Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms

An Artforum Best of 2008 Exhibition

"Obligatory viewing....Demands to be singled out at its curent simultaneous stops (how Warholian!) at the Hayward [London] and the Wexner Center."--Jack Bankowsky, Artforum (December 2008)

"An audacious installation....at once fresh, relevant, and rigorous."--Ann Goldstein, Artforum (December 2008)

Other Voices, Other Rooms sheds new light on the celebrated pop artist and focuses on the ideas at the heart of his work: embracing consumer culture, exploring sexual identity, challenging social conventions, and erasing distinctions between high and low culture.

The Wexner Center is proud to host the only U.S. presentation of this spectacular exhibition featuring films, videos, paintings, drawings, prints, wallpaper, installations, objects, seldom heard audio recordings, and extraordinary archival material. Other Voices, Other Rooms opened in Columbus just after what would have been the late artist's 80th birthday (in August 2008), but as the 700+ works on view make clear, his art remains incredibly timely.

More than any other artist, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) merged the public with the private, the glamorous with the mundane, celebrity with anonymity, and ravenous voyeurism with seeming indifference. Well before the proliferation of media culture, he famously predicted that everyone would have their 15 minutes of fame--virtually foretelling the advent of American Idol and YouTube. Drawing on the quite radical impulses coursing through American culture in the 1960s, Warhol captured and reflected much that would mark a sea change in the social fabric of that time--and continue with potent ramifications since.

The visitor experience of Other Voices, Other Rooms begins with a red carpet welcome, including introductory material and music by The Velvet Underground, the band that Warhol launched from his famous Factory. From there, the exhibition unfolds in sections:

At the heart of the exhibition is the COSMOS, which highlights the artist's ways of thinking and working and his imperturbable eye for detail. Here one finds iconic works of art and objects, a Time Capsule, and the Factory Diaries--in which Warhol captured his life in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s--that feature glimpses of such luminaries as Edie Sedgwick, John F. Kennedy Jr., and David Bowie. In addition, drawings, photos, and rare archival material are presented alongside audio fragments of Lou Reed, Truman Capote, and others.

In the FILMSCAPE, visitors explore a cinematic landscape that includes films made between 1963 and 1968, including the Screen Tests, Sleep, The Chelsea Girls, Kitchen, and Mrs. Warhol. These films were Warhol's experiments. Secluded behind the camera, he depicts--without intervening--behavior in all types of situations, using time and observation as his ingredients.

The TV-SCAPE section of the exhibition presents, synchronously, all 42 television episodes that Warhol created between 1979 and 1987, along with a selection of rarely screened videos. In this section of the exhibition, the artist projects his voyeurism onto everyone--stars and ordinary people, alike--in the medium that seemed best suited to the job. Here, just as in his magazine, Interview, Warhol used his keen eye for detail and trivia to exercise a specific influence on the development of both television and video art.

Notes curator Eva Meyer-Hermann, "Andy Warhol once wondered about how it would be if one mirror would reflect another. He declared that everything which we want to know can be seen on the surfaces of him and his works. I thought I had to look behind these surfaces, but realized that what we are looking for is not behind but in front of them. Warhol�s surfaces reflect the world; his works are about you and me."

Other Voices, Other Rooms will be on view simultaneously at the Wexner Center and at the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Art Centre in London, England.

A Message from Wexner Center Director Sherri Geldin Upon visiting this astounding and ingenious exhibition in Amsterdam late last year, I immediately set the wheels in motion to bring it to the Wexner Center. It explores afresh the remarkable legacy of an artist who utterly transformed the cultural landscape of his own time, but also foretold with uncanny prescience today's media-obsessed society. Given Warhol's masterful manipulation of virtually every artistic medium, what better place than the multidisciplinary Wexner Center to present this exhibition? And what a spectacular opportunity to see it specially redesigned for the center's distinctive galleries, which themselves have an almost cinematic character.

Andy Warhol Other Voices, Other Rooms
Kurator: Eva Meyer-Hermann

Stationen:
08.10.08 - 11.01.09 Hayward Gallery, London
13.09.08 - 15.02.09 Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus / Ohio
09.02.08 - 04.05.08 Moderna Museet Stockholm
12.10.07 - 13.01.08 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam