Teare’s fascination with an issue or event is usually the conceptual point of departure as he starts a new painting. He may even include signifying text on the canvas as he begins, but in working he gradually effaces all that is verbal and so as to expunge from the painted space any outside references or editorial agendas. Somehow though, all this mental activity remains encoded in the painting; an invisible but palpable ghost in the machine enlivens the physical traces that remain on the canvas.

Teare has acknowledged the influence of Cy Twombly on his work. Twombly’s dense thickets of indecipherable marks often look less like brushstrokes than scrawled handwriting and he frequently takes his titles from classical texts or ancient mythology. Teare’s precisely rendered shapes of color also allude to language in that they seem to be glyphic characters from some private alphabet while his titles refer not to Virgil but to a kind of popular mythology composed of Beatlemania, the Kennedy assassination, and other epoch-making events of the past 50 years. As with Twombly, a great part of the interest in Teare’s painting derives from the tension he creates between the suggestion of translatability and his ultimate refusal to divulge specific meanings. Their significance is not in any literal interpretation, but in the way that painting is used to process experience into something beyond words. For Teare, painting is a way of addressing himself to ideas and issues without the limitations of language. “The end,” he says, “is often open.”

Kevin Teare lives and works in Sag Harbor, NY. His first exhibition was at The Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1975 and at the age of 25 he was awarded a National Endowment Fellowship for painting. Since then he has exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. Also an accomplished musician, Teare played drums in the seminal No-Wave band, MX-80. In 1999 he released a record entitled The List of Who Lives, which MOJO Magazine called “one of the three or four best self-produced albums of the millennium.” Besides Teare, the record features such guest performers as Wayne Kramer (MC5) and Richard Lloyd (Television). Teare is a 2006 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Fellowship award for painting. An exhibition of his work entitled The Most High will show at Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY in the fall of 2009. For more information contact Glenn Horowitz Bookseller via email, info@GHbookseller.com, or phone, 631-324-5511.

Source

The crowd at Deitch Projects, one of the few vital galleries in SoHo to have resisted the exodus to Chelsea, had already spilled out onto Grand Street by the time I arrived.  This was the first Friday of the 2003 art season and a grand tour of openings had lead me through scores of packed art houses further West.  Deitch openings, of course, attract a different sort of crowd, one that has more to do with the pinnacle of youth style than contemporary art, and tonight was typical; hipsters with trucker caps and the electroclash kids were out in force.  I wondered if they were here because they are fans of Kristin Baker, a recent Yale MFA grad whose New York City debut solo exhibition glistened on the walls inside, or if some mutant sense of high style had attracted them like moths to this most fashionable of parties.

As I was crossing the street, the roar of a muscle car approached rapidly from the direction of Thompson Street.  It was already dark and all I could see to match the aggressive growl were two headlights speeding towards me at a terrifying clip, now less than a block away.  As I leaped onto the curb the 1968 red Cobra flew past, the driver’s blur of blond hair swishing in the wind.  I turned to hurl caustic vitriol at the driver.  “What’s wrong with you, asshole?!?  This is SoHo, not Daytona!”  But my admonishing yell was completely drowned out by the sound of the engine gurgling past and the surprising cheers of the hipsters with whom I now found myselfstanding.  At first I though they were applauding the driver for trying to splat me like Frogger as I tried to cross the street, but their cheers and cat calls continued as the vintage sports car flew down the block.  What the hell is going on, I wondered.

Snaking my way through the packed gallery, I caught enough snippets of random conversations to learn that Baker herself was driving the car that almost ran me over.  She had been dragging down Grand Street in the Cobra and in an equally muscular and gorgeous Charger all evening, offering thrill rides as extra entertainment for those who had turned out for the opening. This was classic Deitch sensational showmanship and the audience was drinking it up, along with the free beer.

But I was here to see Baker’s paintings. Never using brushes to create her works, she wields knives, normally a tool of deconstruction and violence, to construct worlds of speed and elegant tragedy.  In works like Big Bang Vroom and Boom Boom No. 1, Hockenheim, her contemporary landscapes focus on racecars as they tear around the track and smash into smithereens during high velocity collisions.  The narratives depicted on these monumentally scaled PVC boards freeze crucial fragments of time, the exact nanosecond when wild destruction occurs and God decides if the racecar driver will live or die.  With raucous hues lifted from Formula One bodies and flat aesthetics derived from high tech auto shop tool logos, she causes atomic moments of adrenaline-soaked fear to leaven into lingering operatic drama. She grafts aggressive planes of luxurious, thinly sliced acrylic onto a visual language that lies halfway between pure abstraction and high-speed photography, revealing a near missionary reverence for motorsports.

Less than a week after the opening of the exhibition, New York City mournfully remembered September 11 on the second anniversary of the infamous attack.  Once again, images of the destruction of that horrible day proliferated through all forms of media, the most famous and memorable of which depicts an airliner frozen in the nothing-but-a-moment of its impact with the skyscraper.  This image is burned onto our collective memory like a cattle brand, a powerful icon of fear and destruction that defines our era. It grasps our imaginations like a car crash on the side of the highway.  We cannot look away.  Baker’s videogameish, pixilated sportscapes tap into a parallel iconicpower.  There is irresistible magnetism to the energy with which she injects the stories she tells. We are drawn inexorably into their narratives.  We can’t look away.

In her second solo exhibition, Kristine Moran sharpens the focus in her sci-fi paintings, zeroing in on the ideas of utopian theorists from the 20th century—Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses, Constant Nieuwenhuys and Buckminster Fuller—to present inner-city landscapes from an imagined alternative present. While still sprinkled with her signature airborne vehicles and extravagant explosions, these works ponder idealistic urban environments and the social interactions of their inhabitants. Like all science-fiction tales about supposedly perfect societies (think of Spielberg’s blindingly bright future in Minority Report), Moran’s narratives inevitably present harsh dystopias.

The geodesic dome serves as a motif in the exhibition, providing perfect shelter for the chosen few and symbolizing the ultimate failure of the utopian ideal to encompass those left outside its walls. In Blind Sided, the dome is seen from a top-down, aerial view, the same godlike perspective that the original designers of these idealized cities held when drawing up their blueprints. While those designers saw only plans for a perfect future, we see the chaos that now dominates the fictional metropolitan communities, not lucky enough to be included under the utopic domes. In Next In Line, perhaps the strongest work in the exhibition, we witness a military helicopter patrolling over a tangle of traffic-snarled multi-lane freeways. As its searchlights scan the ground, we are left with the distinct feeling that some kind of tragedy has struck the city. The image is reminiscent of the weeks after 9/11, when military choppers and fighter jets patrolled the skies above Manhattan. The vertigo-inspiring aerial perspective and sickly green-blue Matrix-like hue of these top-down works leave viewers with a clear sense of impending doom or fresh disaster. Moran’s representations of buildings and vehicles are frequently wonky and skewed, their angles and flatness childlike in their clumsy, sketchy quality. The manner in which the artist delineates three-dimensional space in these complex landscapes is awkward and sometimes confusing. But it is exactly this looseness that makes her works so interesting. Combining glossy enamels and alkyds on board with a thick impasto handling of high-keyed paint, the artist captures the intense energy and action depicted in her narratives. The harried, improvised quality of her work injects the pieces with an intelligent and vibrant freshness.

‘Street Art’ exists in heavily urbanized environments from Tokyo to Toronto. Much of it is ‘graffiti’, that pestilence of territorial pissing by visually impaired half-wits who have little creative output beyond barely-literate scratches of their own names. However, an informed eye notices that the seas of scribbled spray paint, stickers and wheat-pasted billboards polluting the sides of buildings are sometimes topped by a foamy sprinkling of intelligent work that competes in the same public urban space. Barry McGee, a.k.a. Twist, whose wall paintings, drawings and mixed media installations were among the first to migrate from the streets into galleries such as Deitch Projects in New York and museums like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, is one of the best-known practicioners.

Shepard Fairey, whose Andre the Giant has a Posse stickers and Obey populist wheat-paste posters can be seen in settings from San Francisco to Singapore, exemplifies the multi-directional cross over of these artists into the gallery and into consumer products. Together with Brian James ( a.k.a. KAWS), Stephen Powers (a.k.a. ESPO), and James Marshall (a.k.a. DALEK), they comprise a movement of artists—coined ‘The Disobedients’ by Tokion magazine in May 2002—who use the aesthetics and distribution tactics of Street Art but cross breed them with a strange brew of Pop culture, illustration, commercial toy production, critical intelligence and artistic integrity. Nicholas di Genova, one of shamefully few talents to graduate from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2004, readily admits their influence. In his debut solo exhibition, at Toronto’s tiny but edgy and inspiring Le Gallery, di Genova offered ink and ‘cell animation’ paint on mylar drawings that displayed his attention to artists like Twist, Futura, and DALEK. His nascent career has been noticed outside of Toronto and he has been included in New York City, Detroit, London, Berlin, and Singapore group shows, as well as Pictoplasma 2, a German collection of the best of international character design. Di Genova’s splotchy black outlines, flat fields of solid muted color, and clever suggestions of depth via mylar-and-Plexiglas sandwiches, show the important influence of Japanese anime and manga. At times his drawings look like they could come directly from the pages of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira manga with their intricate parallel linear shading, finely detailed outlines and gritty futurism. Unfortunately, the work has none of the narrative brilliance of Otomo’s epic Sci-Fi masterpiece.

Story and meaning are lacking. With silly titles like Lump-Head Triclops and Bi-Ped Fish Head Crabot, the works are loosely based on a post-apocalyptic/post-human world populated by mechanized mutations of animal species. However, it is a fanciful and naïve view that fails to deliver any significant message or social commentary. The sculptures included in the exhibit were also regrettable and cluttered the small gallery with objects that showed only that the artist has much to learn in three dimensions. Yet, di Genova’s style is confident and it forms an original departure from his influences. The huge library of charming characters that he has already created function as the foundation of a rich visual language, one that will enable him continue to participate in a vibrant, if underground, art movement.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, I found myself standing in front of a series of framed photographs by Richard Kern, writing in my journal notes that seemed more like Penthouse letters than art criticism. “Staring wantonly into the camera lens, Lucy slides her delicate hand into her bikini bottom, daring the viewer to come to her with a glance impregnated with innocence and desire… Now taking a soothing post-coital haul from her Marlboro, the buxom blonde opens her legs to reveal the used condom still protruding from her vagina and the mess her unseen lover has left inside her legs.” “Oh my God,” I hear gasped behind me.

A middleaged woman had just entered the gallery, looking as small-town as Shelly Long in an infomercial, obviously not aware of what she was about to encounter. I didn’t hear the rest of the brief discussion she had with her companion in front of the works, their whispers barely resounding in the small empty room. Embarrassed, they quickly scurried away, clearly fearing for their morality and their souls, but only after glancing at each work with temperate shocked disbelief.

Richard Kern’s models pose before his lens in manners most people only ever experience with their most intimate partners. Tucked safely into the backroom of Feature Inc., his newest offering of color photographs achieves the same transcendence of pornography and sensuality expected from this small-town Baptist boy. Treading in the shallow underground waters that flow periodically between art and porn, Kern’s images carry the feeling of privacy and intimacy you normally draw only from those home movies or Polaroid/digital pictures of your past sexual partners you keep locked away in a dusty box, somewhere hidden from your current lover. Standing before the beautiful works, a feeling of invasion of someone else’s private life smacks of embarrassment. I was reminded of an ugly college party I passed through years ago, watching a fifth generation, grainy copy of the infamous Pamela Anderson/Tommy Lee video. This was a record, albeit pornographic, of a couple in love, a personal memory of their vacation time together. It was never intended to be viewed by anyone other than the two stars/camera operators, and made me feel dirty and wrong watching it with a roomful of howling my stomach turned with the uncomfortable realization that I was a pervert again, voyeuristically peeking into the private lives of total strangers. And yes, enjoying it.

But unlike unfortunate Pam and Tommy who (apparently) didn’t know at the time of filming that they would be the coming attraction to VCR near you, these models knew what they were doing, and appear to be relishing the very exhibitionism of the medium. The artist has hired these women, not simply subjected them to a post-coital photo session, and posed them knowingly and purposefully. These situations are created, not caught.

Digital photography, with its ease of use and lack of laboratory developing, brought private photography to the masses in a scale the Polaroid never achieved, and created home pornographers out of all of us. No longer fearing that Billy the camera geek at the local drugstore foto-mat would file through your snapshots, home pornography has become a viable and favorite pastime for new lovers and anniversaried pairs trying new spices. (You know what I am talking about, don’t you?) Although Kern’s works are not digitally manipulated in any way, the actors they depict have the comfort level of trusting lovers and resemble the intimate moments captured for private consumption made possible by home digital photography. Yet, these girls have accepted the artist’s camera and perform before it, decidedly challenging the viewers to stare, contorting their bodies and divulging their secrets, clearly aware of the shock value of their revealing openness. Natacha Merritt has taken this performative aspect to a more personal level in her Taschen publication Digital Diaries (2000), by placing herself before her camera, laying bare her own, very real sex life with the same shocking earnestness as Kern’s actors. Kern, however, has been at this project for many years, and Merritt’s images, while more beautiful aesthetically, are clearly derivative of Kern’s ability to elevate pornography to a personal level of art while at the same time soiling the pictures with enough dirt to render their scopophilic pleasure absolute.

A spontaneous chain of personalities and events lead to Czech-born sculptor Richard Stipl’s debut solo show in New York. It started in 2001, at Art Forum Berlin, where the artist’s Toronto dealer, Christopher Cutts, was encouraged by the American collector Steve Shane to take part in the first Scope Art Fair, slated for spring 2002 in New York City. Only hours after selling out his entire installation at Scope, Stipl met David Hunt in the halls of the hotel where the fair was staged. A bombastic and prolific curator and critic, Hunt was looking for artists to flesh out a summer group show at the Daniel Silverstein Gallery.

With the show already titled “The Accelerated Grimace,” there could hardly have been a more serendipitous meeting of artist and curator, and Hunt quickly consigned a small group of miniature contorted self-portrait heads — by now Stipl’s signature style — for the exhibition. The show resulted in solid mentions in the New York art press (including Time Out New York and The New York Times). By the end of 2002, Silverstein had offered the artist his first New York solo show. It all seemed to happen on the strength of the work itself, with Stipl contributing little more than his occasional presence in New York, easygoing nature and wealth of talent.

Trepidation, revelation, revulsion, agony, ecstasy, dementia, nausea, and release radiate from the two multi-piece sculptures in the show. A Futile Attempt to Get to Know Oneself Better is composed of five highly detailed sculptural elements in wax, each representing the artist’s own body, nude and completely hairless, from the top of his head to just below his knees. Rendered in 1:4 scale, the group is mounted away from the wall at eye level, each figure on its own metal device, and careful placement creates a dialog between the individuals. The title refers to the artist’s practice of using his body as a model for the sculptures with only the aid of a mirror, no photography, and the work consequently delves into a surrealistic scenario where five versions of the same person interact with one another. Like Michael Keaton’s genetic counterfeits in Multiplicity (1996), and John Malkovich’s ego-neurotic replicas in Being John Malkovich (1999), Stipl’s handmade clones find themselves in a terrifying and darkly humorous situation where they are forced to confront one another. The narratives created by their awkward and uncomfortable exchanges are even more enticing and stirring than the delicate craftsmanship of the oil-painted wax.

Representing the artist’s head and torso from the nipples up, Sleep of Reason is composed of 15 individual pieces in the same 1:4 scale and continues Stipl’s strategy of using his own body as a model. Stunning verisimilitude is achieved through the careful attention the artist has paid to the surface quality of the skin. Finely painted blue veins appear subtly under the seemingly translucent surface, tiny wrinkles help define areas of muscle and bone and a haze of stubble appears on the tops of the recently shaved heads. Though influenced aesthetically by the exacting techniques of Duane Hanson’s and Ron Mueck’s hyper-realistic sculptures, the beauty and potency of this work lies in it’s bleak and compassionate humanity.

The sublime torment of Stipl’s demented figures resembles nothing so much as the stoic, hardened, drunken peasants trapped in Hieronymous Bosch’s purgatories. And like the prime-time reality-television programs we all deny watching, these grotesque miniatures at once repel and attract our gaze, making us at once slightly nauseous yet terribly compelled to keep looking.

“I would like some bad-acting and wrong-thinking. I would like to see some art that is courageously silly and frivolous, that cannot be construed as anything else.” So wrote the art and culture critic Dave Hickey in an essay that appeared in Art issues during the summer of 1996. Though it is unlikely they were aware of this request, the young members of the Winnipeg-based drawing collective known as The Royal Art Lodge first formed in the same year and have worked collaboratively to unwittingly realize Mr. Hickey’s desire. Their group show at the prestigious Drawing Center in Manhattan, with nearly 500 works on display, proposes a reinvention of drawing itself by raising a simpleton’s understanding of the world above all other markers of value. “Ask the Dust,” curated by Wayne Baerwaldt and Joseph R. Wolin, travelled to Toronto’s Power Plant and De Vleeshal in the Dutch city of Middelburg.

The inventive and delightfully serendipitous drawings, sculptures and dolls in this show derive from a collaborative practice by the eight members of the group: Michael Dumontier, Hollie Dzama, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, Drue Langlois, Myles Langlois, Jonathan Pylypchuk and Adrian Williams. Frequently combining text and image and always offering visual narratives open to interpretation, these artists create post-surrealistic landscapes populated by simply and awkwardly rendered characters who question or fall victim to the lassitude of an imperfect, stupid and mean-spirited world. The ideas presented in these works seem to be fragments of fuller unrealized concepts and their charm and intelligence result from a complete disregard for the traditionally expected and accepted norms of draftsmanship, narrative completion and concern for the audience’s understanding. Just as Kurt Cobain’s influence repressed virtuosic instrumentation in rock music, the images in this exhibition subvert what we think a ‘good’ drawing is supposed to be. Through sheer persistence of vision and practice, The Royal Art Lodge validate and qualify a truly childlike aesthetic.

There are many weak works on display that could have been edited without diminishing the scope of this examination of the group’s output. And the strongest works by the individual artists were not in this show, perhaps because of demands from their galleries (in New York, Dzama shows with David Zwirner, Pylypchuk with Friedrich Petzel and Farber with Clementine). But “Ask the Dust” as a whole joyously exposes a fresh and creative vision that brings to contemporary drawing the same kind of awkwardly geeky and shuffling brilliance Don McKellar’s films lend to cinema. Just as McKellar’s films negate the very existence of Hollywood’s cultural hegemony, the free-range work of The Royal Art Lodge provides scratching explorations and interrogations of a world oblivious to the grand expectations and ambitions of mainstream contemporary art.

The premise is almost unthinkable: finding inspiration in the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. Yet that disaster moved artist Kara Walker to organize After the Deluge, an exhibition tucked away in a mezzanine gallery at the Met, where Walker pairs a roiling selection of tangentially related paintings, prints and collages from the museums collection with her own works. Touching on a multitude of themes - from the representation of blacks in American art to mans primal fear of water - the show is an eloquent expression of one artists frustration at the enduring legacy of racism in this country.

At times, After the Deluge sheds new light on familiar works in the museums collection. A homey genre scene of a black family getting ready for a carnival, painted in 1887 by Winslow Homer, abuts John Carlins 19th-century canvas of sailors accosting a black woman. In this context, Homers glib objectification of his subjects is hard to miss. Such racial stereotypes are echoed in nine miniatures of 19th century New York City by William Chappel: whites are at leisure, while blacks are shining shoes, collecting garbage and peddling fruit.

Walkers survey of representations of black Americans holds a mirror up to social injustices that prevail to this day - as witnessed by the harrowing images relayed in the wake of Katrina. This association is underscored here by the inclusion of paintings depicting raging waters, a scene of hell (painted by an unknown 16th century Dutch artist inspired by Bosch) and a 19th century Congolese fetish figure, originally created as a ritual object to remedy community strife.

Walker also displays a selection of 19th century silhouettes, some of which are surprisingly similar to her signature cut-paper silhouettes of antebellum life, notably an overtly erotic image and several intimations of mixed-race relationships.

But with roughly two-thirds of the show given over to work from the museums collection, Walker fans who make the trek to the Met may wonder why the artist ceded so much space and attention to her host, particularly since the profusion of attention-grabbing material competes with her own, mostly small-scale contributions. The answer is simple: by placing her work in this context, Walker lends authority to her own interrogation of history, as seen in the 17 pieces from her 2001 American Primitives series. These accounts of interracial degradation and revenge - a slumped slave flanked by abusive masters, white bodies that are dismembered - are placed at intervals throughout the installation.

The show includes four of Walkers large-scale works, whose images evoke the degraded social roles of women. One female figure melts into a primordial ooze; another holds a half-human, half-crocodile child in disgust by one of its braids; a third self-immolates, while a fourth beats a fallen (or maybe a dead) horse. While these images are stark and powerful, it is the least formally spectacular work in the exhibition that is the most deeply felt and catalyzing. In a group of typewritten index cards from 2001, Walker conveys a radical ambivalence about contemporary black identity. Her manifesto of disgust at self and society disparages everything from complicity with straggly white folks to emasculated fathers. In just a few small cards, Walker elicits extreme discomfort as she indicts both the willful cultural amnesia of the black middle class and the ineffectual guilt of white liberals.

These cards are all the more powerful for the fact that they predate the Katrina disaster - they are not an off-the-cuff reaction to the social inequities unveiled in the aftermath of the storm. In After the Deluge, Walker performs a gimlet-eyed institutional and cultural critique, cross-examining the Mets collection - and art history - while investigating the consequences of racism in America with category-five force.

Memo to the Art Gallery of Ontario: fire your marketing staff. Initially, we welcomed the news that the AGO would be hosting an Andy Warhol show. And, even though he might not be the first person to leap into our heads to curate, we welcomed the participation of David Cronenberg, as everybody but heaven knows our misgivings about curators past. Until, that is, we saw the ads: “Sex symbols. Car crashes. Electric Chairs. We’d expect this from Cronenberg, but from Warhol?” Far from being clever and savvy, these ads actually raise the not-entirely-unrealistic prospect that the AGO had never ever heard of Warhol, nor had they any clue what he had ever done. Furthermore, what the general public knows of Warhol (aside from that dreary quote about fame that everyone invariably gets wrong) is that, over and above all else, he was a fey, pale, remote weirdo, and thus a prime candidate to create remote weirdo work.

In point of fact, Warhol has become more famous than perhaps even he realized was possible. All one has to do to find evidence of this is take a walk down Queen street, or any street in any major cosmopolitan city; his imitators and adulators are everywhere. He has become the (if not merely an) archetype of the contemporary artist; the flâneur, whose bizarre ideas are forever walled up behind a barrier of terse, mystifying speech; the ur-scenester who waltzes just as easily with the demimonde as with the world of high culture, all without missing a step. Whatever one may think of him, he is part of the art pantheon; we do not think it amiss to declare that he is to our end of the last century as Picasso was to its first half. Editorializing aside, his perplexing centrality must be recognized, and, to paraphrase Mr. David Moos’ slightly condescending monologue on the show’s audio-guide, wrestled with.

And so the AGO does, with a great degree of success, thanks to the nimble hand of Mr. Cronenberg. The wisdom of their ad campaign aside, the show is excellently handled, and generally free from the undergraduate amateurishness that blights most of their blockbuster efforts.

Weighing in at a scant two and a half rooms long, it’s certainly an oddly attenuated blockbuster, yet it manages to make the best out of the meagre means forced upon it by renovation follies. Of epochal interest, however, is that this is the first museum exhibition where we voluntarily perpetrated an abrupt violation of one of our sacred precepts: we indulged in an audio-guide, although ‘voluntarily’ might be stretching it a bit. We are warned from the get-go that we are bereft of Informative Wall Plaques (thank Heaven, at long, long last!) and, lest we lose our interpretive way, Mr. Cronenberg’s disembodied voice is there to usher us safely through (we knew there might be a catch). Now, we know a marketing gimmick when we see one; all this urgent, plaintive filibustering on behalf of the necessity of the audio-guide serves merely to underscore Mr. Cronenberg’s involvement (his narration is even available at the gift shop as a consumer-priced CD). Nonetheless, this strikes us as perfectly kosher. As we said before, he is an odd choice of curator, and thus, we were more than curious to hear what he has made of Warhol, and so more than happy to press that clammy receiver to our waiting ear.

And what of Mr. Cronenberg’s involvement? This is, after all, a double feature: the curation of the show proper, and, because the AGO insists on stressing the singularity of his interpretive vision, his narration. As a curator, at least, and perhaps at best, he escapes unscathed. A remarkable aspect of the presentation is that films and paintings hang side by side. Not only does this make the most of the two and a half rooms, it simultaneously allows for a greater variety of work (instead of having scheduled single channel screenings) and makes a gracefully quick job of introducing the fluid promiscuity of Warhol’s output. Through Mr. Cronenberg’s expert arrangements, interpretive associations and thematic connections are suggested rather than belaboured, and so the show hangs together like a well constructed essay; an idiosyncratic argument, rather than heavy-handed institutional didacticism. Witness the easy fraternity of Liz-as-Cleopatra with the Red Disasters (Mr. Cronenberg accurately points out that Liz herself was a Hollywood disaster of the grandest sort), or the moribund threesome of films Kiss and Blow-Job sandwiching the “Silver Disaster #6″ painting.

His narrative interpretations, while generally astute, are a little spottier. Certainly, the presence of “guest stars” on the soundtrack is mostly frivolous, as they add little beyond bland gossip (did we really need a whole monologue delivered by Warhol’s wig stylist?). Cronenberg himself fares better than his guests; in proper schoolmarm fashion, he consistently hammers all the right Warhol-101 nails, both professional - he wanted to be a machine, his silkscreen technique was deliberately smudgy, most of his work was done by assistants - and personal - shy, remote, vaguely asexual, and celebrity-obsessed. Celebrity obsession is the axis around which the show rotates, Mr. Cronenberg making grand opera out of the relationship between celebrity and death, and Warhol’s (and our) eager appetite for the two. The idea is certainly there for the interpreting, although that’s the curious thing about Warhol’s oeuvre; it’s so accommodating to interpretation that its oft-described (by Warhol, anyway) blankness is almost overpowering. At any rate, Mr. Cronenberg insists on his celebrity/death hook with a dogged fixation, which makes for some odd moments. Consider his discussion of “Elvis I and II”: the image is taken from a publicity still from the film Flaming Star, which Cronenberg takes to be the Flaming Star of fame, the very same celestial body which would engulf his musical majesty in a whirling torrent of drugs and weight-gain and eventually death. Thus, Warhol was giving us prescient warning of the transience of beauty and the perils of notoriety. That’s all fine and dandy, although we hope that Mr. Cronenberg didn’t pull any muscles reaching for that tenuously retrospective conclusion.

Allow us to offer a more direct reading, and in so doing, draw attention to the major (and startling) shortcoming of this persistently single-minded musing: Elvis was a sweet piece of ass, especially in the ’50’s and ’60’s. That the title of the image’s source film is “Flaming Star” is indeed of great significance, not as a black harbinger of Gotterdammerung, but as a queer double entendre: Elvis is a flaming star. Funny yes, but this is not a one-liner; Andy is suggesting that the homoerotic gaze is infectious. At the level of icon (where stars operate, after all), queer lust for the macho stud is enough to turn him into a flamer. An interesting assertion now, and certainly a dangerous assertion in pre-Stonewall America, let alone pre-Stonewall Nashville.

And this is where Cronenberg fails, and fails terribly. As far as identity goes, Warhol was never particularly moored to anything, or at least not for a very long time. Early on, the New York critics called him a Painter, and lumped him in with the Abstract Expressionists. He confounded that designation by cheerfully asserting that his assistants rather than he did his paintings, that he envied the inhuman ease of the machine-made, that he and his work were equally shallow (consider the revolutionary aspect of that statement, amidst the heavy critical breathing of Artist as singular genius, cultural &uumlbermensch). The Marxists and Leftists claimed him as one of their own, citing every Campbell’s soup can as a blow against commodity fetishism, a shriek piercing the vacuous surface of Western capitalism. He betrayed them as well, especially later in his career, jet-setting to Iran at the behest of the Shah, cozying up to the Reagans in an attempt to get an official portrait commission.

The one thing that Andy was, resolutely, inarguably, until the end of his days, was queer. He created an enduring oeuvre around his own perversities, and therein lies the great catch of his work: in order to get comfy with it in any meaningful way, you have to assume his desires; you have to want to see Jackie O or Liz or Troy Donahue 16 times over; you have to want to watch a grotesque closeup of people kissing for god knows how many hours; you have to want to watch people play out their drugged-up hysterias and insecurities and cruelties; you have to want to watch, unblinkingly, someone sleep for 5 hours. You have to submit your will to his perversity. In short, like no other artist, Warhol colonizes your desires, and his cipher-like blankness is a devilishly good conduit for that particular brand of hegemony. Granted, his work seems blank enough that one can affix anything - Marxism or Cronenberg-ism - to it, and it will stick, for the most part; but that misses the point. If his work is political in any way, it is in its insistence on queerness as an extravagant problem (not coincidentally, that was his own euphemism for homosexuality - he was constantly querying whether so-and-so had a “problem”). And, in ignoring his queerness as if it was a child with a temper tantrum, the show misses some excellent points and, more often than not, veers towards the ridiculous: viz., a roomful of deeply polite, patient and slightly incredulous museum-goers watching an absurdly high Ondine fucking an especially toothsome bit of trade in “Couch,” while Amy Taubin whispers genteelly in our ears on the kooky comings-and-goings of the Factory. In discussing Jackie or Liz, the word “gay” is tossed off casually, as if to couch Warhol’s manic collection of their respective images in an easy psychological shorthand. But this is to Cronenberg’s great detriment, as queerness is the missing numeral in his celebrity/death equation. That is why his discussion of the “Most Wanted Men” feels flaccid and sketchy; how can one speak of the allure of the criminal element and leave out sexual desire? Certainly, these men were most wanted by the FBI, but they were also wanted, lusted after, by Warhol himself, and it remains a matter of conjecture as to whose desire (J. Edgar’s or Andy’s) caused Most Wanted Men’s censure at the New York World’s Fair. It is precisely the addition of desire to Mr. Cronenberg’s particular constellation that makes Warhol’s achievement so utterly perplexing: how is it that a man this odd, this remote, this fey, should exercise such a fierce and lasting hold on the larger public imagination? Warhol single-handedly waged a culture war from a relatively marginal trench, and, from where we are sitting, it very much looks like he won.