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MUSIC REVIEW CA R O LY N H AX THE RELIABLE SOURCE
Instrumental dialogue
Gabriela Monteros piano and Gautier Capuons cello conversed powerfully in their concert at the Library of Congress. C9
Got plans? The Going Out Guide gurus are here to help 1 p.m. Celebritology Live with Jen Chaney and Liz Kelly 2 p.m.
A RT R E V I E W
of a salesman
Last Decade reflects how much Warhol turned sellout into high art
by Blake Gopnik n the last 10 years of his life and career, Andy Warhol sold out. He jumped headfirst into the crassest of pop culture: He appeared on junk TV such as The Love Boat, turned out junk TV himself (Andy Warhols Fifteen Minutes for MTV), applauded and created celebrities in his Interview magazine and then made junk portraits of any of them who would pay. This junk turns out to have made Warhol one of the most important and compelling artists of the 20th century. Thats the artist now on display in a show called Warhol: The Last Decade, on tour to the Baltimore Museum of Art from the Milwaukee Art Museum. By the time he died in 1987 at age 58, Warhol had turned selling out into his principle art form. He held a mirror up to our sold-out commodity culture by selling himself as a cultural commodity. This launched a major movement in art. (Last year, an excellent show called Pop Life, on tour from the Tate Modern in London, made this argument in detail.) Warhol on
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PHOTOS COPYRIGHT THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY
B O O K WO R L D
he building at the center of Karen Tei Yamashitas colossal new work of fiction, I Hotel, is a creaky hotel that once stood on the edge of Chinatown in San Francisco. Built after the great quake that nearly destroyed the city in 1906, it had rusting plumbing, dangerous wiring and rats the size of cats in the basement. But for the aging workers and young radicals who found shelter within its deteriorating walls, the International Hotel was both a fortress and a beacon. For Yamashita it is also the girder in a tremendous feat of creative engineering, because I Hotel is no ordinary work of fiction. As original as it is political, as hi-
I HOTEL By Karen Tei Yamashita. Coffee House. 612 pp. Paperback, $19.95
larious as it is heartbreaking, I Hotel is the result of a decade of research and writing that included more than 150 personal interviews. Its also a finalist for this years National Book Award in fiction, which will be announced on Nov. 17. Whether or not I Hotel wins the prize, it will be dog-eared and underlined and assigned to college reading lists for generations. Oddly enough, the novel began with a request from Wisconsin. Provoked by a questionnaire for Asian American writers that she received from a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yamashita decided to write a book about the Asian American movement in Calibook world continued on C3
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Recycled joke
Steve Martins line at the Mark Twain Prize ceremony sounded familiar. C2
The Love Boat leads to Jeff Koonss radical experiment with hard-core shots of his wedded bliss with porn star Cicciolina. The diamond dust that Warhol sprinkled on the most sold-out of his portraits foreshadows Damien Hirsts diamond-studded skull, price-tagged at $100 million. Warhols ads for Coca-Cola and Absolut Vodka are just a step away from Takashi Murakamis purses for Louis Vuitton. The Baltimore exhibition gives a hint of what Im talking about but you have to hunt for it. At the very tail end of the show, theres an extra little room that curators are calling the Last Decade Lounge. It is dolled up with beanbags, Lucite chairs, copies of Interview and a vintage television that loops a 1985 episode of Warhols Fifteen Minutes, featuring Debbie Harry, Bryan Adams and a throng of lesser lights. The walls are lined with photos of Warhol schmoozing his famous fans and clients, while a timeline records the rest of Warhols public presence in this era, from his nights at Studio 54 to when he paints a race car at Le Mans. art review continued on C10
TRUE TO HIS FORM: Warhols 1978 Self-Portrait (above) and 1986 Camouflage are among the works included in Warhol: The Last Decade, currently on tour to the Baltimore Museum of Art.
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DIRECTIONS
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ARTIST AS ART: Warhol pushed the boundaries of artmaking in his last decade, producing this 1984 Rorschach (left) and 1985-86 Repent and Sin No More!, as he explored his own stature as an artist.
and fourfold repetition has diluted any uniqueness it might once have had and yet it still has the same talismanic power as when Warhol first presented it, because its still by him. In fact, the image seems to have almost more power than before, because we know that, repeated and nearly invisible, it really ought to have none at all. Warhol recognizes that he has arrived at a place where everything he makes or does even an appearance on The Love Boat will come to count as significant art. He tests that proposition by trying to cancel out an iconic early work, and watches as he fails and realizes that, by failing in his canceling, hes succeeded in making art as good as any hes made. The following year, Warhol ran
the same test on a doubly iconic work: his own 1963 rendition of the Mona Lisa, this time reproduced 15 times in disappearing white on white. Same result: A Leonardo touched by Warhol, however wan and bleached-out, is an unstoppable force. So, for that matter, is the pee of a great artist, or even of his studio assistants. Warhols Oxidation Paintings, which he began to make in 1978, started life as an even field of metallic paint laid down on canvas. That bronze- or copper-colored paint then got oxidized to greens and browns when it received the urine of denizens of Warhols studio mostly men, but with the occasional woman squatting for the sake of art. These works are a successful, fine-looking riff on the splashy
last-gasp abstraction being made in paint at that same time, by erstwhile superstars such as Jules Olitski and Larry Poons. Despite their origins in bathroom humor, that is, Warhols pictures manage to function perfectly well as fine art. Once again, Warhol pushes against the boundaries of artmaking, and finds himself crashing through to the other side. You can hate the oxidation paintings, but it doesnt make much sense to deny their status as art. They come from the hand and mind or at least the body and studio of a certifiably great artist. Something similar happens in 1983, when an Italian yarn manufacturer pays Warhol to make a series of images of its goods. Warhol first photographs a tangle of yarn, then silkscreens those images into what seems to be a spoof of Jackson Pollock as a salable product. The silkscreens are that, but they arent merely that: They also read as excellent new pictures that take Pollock forward into Warhol land, where theres simply no gap between the salable and art. Incredibly, the Warhol magic goes on to do its work even on much less promising of materials.
Un-camouflaged
In 1986, Warhol takes on camouflage, a pattern whose sole function in life is to remain absolutely unseeable. In Warhols hands, it stops melding in with anything at all. Instead, it pops into the cultural foreground as Camouflage, an important work of abstract art by a great artist the most to-be-seen object imaginable. The formless Rorschach blots that got squeezed out huge in Warhols studio in 1984 undergo a similar transformation. The whole point of such a blot is that it functions as a blank screen, with so few significant properties of its own that we can fill it with any we choose. But as Warhols Rorschach, its not empty at all. Its full of artfulness, worthy of being taken in for precisely what it is, and only for that: Once its on the museum wall, you read it, you dont read into it. You couldnt change an inch of its surface without doing violence to a great artists great creation and ruining your investment as well. Under all these droll experiments in pushing art as far as it can go, and beyond, there is a scream of pain. This show may look cheery or goofy at first sight, but much of its work leaves the impression that Warhol, who had a conservative streak a mile wide, cannot believe what hes wrought. The Rorschachs could as easily be cross sections through a diseased brain. The camouflage inevitably conjures warfare and hunting and death. Near those two blurred self-portraits at the beginning of the show is another doubled portrait of the artist, with a skull: The jester knows what is in store for him, and thinks that maybe he deserves it. And then theres one other take on self: a 10-silkscreen grid by Warhol, of Warhol . . . but with another mans hands around his throat, squeezing. Warhol does his best to kill himself off. But he knows, deep down, that he has become the undead of art. gopnikb@washpost.com
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MORE PHOTOS To see more pictures from the Warhol exhibit, go to washingtonpost.com/ style.