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[Beaux-arts]

Schnabel Julian.의 작품세계와 이론

참고서적;
1) " L'aventure de l'art au 20eme Siecle";
peinture,Sculpture,Architecture.출판사;1990 Ste Nelle des Editions du Chene.JEAN-LOUIS FERRIER.
p.p; 781,782,783.
(우리나라번역출판서?; 20세기 예술(미술)의 모험: 도서관에서 찾아보기 바랍니다.)

Julian Schnabel came to prominence in the eighties as a leading figure in what came to be known as "neo-expression‎ism". Schnabel's work often displays a romantic or heroic content, which was seen, after decades when cool minimalism and conceptual art had completely eclipsed painting, as innovatively emotive and subjective. Along with the attention Schnabel garnered for his painting came a hype and controversial stardom never before seen in the art world. Schnabel was, as one observer puts it, "dealt with more as a phenomenon than as a painter", so that the hype surrounding the artist--often self-generated---occluded the importance of the work.

Schnabel is perhaps most famous outside the art world for painting on broken plates and crockery applied onto typically vast wooden armatures. Though he made many works that did not employ this device, these unusual surfaces became his signature style. According to the artist, the idea came to him during a reverie in Europe, when he "had the funny idea" that he wanted to make a painting the size of the oddly large closet in his cheap hotel room, covered with broken plates. The works he made upon his return possessed a sculptural and tactile vitality that catapulted Schnabel into the limelight. The plate painting Self-Portrait in Andy's Shadow illustrated here, demonstrates Schnabel's frequent use of the plate surfaces for large-scale portraiture, mostly of friends and personalities in the art world. Schnabel here makes his own image and links it, as homage, to Andy Warhol, whose date of death is written on the surface.

JULIAN SCHNABEL 26.01.2002 to 21.04.2002 The exhibition of sculptures by Julian Schnabel in the Rupertinum is the most comprehensive presentation of this kind in Austria to date. The works will be presented in the Arkadenhalle and in the court-yard. Schnabel's sculptural oeuvre comprises over 60 works which he created between the years 1982 and 1991.

The exhibition is devoted to colossal bronzes which are mostly composed of found objects. In those bronzes inheres the same familiar theatricality as in his pictures. The titles and themes often emerge from quotations or portrait historical figures respectively people from his environment.

On the one hand there are sculptures which are fascinating by their simplicity, like "Jacqueline", a portrait of Schnabel's wife, or "Napoleon" from the year 1991, a work which he already sketched in the drawing "What to do with a corner in Madrid" in 1978. On the other hand there are works formally and as to the contents complex, like "Galileos table" or "George Washington crossing the Delaware", where the playful symbolism confronts the beholder in an ironic and amusing way with quotations from history.

Schnabel who is a passionate collector creates his sculptures, as already mentioned, with found objects - so the table "George Washington crossing the Delaware" is a casting of a sideboard designed by Vladimir Kagan. In "Galileos table" the table-legs are amphorae which were purchased on a trip in Italy and have already been used in the sculpture "Columns" created in the year 1982. Schnabel continuously reuses his material, for example, the casting mould of an amphora is turned into the base of "Napoleon".

Julian Schnabel was born 1951 in New York, studied at the University of Houston/Texas from 1969 to 1973 and then completed an Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum in New York.

After a first presentation of his "Plate Paintings" - works in large size where the surface consists of broken china - in the Mary Boone Gallery in New York 1978, he became from one second to the other famous in America as well as in Europe. In the following years Schnabel continues to work with three dimensional objects within his painting and from 1982 on he also turns to the creation of sculptures.

His painting, which in the eighties has been described as "neo-expression‎ism", is changed by the text-and word paintings staged in the former abbey Cuartel del Carmen in Sevilla in 1988 into a conceptualistic, political-religious art. The creation of the series known under the title "The recognitions-paintings" was based upon the novel "The recognitions" by William Gaddis, the headings of which Schnabel painted on huge truck-tarps.

Schnabel introduced himself as a film director with sympathetic understanding with the movies "Basquiat" from 1996 and "Before the night falls" from 1999.

Since 1978 Julian Schnabels works have been presented all over the world in numerous exhibitions, a detailed list is available at the website www.artist-info.com .

"Jean-Michel Basquiat &Schnabel"
RECENTLY Vanity Fair ran a short piece on Basquiat, complete with glossy A4's of the films cast and its creator, Julian Schnabel, with his arm around his daughter Lola (who also appears in the film).

Schnabel is a big, burly man with a dark thatch of beard and an intense gaze. A cigarette jutts from his mouth and his gait is one of a bohemian that leans more towards the European state than that of his native America. His expression‎ speaks more of decadence and experience than it does the traditional tormented Van Gogh type figure.
It's easy to picture this artist in the throes of creative ecstacy. A glass of red wine resting on an antique and baroque table, classical music (from the masters) seeping through the air, and a head full of inspiration massaging and staining a virgin canvas.
But to truly understand the invincible spirit of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and his custodian, artist/sculpturist/writer and director of Basquiat, Schnabel, one only has to glance at the haunting and provocative scene where the camera slides up close to the spine of a Gothic, Manhattan building. A wave acts as a backdrop to the decaying concrete, and as the wave curls and pirouhettes into a tubular scroll, a lone surfer rides its edge, bending, swaying, weaving and contorting with its density, power and strength.
This aquatic metaphor is the key that unlocks the doorway to the soul of both the film's writer and director and the former grafitti artist Basquiat - known to the street world as SAMO, his tag.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was a man plagued by loneliness, self-destruction, the belief that people did not really accept him for who he was and, who was later daubed "the art world's closest equivalent to James Dean."
He inhabited a ultra-real world frequented by fellow artists such as Keith Haring, LA II and Futura 2000 where his strength lay in his ability to stress the universiality of instruments - despite his use of black imagery. Like his friend Andy Warhol, Basquiat's works stretch across a wide frame of cultural reference, holding a mirror to teh modern metropolis.
Schnabel - a former friend of the genius whose urban collages set the '80s art world on fire and was a friend and confidante ofWarhol - captured the Haitian-born artist's rawest and crudest essence within the neuro-optic samba through Basquiat's lofts, galleries and sprawling creative freedom of the imagination. "Water is an overpowering force that is much stronger than we are," Schnabel agrees.
"I think there's a kind of optimism that occurred in the beginning of the film, where Jean-Michel sees the surfer and the bright sunlight and as we go through the film, the sea becomes more ominous and everything becomes darker and more dangerous, and finally, there's that possibility of drowning. I think that those images of the sea were like a barometer for his personal state, besides the fact that he was always talking about escape and escaping from New York.
"I think the wave is like showing his dream. He was sort of freed by his imagination, but at the same time his imagination got him into all sorts of trouble and for myself the sea has always represented freedom in someway. I've always had this nearness to drowning and yet still felt compelled to paddle out in big surf," he pauses. "There's no safety net really. You do it because of the burst of power. Maybe that's like painting, in a way, I probably see surfing and painting in a similar way."
Basquiat, portrayed with tenderness, tragedy and vulnerability by Tony Award winner Jeffrey Wright (Angels In America, Bring In 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk) was a role that Schnabel agrees many young actors would kill for. But there's an underlying tension when Wright's name is mentioned that makes its too easy to supsect that there was no great love lost between these two artists. "It drove him absolutely mad," he confesses, "I think he was having a really difficult time and he thought I was being too hard on him, but I had a very specific idea of how I thought Jean-Michel would respond ..."
Schnabel, himself a controversial artist and reputed enfant terrible, surfed his own wave by weaving together a tapestry of friends such as Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, Parker Posey, Courtney Love, Wilem Dafoe and David Bowie (whose portrayal of Andy Warhol "is worthy of an Academy Award") to breathe life into some of the heady deities and powermongers who ruled the '80s New York art scene.
When the film screened at the London Film Festival, Schnabel and Christopher Walken, whose depiction of a journalist probing the depths of Basquiat was eerily accurate and worthy of a cluster of awards, made their way to the bar mid-way through the film: "I wanted to go with him so as not to leave him alone in the bar," Schnabel remembers, "and that was one of the first times I had walked out of the movie theatre and didn't sit through the performance.
"When I came back everyone was waiting for me to say something about the film, but I had missed being part of the communial sense of loss that I think everybody feels when they are sitting there, and talking to them I just felt like, why did I come into this room when everybody else was in another mental state? It's funny, humans are hypnotised by those drenched with talent; they also can't take their eyes away from the violent accident that often occurs to those people.
"I wanted to make a movie about Jean-Michel in particular, and about an artist's life in this culture in general. Jean-Michel had the success and fame that an artist wishes to achieve. He burned bright, caught on fire and burned up. He paid the price, sealing his fate with his early death (of a heroin overdose). He became what he longed to be, and he fulfilled what his audience waited for him to become. Was his life a tragedy? I don't know. He certainly accomplished a lot more than most people do who live to be 80."
So did Schnabel feel that he was truly able to be objective about a close friend and creative colleague? Was he able to distance himself enough to give a balanced depiction? "I think I was very objective. I mean, I think I was very subjective. People have asked, 'do you think you were too close to the subject matter and was that a problem?' And I've said, 'No! Absolutely not. I think you are much better knowing more than less. I mean, if you have more information the more distance you can have and the more objective you can be.
"I'm not a cold person. Whatever I do, I'm more of an Indian than a cowboy. I think the film is filled with feeling but it's not sentimental. I think it's sad and more sonorous without being morose or apologetic. But I think it's powerful and heart-breaking. I guess I witnessed the death of a couple of my friends, I watched the world change and I watched this blandished society, in a sense, edge him onto the next world and through very poor excuse of criticism a lot of times.
"Critics insinuated themselves into the relationship, they attacked Jean-Michel for being Andy Warhol's protege, called Andy a vampire, and y'know, it ate away at their friendship. They stopped seeing each other for a while, and when Andy died Jean-Michel was heartbroken over the whole thing. Jean-Michel receded after Andy's death and never really came back." Schnabel had his first solo painting exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery, New York City, in February 1979. Since then, Schnabel's paintings and sculptures have been exhibited all over the world. His work is included in private and public collections including New York's Museum Of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art, Paris' Centre Georges Pompidou; London's Tate Gallery, and Tokyo's Metropolitan Museum.
But, perhaps, one of Julian Schnabel's greatest gifts to the world will ultimately be the vivid celluloid portrait of Basquiat that moves with the fluidity and danger of a surfer surfing his greatest wave yet ...
Director: Julian Schnabel HAITAN-born artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was a man who seemed at times as if he were too fragile for the world he inhabited. Ironically, his was a world that crawled with artists, poets, counter-cultural icons, agents, journalists, critics, drug pushers and groupies that all demanded their pound of flesh. Just as those same deities left their mark on our society and culture, none moreso than Andy Warhol and his Pop Art legacy, so too did Basquiat.
Much speculation about the friendship between the two genius' ate its way into their friendship and resulted in Basquiat wearing the tag of "Warhol's protege and mascot" (others conceded that Warhol was a vampire when it came to his young friend). Artist/sculpturist/writer, director and friend - Julian Schnabel - who has recreated the colour, creativity and tragedy of Basquiat's life never saw the artist as that. What he saw was a loner who felt that the world was often against him, and that people did not like him for who he was. He also believed that Basquiat was a man who understood the dichotomy of both his own and Warhol's life.
"THIS IS THE TRUE VOICE OF THE GUTTER", Jean-Michel scrawled in graffiti on a wall and that was how he perceived himself. With dreadlocks askew and a perpetual look of innocence and surprise glazing his brown eyes, he would use tabletops as canvas for his artwork and walked beyond the fringe of life, bohemianism and art: "Everyone wants to jump on the Van Gogh bandwagon," he mused cynically, and continued to live out that very aphorism.
With a cast that would make even Robert Altman's mouth water, Julian Schnabel has pooled his resources of famous friends; Michael Wincott, Benicio Del Toro, David Bowie, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, Parker Posey, Courtney Love and Tatum O'Neal and created within Basquiat's urban tango a visceral picture of art, desire, decadence, torment and sadness.
"Beauty is possible even in the most wretched," Basquiat sniffs in the early part of the film, as he creates primal Creolian collages and landscapes of urban turmoil. It isn't long before his and Warhol's paths cross and the '80s New York art scene has twisted its way through his soul, and when Basquiat meets the exotic and ethereal Gina Cardinale (Claire Forlani), it appears that salvation comes his way. But after succumbing to the lure of his first smack hit even she cannot reach him.
From the age of 19 through to 27 Basquiat soared high. He knew the highs and lows of creation, tore through the sky like a comet and crashed back down to earth in the footsteps of his romantised heroes Jimi Hendrix and Charlie Parker. His mother's incarceration in a mental institution haunted him throughout his short life, as did people's ability to wound his sensitive feelings.
This is the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat and a stunning realisation of one artist's vision of another. Through Julian Schnabel, Basquiat lives again.

"Rorschach Paintings"
Basquiat: A Film by Julian Schnabel I Shot Andy Warhol: A Film by Mary Harron Andy Warhol is at work on a painting. He is transferring to blank canvas a plain red logo, a flying horse. Nothing gives away the artist's hand—nothing, unless the mechanical means alone make it a Warhol. Yet he shows obvious pleasure as puts down the stencil and steps back. This one is going to be a collaboration, and now it is the turn of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the shooting star he helped launch, well, over lunch.
Basquiat came in right off the street with a handful of color sketches, like cards for a transparent trick. Warhol's lunch companion wanted to brush him off, but Warhol was eager and unassuming. Not that he smiled exactly. He was too spontaneous and much too knowing.
Maybe he caught the younger man's mix of flamboyance, slyness, and naivety, so much like himself. And now he has invited Basquiat into his art. Warhol's is an art of betrayal. Now he will be, literally, a collaborator. I want to trace that act of betrayal through two new movies—Basquiat and I Shot Andy Warhol—and Warhol's late Rorschach paintings. It turns out to renew those early silkscreens for me. And it turns out to involve the drama of Postmodernism as a kind of Modernism under erasure.
Schnabel's Basquiat The scenes are from the movie Basquiat. The director, the painter Julian Schnabel, caught on in the same years of hype and heroin. Warhol's pleasure could be his too, a defiant statement of sober dedication to his art. He too knew cynicism in the art world at first hand, and he too could have meditated on the double edge of his influence.
With his smashed plates and painterly gestures, Schnabel wanted good old-fashioned painting as expression‎. At the same time, he questioned whether art could ever match a painter's outsize ego—and which was the art world to value more? Warhol's stencil is one among thousands of gestures of self-effacement, from those first famous Brillo boxes—and how long before there is nothing left to efface? Now the generations collide in Warhol's studio, and painting must once again be given the lie.
Basquiat likes simple icons and big gestures, but his icons and his gestures. Filling the brush with white paint, he takes a casual swipe at the back of the horse, wiping it out. Warhol reacts perfectly: that was his favorite part! David Bowie plays Warhol's shy outrage straight. It is part of a wonderfully funny, knowing performance.
Did Warhol discover Basquiat, or did the aspiring artist thrust himself on the stage? Was Basquiat using Warhol, or was a fading idol using a younger man's instant of celebrity? Was Basquiat getting back at him now, or had Basquiat already immersed himself in Warhol's endless reproduction and obliteration of images? Can an artist approach painting with a love near to innocence and somehow never notice his erasure of its meanings?
Warhol's self-effacement Probably without knowing it, Basquiat has echoed the pattern of Warhol's early paintings. Those first Pop works still pack a wallop, and they do it by a gesture of effacement.
Warhol starts with frightening scenes, like an electric chair or a car crash, and with images of the things he loved. I imagine that Marilyn Monroe carried the same intensity for him as she did for my own mother. He was not so far after all from an artist of the past. In another age, he might have been recording the terror of a martyrdom or the eternal grace of the Virgin. Well, he might have dressed them up a bit, to look more like an Ingres.
On the other hand, he loved those images almost as much for their banality. His silk screens do not create the numbing repetition; they reproduce it. It is all too real. The automobile represents the leading unnatural cause of death in America. The deaths are as meaningless and unnecessary as in the painting. I think of the automobile fenders accepted as formal materials by John Chamberlain—or the tire hanging over Robert Rauschenberg's goat only a couple of years before.
Mass culture had helped empty Warhol's subjects long before him, too. Warhol knew well the film star reduced to pop icon. He knew the divide between a murderer and a saint, the sex goddess and an eternal virgin. He acted out the anonymity of any execution: if someone remains an individual, then I cannot kill. Reality had anticipated Pop Art. It had preserved terror and love at the risk of their loss of meaning. Warhol takes another step, however, to insist on their banality. He repeats the image as a decorative pattern, along a grid, and he adopts mechanical techniques to create it.
And still the power and personal meaning will not go away. Warhol's painterly hand shows it. One sees it in the jarring irregularities of the silk-screen reproduction. One sees it in the huge scale of his art. Like de Kooning painting on into senility or Wayne Thiebaud basing his Pop Art on lush cake icing, Warhol never gave up on on the aura of Abstract Expression‎ism.
Now there comes another twist—I cannot say a final twist. When Gary Simmons erases his own chalk marks, one feels almost a sense of release. Here, however, the irregularities trivialize things further, as if the painter cared so little for his images that he could create and erase them at will or at random. Reference to Abstract Expression‎ism comes with an air of mockery, but the laughter is none too gleeful.
An early Warhol keeps cancelling emotions that refuse to die. Like Warhol, I want to put these things out of my mind, and I cannot. Like Warhol, I want the world to deaden my sensation so I will not have to deal with it. And that means the world can sell me back my experience all the faster, and the prospect terrifies me.
Under the eraser Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher, has described what happens when one tries to unseat the past. A simple negation, he argues, has a way of accepting the old terms of debate: it has, after all, to grapple with them. The old categories triumph, but only because one has rejected the ideas they underlie.
Derrida wants another way to argue, one that does not try so hard to succeed. New terms can be more productive if they are asserted less strongly, if they can be read as old terms under the marks of erasure.
Warhol's art lived under erasure, and that is why it manages to live still. Egoistically but in vain, Basquiat hoped to appropriate the mark of erasure for himself. In fact, Derrida's phrase in French, sous rature, although usually translated as "under erasure," really means crossed out, like written text under revision. It encompasses the reduction of an image to a familiar sign, like Warhol's stencil. Along with Basquiat, I want to be erasing Warhol.
Make no mistake: erasing Warhol is not the same as turning him into a failed Abstract Expression‎ist—a Schnabel himself, if you like. Warhol made dreams of self-expression‎ and self-assertion simply impossible. Negation is not a window on existential nothingness. The present tense of erasing is not a fancy substitute for art's ethereal presence, whatever that means. Its mark is not Cy Twombly's studied handwriting. It is about the compulsion to cancel, to repeat, and to remember.
In the Symposium, just when Socrates has taught us to raise ourselves safely above desire, Alcibiades staggers in drunk. Plato cannot help reminding us of what we are supposed not to be missing. Neither can Andy Warhol.
Rorschach tests Not surprisingly, perhaps, art history has had trouble remembering. Critics at first saw mostly the anonymity of Pop Art, a rejection of Abstract Expression‎ism, and an assault on the comfortable realm of fine art. They saw factory reproduction of familiar objects. An important critic and philosopher, Arthur C. Danto, asked what happens once one can no longer distinguish Pop recycling and "real things."
An exhibition just this fall shows that the forgetting continues into Warhol's later career. The Gagosian gallery displayed Warhol's 1984 Rorschach paintings. He created them much like Rorschach's ink blots, pouring on paint and folding the canvas. At fourteen feet tall, the series in Soho was larger than life. (Easel-sized versions were simultaneously on display at Gagosian's uptown gallery.) Like totems, their symmetry and shining surface evoke an eerie human presence.
In her catalogue essay, Rosalind E. Krauss describes the Rorschach paintings as an assault on Abstract Expression‎ism: their anonymity usurps their authority. And certainly poured metallic paint and the automatism of the fold do invoke Jackson Pollock or Robert Motherwell.
However, she recognizes only half the bargain. She does not notice that the paintings can work the other way, too. They also ask about the remains of authority in a culture of anonymity. They accept without apology the authority of a blue-chip, cut-throat dealer and a fancy catalogue (with, naturally, an essay by a critic who is better known than the paintings). They challenge one to read more into them. After all, they are tests, and Rorschach tests at that.
If Danto thought the Brillo boxes in Warhol's studio were identical to the ones in the drug store, he was not looking closely. If Krauss finds only mathematical symmetry, she is not letting herself feel. They recover Warhol for the world of fine art, but at the price of denying a record of desires and fears.
Danto and Krauss see through the work, when they should be seeing it too. They see its effacement of meaning as over and done, not as always reasserted and tantalizingly incomplete. With art so obviously, Too much White-out Erasing Warhol takes account of a depressing fact. It helps address his steady decline in interest after his first Pop paintings. Oh sure, everyone knows it. There is that boring Warhol Factory, with all the portraits of Mick Jagger. There is the searching after celebrities and celebrity, the lifestyle that placed parties ahead of work.
Everyone knows it, and everyone, of course, knows just what to make of it. Depending on one's dedication to high art, one knows that Warhol's career either betrays his true genius or invalidates his work. Everyone is wrong. He would not miss so often without the power of his early work and its logic of self-destruction. The more often he repeats the mark of erasure, the harder it gets to read. Even the mark of abstract painters since 1970 runs less risk.
Erasure is always a twin gesture, of denial and recovery. Once Warhol became important, the recuperation of his work for art grew more and more automatic. Therefore the denials had to grow louder and louder, and the emotions got deader and deader.
He had to find bolder tokens of anonymity, such as the Factory or an exhibition of actual Brillo boxes. He had to factor his own stardom into the equation, recycling himself like any other icon. And this all took place against a background of a fearsomely efficient commercial culture, in which denials grow harder to hear anyhow. Marilyn Monroe had given way to Jackie O. and Lady Di—from the talented actress as celebrity to celebrity as a role.
Shooting Warhol Erasing Warhol means that there is more to his late career than sycophants, knock-offs, and discos. There are, at least, the Rorschach paintings and the sympathetic character in Basquiat. Actually, the same month offered two fictional Andy Warhols, and the movies pretty much agree on what he was like. I Shot Andy Warhol deals with his mid-1960s' fame. That falls between early Pop and the art scene of Basquiat. Jared Harris makes a decidedly forgettable Warhol compared to Bowie, as if he were still more than half deadened from his part in Natural Born Killers. Even his wig looks unconvincing. Mary Harron, the director, does a poor job herself evoking the art. When Warhol's acolytes are at work, they look as if they were making stag films on LSD. In fact, they were taking risky moves toward an avant-garde cinema and video art, such as Empire, a twenty-four hour shot of the Empire State Building. And they let in women, like Thomas Eakins and his daring studio almost a century ago. Fortunately, this is also Lili Taylor's movie. The actress lends almost too much appeal to Valerie Solanis, the woman who really did shoot Andy Warhol. Everyone insists that she is annoying and unattractive, but Taylor never let me believe it, and that makes film sense. Solanis came to the Factory with a message—of equal parts feminism, wit, and sheer lunacy. She was peddling her manifesto for SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men. Reading it even now, I hardly know whether to admire it, to laugh with it, to deride it, or to run for cover. Still, what interests me is Warhol. Exactly as in Basquiat, he projects a sincere love of his art, a childlike innocence, and a strong critical eye. He accepts the eccentric, pushy newcomer where others will not, because he runs the Factory to give creativity a chance. It was really the first alternative space! He draws the line at anything that interferes with work, whether Basquiat's drugs or Solanis's slender hold on reality. He also leaves newcomers unsure whether he has been creating them or using them. Solanis is dead certain that Warhol stole from her—so certain that she pulls a gun. His art is above cynicism, and yet it drives others to anger and self-defeat. It erases them, too.
Block buster It makes sense that Warhol has been everywhere at once, with a big show plus two movies. Art has recovered from the soaring prices and extreme careerism of the 1980s, but the legacy of cynicism persists. The eraser persists. Part of blockbuster is buster.
Museums still depend on blockbusters, and galleries still bank on stars. Cindy Sherman still ups the ante with each new exhibition, even at the risk of becoming more shallow than suits her prodigious talent. Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst still get tons of publicity out of art's carnival. The dilemma has driven Soho's fanciest galleries to a neighborhood a couple of miles away.
At least it has given Warhol a healthy shot of relevance. I can now re-experience Pop Art and its logic of erasure. I can almost feel myself shying away from Claus Oldenburg's grand eraser as Pop sculpture. Stop me before I grab the electronic White-out and mark over this whole page. Modernism and Postmodernism repeat that gesture on each other every day.
The electric chairs were powerful stuff. Too bad their nature, as Warhol himself came to see it, made him the progenitor of Koons, Hirst, and others. In his Basquiat collaborations, I believe that he was trying to recover his art's former spontaneity and connection to a world outside the disco. I think he was doing a lousy job by then. But then I never much liked to dance.