Andy and Oz

It’s a parallel universe, a happening thing

For the 1960s Warhol’s colour was silver … astronauts marched in their shiny space suits everywhere in the media. The Velvet Underground performed ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ while Warhol’s antique mirror ball splintered spotlights into millions of diamond shards. His gently floating silver ‘Clouds’ series of 1966 represented the apogee of the silver theme. [1]

Andy and Oz: parallel visions is the international event to coincide with the National Gallery of Australia’s silver anniversary, marking twenty-five years since the Gallery first opened its doors to the public. A joint initiative between the National Gallery and The Andy Warhol Museum, the exhibition is also taking place in the year that marks twenty years since Warhol’s untimely death. The initial proposal for the show was to select works from the National Gallery’s collection considering the influence of Warhol on Australian artists. This presented some difficulties. Some artists in the national collection clearly have stronger links with Warhol than others. Yet some of the less expected parallels are as intriguing. Therefore, in the selection process with Thomas Sokolowski, Director of The Andy Warhol Museum, the idea of establishing links with Warhol’s art evolved laterally in terms of shared ideas and ways of working, differences of opinion, snapshots of pivotal connections and parallel visions, to enable lively ‘conversations’ between artists’ works to occur.

As the exhibition developed surprising parallels emerged across three groupings. The first includes Martin Sharp, Richard Larter and Robert Rooney – artists who experienced the era when British and American Pop art came to the fore (although it is perhaps only Sharp who would feel at ease with the idea of being called a Pop artist). All three have worked with popular culture and ideas around the everyday. All have worked across media: painting, printmaking, drawing, collage, graphic design, photography and film. The second group includes Fiona Hall and Tim Horn who relate to Warhol in their obsessive ways of working; in their almost fetishist approach to making things, combining seemingly disparate elements and using unexpected materials from everyday contexts in their investigations of sexuality, nature and culture. The third group includes artists working in photo-based media: Tracey Moffatt, Juan Davila, Liu Xiao Xian and Christian Thompson – artists whose work suggests parallels with Warhol’s in terms of their unconventional, theatrical approaches and their distinctive takes on cultural and personal identities.

This exhibition is proudly supported by the National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibitions Fund

Two takes on Warhol

Martin Sharp met Warhol twice. On both occasions he remembers Warhol as ‘the calm eye of the hurricane’. The first encounter was in Paris when Warhol was making a film with Paul Morrisey. ‘There was all this frenetic activity going on with the production and he was sitting there knitting this thin, long, green scarf. He was like this pool of stillness.’

Then, in New York, Sharp found himself sitting outside a bookshop (where a launch was taking place) with a group that included Warhol. ‘A lot of people kept coming to talk to him. I noticed that he was continually giving out a lot of himself. He was very polite and gentle despite all the demands. I asked him if he ever went to church, and he said, “Yes, every week.”’ [1]

This is perhaps not the image most people conjure up when they think of Warhol, the radical artist who, with others of his generation, revolutionised the art world with the Pop art phenomenon and his risqué underground films. Although he was involved with some of the liveliest action in the New York art scene from the 1950s until his death in 1987, he was also an intensely private person. The complexities of his personality may have been buried in terms of his introverted public persona but they are there in the range of his work across diverse media. The fact that Warhol is still relevant to many artists working today is testimony to the breadth of his thinking and his capacity for reinvention. For many artists in this show – from Richard Larter born in 1929 (the year after Warhol), through to the youngest, Christian Thompson, born in 1978 – Warhol has epitomised an inventive, liberating force in a televisual world where correspondences across time and place are not only possible but probable. As Thompson remarks:

Andy is so explosive and he has always represented artistic freedom to me. His work is provocative and presents popular culture to its self, revealing a new layer and bringing an array of social issues to the fore …

I love Andy’s approach to cinema and his meditations on celebrity. He saw celebrity in the everyday and the people around him. His movies like ‘Couch’ and ‘Kiss’ were absolutely ahead of their time, look at our obsession with reality TV. [2]

God save Oz

't was just the spirit of the time. I could do those Collages because the original images had radiated so far out into the mass culture, that the original colours weren’t there anymore, the scale wasn’t there anymore, they’d lost their preciousness … If you flick quickly through Sir Herbert Read’s book on the history of art, that goes from the Lascaux Caves to Jackson Pollock, the image vanishes into a flux. But then you can’t keep the images out of art, so Pop art had to come.

(Martin Sharp) [1]

The painting that Sharp did with artist Tim Lewis, Still life: Marilyn 1973, pays homage to both Warhol and Marilyn Monroe. In the months that followed Monroe’s death in August 1962, Warhol made more than twenty silkscreen paintings of her, combining two of his consistent preoccupations: death and the cult of celebrity. Sharp initially made a collage of the still life by pasting Warhol’s image of Monroe from a Tate Gallery poster onto a print of the much-reproduced Sunflowers by Van Gogh.

This collage was only possible to me at the time because Marilyn’s green eyeshadow was the same green as the background of the sunflowers. There was also an echo of Marilyn’s life and Vincent’s. They were both great artists, they died at a similar age and one could describe Marilyn as a sunflower. I called the painting Still life, because though they had left this world they were still alive in their art and influence … [2]

Although the painting Still life: Marilyn was done later than the collage, the idea had come about while Sharp was living in London. Like many young Australian artists, he was drawn to the the swinging sixties in London where he lived from 1967 to 1969. During this time, he befriended Eric Clapton, the rock guitarist with the band Cream. Sharp met Clapton in the Speakeasy Club in London in 1967, having just written a poem which he thought would make a good song. The scribbled lyrics which he handed to Clapton on a serviette became the hit song ‘Tales of brave Ulysses’ on Cream’s album Disraeli Gears.

Like Warhol, Sharp designed album covers including the cover for Disraeli Gears as well as the later Wheels of fire which was awarded the New York Art Directors Prize for Best Album Design in 1969.

As a contributor to the radical underground magazine Oz both in Sydney and in London, Sharp was caught up in two sensational court cases involving the magazine, first in Australia and then the United Kingdom. Some of the most brilliant minds of the day came to the defence of Oz magazine, championing anti-censorship and free speech. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were among the supporters marching in a demonstration at the time of the trial. They also wrote the lyrics for the album God save Oz (released in 1971 and performed by Bill Elliot and the short-lived Elastic Oz Band). One of the most striking covers of Oz magazine was from the poster Sharp designed for Bob Dylan, Mister Tambourine Man 1968. Printed on shiny foil paper, the large scale of Dylan’s face and distinctive halo of hair floats above the small profile view of the singer-songwriter below. It is like a projection of the performer writ large – his state of mind and feeling for sound given hallucinatory shape in the circles that overlap and recur one within the other in a seemingly infinite pattern. This is reinforced by the lettering in his ubiquitous dark sunglasses inscribed in one lens with the quotation ‘BLOWIN IN THE MIND’. Andy Warhol remarked that he liked the way Dylan had created ‘a brilliant new style’ as well as his courage to change direction from folk to rock: ‘He didn’t spend his career doing homage to the past, he had to do things his own way, and that was just what I respected.’ [3]

Sharp experienced aspects of the same milieu as Warhol, attending concerts by the likes of Dylan and Hendrix and going to after-event parties. Sharp painted a dazzling rendition of Hendrix – the lines bursting with a palpable energy from Hendrix’s electric guitar and radiating out into space (see inside back cover). It was in the 1960s that the Rolling Stones also made an impact. As Warhol recalled:

This was the summer of ‘Satisfaction’ – the Stones were coming out of every doorway, window, closet, and car. It was exciting to hear pop music sounding so mechanical, you could tell every song by sound now, not melody: I mean, you knew it was ‘Satisfaction’ before the first fraction of the first note finished. [4]

You can almost hear Mick Jagger belting out lyrics to ‘Satisfaction’ in Richard Larter’s portraits of him painted in Cream filling; phew, finger ring. There are multiple frames in the painting; some like film stills, some like cut-outs from underground comics and magazines, brought together in a painted collage that reflects the energy of an era. Elvis, Nietzsche, a Russian Samidzat heroine, an ape, a screaming man and a beautiful model all occupy the same space. Larter started adopting images from popular culture in his art before migrating to Australia in 1962, inspired by artists working in Britain at the time such as Eduardo Paolozzi and John Bratby and also by youth culture that has continued to fascinate him.

He wrote of the early 1960s:

A whole new youth oriented culture was permeating London, it was in the main rebellious and the attitude to middle class mores was dismissive … I drew my images from popular culture – Elvis Presley, Sophia Loren, Rock ’n Rollers of both sexes, motorcycles and their riders, the young patrons of coffee shops with Gaggia machines, dance halls, rock ’n roll and skiffle venues. [5]

A very literate artist, Larter also noted that around the time he moved from Britain to Australia, he and his wife Pat swapped their copies of James Joyce for Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. While he has long been interested in the relationship between figuration and abstraction – noting that his figures are another element, like signs – Larter recognised, like Warhol, that popular culture provided ways of engaging with people.

My signs (figures) were not just there to be recognised but to get the viewer’s attention, thus to get the viewer thinking and participating in my work. This idea came from psychology and the marketing techniques of the period. I was well aware that sexuality and also fame were excellent attention getters, as was anything different, unexpected or startling. [6]

By the start of the 1970s Larter was inspired by Warhol’s work in relation to photography and film and painted his portrait into Frame 1971 (page 23), alongside a posed female model. Both figures are painted in monochromes of black and blue, the latter perhaps alluding to Warhol’s Blue movie. Warhol’s face is only partly in frame; the play between the picture frame and film frame accentuated in the word repeated below and cascading out of the painting. In another painting of the period, Sliding easy, a prominent Jackie Kennedy look-alike is juxtaposed with repeated screenprinted images of the American President Lyndon B Johnson whose advocacy of the Vietnam War riled the artist. Although outspoken in his views, Larter is conscious of a complexity in Warhol’s art that, in his view, is undiminished by a lack of commentary on the artist’s part.

I think Warhol is terrific. He managed to have his cake and eat it. Art is really about visual communication between the artist and the viewer and he understood that. He realised that it was best not to explain things too much. I mean the electric chairs and other images like the guy getting his trousers ripped [Birmingham race riot 1964] were very serious but he didn’t get much flak because of his fey attitude … He recognised the work should speak for itself. His commercial art background taught him that art is about communication. It needs to make its own impact. He never lost that. When he did repeated images of well-known figures like Mao and Marilyn the reach of his work was huge. [7]

In some of Warhol’s best known Pop works of the 1960s – of Mao and Marilyn, Campbell’s soup cans, Brillo boxes and Kellogg’s cereal packets – repeated images seem to subliminally echo the enormity of the physical landscape and the reach of the mass media, especially television. In both America and Australia through the 1950s, when domestic appliances and all manner of consumer products were transforming lives, there was also a natural allegiance between mass communication and the intimate, interior spaces of domestic living rooms, laundries and kitchens. Within the domestic interior and the supposed boredom of suburbia, young would-be artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rooney discovered worlds within worlds. Both shared a background in design as commercial artists. For both, there was a deliberate denial of the autobiographical self (in part a reaction against the self-expressionists who preceded them). Yet both, to some extent, acknowledged the significance of the home base with all its paraphernalia and slippages of memory. Both understood that ‘the secret life of the suburbs’ was fertile ground for re-thinking what art could be.

There is a photo of Andy Warhol with his mother Julia Warhola in the house they shared in New York with a box of Kellogg’s cereal on the kitchen table. Julia Warhola is perhaps not the first person that one may think of as a collaborator with Andy Warhol. Yet, from the 1950s when she contributed the decorative writing on his commercial illustrations and contributed to her son’s book 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy to the film Warhol made with her in 1966 called Mrs Warhol, she was just that. Samuel Beckett understood the potency of the everyday was not in its extraordinariness but in its ordinariness. As Warhol put it, ‘I just happen to like ordinary things. When I paint them, I don’t try to make them extraordinary. I just try to paint them ordinary-ordinary.’ [8]

Robert Rooney would agree with this sentiment. Like Warhol, he works subversively with memory, enlarging aspects of home and the everyday. He became aware of Warhol when he was a student at the Swinburne Technical College between 1954 and 1957: ‘In the Third and Fourth year we were required to specialise, and I chose Graphic Design and Illustration rather than Painting, even though my ambition was to become an artist.’ He continues:

Ben Shahn and pre-Pop Andy Warhol were familiar to me, as their work was often featured in magazines such as Gebrauchgrafik, Graphis and American Art Director’s Annual. What attracted me to Warhol’s work was his drawing method, his blotted line, which I saw as being related to the ‘hooked’ line in Shahn’s drawings.

Andy Warhol the Pop Artist was still a few years off, though I did see several exhibition reviews in Art News. I remember one in particular, of a pre-Pop group show, which mentioned Andy Warhol’s drawing of a Coca-Cola bottle with a rose in it … Around 1958 I made a screenprint of two teenage boys, one holding a Coca-Cola bottle. (It’s now in the Coca-Cola Museum).
Something I inherited from illustration – in common with Ben Shahn and Andy Warhol – was the use of existing images. Life magazine and newspaper photographs (the wrecked cars) were common sources, as well as photos I had taken with a Box Brownie. I continued to work in this way, even in my hard-edge serial/cereal abstractions on the back of Kellogg’s boxes. [9]

Around this time Rooney began to work in bookshops, delighting in the absurd topics of second-hand books from Swedish club swinging, to exercising in the bath, to the walking stick method of self-defence. Such finds became part of his ‘Spon’ collection, the term drawn from the ‘Goon Show’ – a term of praise for spontaneous absurdity. [10] Packaged, mass-produced goods were often source materials, such as bird masks printed on the backs of Kellogg’s cereal boxes that provided stencils for seemingly abstract works. While his Kind-hearted kitchen-garden paintings have an undeniable abstract rigour, the modernist grid is given an absurdist twist in his use of the tops of scalloped cake-box lids applied as stencils to create the curvilinear rhythmic lines and patterns.

Unexpected sources such as books of knitting patterns also fed into the Spon collection and later into series of works such as the Superknit paintings. In works such as Superknit 1970, the repeated pattern is both real and abstract, uniform and absurd, defined and seemingly infinite – not dissimilar to Warhol’s deadpan humour in the repeated cow motif designs for wallpaper. Looking back to the late 1960s, Rooney notes:

Andy Warhol was one of the artists featured in the exhibition Serial imagery at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1968. Looking through the catalogue again, I can see why it was important to me. Notions of repetition, banality and boredom were very much in the air at the time. However, Andy Warhol was just one of many influences, and an interest in Erik Satie, Gertrude Stein and John Cage had already set me in a direction that resulted in the Kind-Hearted Kitchen-Garden and Slippery-Seal series of 1967–8… [11]

In 1967 Warhol’s work was included in the landmark exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Two decades of American painting, from the Museum of Modern Art. The following year another major exhibition, The Field, was held at the same institution that included Rooney’s Kind-hearted kitchen-garden IV. Rooney began his camouflage paintings such as Against the sun in 1985, the year before Warhol began his Camouflage works. Like Warhol, Rooney had returned to painting after a break from the medium. For both artists, the use of camouflage did not reflect military colours but instead were painted in vibrant, even garish hues. On the one hand the similarities are uncanny. On the other, it is perhaps not surprising that these two artists who were interested in maintaining a sense of personal distance – playing with shifts between abstraction and figuration, reality and imagination – would have been drawn to a method of concealment such as camouflage.

Deborah Hart
Senior Curator
Australian Painting and Sculpture after 1920

The fall from grace and the expulsion from Paradise is a profoundly melancholy tale, but in endorsing subversive readings into the text, Hall finds surprising blessings. The temptation of Eve – glorious, chattering, knowing, incredibly sexy – is the Mae West of monochrome photography. [1]

Packaging for food, along with ideas of containment and explicit revelation, is at the heart of Fiona Hall’s Paradisus terrestris series. Conceived at her kitchen table and inspired by visits to the Adelaide Botanic Garden and its Museum of Economic Botany in Adelaide in South Australia, Hall used sardine cans as the containers of her extraordinary provocative work. Hall was fascinated by the parallels between humans and nature, by the common aspects of our existence – pointing out that we are nature, sharing things like haemoglobin and a sex life. In Paradisus terrestris Hall juxtaposes explicit images of the male and female body – torsos, breasts, buttocks, genitalia – against intricately carved images of plants. One of the striking aspects of these exquisite, challenging works is the artist’s background in drawing. Similarly, Warhol’s work was informed by his drawing abilities and there are parallels in his quite beautiful erotic and explicit drawings from the 1950s of male nudes in ink on shiny gold leaf and graphic paper. Both artists have also been intrigued by the way that we frequently use plants as erotic metaphors, as in Warhol’s famous image of a half peeled banana on one of the album covers for the rock band, the Velvet Underground. When the first series of Hall’s audacious aluminium sculptures in her Paradisus terrestris series were shown, they caused a sensation. As Julie Ewington writes:

Paradisus terrestris bloomed in February 1990 at the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia. This was the first appearance of Hall’s metal figures … finely worked and blatantly erotic, erudite (even recondite) and salaciously punning, the work was composed of familiar images but completely unexpected in effect. Diminutive in size but artistically and intellectually ambitious, Paradisus terrestris was a miracle of ambiguity in a suite of twenty-three small sculptures; each was made from two cojoined sardine cans with a beaten aluminium insert made from a soft drink can, and was labelled with a small text listing the botanical and common names for each plant. [2]

In the 1980s Hall had used the containers of sardine tins in Pride 1985 from The seven deadly sins series – photographs based on intricately constructed collages. The combination of religion and sexuality also appeared in the 1984 Paradise series. In Temptation of Eve the smiling lips of women find themselves in a garden that is inhabited by plants and also by corkscrews and penknives. They look surreal, even playful – the bric-a-brac of contemporary life – but also signal danger. The sources and substance of these collages are photocopies of images from popular magazines, medieval engravings, mail-order catalogues, small toy figurines and diminutive metal tools. The intricate, miniaturist scale in Hall’s works serves paradoxically to intensify effect, to create a parallel universe – ‘a realm not of fact but of reverie’. [3]

The reverse is true of Timothy Horn who transforms natural forms and constructed objects by enlarging them to dazzling effect. Horn notes:

I’ve always responded to the iconic, emblematic and brazen scale of Pop Art. In relation to Warhol: his use of repetition and appropriation; the archetypal portraits of Marilyn, Elvis and Elizabeth Taylor. His work (and life) also capture something of the high camp glamour and of the 60’s – velvet and ruffles, gilt mirrors and flock wallpaper, dusted with clichéd themes of love, death and desire … [4]

Like Hall, Horn emphasises the fluid correspondences between nature and culture. He shares an obsessive approach to fabricating in his work, relishing the inherent properties of the materials he uses – their sensuality, resilience and mutability. His giant jellyfish chandeliers, Medusa and Stheno, made primarily from silicone rubber, are based upon imagery of the nineteenth-century zoologist Ernst Haeckel who was notorious for embellishing the facts and for his preference for artifice over scientific fact. Suspended in space, the constructed, stitched, stretched, semi-transparent, lacy, dangling forms have a spellbinding presence. They shed an eerie light, mimicking the idea of jellyfish and their bioluminescence to attract prey.

Horn’s over-size shoe Glass slipper (ugly blister), constructed out of lead crystal, silicon, nickel-plated bronze and Easter egg foil, also conveys a tension between luxuriant beauty and repellent excess – a novel take on the Cinderella shoe. Throughout his life, Warhol was fascinated by shoes. His numerous drawings of shoes for the I Miller Shoe Company in the 1950s were legendary and his interest in the subject continued for the next thirty years, with some of the later images given a shimmer with the addition of diamond dust. Warhol even constructed a few lavish sculptural shoes, covered in gold leaf and embellished with floral and leaf patterns. Horn’s glass slipper and jellyfish chandeliers also bring to mind Stephen Frears’ film adaptation Dangerous liaisons, set in pre-Revolutionary, eighteenth-century France. The sumptuous sets, costumes and jewels (essential for preening and courting) complement themes of sexual attraction and duplicity that the viewer can hardly bear to watch but is simultaneously entranced by. Here Horn shares with Warhol a camp sensibility, evoked by Susan Sontag who wrote in her essay Notes on ‘Camp’: ‘The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.’19 On a personal level and in his work, Horn has been inspired by Warhol’s openness in relation to his homosexuality:

[Warhol] was an openly ‘out’ gay artist at a time when homosexuality was considered a psychological disorder and associated with criminal activity. Whilst his peers, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg remained tightly closeted, Warhol immersed himself in the underground current of gay culture … The first Warhol films I saw were during the 80’s, while I was at college, trying to figure out my own sexuality. A retro cinema in Melbourne screened Lonesome Cowboys, Blow Job and Blood for Dracula, in 3D. I was a lonesome cowboy, in search of a Joe Dellesandro of my own. [5]

Deborah Hart
Senior Curator
Australian Painting and Sculpture after 1920

All the world’s a stage, a film set, a television scenario, a photo-shoot: take 1/ take 2/ take 3/ take 4

'Andy Warhol as an artist and person has been one of the greatest influences in my life. It was really through him that I learnt to be a visual artist. His irreverence and funniness most of all taught me to relax about art. If you wanted to produce it all you had to do was ‘work at it’. Andy once said to one of his ‘kids’ who wanted to be a successful artist: ‘just stay at home and work really hard and then you’ll become really famous’.

(Tracey Moffatt) [1]

In one of Tracey Moffatt’s most famous works, Something more, she creates the impression of film stills cut from an Australian road movie of her own making. Each frame is in turn like a stage set – a constructed world of painted and fabricated backdrops in and around which the central protagonists act out the implied drama. From the first image, beauty and danger are present: embodied in the image of the artist in a dazzling red and black cheongsam; the threatening presence of the drinking thickset man at the table, and a sleazy woman smoking in the doorway trapped in her own fate. Against the stillness of these three figures is the movement of the young Asian man moving into the sightline and the blurring of two young boys. Across the whole set of images there is a sense of melodrama and, always, the possibility of something more. There are suggestions of taunting youths, gentle seduction, the shimmer of a new outfit, a violent encounter, sado-masochism and disaster. While the idea of a narrative is central – of a beautiful young woman who ends up sprawled, presumably left for dead, on a roadside 300 miles from the city – there is also in each image a fabricated, layered world that is closer to poetry; ambiguous, suggestive, open-ended. Like Warhol, Moffatt has a passion for the look of things – the way that dress is a theatrical and psychological device. There is a continual play in both artists’ works between glamour and a camp attitude, between artifice and reality, between documentary photography and an attraction to the bizarre in the everyday. For both artists, television and film provided an outlet for their dreams when they were growing up (Warhol in Pittsburgh and Moffatt in Brisbane). Like Warhol, Moffatt has also had a passion for Hollywood movies, reflected in her DVD compilations Love and Doomed (made in collaboration with Garry Hillberg): in the deliberate selection of images or cuts from a range of films that cumulatively tap into shared emotions of love and terror.

Moffatt’s work can be interpreted on many levels. It has, for example, been written that while her photographs and films ‘engage with many of the major social issues of the present era – landrights, immigration, mass media, globalisation – they also constantly reference and re-imagine her own past as an Aboriginal born in 1960 and brought up in a foster home in Brisbane’. [2] Moffatt herself says:

I think all my imagery comes from my subconscious, from dreams. I am not talking about when I dream at night … but the dreams I have when I am awake. We can dream with our eyes open. This is why I’ve been hesitant to be written about as a social commentator. I think my work is very dream-like … I like to create my version of reality, the work comes from me, what I know. Things I have seen and experienced and things I think I have seen and experienced. Maybe it’s just an exaggerated version of my own reality. Sources of inspiration come from everywhere. [3]

Juan Davila also sees issues of cultural identity as layered and complex, drawing inspiration from diverse contexts and imaginative possibilities. For him, partial, simplistic readings of identity relating to Australia and his country of birth, Chile, have been ongoing sources of frustration. He recognises that the personal and political are linked; that society, history and attitudes about the way we live our lives are inseparable. He notes:

For me Pop art represented a fake popular culture in the sense that it was a Western only view. Warhol and Lichtenstein are an example of the clean White Anglo Saxon Protestant ethos. Product, marketing, money, social climbing, perversion, apoliticality and repression of emotion are what come to mind for me with Warhol. In the 80s we tried to rewrite the history of Pop art from the antipodes, mixing American and English Pop with local references, thus altering the Australian passivity in repeating imported culture. We also highlighted cultural materials rejected by the High Pop, for example Indigenous culture. [4]

Like Robert Rooney, Davila was included in Paul Taylor’s Popism show that considered the Post-Pop phenomenon. [5] On sexuality and politics brings out other parallels or possibilities for a different ‘conversation’ between artists. Davila notes that during the 1980s in Australia there was a discussion about provincialism and that, along with other artists, he developed strategies ‘to counteract the prominence given to American and European art in a cringe that continues today’. The really moving ideas for Davila did not derive from the dominant Western idea of Pop art: ‘I have quoted both the works of Warhol and Lichtenstein, not because I love them, but because they can operate as a sounding board for what has transpired in the Reagan and Bush era. What I have loved all along is the Latin American Pop Baroque Art with it social commitment.’ [6]

The first impression of On sexuality and politics is its dramatic scale, its visceral qualities, its strength and poignancy, its edgy erotic power. Davila comments on the process:

[On sexuality and politics] contrasts the new painting in the 80’s, for example that of [Jorg] Immendorf, with the discourse of photography. The picture wavers between photography and painting. I recall also altering the work many times with the concept of the unfinished work. I tried to make Authorship multiple and open. [7]

These photographic, painterly works are theatrical in their staging, interweaving religious iconography with sexual politics and the politics of the art world. Davila has noted that he is interested in the process of replacement of what is real by its reproduction. There is a fascinating reversal of this in On sexuality and politics in the way he replaces the reproduction with the real – the many reproductions of the pietà or images of remembrance, replaced with a sweating self-portrait holding a young half-naked man on his lap. (Davila notes that the image was photographed in front of the Shrine of Remembrance and is also a reference to Diggers at war.) Around the bodies, he has painted trademarks of the styles, names and imagery of artists who have ‘made it’ in the art world. It may be tempting to read the portraits of the male protagonists as a shift from the sacred to the sacrilegious, the iconic to the iconoclastic. This may be true but it may also undermine the potency of the image. Could the transmutation of a religious icon not also be a re-reading of love and suffering? Davila is passionate about questions of sexual repression, believing it to be as important as political repression in his native Chile. On sexuality and politics can therefore also be seen as part of a wider investigation of masculinity, machismo and the outsider, made all the more urgent taking into account the context of the 1980s when AIDS was having a devastating impact around the world. Like Warhol, Davila often includes homosexual references in his art, while simultaneously guarding his privacy. In this work Davila allows confrontation to be coupled with a certain tenderness, shifting our orientation so that the images of the outsider take centre-stage, leaving the field of possibilities – sacred and secular – wide open.

Like Davila, Moffatt and Liu Xiao Xian, Christian Thompson incorporates his self portrait into his photo-based work. In the act of transformation he suggests alternate ways of thinking about identities. In his Emotional striptease series he questions issues to do with personal and cultural identities; refusing, as a young Aboriginal artist, to succumb to narrow, easy stereotypes. In this series he depicts himself wearing a ruff and holding a boomerang over his head, while in another image a female model poses in a whalebone corset. Attributes from Australia’s colonial past are no longer shackles but have become complicit in a contemporary process of reclamation. For Thompson, these works are about turning images of Indigenous people as victims around; taking control – in a spirit of defiance, with panache and theatrical flair. Part of the liberation for Thompson in his encounters with Warhol’s work has been his diverse identities.

Andy is the child of European migrants. I identify with him as an outsider or fringe dweller. I’m not sure why but characters like Francis Bacon, Quentin Crisp, Boy George and of course Andy Warhol have always appealed to me. Perhaps it is their larger than life exterior or their ambiguity? Their inbetweeness? The collision of their seemingly disparate senses of self … [8]

Like Warhol, Thompson has long enjoyed the idea of dressing up as a means of altering identity. He identifies with the spirit of experimentation and inventiveness in Warhol’s work, including his multiple representations of himself. Warhol was deeply interested in ways of imaging the self, changing his name from Warhola to Warhol. In the 1950s he began to effect a physical transformation. He started to lose his hair during his early twenties and wore a small hairpiece to hide the fact. In photographic contact sheets of self portraits in The Andy Warhol Museum he is shown ‘doubling his efforts to hide and transform himself – once by wearing whiteface makeup and by posing near one of his hand-painted folding screens, whose purpose was to create privacy’. [9] The personal wigs that Warhol wore from the mid-1960s were shades of blond veering to white that made him instantly recognisable.

It is this ‘look’ that Christian Thompson adopts in his portrait Gates of Tambo – Andy Warhol. The long, pale hair falling across his face leaves us in little doubt of the subject of his impersonation, despite the concealment of his face. At the same time, the spout of water that he blows from his mouth adds a sense of absurd humour, echoing Bruce Nauman’s Self portrait as a fountain 1967. Thompson’s reasons for depicting himself as Warhol are in part because of the ongoing relevance Warhol has to contemporary culture, predating our obsessions with reality television. Thompson also points out that Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists from Australia travel widely, live in different places and take their ‘selves’, their cultural, social and artistic backgrounds, with them in an ongoing process of engagement with fresh ideas and alternative ways of looking at the world. As he says:

Andy and Bruce [Nauman] are absolutely creative forefathers. I have never thought of my work or my position in Australia as being ‘not’ international but in fact the opposite, I feel international as much in regional Queensland as I do in Amsterdam or New York. What is pure is the energy that perpetuates the simple gestures which are most central to our existence. [10]

One of Warhol’s most audacious cross-cultural migrations into portraiture is his depiction of the Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung. As Robert Rosenblum writes:

It is something of a miracle that a contemporary Western artist could seize, as Warhol has, the Olympian Big Brother image of Mao Tse-Tung. In a quartet of canvases huge enough to catch one’s eye at the Worker’s Stadium in Peking, Warhol has located the chairman in some otherworldly blue heaven, a secular deity of staggering dimensions who calmly and omnipotently watches over us earthlings. [11]

Liu Xiao Xian, an artist born in China who migrated to Australia as a young adult, recalls that in the 1980s when Warhol’s images of Mao Tse-Tung first became known in his country of birth, they sent shockwaves through society. He recalls that at the time many people still revered Mao, reading their little red books – not just in China but around the world.

During the 1970s, China was totally closed to the world … I saw Warhol’s work first time in the mid ’80s when China had reopened itself to the world for about five years. I remember there was a major exhibition of American Pop art at China’s National Art Gallery in Beijing. It was as though a bomb had exploded among the Chinese art world especially to the young people like myself. I was starting to use photography in my art practice and I was largely influenced by Pop art artists, such as Warhol, Hockney, Rauschenberg and others. [12]

With the passage of time, many of the younger post-Cultural Revolution generation of artists became interested in the Pop idiom, easily grasping Pop art’s engagement with the effects of mass production and the mass circulation of ideas. They also took on board the spirit of inquiry and energy implied in the re-invention of the cultural icon of Mao in their own works and in their own ways. Liu Xiao Xian has been fascinated by Warhol’s use of seriality and multiples in his work, recognising the potent effect of the reinforcement of images of the same scale placed alongside one another. Like Warhol, Hall and Horn, he also understands the effects of the macrocosm and the microcosm. In Reincarnation – Mao, Buddha & I, he uses new technology to striking effect with each giant portrait – of Mao, the Buddha and himself – inhabited by thousands of tiny portraits (not clearly visible in reproduction). The artist takes this further:

The work is completed in three portraits … Each consists of 100 panels of A4 size prints. Tiny portraits of each subject are used as ‘basic elements’, which in turn construct the portrait of the other, i.e. ‘Mao’ is made out of ‘I’, and so on. Technically, I utilise the principle of the halftone image reproduction – the tones are broken into dots, which I have swapped for tiny images to emphasise that the universe is made up of basic elements …

The work is constructed to such huge proportions not only to meet the technical requirement, but also to allow the 108,300 small images to compete with each other outrageously for attention. Moreover, the delicacy of changes from small to the general as a whole may lead us into thoughts about micro
versus macro. [13]

The multiplicity in the work suggests our human interdependence, as well as our connections with the recent and more distant past and with the future. The reinvention of the Buddha, Mao and the self is about the mutability of one presence into another, a changing of roles and a continuum beyond this life. After seeing the work up close and at a distance, the ambiguity of identities becomes obvious in the constant changing of roles. In this the artist draws upon the Taoist principles of Yin and Yang; basic elements providing the ‘explanatory basis for the formation of the cosmos and its symbolic correlation in the corresponding human world’. He also refers to the Buddhist Scriptures, noting ‘that the immensity of the gigantic cosmos has no boundaries? Yet, it is so small that the infinitude of the inside has no end’. [14]

Deborah Hart
Senior Curator
Australian Painting and Sculpture after 1920

The final take: Andy lives on as a shining star

I had an appointment to go to the Factory. It was a weird place with dozens of people running around. It was so mad … and there was Andy, as quiet and still as a little ghost. He was almost a non-person and yet he motivated all this activity. I found the stillness fascinating. There was something about him that caught the imagination. I immediately liked him even though he didn’t say very much. (Loti Smorgon) [1]

Warhol does not seem to have believed in reincarnation – at least not in the conventional sense. After surviving being shot by Valerie Solanis in 1968 he may have felt he had been given a second life, although he became preoccupied with his health and mortality. In much of his work there is also a sense of ghostly recurrence, as in his repeated images of Elvis, Jackie Kennedy or Natalie Wood where they at times appear to be on the edge of disappearance. Born of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants, Warhol’s identity with being the outsider as well as intrinsically connected with being an American was entwined in his art. He recognised parallels between America and what he had heard about the vastness of Australia, and thought his work would have an audience here. Henry Gillespie, who knew him in New York, recalls that Warhol wanted to travel to Australia and asked if it would take thirty days to get there: ‘I said, “Andy, 30 days would get you to the moon!” and he laughed.’ Gillespie continues:

When I saw him on later occasions he often enquired about Australia. He was intrigued at the distance and the vast space and had seen tourism ads with beautiful beaches and lifesavers and it whet his appetite … Australia represented a new world, a new frontier and a challenge … He thought his style would have popular appeal in Australia. He began talking about specific works he could do. One of the works he wanted to do was a series with the working title, ‘Australia’s Most Wanted’, to be screenprints of our worst criminals from police mug shots. [2]

One can imagine the results – a contemporary Warholian take on Sidney Nolan’s bushrangers and Ned Kelly series! It would certainly have added an absurdist dimension to the already extensive range of portraits that Warhol had done over the years. Both Henry Gillespie and Loti Smorgon from Australia had seen an exhibition of Warhol’s portraits at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1980. Smorgon recalls that she had responded very positively to Warhol’s work in the show. Around the same time, her husband was approached to see if he would like his portrait done by Warhol. He declined but thought that his wife, being keen on art, may be interested. She recalls:

I had been out of the room and when I came in I was asked if I would like to have my portrait done. I already had a couple of portraits which I was happy with and really didn’t think I needed another one. When the question was posed another way, ‘How about a portrait by Andy Warhol’ that was a different matter. I said, ‘of course!’. [3]

Both Smorgon and Gillespie met with Warhol for their portrait sittings at the Factory in an old Con Edison power sub-station at 22 East 33rd Street, not far from the Empire State Building. They recall that Warhol took hundreds of polaroids, inviting them to participate in the selection of the ones they liked best. For Portrait of Loti, Warhol prepared his sitter by having his make-up artist paint her face white. ‘In his portraits of women … he more or less obliterated the face. He got his make-up artist to paint women with a white mask, like a geisha – from the forehead to the buttons. Then the make-up artist made up the face, painting the eyes and the lips.’ [4] Smorgon recalls that Warhol wanted to know what colours she liked: ‘I said he shouldn’t make it too pretty … But he did the opposite. He did what he wanted and he seemed to see in me something that was quite serene. Looking back, it was a wonderful experience. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’ Gillespie recalls his experience with similar enthusiasm:

Sitting for my portraits was a magical experience ... Andy buzzed for his assistants and part of the dining room was set up for the sitting. I was seated against a blank wall and treated like a movie star … He worked quickly, all the time flattering the sitter and calmly giving directions which way to look ... ‘chin up, look this way and so on’.
Having known Warhol was a revelatory experience … He was the first to interpret and chronicle the celebrity and consumer culture we live in. I can be in the supermarket looking at lines of products or travelling down the highway and see a billboard and it reminds me of Andy … ‘Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes’. There are very few people who survive their times but Andy’s star has shone ever brighter with the passing of the years. [5]

Andy Warhol was prescient when he said that silver – the colour of the silver screen and the space age – was the colour of the 1960s and also of the future. Some four decades later, on the auspicious occasion of the silver anniversary of the National Gallery of Australia, Australian artists have the opportunity to shine with Warhol at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. It is an opportunity to celebrate and to contemplate diverse viewpoints and parallel visions across time and place.

Deborah Hart
Senior Curator
Australian Painting and Sculpture after 1920