My Date With Andy Warhol, part 1

A few days ago, I realized with shock and awe that it is almost February 15th, which means the closing of "Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms" at the Wexner Center in Columbus is about to come to a close. A huge Warhol exhibition on it's only stop in the U.S., and in my backyard no less, I wasn't about to miss it. Luckily, the stars aligned: Sunday I was off work, Nick had a day's worth of grading to do, and it was beautiful outside- it was the perfect day to hop in the car and drive the vast expanse of I-71 north to Columbus.

This is the most boring drive ever, by the way.

The Wexner Center for the Arts is located on the Ohio State campus, off High Street, which is where you go when you are a Kenyon student and go to Columbus to do something cool like eat ethnic food or get a tattoo (for those particular ventures, I recommend Bento Go-Go for sushi and Evolved for body art). I parked in the familiar parking garage and walked over.

Admission is $8, but I'm not ashamed to pull out my expired student id to get something for free. As I made my way down the stairs to the beginning of the exhibition I had to remind myself to be patient and take it all in. I find that with huge shows I tend to rush through them, but I was determined to absorb this one. I didn't drive two hours to get there and rush through. Photography wasn't allowed, but I'll do some google and youtube searches to give you and idea of what things looked like. The exhibit starts with "A Biography in 42 Pictures," which told the story of Andy Warhol's life through pictures of him as a child, his autographed picture of Shirley Temple (as a child he collected autographs), pictures of the Factory, and Polaroids that he took of himself. It was augmented by little blurbs going along with most of the images. It was a good way to get eased into the exhibit and get acquainted with at least the timeline of his life and his major projects.

The first room of the exhibit was, in my opinion, the best. In the center there were four huge screens onto which were projected his "Screen Tests." They were four minute clips in which he filmed his friends- everyone from Salvador Dali to Lou Reed, to Edie Sedgewick- just sitting and looking at the camera. It may not sound that interesting, but it might have been my favorite part of the room. They reminded me a little bit of how pictures in Harry Potter are just people who sit there. But you looked at them and they stared back at you, and you didn't feel the need to turn away because they were just projected images and not real people. I thought it was really cool that you could just sit there and watch a person's face for minutes at a time without feeling like a social freak. You could watch the little changes that a face makes even when it is seemingly blank- blinking, opening and closing lips, tiny eye movements, the slightest twitch of a nose. These are things that you know happen, but you rarely experience them because we don't typically stare at other people for minutes on end.

Here's a clip of Salvador Dali's screen test. Obviously somebody was filming another screen, so the quality isn't great, but you get the idea.

On one wall in this room were some of his paintings and some of the first issues of Inter/View (now Interview), which he founded. There were also cases of Polaroids, which I thought were the most interesting. There were 20 self-portraits in drag, and tons more of his famous friends. To name just a few: Truman Capote, Mick Jagger, Jean Michel Basquiat, Jimmy Carter, Sean Lennon, Robert Rauchenberg, Jack Nicklaus, Sylvester Stalone, O.J. Simpson, Max Ernst, William S. Burroughs, Liza Minelli, Debbie Harry, and Grace Jones. Talk about a social circle. On the other side of the room were about 12 different booths cut out of the wall that people were sitting in. Once I walked over, I learned that each booth had a speaker in it where you could sit and listen to interviews, conversations, music, and events (like dinner out with friends or brunch at his family's house) that Warhol had recorded. Apparently he carried a tape recorder around with him everywhere, which I didn't know. This was a really cool idea and a unique set up, but the volume was so low! My hearing definitely isn't the keenest of my five senses, but there were some that I couldn't make out a single word and found that standing and leaning just my head in (the speakers were on the ceiling) achieved the best results.

To be continued...