Who is and who isn’t? What is identity’s price? These are Warhol questions. And the ways in which he poses them are no less charged now, nearly twenty-four years since his death. 

Here is a part of the Diaspora of images created by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts when it chose from among the thousands of photographs that Warhol produced to make a series of gifts to art collections throughout the country, the Housatonic Museum of Art being one of them. 

But Terri C. Smith, the curator of this exhibit, has no interest in a mere celebration of good fortune. The donation is not the only subject here. Rather, Smith has worked to create an expressive history, using other elements from Warhol’s own larger project along with the work of current artists who are now playing variations on his inventiveness. Fine Arts Magazine 

 

Part of the power of what is on display here is that it does not treat Warhol as an artifact. There is more and more to him at every new reading of the work, and our own time keeps looking back at us out of what he found. One tradition at work here is that of Ingres, with his relentless categorizing of social flair and dismay. But as critical as Warhol’s eye could be, he never lacked for empathy. 

There is a Roman Catholic framing of the world with these Polaroid ranks of votive images, in each of which he saw something of his own self, and in which he demands that we see something of ours. That is where the real matter of recognition lies. Among his subjects, does it matter that I know who Rick Ocasek is, but not Anne Basse? And what of the collection of the “unidentified,” among which is obviously a group of waiters who are unknown almost by definition. But there is a democracy to the visual presence that Warhol grants them. Even without names, they are declared as individuals. 

As also are the children whom he portrays as sympathetically human. These are not Diane Arbus’s demons, even though they are not innocent. And he manages the same equanimity in his treatment of objects, as with a knife, more a cleaver, that is as distinct as a Dürer engraving, and registers as a small human splendor, even with its cutting edge. 

Black and white images are often the surprises here, especially since the medium seems so far from the stereotype of Warhol’s more spectacular devices. But he is good with these. In a 1986 photograph of Dianne Brill we see only her back, but it shows us everything. An undated view of a tennis court and its habitués is like one of those mediaeval allegories of the vices, here offering a careful reading of indolence. 

 

Jeremy Kost’s ‘Not Yet Titled (Gaga),’ a triptych of photographs made last year, records the new evanescence of the public personality, here masked to make herself more visible. As Warhol did for his subjects, Kost presents Lady Gaga’s self-conscious mutations as experiments in evasion. When will she ever be anonymous again? 

In a series of Screen Tests made between 1964 and 1966, not part of the Warhol gift, but included as a wonderfully chosen loan, Warhol records Marcel Duchamp like a unperturbed deer in headlights, some illegible plot of lines inscribed on the wall behind him, with his smile thin-lipped, then pursed. When he turns his head, he becomes a prototype of profile. Paul America’s filmed sequence has the single narrative of his struggle to suppress his laughter. And then there is Lou Reed, sunglassed, Coke bottle in hand, drawing the concoction back to its founding recipe when it actually contained a trace element of cocaine. He is, wonderfully, the Coca Cola Corporation’s worst nightmare. 

 

At the time that I walked through this show the space had been put into service as the background for a fashion photo shoot. The model had some vocal exercises obviously meant to shape her face properly for the camera. So my progress was accompanied by a litany of “hi, hi,” “aw, aw,” and “you’re so cute.” There was something strangely appropriate to these empty gestures pretending not to be so as an accompaniment and contrast to what I was seeing in these galleries, particularly after I sat down with headphones to listen to the more arresting chants recorded in Rashaad Newsome’s 2009 work, ‘Shade Compositions (Screen Test 2)’. But this was simply further evidence of how sensitive the exhibition was to Warhol’s thoroughgoing curiosity. Even accidents immediately found their proper place in the story. 

At one point in an episode from Andy Warhol’s TV of 1981 that was also on view, the film director John Waters affirms that “I like to eavesdrop.” The visual equivalent of that is found in these photographs, with Warhol the voracious, forgiving auditor. Each small museum like this one that received a careful sampling of his work now possesses an equally precise testimony. But not every one of them will let us listen in as clearly as this exhibition does. 

by Stephen Vincent Kobasa, Contributing Writer 

At the Housatonic Museum of Art, Bridgeport, CT through October 15, 2010 at www.hcc.commnet.edu 

Or visit the museum blog at: http://inthecompanyofhcc.blogspot.com