Pop Life: Art in a Material World showcases the commercial inclinations of everyone from Jeff Koons to Takashi Murakami, above.Bruce Yamakawa
Late-career Andy Warhol didn't cut it for the critics. Even as his celebrity rose, the pop-art superstar was heavily criticized in the 1970s and 1980s for churning out self-portraits and silk-screens of the rich and famous on demand. Many felt he was just printing money, not art.
But that was the whole point, says Jack Bankowsky, the co-curator of the major summer exhibit Pop Life, opening Friday and running until Sept. 19 at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Warhol was fulfilling the themes of his early work; he was embracing both art and commerce in totality.
The exhibit's comprehensive re-examination of those themes starts off with many of Warhol's later pieces, and then showcases the commercial inclinations of everyone from Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst to Keith Haring and Takashi Murakami. The National Gallery has also added a Canadian component to this exhibition, first shown at London's Tate Modern last fall, by including works by Toronto-based General Idea.
"We're asking ourselves, 'What's the decisive motor behind this art?'" Bankowsky says. "We feel you have to look at the whole thing at once. This is the only way to really understand what happened to Warhol, how he actualized all of these intuitions we see in his early pop art, and [turned them]into this multi-tentacled business machine. And then we say that's a good way to link to the same things that we see in the works of artists that follow him."
On the Warhol front, the exhibit will include a sampling of his celebrity portraits and other, later works, along with video segments of his MTV show Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes and even a clip of his appearance on Love Boat.
Pop Life also includes Koons' monumental and controversial Made In Heaven series of photos, sculptures and paintings from 1990-1991, which show the artist and his then-wife La Cicciolina, the porn-star-turned-politician, often in explicit embraces.
The exhibit has a room showing a selection of the pieces included in Hirst's massive 2008 auction he held for his own works; the point of that event, known as Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, was to turn the auction process into an art-meets-media spectacle in itself.
And for Haring, the exhibit is recreating the actual downtown Manhattan store that he opened in 1986 to sell T-shirts, badges and other goods bearing his graffiti images.
"Having a retail store as an artist, in 1986, that was critically seen as a move that could have completely bankrupted him as an artist. The critics were saying, 'If you do that, you won't be taken seriously as an artist,'" says Jonathan Shaughnessy, assistant curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery. "Warhol was one of the ones who supported him and said, 'No, it'll work out, just do it.'"
"Haring just wanted to get his badges and his artistic message out to a broad public," Shaughnessy adds. "He was a graffiti artist, that's how he started. And it worked. [The store]was great success."