MODERN ARTS Conversation with Keith Haring
Andy Warhol His Artistic Influence
David LaChapelle's Journey From Fine Art to Fashion and Back Again
May 2018
David LaChapelle’s fine art portrayal of Michael Jackson
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA Taipei) has been focusing on “Contemporaneity”, so that its mis-sion is lighter and more agile than other big museums in Taiwan, and has a vivid character of leading the trend. Based on this orientation, as we continuously in seeking the new and to change, we have to go back again and again to reach the originality of Art. This is so-called Walking in the front end of the world, at the same time, if the proper knowledge of rituals is lost, then look for it in the wilds. Located in the cultural center, current trends in the Taipei city change with high-speed and it is difficult for Art to escape from being a product which corresponds only with avantgarde trends and not for its sake. Therefore, we should become more
Editor's letter
aware of the moment when the culture is getting feeble, and we should know how to regain the wildness, to restore vitality. Artworks and art appreciation are not only for a privileged few,
they should be the cultural property of all citizens. Everyone can freely approach art according to their taste, and this is the social responsibility of MOCA, Taipei. These years in MOCA, Taipei, the number of visitors has been continuously increasing, and mostly of them are young gen-eration. Correlation studies show that, the regionalism and the cultural life of the old city district nearby might be one of the reasons, but most important reason is the “contemporaneity” of the exhibitions. Through the new media and various forms of the artworks, the experience of viewing is close to our daily life but somehow beyond the reality so that the visitors can perceive a novel and powerful visual impact, and that is the charm of the contemporary art. However, we are fully aware that, no matter the trendy crowd on the internet or the art amateurs, they cannot be equated with each other. Besides, a better strategy would be needed for the people who cannot accept the avant-garde and controversy in contemporary art. Based on two above-mentioned questions, our responsibility is to strive for revealing the spirit of humanism in Art, no matter how audacious and extreme the artwork would be. Controversial and critical, fashionable and kitsch, the humanism connotation in the work should be clearly interpreted. Through Art, the citizen can enlarge the vision of human beings, understand the world and the appreciation and passion toward art of the citizen would be the deepest understanding of humanity and the biggest tolerance. Except the interpretation and expansion of humanism, we will
continue our previous achievement, keep bringing art into urban and community space, with hospitality of Taiwanese people integrated. Taking an event, a story, or a history from neighboring communities, through young artists’ various techniques of expression to integrate into life, we can make the city more glamorous.
2
MODERN ARTS
02
04
Editor's letter
Andy Warhol
His Artistic Influence By Glenn O’Brien
08
David LaChapelle
Journey From Fine Art to Fashion and Back Again By Amah-Rose Abrams
12
Keith Haring By John Gruen
Table of
16
Calendar May
MODERN ARTS 3
Warhol
His Artistic Influen
4
MODERN ARTS
l
Andy Through his channeling of America’s popular culture, Warhol created a new genre of art: pop art By Glenn O’Brien
His Artistic Influ
nce Self-Portrait is an acrylic paint and screenprint work on canvas by the American artist Andy Warhol. It is a large portrait of Warhol and employs an arresting colour scheme in which the artist’s vivid red head floats against an empty black background. The artist’s neck, shoulders and torso have been excluded from the portrait, focussing the attention on his face, expression and hair. Warhol stares directly out at the viewer with an intense gaze, his lips slightly parted and his expression blank. The most animated part of the portrait is the artist’s hair, which sweeps strikingly across the canvas in a strong, diagonal movement from the top-left corner down towards the lower-right. MODERN ARTS
5
Cow Wallpaper Andy Warhol's Cow Wallpaper was the first in a series of wallpaper designs he created from the 1960s to the 1980s. According to Warhol, the inspiration for the cow image came from art dealer Ivan Karp. 6
MODERN ARTS
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” WHEN HE WAS ALIVE, it seemed like Andy Warhol was everywhere, but dying has done nothing to diminish his popularity. In fact it could be argued that Warhol’s death, as Gore Vidal said of Truman Capote’s passing, was “a good career move.” It probably helped him get the solo show he had desperately wanted at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989, and it’s been one exhibition after another ever since. These days Warhol is a movement bordering on a religion, and his almighty influence is on full view in London this fall at the Tate Modern’s big exhibition “Pop Life: Art in a Material World.” The show’s basic tenet is that “Warhol’s most radical lesson is reflected in the work of artists of subsequent generations who have infiltrated the publicity machine and the marketplace as a deliberate strategy.” It tells a story of how Keith Haring, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, and other artists who achieved art stardom in the eighties and nineties did so by co-opting Warhol’s tactics. These included referencing consumer products, practicing corporate-style branding and self-promotion, even engaging in factory-like production—often in the unabashed pursuit of wealth or, at least, celebrity. The artists presented in “Pop Life” were certainly chosen for their embrace of commerce as well as for their roles in the speculation-driven, recently deflated art market. But they aren’t necessarily fighting the same battles Warhol fought, and following Andy’s way is, at this point, perhaps just using common sense. The arguments put forth by the exhibition’s curators, Catherine Wood, Jack Bankowsky, and Alison Gingeras, don’t exactly qualify as epiphanic thunderbolts. That Warhol created the model for so many of today’s art practices should be obvious to anyone conversant in art of the last 30 years. In his 1975 book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), Warhol made the first of his notorious statements about business and art. He wrote: “During the hippie era people put down the idea of business—they’d say ‘Money is bad,’ and ‘Working is bad,’ but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” Though this was a provocative thing to say at the time, provocation had been Warhol’s modus operandi since the sixties, when his studio became known as the Factory. Warhol, who had started his career
as a commercial artist, intuitively grasped that the lone artist in his garret was a creature of simpler times. A corporate world called for a corporate artist. Before Warhol, lots of artists had assistants who stretched and primed canvases, ran errands, or even participated in making the work. But at the Factory, the crew grew to the size of a small business. It was seen as a sort of entourage, but Warhol turned that idea on its head: “People thought it was me that everyone at the Factory was hanging around…but that’s absolutely backward. It was me who was hanging around everyone else. I just paid the rent.” Though the idea of the Factory captured the public’s imagination, Warhol later downplayed the term. For him it was the office, an art company where he and “the kids” worked. The Factory allowed Warhol to make paintings and films, publish Interview magazine (where I served as editor and wrote a column for many years), put out a novel and a book of philosophy, stage a play, design album covers, make TV commercials and music videos, work as a fashion model, and act on The Love Boat. Not to mention such press-generating projects as the Rent-A-Superstar service or the Andymat, a restaurant for solitary customers, or the Coke-bottled fragrance You’re In. The last project was recently echoed by Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli’s fake perfume, Greed, a decidedly Warholian invention (that also references Marcel Duchamp’s famous readymade Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette) complete with a Roman Polanski–directed commercial starring Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams and a bottle featuring a portrait of the artist in drag. Vezzoli isn’t included in “Pop Life,” but he is certainly among the breed of artist that this exhibition claims Warhol gave rise to—a type for whom conflating culture and commerce is about “engaging with modern life on its own terms,” as the curators put it. I would argue that for artists of Vezzoli’s generation or of mine, like Richard Prince, their practice is not a matter of following Warhol’s rebellion against modernism but simply doing what comes naturally. To overstate the self-consciousness of these artists is like saying that TV babies rebelled against radio. The most conspicuous representatives of this new group include Prince, Koons, Hirst, and Murakami, who also happen to be the big money winners of the moment and top stars in the Gagosian Gallery pantheon. And they have lots of what Warhol wanted most: wealth and fame. One of Andy’s most endearing qualities was his jealousy of anyone who had something he didn’t, and the current generation would give him real grounds for turning green.
Warhol ever did. Hirst has had restaurants, he’s got the Other Criteria shops, and he threatened to start a revolution by cutting out his dealers and selling $200 million of his art directly through Sotheby’s. Andy must have been spinning in the big Leo Castelli Gallery in the sky. Murakami, I think, would have especially driven him nuts because of the tremendous high-low range of his product—Louis Vuitton handbags, costume jewelry, toy figurines, art fairs. He even got away with putting a luxury boutique inside the sacrosanct confines of a museum as part of his traveling retrospective “© Murakami.” When I saw that exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007, I couldn’t help but think how envious Andy would have been if he’d lived to see this. But Warhol didn’t invent the stances he’s famous for. Salvador Dalí, who was 24 years older, was a master of publicity who dared to utilize his art world status to cash in, making TV commercials, doing store windows, and selling signed blank paper. Warhol just took it to the next level, updating strategies practiced not only by Dalí but also Duchamp. That legacy continues with Koons, Hirst, Murakami, and numerous artists around the world, like the young Indian duo Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, whose paintings and store-like displays riff on fashion, advertising, and globalization. The curators of “Pop Life” seem eager to find subversion in artists’ “complicity” with the market, insisting that their work hasn’t acquiesced to the world of commerce so much as penetrated and disturbed it. Such arguments exhibit a nostalgia for an ivory tower, a removed position that never really existed. What’s interesting is how the artists in “Pop Life” transcend the diagnostic exegeses. Sure, they play with conventions in art and commerce, but most of them are at least a step ahead of the postmortems. These artists are Teflon. Like Warhol, they have achieved escape velocity and can’t be contained by the gravitational pull of art history and interpretation. For them, the sky’s the limit. “Pop Life: Art in a Material World” remains on view at the Tate Modern through January 17, 2010, before traveling to the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany, February 6–May 9, and then to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, June 11–September 19.
Murakami, Koons, and Hirst all have more employees than MODERN ARTS 7
8
MODERN ARTS
David Lachapelle’s journey from fine art to fashion and back again He was shooting for Interview before he turned 21. By Amah-Rose Abrams
MODERN ARTS 9
10
MODERN ARTS
BRIGHT, uplifting, sexy, and brilliant— David LaChapelle’s work is highly prized in a culture obsessed with all things Pop. His career has been characterized by a boomerang-like trajectory, beginning in a contemporary art mileu and blossoming into commercial success, only to find its way back to where it started. Since he returned to exhibiting his work in a fine art context in the late aughts, LaChapelle has had a slew of gallery shows. Currently you can see his color soaked work in person at “PIPE DREAM– Araki, LaChapelle, Molinier, Newton, Pierre Gilles” through February 19, 2016, at Galerie Andrea Caratsch in Zurich. LaChapelle grew up in Connecticut, and grew up fast. By the age of 14, he was already travelling into New York to go dancing in nightclubs, and by the following year he had moved to New York and was working as a bus boy at the infamous Studio 54. Nevertheless, he and his parents agreed he would return home to finish high school at the North Carolina School of Arts, where he discovered photography—and instantly knew it was what he wanted to do with his life.
attention, and soon he was shooting for other prestigious publications such as Vogue Italia, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. In 1984, LaChapelle had two solo exhibitions in New York. “Good News for the Modern Man” was at a friend’s loft, and “Angels, Saints and Martyrs” took place at Lisa Spellman’s 303 Gallery. He was heavilynvolved in the contemporary art scene at the time, mixing with the likes of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. His early fine art work contains traces of the hyper-real iconographic imagery found in his later work, but it was the commercial aspect of LaChapelle’s photography that initially launched his career. Working in his signature pop-surrealist style, LaChapelle created layered, dramatic portraits and fashion editorials, often involving intricate sets and expensive props. The effect was immediately iconic and became highly sought-after, and by the the early 90s, LaChapelle was photographing the biggest starts on the planet, such as Michael Jackson and Madonna. He has said since that his uplifting, colorful style was born as his friends began to die from AIDS in the 1980s, making him want to focus on creating beautiful things.
The adornment of the body is a human need. I don't see anything superficial about it unless your life becomes very materialistic. At 17, LaChapelle was back in New York and began associating with Andy Warhol, who famously offered him a job at Interview Magazine. Working for Interview Magazine, the young phot-ographer enjoyed shooting a variety of famous subjects, ranging from the Beastie Boys’s first shoot to Andy Warhol’s last. His work attracted a lot of
“My love is the still image, creating these scenes, or creating these tableaux and stories or narratives where you’re reaching people through an image,” he said in a Vice documentary. “That’s my love: the power that’s within that still image” During the mid 90s, LaChapelle was working conti-nuously, and was so wellregarded one magazine called him “the Fellini of photography.” He then began to branch off into time-based work, making music videos for a huge range of artists including Kelis, Christina Aguilera, Amy Winehouse, and Moby. His videos all bear the same signature style of saturated color and a “super-real” aesthetic.
Following the success of his video work, LaChapelle moved into feature film. He first made the Sundance-Awarded short, Krumped (2004), and followed that success with Rize (2005), a critically acclaimed documentary on the “krumping” style of street dance. But in 2006, the hard-working LaChapelle abruptly left the business and moved to Hawaii to live in seclusion, citing exhaustion. He had reached a bit of a breaking point, and it was unsure when or if he’d return to his prolific output. After a few years, a friend suggested that he could exhibit fine art photographs again. LaChapelle has since compared the experience of returning to fine art photography to being reborn. The subject matter in LaChapelle’s fine art work varies widely, from stylized still lives mixing art history with modern paraphernalia, to hyper-real landscapes blending urban and suburban environments. His exhibition “LAND SCAPE” at Paul Kasmin in 2014 sought to highlight ecological concerns. “When I was young, we didn’t think about the end of human existence,” LaChapelle told Interview Magazine. “We didn’t think about the end of existence at our own hand, with just living. I can’t see 20 years from now, us going along with the way things are today.” LaChapelle has lived a fascinating life, coming of age during an era in New York that holds a great fascination for many. His transporting aesthetic has always been and will likely always be popular—but perhaps more so than fame and popularity, it will be interesting to see how his work matures, as LaChapelle gets older and, and like many of us, more worried.
Redeeming the King of Pop: David LaChapelle’s fine art portrayal of Michael Jackson
MODERN ARTS
11
13
MODERN ARTS
By John Gruen
This essay is published in The Keith Haring Show (Milan, Italy: Skira), 2005.
Conversation with Keith Harin
Photography has become such an important part of my work since so much of it is temporary. After all, the phenomena of photography and video that have made the international phenomenon of Keith Haring possible. - Keith Haring
About Inspiration from other Artists At the arts and crafts center in Pittsburgh, I started to do printmaking… Around this time, 1977, I had a real obsession with paper. As I started to expand and do bigger things, I had this real aversion to canvas. I didn’t want to do things on canvas. I wanted to work on paper, partly because paper was inexpensive, but partly because it was interesting. Also, I felt this strong need to get to know what other artists had done. I spent a lot of time at the library and came across Dubuffet. I was startled at how similar Dubuffet’s images were to mine, because I was making these little abstract shapes that were interconnected. So I looked into the rest of his work. And I became very interested in Stuart Davis, because one of his tea-chers was Robert Henri, and also because he was interrelating his abstract shapes. And I began relating to Jackson Pollock–especially the early abstract stuff–and to Paul Klee and Alfonso Ossorio and Mark Tobey–and suddenly seeing the whole Eastern concept of art, which really affected me. Of course, at the time, I didn’t in any way consider myself an equal to those artists. But each of those painters had something I was involved with, so I investigated them, trying to find out who they were, so I could figure out who I was and where I was coming from. Then, even more importantly, it was the time of the Carnegie International, which was this huge show given in Pittsburgh, at the Museum of Art at the Carnegie Institute. That year, in 1977, the show was an enormous retrospective by Pierre Alechinsky. I had never heard of him before, and all of a sudden there were something like two hundred paintings and drawings tracing his career. And there were videotapes of him working. And I didn’t know who that was!
MODERN ARTS
12
When it is working, you completely go into another place, you're tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self. That's what it's all about. 14
MODERN ARTS
I couldn’t believe that work! It was so close to what I was doing! Much closer than Dubuffet. It was the closest thing I had ever seen to what I was doing with these self-generative little shapes. Well, suddenly I had a rush of confidence. Here was this guy, doing what I was doing, but on a huge scale, and done in the kind of calligraphy I was working with, and there were frames that went back to cartooning– to the whole sequence of cartoons, but done in a totally free and expressive way, which was totally about chance, totally about intuition, totally about spontaneity–and letting the drips in and showing the brush–but big! And this huge obsession with ink and a brush! And an obsession with paper! And all those things were totally, but totally in the direction I was heading.
It fulfilled all the philosophical and theoretical ideas I had about public art and about the intervention of an artist with the public and with real events.
I went to that exhibition I don’t know how many times. I bought the catalogue, I read Alechinsky’s writings. I watched the videos of him painting these enormous canvases on the floor! For him, it was like an Eastern thing, with the importance of gravity having great meaning. And he had rigged up these boards in his studio so he could lie on top of them in order to get to the middle of these big paintings on the floor. Well, Alechinsky totally blew me away. From that point on, it changed everything for me.
Well, it impressed me incredibly. I had no idea how I could do anything similar–how I could involve other people– how I could engage the public like that. I had no idea how to do that.
Right away my work started getting bigger and bigger. I found a place to get paper where they had cardboard tubes, leftover pieces from Styrofoam cuttings, and rolls of paper from printing plants. I’d haul the paper to the arts and crafts center and, after work or during lunch breaks, I’d be doing these paintings inspired by Alechinsky. I began working on the floor. The drips from the paint would be incorporated into what I was doing. My things were different from Alechinsky. They didn’t have the fluidity of his abstract line. Mine had a boxy edge to the line–a sort of constrained look, but still liberated.The main thing that I was acquiring was confidence. I felt I was doing something that was worthwhile. On Christo During my last year in Pittsburgh there was one other really important thing that occurred, and that was my hearing a lecture given by the artist, Christo. After the lecture, he showed a film made about one of his works called Running Fence. It affected me profoundly.
I mean, to see these people–these farmers–who resisted Christo’s project getting up early in the morning to see the sunrise reflected in the Running Fence–and standing there and saying it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen! I mean, totally transforming these people, who were farmers! And seeing them affected and challenged by and inspired by a work of art! No matter how contemporary it was, and no matter how alien it was to everything they knew –somehow, that forced intervention by an artist made them see things in a whole other way.
On Video Art The first tapes I made were all self-referential. The first time you see and hear yourself on video–and look at yourself from outside of yourself–is an incredible psychological lesson. Since then, I’ve maintained that schools should teach video not as a video class, but as a psychology or philosophy class. Video really gives you a whole other concept of self and ego, and an objective way of looking at and being comfortable with yourself in a way that might not have existed before. Especially important is the way the camera is set up, so that it’s live and you react to what you’re seeing yourself do at the same time that you’re doing it. I mean, you can see the back of your head while you’re doing something else–you can see yourself from the side. So I looked at video, and started thinking about the meaning of this concept of self and ego.
KEITH HARING Ignorance = Fear, 1989 On behalf of the New York based AIDS activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Keith Haring designed and executed this poster in 1989 after he himself had been diagnosed the previous year. The poster reveals three figures communicating the "see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing" to imply the struggles faced by those living with AIDS and the challenges posed by individuals or groups that fail to properly acknowledge and respect the epidemic.
Keith on Painting as a Kind of Dance At SVA, I was producing lots of things in quantity. Like, I found a place where someone had put out on the street these huge rolls of paper, which were about nine feet tall and they turned out to be photographic backdrop paper. I dragged those rolls back to the school, laid them down on the floor in the sculpture studio, and proceeded to do these ink paintings similar to Alechinsky’s, but bigger. This time, though, I became very intrigued with the act of doing this.It was the idea of making the movements I was doing into a kind of choreography– a kind of dance. I was thinking that the very act of painting placed you in an exhilarated state–it was a sacred moment. On Graffiti Art and First Meeting with Basquiat Almost immediately upon my arrival in New York in 1978, I had begun to be interested, intrigued, and fascinated by the graffiti I was seeing in the streets and in the subways. Often I’d take the trains to the museums and galleries, and I was starting to see not only the big graffiti on the outside of the subway trains, but incredible calligraphy on the inside of the cars. The calligraphic stuff reminded me of what I learned about Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. There was also this stream-of-consciousness thing–this mind-to-hand flow that I saw in Dubuffet, Mark Tobey, and Alechinsky. The forms I was seeing were very similar to the kinds of drawings I was doing, even though I wasn’t making the voluminous letters and the aggressively fluid lines, which were done directly on the surfaces, and without a preconceived plan. They were really, really strong. Well, I felt immediately comfortable with this art. I was aware of it wherever I was. So the time spent en route to a gallery or to a performance or to a concert was just as interesting and educational as that which I was going to see. Sometimes I wouldn’t even get on the first train. I’d sit and wait to see what was on the next train.
had this incredible mastery of drawing which totally blew me away. I mean, just the technique of drawing with spray paint is amazing, because it’s incredibly difficult to do. And the fluidity of line, and the way they handled scale–doing this work on these huge, huge trains. And always the hard-edged black line that tied the drawings together! It was the line I had been obsessed with since childhood! As I was coming to the end of my time at the School of Visual Arts, there started appearing on the streets this graffiti which said SAMO. It appeared for almost a year, and I had no idea who this person was, but I began to religiously follow the work, because it was appearing where I was living, walking, and going to school. It was the first time I saw what I would call a literary graffiti, one that wasn’t done just for the sake of writing a name or for making a formal mark. These were little poems, little statements–they were non sequiturs–and they were conceptual statements– and they were on the street. For me, it was condensed poetry which would stop you in your tracks and make you think. Well, SAMO, which some said stood for “same old shit” turned out to be Jean-Michel Basquiat. I had heard that Jean Michel was attending an alternative high-school program, that he was part of the Mudd Club scene and that he lived wherever he could crash. Actually, I still hadn’t met Jean. Michel–I had only heard about him.
Graffiti were the most beautiful things I ever saw. This being 1978-79, the war on graffiti hadn’t really begun yet. So the art was allowed to blossom into something amazing, and the movement was really at its peak. These kids, who were obviously very young and from the streets, MODERN ARTS
15
M AY 01 08
16
MODERN ARTS
Member Early Hours: Being: New Photography 2018
9:30–10:30 a.m. The Museum of Modern Art Gallery experience, for members
Member Early Hours: Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016 9:30–10:30 a.m. The Museum of Modern Art Gallery experience, for members
12
The Duchess. 1966. Directed by Andy Warhol Nico in Kitchen. 1966. Directed by Andy Warhol
7:30 p.m. The Museum of Modern Art Film
23 16
Notorious. 1946. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1:30 p.m. The Museum of Modern Art Film
The John [singlescreen version]. 1966. Directed by Andy Warhol 4:30 p.m. The Museum of Modern Art Film
28
The Closet. 1966. Directed by Andy Warhol
7:00 p.m. Introduced by Randy Bourscheidt The Museum of Modern Art Film
MODERN ARTS 17
Hsin Yu Lin 575 Harrison St. Apt 306 San Francisco, CA 94105
Hours: 10:00-18:00 Tue-Sun Closed on Mondays Address: NO.39 Chang-An West Road Taipei, Taiwan 103