"Other Voices, Other Rooms": Warhol at the Wex

Paul Clark — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In my time writing for the Screengrab, I’ve written primarily about subjects with universal interest- films that are (or will be) in national release or are widely available on video. However, I occasionally take the forum that has been granted to me to spotlight events in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, that might be appealing to those who live elsewhere. In particular, I like to keep readers abreast of the notable goings-on at Columbus’ indispensible artistic resource, The Wexner Center for the Arts, especially those with a cinematic bent. I’d say that the Wex’s latest exhibition, Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms, definitely fits the bill.

Its title taken from the debut novel of longtime Warhol friend Truman Capote, the Wex will be the only U.S. showing of this internationally-touring exhibition, curated by Eva Meyer-Herrmann. A survey of the life and art of Warhol making its U.S. debut shortly after what would have been his 80th birthday, Other Voices represents perhaps the most ambitious project the Wexner Center has undertaken to date. Knowing full well that a single gallery couldn’t possibly do justice to the breadth of Warhol’s varied career, the Wexner Center has overhauled its entire exhibition space and devoted it to the program, which encompasses his visual art, his film and TV work, and footage from his life.

As a cinephile, I was naturally most interested in the exhibition’s film offerings, and I wasn’t disappointed. With more than two dozen projectors and screens mounted throughout the galleries, Other Voices shows a surprising number of Warhol’s films playing on constant loop, from obvious inclusions like Chelsea Girls (1966) to notorious titles like Blow Job (1964), to outright curiosities such as Outer and Inner Space, starring Edie Sedgwick and… Edie Sedgwick. Likewise, there are forty of Warhol’s “Screen Tests” interspersed throughout the galleries, featuring subjects ranging from Hollywood stars like Dennis Hopper to art world icons like Salvador Dali to Warhol-anointed superstars like Taylor Mead. Purists may sniff that the exhibition is using projected video rather than the original 16mm film, but given the wealth of material on display, it seems churlish to complain. I for one intend to return to view movies like Chelsea Girls, Lonesome Cowboys, and The Velvet Underground and Nico in their entirety, although I don’t think it’ll be necessary to watch Empire (8 hours, 5 minutes) or Sleep (5 hours, 21 minutes) from beginning to end.

But there’s plenty of extra-cinematic material on display as well. The “TV-Scape” gallery features 42 separate television programs conceived by Warhol, including all 27 episodes of the two incarnations of Andy Warhol’s TV. And the visual art selections, while hardly comprehensive (how could they be?), offer a primer of the broad spectrum of Warhol’s artistic interests. There are paintings, drawings, prints, silkscreens, “objects” such as the Campbell’s soup cans, even the infamous “Oxidation Paintings” created using acrylic and urine (!) on linen. Likewise, there are photographs with photo booths and Polaroid cameras, including snapshots of icons ranging from Jimmy Carter to Debbie Harry to Sean Lennon, plus photographs of Warhol himself, occasionally in drag. All this plus album covers (Velvet Underground, The Rolling Stones, the soundtrack to Fassbinder’s Querelle, and others), books, wallpaper, back issues of Warhol’s Interview magazine, the “Silver Clouds” installation, and a shoe of Warhol’s design.

And while Warhol was such an enigmatic figure that we’ll probably never really be able to get a read on his personal life, Other Voices, Other Rooms contains enough documentary and archival material to satisfy all but the most die-hard Warhol fanatics. There are a number of home movies made throughout Warhol’s life, from early footage of young Andy with his mother to “Factory Diary” films made between 1970 and 1982. There are also audio tapes documenting Warhol’s interactions with various Factory figures, which allow visitors to gain some insight into the inner workings of Warhol’s Factory. Combine the documentary nuggets with the wide variety of artistic and cinematic offerings on display, and Other Voices, Other Rooms is an essential view for anyone with even a passing interest in Warhol. Once again, the Wexner Center has proven itself to be essential to the furthering of culture in Ohio.

Manny Farber, 1917--2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:30:00 GMT

A one-of-a-kind eccentric voice whose tastes and opinions left an unexpectedly long shadow across the battlefield of late-twentieth-century movie criticism and geek argument, Manny Farber has died at the age of 91. In such essays as "The Gimp", "Underground Movies", "Cartooned Hip Acting" and the landmark "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art"--originally published in such out-of-the-way venues as Film Culture, City Lights, and Artforum--Farber gleefully pissed on middlebrow attempts to uplift the movies to the level of self-serious kitsch, saving his highest praise for those directors, ranging from Samuel Fuller and Don Siegel to Chuck Jones and Jean-Luc Godard, who "seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn't anywhere or for anything." Farber's embrace of wise-cracking, tough-guy language and a scorn for the self-conscious "pursuit of the continuity, harmony, involved in constructing masterpiece" (so that the "assemblage becomes a yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition; far inside are tiny pillows holding up the artist's signature, now turned into mannerism by the padding lechery, faking required to combine today; esthetics with the components of traditional Great Art") that almost borders on nihilism should not be mistaken for philistine thuggery. Farber himself was a painter, often turning out canvasses inspired by his favorite films by Fassbinder and Sam Peckinpah. As a critic, he used words the way the best Abstract Expressionists used color and brushstrokes, boiling his opinions into a steady stream of hard little bullets of impressions and laying them out in a field of poeticized yet slangy language that could at first appear chaotic and off-the-cuff yet, upon close examination, revealed themselves to be the carefully shaped product of a lifetime's thinking about what mattered in the arts. Because Farber was so funny, and his writing so electric, nobody ever needed much convincing that they ought to give his writing that kind of close study.

The "White Elephant" essay, a full-throated expression of artistic preference, begins with a dissertation on Cezanne before veering off into a celebration of those "termite artists" of the movies, such as Laurel and Hardy and the Howard Hawks of The Big Sleep, whose work does not stand before the audience preening its beauty and solemnity of purpose but rather "goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity." Farber's own path of eager, industrious, unkempt activity as a writer can be found in his single collection, Negative Space, which was originally published in 1971; a paperback version was issued under the title Movies, and in 1998 Da Capo brought out a new paperback edition which included a preface by Raoul Walsh (who certainly owed him one) as well as the scarce handful of movie essays that Farber had turned out since the mid-70s, all of them listing his wife Patricia Patterson, as co-author.

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"Other Voices, Other Rooms": Warhol at the Wex

Manny Farber, 1917--2008