My friend Lee-Ann won a couple of free tickets to the Andy Warhol exhibition at the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art and very kindly invited me along. We were very lucky, the tickets didn’t cover the evening’s music event – but we took a chance, played dumb and were allowed through. Was great, Glenn A Baker was there, gave a presentation on Warhol’s influence on music (primarily through his backing/management of the band, Velvet Underground).
Warhol’s art and concepts were interesting – his originality is astounding; he seems to have had the ego to match – example Velvet Underground promotional posters had Warhol’s name plastered all over them, often in larger letters than the name of the band.
Warhol was fascinated with glamour and fame so celebrities were often the subject of his works of art (example the famous Marilyn Monroe prints). Saw a video of Warhol from 1981, he was doing a glam shoot of himself in drag! The resultant photos looked quite spectacular but in the video he did not come over as very appealing, a bit of a fuss-pot who wanted his eyebrows painted on just SO (well I guess he was the artist, not the make-up guy). He was also into social commentary – the Campbell’s Soups cans, mass production and marketing.
The evening was good for people watching too, interesting to hear some of the reactions – mainly in the realm of “he was weird!”. A diverse mix in the crowd, pretty young things, older people, family groups.
A couple of surprising things I discovered about Warhol, he collected children’s toys – creating an exhibition especially for kids, and he was a practicing Catholic who went to church almost daily. He was quite a private man and much of his private life (eg. sexuality) is speculation. He died in 1987, my final year at highschool.