MAKE LOVE NOT WARHOL!

Rarely is there progress without a little bit of destruction so join me now in a ritual debunking of one of modern art’s sacred cows. 

[Original scribbles from a well wisher, left on the free-for-all daubing wall at the end of Taipei's Warhol Exhibition]

Since the start of January and for a few more weeks yet, the “Pope of Pop - Andy Warhol World Tour Exhibition” has been sat plumply in the basement of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei on the first leg of a tour that will see it crawl across Asia. It will visit boom-cities that, up until the recession hit, have been experiencing the kind of rapid economic growth supplying a standard of living the West first enjoyed back when Warhol was actually relevant.

That the tour kicked off in Taiwan’s capital is fitting – this is after all the island that for many is still foremost associated with cheap, mass-produced tat. And re-viewing the 122 Warhol Factory “originals” (however you might define “original” in the Warhol post-modern condition), threw up a stark revelation: what was once deemed worthy now stands artistically hollow and completely un-affecting. Not even cueing up The Velvet Underground & Nico on my mp3 player and attempting to regress into a state of what once was was capable of infusing the tired images with any kind of significance.  

Walking through the exhibition hall, filled mostly with young Taiwanese innocently mimicking the American fashion that links Fred Durst with 50 Cent via the spirit of a giant, soiled camouflage-print nappy, felt a lot like stepping into a nightmarishly over-sized Clinton Cards.  Marilyn Monroe, Lenin, The Marx Brothers, Marilyn Monroe again, all POPped until they’ve dropped. We’re so used to seeing reprints in student poster-sales, what on earth could looking at an ‘original’ do or say today?

It seemed each of these famous images’, now saturated by the commodity culture on which they once commented, sole purpose was as a shopping aid to visitors - the exhibition’s real climax was The Gift Shop. Here creativity came courtesy of the cash register as the dull old designs were re-appropriated on to pencil cases, t-shirts, tea towels and even little Velvet Underground Banana face-masks to protect locals’ little lungs from the Taipei smog.

[An array of colourful shit. You should know better.]

There may be renewed interest bestowed upon Warhol from the gaze of young Chinese and Taiwanese citizens caught up in the excitement of their country’s rapid development, but they’re just playing catch-up and as an imported fad he’ll never outlive the 15 minutes of fame that he himself invented. 

Yes, Yes, we all know Warhol’s modus operandi was to celebrate and exploit the mass-culture movement that must have unfurled before him and his peers like – well - the burst of rainbow colour that Coke-Cola are currently using to try and illustrate what comes out of their bottles if you drink enough of them – but that was fifty years ago. Just because he and everybody else knew and embraced what he was doing then, it doesn’t let him off the hook when we look at him now. 

In 1963 Warhol said “Pop art is loving things. Loving things means being like a machine, because it does the same thing over and over again.” Today’s dilemma is we’re starting to hate things. Things require resources – we’re running low on them. We need money for things – we don’t have any money! Things are made by machines – but the capitalist machine we (and Warhol) placed our trust in has had a terminal seizure and right now we’ve no alternative providing-bosom to suckle on. We simply don’t have the means to do the same thing over and over again any more – even if we wanted to.

With the old consumer model of living, with which Warhol constantly antagonised, having had the rug pulled from beneath its feet by financial meltdown, the threat of climate change and running out of natural resources, the scope of interpretation and discussion inspired by a tin of Campbell’s Soup today is painfully out-dated. Wastrel art students and other dumb young scenesters using Warhol’s legacy for inspiration (from his own images to the visual advertising culture it underscored) will, for as long as they continue to engage with him seriously, always struggle to say anything genuinely new. You wouldn’t turn to Beowulf to communicate Britain in 2009, similarly Warhol’s had his window to transmit but now times have move on.

[maybe.]

The one overwhelming realisation that came to me when standing face to face with the Mick Jagger and Chairman Mao lithographs was just how far from this state of post-WWII creative delirium we’ve come, that Warhol today can only be viewed as nostalgia, and how desperate we should be for a new pan-global mainstream art movement to see us through this next great wave of social-global change. 

The first half of the 20th century saw avant-garde artists envisioning future status quos, the second half was spent settling into them and reflecting. It is early days still for the twenty-first century, but it’s time for young people with the arts in their eyes to put Warhol and his legacy behind them once and for all, and in his place unite to start working boldly towards something completely new.

STOP THE WARHOL!