Love-Hounds-request@EDDIE.MIT.EDU.UUCP (02/24/87)
Really-From: rutgers!uwvax!astroatc!gtaylor (Mais, ou sont les neiges d'antan?) >Andy Warhol >1928-1987 Once long ago, I happened upon an exhibition of Warhol's work (Castelli?) in a large exhibit space. The subject of this particular set of works was an familiar portrait of Mao Xidong (easily 12 feet high), silkscreened in the usual Warholian way over this *other* painting in bright colours. These particular sets of stuff painted underneath that single, mass-produced newspaper image were the complete antithesis of the screened image. They were bright smears of paint that could almost have reminded you of someone like DeKooning, save for the fact that they just barely synched up with the screened image. Given their scale, the effect on me at the time was so strong that I can still remember it rather clearly: This enormous image of a single face thrust in my face in the kind of impossible scale that larger-then-life ideologies usually require-and there, underneath the huge image, the gradually emerging sense of uniqueness and the individual mark of the brush-tugging at the huge and staid image. And now he is dead. At some point, we all will die. In the meantime, as Auden says, "the words of the dead are modified in the guts of the living." I hope he was prepared for his death. I will remember his work while I am alive, and tell other people about it. Stories and concensus. -- "As one who sees within a dream, and, later/the passion that had been imprinted stays,/but nothing of the rest returns to mind,/such am I- for my my vision almost fades/completely, yet it distills within/my heart the sweetness that was born of it."(Dante/Paradiso,XXXIII 58-63)