vertical grid of three high and two across is a compelling portrait of
everyone--from starlet to drag queen. Demonstrating his genius for
identifying the seminal motif for a culture at the peak of punk rock (Clash,
Blondie, Talking Heads and all the new wave groups frequenting the Factory)
it also allows for a rare opportunity to experience the artist's innovative
use of his silkscreen technique.
The idea for the
"Hammer and Sickle" series began in Ferrara, Italy in 1975 when Warhol
became increasingly aware of the conspicuous communist graffiti scattered
throughout the countryside.
His obsessive re-use
of the same image singly within a series of individual works or in a
multi-paneled composition illustrates both the flexibility of the medium and
the virtues of repetition. Is this Warhol tipping his hat to the emblematic
omnipresence and repetition of modern mass media perhaps? With Its varying
lurid colors, tonal contrasts that emphasize the grainy cinematic effects,
and the sculls' nuances of difference in the 'chance' off-registration of
the screen, the viewer is lured into a game of pleasurable optic if not
philosophical discovery. The subtle shifting of the variation in the
silkscreen ink in the eye cavity of the scull alone propelled this viewer
into a morbid reverie on the process of decomposition that faces us all.
Perhaps this was Warhol's way of reminding us that famous or not, we are all
equal--death is the great leveler.
