{"id":1627,"date":"2012-04-22T12:32:42","date_gmt":"2012-04-22T11:32:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1252"},"modified":"2016-01-24T19:42:08","modified_gmt":"2016-01-24T18:42:08","slug":"andy-warhol-late-self-portraits-and-eduardo-paolozzi-moonstrips-empire-news-graves-gallery-sheffield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1627","title":{"rendered":"Andy Warhol, Late Self-Portraits<\/em> and Eduardo Paolozzi, Moonstrips Empire News<\/em>, Graves Gallery, Sheffield"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andy Warhol: Late Self-Portraits<\/em> is one of the smallest exhibitions I\u2019ve seen recently. Being generous, it extends over two rooms of Sheffield\u2019s Graves Gallery, but one of those rooms is in fact devoted to pictures of, and interviews with, people who knew Warhol. Nevertheless, the one room of self-portraits \u2013 paintings and photographs from the last ten years of Warhol\u2019s life \u2013 offers both a fascinating insight into Warhol and a reminder of how prescient he was, not only in predicting today\u2019s celebrity culture, but in seeing the emptiness beneath the glossy surface.<\/p>\n

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The room is dominated by a 1986 self-portrait, a red and black silkscreen of Warhol in a fright wig. At first sight, the red head appears to hang in a black void, as if Warhol were insisting on the primacy of his own image, converting it into a Pop Art totem. On closer inspection, the black space is in fact slashed through by stray wisps of hair that stick up. The top of the painting ends where the hairs end, just as its bottom ends below the chin. The black void we first see is then revealed to be claustrophobic, a box that allows no movement beyond the limits of the self. Whether the painting is a metaphor of the limits of the aging body or of the crushing confines of fame, once we realise the limits of the frame, Warhol\u2019s image becomes more haunted than narcissistic, the coolly starting eyes presenting a challenge to the viewer to consider their own part in a culture that constantly demands objects for its communal gaze to consume.<\/p>\n

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Similar themes of mortality and fame are touched on in several of the other works. There are, for example, two versions of Self-Portrait Strangulation<\/em>, where a picture of Warhol with someone\u2019s hands around his neck is reproduced over and over, but the constant repetition never solves the picture\u2019s central mystery: is his twisted expression the result of an assassination attempt by a crazed admirer, or just Andy goofing off for the cameras? In another self-portrait, again in red and black, we see a three-quarter portrait of Warhol inhabiting the familiarly cool guise that was his trademark. But when we look closer at what at first appears just another moment of self-publicity, we see a skull creeping in from the surrounding blackness, apparently gnawing into his shoulder.<\/p>\n

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The skull motif reappears in what seems the boldest inclusion in an exhibition of self-portraits: Skulls<\/em>, a 1986 silkscreen that treats a skull to the familiar Warhol treatment of the same image repeated over and over, distinguished only by changes of colours and different levels of deterioration. Whether the skull is supposed to represent Warhol or not, by giving it the same treatment as icons such as Monroe or Jackie Kennedy, he shows us what Eliot calls \u2018the skull beneath the skin\u2019, the mortality that no amount of plastic surgery or photo airbrushing can ever remove. It may not be a self-portrait of Warhol\u2019s actual skull, but it is a self-portrait of his and everyone else\u2019s future. And in the intimacy of a small gallery where paintings can be viewed close and without a press of tourists at one\u2019s elbow, what this work also reveals is the subtle interplay in Warhol between the expected and the unexpected: the identical images that never quite give our eye what we think we\u2019ll encounter, defeating our expectations with a thick smear of paint that disrupts the otherwise smooth surface, or with a marked deterioration of the copied image, or with the unnatural glow of lime green acrylic against the white of the skull.<\/p>\n

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Perhaps the most intimate works here though are the small self-portrait photographs in a cabinet at the centre of the room. Some of them are familiar from reproductions as silkscreen images, but others, you feel, are ones Warhol made less for public consumption than as reminders of his own mortality. This, it seems to me, is Warhol confronting his end. His face in these photos is drawn and deathly pale, the look towards the camera stripped both of affection and affectation. Even in the images where he\u2019s donned a transvestite\u2019s wig and smeared his face with make-up, the decay and self-knowledge are obvious. After all the years of fame, he\u2019s reduced to a lonely, ruined diva whichever guise he adopts.<\/p>\n

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Showing in an adjacent room, a selection of prints from Eduardo Paolozzi\u2019s Moonstrips Empire News <\/em>gives a different perspective on Pop Art. Paolozzi\u2019s Pop Art was always more political than that of his American counterparts, sceptical towards the huge embrace of American culture by Britain, and Moonstrips Empire News <\/em>makes that scepticism explicit. He identifies in his introduction that London was most vulnerable to media bombardment because, unlike the US, Britain had no reality against which to compare the images favoured by American advertisers and filmmakers.<\/p>\n

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The end result, as selected here, is variable in quality, ranging from abstract patterns that look like they\u2019ve slipped off psychedelic wallpaper to razor-sharp juxtapositions of Disney and missiles. However, it offers an interesting contrast to Warhol, and does provide some insight into the techno anxiety that the American mass media provoked. It\u2019s no surprise to discover that Paolozzi was close friends with J. G. Ballard, as they were both equally prophetic of our own age\u2019s submission to mass media and advertising, and shared a similar unease about the fusion of technology and everyday life.<\/p>\n

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In this Olympic year, when the Tate has chosen Damien Hirst to represent British Art, I wonder if Paolozzi wouldn\u2019t have been a more interesting and challenging choice. He\u2019s certainly long overdue a major retrospective, though I doubt he\u2019ll get one soon: more likely, unfortunately, is that the intricate Paolozzi murals that decorate Tottenham Court Road tube will be covered over by advertising space, one more stage in the steady transformation of the world around us into a space whose only purpose is to sell. Were he still alive, I\u2019m sure Paolozzi would have seen the irony. As Moonstrips Empire News <\/em>makes clear, even in 1967, he saw it coming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andy Warhol: Late Self-Portraits is one of the smallest exhibitions I\u2019ve seen recently. Being generous, it extends over two rooms of Sheffield\u2019s Graves Gallery, but one of those rooms is in fact devoted to pictures of, and interviews with, people who knew Warhol. Nevertheless, the one room of self-portraits \u2013 paintings and photographs from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[12,283],"tags":[69,88,118,176,190,200,277],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nAndy Warhol, Late Self-Portraits and Eduardo Paolozzi, Moonstrips Empire News, Graves Gallery, Sheffield - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1627\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Andy Warhol, Late Self-Portraits and Eduardo Paolozzi, Moonstrips Empire News, Graves Gallery, Sheffield - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Andy Warhol: Late Self-Portraits is one of the smallest exhibitions I\u2019ve seen recently. 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