_Taking its title from a novel about the journey from alienation to self-acceptance by Truman Capote, of whom Warhol was a fan, Other Voices, Hidden Rooms, is an attempt to “do” Warhol as he has not been “done” before. As such, we don’t get the Elvis’ or the Mau’s or Jackie O’s.
Instead, we get the letters, postcards and party invites of the time capsules, the magazine covers and record sleeves, the Polaroids, the Factory diaries, the tape-recorded interviews, the TV shows, the screen tests and the films in an attempt to demonstrate the entirety of Warhol’s zygotic output from which no subject was either too trivial or to be excluded or too grand to be transmuted into something shiny and pop, death included.
We get Warhol’s Polaroids of Duchamp, Burroughs and Jimmy Carter alongside those of Sly Stallone and Debbie Harry – politicians and pop stars, great artists and cult legends, each buying into the other’s myth in a mutually beneficial transaction of endorsement and adoration.
And we get footage of Warhol’s elderly mother in bed and interviews with Truman Capote in Trader Vic’s. We get his one-shot films of the Empire state building, of Candy Darling singing and of artist Nekke Carson painting a portrait of Warhol with a brush held between the cheeks of his bottom, as all the stuff that usually ends up on the cutting room floor is put back in as the main event.
Much of this is the aesthetic equivalent of watching paint dry – only this paint is no ordinary paint but what happens to paint when you put a camera in front of it; paint which becomes trashy and glamorous and disturbingly compulsive all at once. But then, “I like boring things,” Warhol claimed. If the producers of Big Brother haven’t already studied this footage to death for tips, then surely they should.
The famous screen prints of flowers and accidents, by contrast, seem almost superfluous next to the borderline obsessive compulsive project of the diaries and films, as if they in fact were the side show.
Throughout, there is the sense of Warhol’s short attention span and of his whimsically wanting to photograph, then film, then make a magazine, or a TV show, or whatever else might have taken his fancy that morning, suggesting a rapid assimilation of media and equally speedy production of it. But there is also a woozy, dream-like quality to the screen tests and their extension of a split second photograph into long, drawn out minutes along with their suggestion of the impossibility of ever gazing too long upon the turned up nose of Edie Sedgewick as if it were one of the great mysteries of the universe. But most of all, there is the sense amongst all the perpetual performing, producing and recording, of reality itself being staged and broadcast to the world as Brand Warhol. For if Andy meant one thing, he meant business.
Words by Rachel Newsome for www.ponystep.com
Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Hidden Rooms.
The Hayward.
Until 18th January 2009.
