Warholic Culture

Quick, who do you think of when you see panels of technicolored Marilyn Monroe or Mao? Of course, it’s none other than Andy Warhol, that weird dude who also brought us paintings of giant Campbell soup cans and all things previously thought to be un-art worthy. He is either enthusiastically embraced as the cultural icon who elevated the lowest common denominator and made art accessible to the general public or passionately loathed as a fraud who shamelessly presented advertisement and crass commercialism as art.

I tend to agree with the former. I love Warhol, whose work is on exhibit at Brisbane’s brand new Gallery of Modern Art. This is the last weekend for it, so of course I am making a day of going to see it. Not that I haven’t seen his work before, I had visited the Andy Warhol Museum seven or eight years ago when I went to Pittsburgh, Warhol’s hometown, to see a friend. But it’s good to revisit great art like this.

As I walk through the exhibit, it suddenly strikes me that the material on exhibit is very American. The exhibit shows a snapshot of the American pop and underground cultures of the sixties and seventies. Does the Australian audience get the cultural references and know the subjects of the artwork? I think most of them do – the Coca-Cola bottle is universally understood, international superstars in their days like Liz Taylor and Elvis are instantly recognizable, even the series with Jackie Kennedy wouldn’t be too foreign to Aussies; pieces like the Oxidation Painting where squares of copper-coated canvas were urinated on and then allowed to oxidize to immortalize the patterns of urine splatter are both base and sublime – the main determinant is probably generational rather than national. Of course, this exhibit would probably feel infinitely more foreign in some parts of the US than the cosmopolitan city of Brisbane.

I spend the rest of the afternoon sitting, with coffee in hand, with my friend Pedram at the open-air café overlooking the river.

After a year out in the cultural desert that is Hervey Bay, it is good to be back in Brisbane again.