IN 1981, WARHOL APPROPRIATED 1981 SOUP CANS – COMPLETE WITH BAR CODES — RATHER THAN GOING BACK TO HIS 1962 CANS

In the fall of 1981, Warhol was lured to visit Colorado State University by his local patrons John and Kimiko Powers. To honor his visit, CSU built three building-size soup cans and asked Warhol’s permission to paint them to look like his 1962 Campbell’s Soup paintings.  And here’s where it gets interesting: Warhol insisted that the cans be painted to copy the current 1981 Campbell’s product, complete with bar codes, instead of the 1962 product—just the way Marcel Duchamp told some early collectors to go out and buy their own, current urinals to use as art instead of trying to buy ones made by him to look like the 1917 version. (Eventually he gave in to them—with his tongue firmly in his cheek, as I’ve claimed.)

At the moment of their first making, Warhol’s Pop paintings were — and were read as — direct, untransformed appropriations of stuff from the real world. It was only later, as Warhol’s prices and fame began to take off, that the Soups came to be read as the artiest of fine art.

That’s why it’s so nice to see Warhol, at the tail-end of his career, revisiting and reaffirming the true, conceptual essence of where that career started out.

For more on Warhol’s visit to CSU go to https://libarts.source.colostate.edu/reel-csu-stories-pop-artist-andy-warhol-visited-campus-in-1981/

Warhol’s Photo of a Painting of a Photo, at Jack Shainman

THE WEEKLY PIC: I saw this image by Andy Warhol in a rare survey of his photos that’s now filling both Jack Shainman spaces in New York. It includes examples of most of Warhol’s photo work, barring only the early-’60s Polaroids that live only in his archive in Pittsburgh, and that document his first steps into the “serious” art world.

The 1985 image I’ve chosen shows part of one of the Shadow paintings Warhol had made some seven years earlier—abstractions that were themselves based on photos of unknown and unnameable objects. Unlike some of the shots in the Shainman show, which can have pretty clear functions (if sometimes erotic ones), this one feels as though Warhol is after something more purely artistic, achieved by revisiting his own earlier art. By making a hard-to-read photo of an enigmatic painting of a cryptic photograph, Warhol was launching himself further down the mise-en-abîme where his best work had always lived.  And note that he signed the shot. (Image courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, © 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)

For a full survey of past Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy Show How Business Makes Art Dance for Its Supper

THE WEEKLY PIC: I’m usually semi-allergic to any human movement that looks like High Dance, the way I’m semi-allergic to any Painting in Oils: Both can seem more invested in their art status than in any actual work they may do as art.

But I completely bought into the dancing dancer in a recent video called “Cleaner,” by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, that ran until Saturday at Postmasters gallery in New York. (I hate to break my rule about covering shows that are closed, but work on my Warhol book was still all-consuming until just now—hence my recent weeks of art-critical silence.)

The McCoy piece, shot using gorgeous high-tech video, shows a very dance-y modern dancer taking on the role of  office-cleaner in a stylish, post-industrial building in Brooklyn. As she washes the polished concrete and dusts the vintage factory lights, our dancer, slender and elastic in her every move, could also be on stage at Lincoln Center.  (That’s not meant as a compliment.) But in fact it’s her very dancerishness that gives this video impact:  The cultural commonplaces she inhabits let her stand for all artmakers, of every kind, in their relationship to our era’s unbridled and almost unquestioned capitalism. Mostly with our acquiescence, businesses expect the arts to defer to them, like a maid curtsying to her masters; the arts keep the culture sparkling and fresh-smelling, as money gets made all around them.  (My still from “Cleaner” is courtesy Postmasters.)

For a full survey of past Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.