The Wake

Upon entering the new Andy Warhol exhibit at the Walker Art Center, I saw exactly what I came for, three walls full of Marilyn Monroe. The show is entitled: Andy Warhol/Supernova: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962–1964. Curated by Douglas Fogle, a Warhol fan since birth, Supernova examines a side of Warhol’s art that I think many people don’t see. The focus on the 1962-1964 period limits the work to only silkscreen printing. At this point in his career, Warhol had abandoned the brush and referred to himself as a “machine” simply recording events portrayed in the media. The first room, as I mentioned before, has three walls filled with Marilyn, a series of work for which Warhol is notorious. On one side, a single portrait of Marilyn, facing her is a much larger work with repetitions of the same image. As Warhol printed more and more images of Marilyn she seems to deteriorate, a function of silkscreen printing that produced a work which coincides with her suicide. Fogle said he positioned the two works facing each other to indicate a sense of narcissism. On an adjacent wall, another sheet of repetitions, this time only of Marilyn’s lips, facing two paintings of Jackie Kennedy. The prints of Jackie intermingle images of her before and after her husband’s assassination, arranged in random order in 3×3-foot squares. The placement of Jackie facing the lips, Fogel said, was to show the contrasts between America’s two sweethearts of the era. One, a sex symbol created by popular culture and the media, the other a refined and wealthy wife of a politician, both in the midst of disasters at the time the images were captured.

The second room took on print media, showing images of public-man made disasters. Taken from the newspaper, “Tunafish Disaster.” “Five Deaths” and “Car Crash” depict how the creation of technology creates a new type of disaster. “There was no train wreck before the train,” Fogel pointed out in relation to the works. “Car Crash” and “Five Deaths” both depicted mangled bodies being crushed by cars. The words “did a leak kill?” lined the bottom of each row on “Tunafish Disaster”, a print of the faces of two women killed by bad tuna fish alternated with cans of the offending fish. The works, although produced nearly 40 years ago had a contemporary feel.

The third room was confrontational, even more so than the images of car crashes. On one side, a 3×4-foot repeated print of electric chairs, aptly titled “Twelve Electric Chairs.” Two single portraits from the series “Thirteen Most Wanted Men,” in which Warhol silkscreen printed mug shots from the FBI’s Most Wanted list, face “Twelve Electric Chairs.” “Most Wanted” was originally produced for the World’s Fair in 1964 and was displayed on the side of the New York State Pavilion. The men are facing the “Twelve Electric Chairs”, looking on to their fate if captured. On the third wall, “Race Riot” reproduces a picture taken during a clash between civil rights protestors and the police in Birmingham, Alabama. Naming the print “Race Riot” transformed the photograph into a statement about the police and civil rights; it hung on a wall next to the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

The next room returned to celebrities, including Elvis and Elizabeth Taylor. The actress is shown in prints from National Velvet, which was one of her first films, and Cleopatra during the filming of which Taylor became ill and nearly died. “Elvis I & II” show the king in a still shot from the cowboy film Flaming Star. In this film still, Elvis is standing and pointing a gun directly out, which in the context of the exhibit, points directly towards “Race Riot.”

The curator arranged Supernova in such a way that through the course of the four rooms, you are taken through an important and ever present dichotomy of society. Celebrities, cars and the electric chair are all objects created by society, each of which then created their own new type of disaster. Supernova (which is an exploding star) ties in to the disasters surrounding all of the objects shown in the exhibit. The celebrities depicted were all shown in proximity to death or catastrophe, and the remaining images were all direct confrontations with or depictions of mortality and disaster. Having “Elvis I & II” point a gun at “Race Riot” depicts not only the conflict between races in the United States, but also points to the line which Elvis so famously walked between black and white popular cultures. At the same time, the print shows an all-American cowboy, pointing a gun towards a room of criminals (“Most Wanted”) who were from markedly ethnic backgrounds. The room containing “Five Deaths” and “Tunafish Disaster” juxtaposes two fatal events made possible by modern invention. They face each other and ask the onlooker if a leak in the endeavor towards technological accomplishment killed innocent people.

This exhibit brings up Warhol’s critical admiration for popular culture, while at the same time tackling the issue of self-inflicted disaster. I had never made it past the cans of Campbell’s soup and obsessive pictures of Marilyn Monroe before, but I walked out of the Walker stunned, excited to go back and look again at another side of Andy Warhol.

You can view this exhibit at the Walker Art Center until Feb. 26th.