TALES OF LOHR: "KAWS+WARHOL" AT THE ANDY WARHOL MUSEUM
On the paradoxically morbid new exhibit at the Warhol; plus, "Factory Roll Call" celebrates the Might of Mary
There have always been clear intersection points between morbidity, the uncanny, and kitsch in American art. From the tackily haunting big-eyed paintings of Margaret Keane, to the picture-book surrealism of Mark Ryden, to the posters and blacklight imagery adorning the walls of goth kids at college campuses across the country, there is something about ostensibly user-friendly, frequently colorful and fun-loving popular art that dovetails, in unexpected but inevitable ways, with notions of evanescence, the supernatural, decay, and death. The work of Andy Warhol offers its own persistent intermingling of pop schlock and the finality of the void, with increasingly distorted death’s-head silkscreen renderings of Marilyn Monroe; becalmed, surprisingly moving late-period interpretations of Da Vinci’s Last Supper; and an extended series of Screen Test-style daily filmed portraits of Warhol lover Philip Fagan, which at one point the Pop artist intended to call Philip Dying. This is to say nothing of Warhol works that offer a far blunter glimpse of the Undiscovered Country, such as the Death and Disaster silkscreen depictions of car crashes, electric chairs, and suicide aftermath; his series of solemn glimpses of Jackie Kennedy, both disembarking at Love Field and in her funereal raiment; and still lives of skulls, guns, and other emblems of violence and the grave.
I was at first skeptical when the Andy Warhol Museum announced that its most recent exhibition, focusing on the connections between Warhol and the work of the Brooklyn-based artist known as KAWS (born Brian Donnelly), would foreground the artists’ twinned obsessions with death, pain, and agony. I was admittedly only noddingly familiar with the work of KAWS, which draws heavily on canvas-based and sculptural depictions of an array of vintage-cartoon-ready proprietary figures, complete with puffy Mickey Mouse-style gloves and shorts that sport the Disney rodent’s trademark big round buttons. Sure, these figures, from the puffy Michelin-bodied Chum, to the more blatantly Mickey-esque Companion, to the fuzzy Blue Elmo-like BFF, sport X’es for eyes, just like any character in classic animation who’s taken a fatal blow to the skull. But does that really mean I’m supposed to look at these goofballs and reflect on my own mortality? These issues are further compounded by complicated, Warhol-reminiscent issues surrounding the authorship of KAWS’ art. He has embarked on numerous high-profile commercial collaborations, with everyone from the Uniqlo clothing chain, to the Brooklyn Nets basketball team, to General Mills cereal, for whom KAWS designed a series of special boxes featuring their cast of Breakfast Monsters (Franken Berry, Count Chocula, et al.). Combine these “Business Art”-ready capitalist endeavors with the necessity of utilizing outside fabricators to render some of his largest-scale pieces, and it’s no wonder a collage-artist colleague of mine has described KAWS’ art as “the product of looking at Jeff Koons and thinking ‘I could do that.’”
But as the works of KAWS and Warhol are presented and juxtaposed within the Warhol Museum’s new exhibition (the last to be personally curated by outgoing director Patrick Moore), the tenuous threads of threat and fragility that bind our lives likewise coherently link together the art on display, and the overall effect, indeed, is somber, sobering, and unexpectedly genuinely powerful. The installation above, in which a Warhol silkscreen of a brutal car crash scene looms over a face-down sculpture of KAWS’ Companion, hammers home the point with almost comical directness: No matter how many layers of silkscreen distortion or bubbly, rubbery animated bodies try to distance us from the implications of the imagery, it is an immutable fact that death has come, for Companion, for the unfortunate motorist in Warhol’s piece, and, eventually, for all of us in the gallery absorbing the works in question.
Everywhere you turn, death, violence, and pain stalks KAWS’ only inadvertently amusing avatars. One striking setup features an anguished sculpture of a slumped-over Companion, head in hands, watched over by a projection of Warhol’s voyeuristic pleasure-or-pain short film Blow Job, and by two canvases featuring close-ups of an X-eyed Spongebob Squarepants caught in a frenzy of anxiety. A five-canvas series of at-first cheery images becomes increasingly frenzied and entropic as an X-eyed Elmo rips through the canvas, then BFF rips through Elmo right back, the convivial interactivity of so much colorful children’s entertainment weaponized and literally torn to shreds. The formidable square canvas TIDE (2020) features Companion taking a moonlight swim…or perhaps floating out to sea, a lifeless waterborne hulk sans Viking funeral. One painting, enigmatically titled simply NEW YORK (2018), shows a pair of Mickey-gloved hands grasping at air as the figure that bears them sinks deep below the surface of a blood-evocative bright crimson puddle.
The sculptures of KAWS’ creations, some human-sized, others larger than life, and at least one so monumental it is displayed in the small open-air parklet across the street from the Warhol, are among the exhibition’s most affecting works, simply because the sheer scope of the pieces amplifies the fraught emotions they convey. GONE (2018) shows Companion, his face its usual dead-eyed mask, carrying the prone, sagging body of BFF, less like newlyweds crossing the threshold than a pair of supplicants piercing the final veil. Chum, whose sturdy, barrel-chested physique would mark him as a bluff, athletic bully type in the classic cartoons he resembles, is here envisioned as a downcast, slump-shouldered reject in the bittersweet full-size sculpture WHAT PARTY (2020). Even the mammoth wooden sculpture TOGETHER, installed outside the Warhol for the duration of this exhibition, features figures embracing not out of affection, but seemingly in mutual bereaved consolation. Even when KAWS forsakes the use of his Silly Symphonies stand-ins and engages in straight self-portraiture, the result is redolent of death. Here, a bronze rendering of the artist’s head, complete with jaunty baseball cap, is disembodied, lying prone on a short elevated platform, as if it’s freshly rolled there from the guillotine. The looming specter is further driven home by the sculpture’s proximity to one of Warhol’s spike-haired, hollowed-out grand-scale self-portrait silkscreens, created from a photo taken less than a year before the artist’s 1987 death.
Still, those who continue to perceive KAWS as a representative of contemporary art’s most mercenary mass-extruded tendencies will find their suspicions of this work’s ultimate inanity potentially confirmed by one of the exhibition’s largest sections, presented on the Warhol Museum’s fourth floor space. Here, in homage to Warhol’s cow wallpaper, which, along with his floating Silver Cloud balloons, made up the entirety of a notorious 1966 exhibition at New York’s Castelli Gallery, the Warhol team has covered three walls of a narrow section of a gallery with copies of the KAWS-designed General Mills monster cereal boxes. There are also framed large-scale acrylics of each of his four box designs (yes, he even did Frute Brute) and plasticine sculptures of the quartet of sweet-toothed creatures that look for all the world like blown-up versions of the kinds of toy surprises one would have found in one of these boxes back in the day. The visual impact is undeniably appealing, but KAWS simply has not engaged with these commercial mascots in a transformative enough way to make them feel worthy of the other pieces sharing the exhibition. This point is further emphasized by the presence, within the adjacent space, of 1983 Warhol canvases depicting his take on vintage children’s toys. These pieces, such as a rumpled Kermit-like frog doll rendered in scraggly outline, or a toy wind-up drumming panda complete with kitschy Chinese-style lettering, offer a perspective that upends our usually colorful, soothing reminiscences of such playthings, in a way the KAWS cereal boxes never seriously approach.
Of course, one of the reasons serious art scholars and connoisseurs still find themselves grappling with Warhol is because his work was kitsch and substance, both a celebration of Pop mundanity and a jaundiced deconstruction of it. An embrace of the day-to-dailyness of life and an eyes-open stare into the incertitude of all that awaits us once our eyes glaze over with shaky-lined X’es for the last time. It is hard to say, as he enters his 50th year, if KAWS’ work will show anything like the cultural staying power of Andy Warhol at his finest. But there is enough meat on the bones of KAWS+WARHOL to suggest that, even if his art fades from the conversation once he himself has shuffled off the coil, the conversations are worth having today. The art is worth contemplating now. And the cream, as it has with Warhol, will soon enough rise to the surface, like a marshmallow in a bowl of sugary cereal…or a puffy-gloved corpse by the light of a cold, stony, thoroughly lifeless moon.
KAWS+WARHOL is on view at the Andy Warhol Museum through January 20. For more on the exhibition, and to reserve tickets, visit the Warhol Museum website.
FACTORY ROLL CALL
MARY WORONOV (1943 - )
In cultivating and curating the menagerie of “Superstars” that coalesced around his Factory in the mid- to late 1960s, Andy Warhol was fortunate, among the array of vapid pretty boys and striking but essentially talentless young women within his entourage, to occasionally draw in an individual of genuine, unmistakable gifts. The most truly talented of Warhol’s Superstars include the turbulent but mesmerizing actor and monologist Ondine; the fine-eyed interior designer (and former Warhol lover) Jed Johnson; the combative and difficult but singularly original filmmaker Paul Morrissey; and the protean, poetic rock musician and songwriter Lou Reed. One of the true standouts from the pack was Mary Woronov, who was ushered into the Factory under the auspices of stalwart Factory jack-of-all-trades Gerard Malanga, and who has gone one to a prolific, influential career as a star of both cult and mainstream cinema.
The Florida-born, Brooklyn Heights-raised Woronov met Malanga in 1963, when she was a student at Cornell University studying sculpture and art. Malanga was immediately struck by her shading-towards-androgynous looks and powerful affect, and he shot a few reels of film of her forcefully striding across a bridge near the campus. Some time later, during a class trip to Manhattan, Woronov paid a visit to the Factory, where she sat for a Screen Test and, as with Malanga, impressed the artist with her considerable presence. She soon became a regular at the Factory (she ultimately sat for seven Screen Tests, including two each with Malanga and the poet George Millaway), where she became fast (and speed-enhanced) friends with Ondine, Factory caretaker Billy Linich, and the cadre of amphetamine-fueled witching-hour dwellers known among the Factory crew as The Mole People. Her no-nonsense strength was brilliantly spotlighted in several reels of The Chelsea Girls; in one, she plays the eponymous “Hanoi Hannah,” lording it imperiously over a cowed roomful of women including Ingrid Superstar (who Woronov, in life, genuinely despised) and Susan Bottomly, aka International Velvet. Warhol tried to brand Woronov herself with the Factory-read nickname Mary Might, but it never quite stuck. Woronov’s other crucial contribution to the Factory’s output was as part of the visual presentation of the early stage performances of the Velvet Underground. As Lou Reed and his bandmates bashed away onstage, Malanga and Woronov (the latter frequently wearing a face-concealing BDSM mask) would taunt and tantalize one another as they entwined their bodies in a whip. Though Woronov, like many of the most talented Factory members, would eventually break from the scene to go her own way, she never forgot the contribution of those years, and would compare her relationship with Warhol to the one between Lancelot and King Arthur.
In 1970, Woronov married her first husband, Theodore Gershuny, and appeared in several of his films, including the wild slasher flick Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972), which also featured fellow Warholians Ondine, Tally Brown, Candy Darling, and Jack Smith. In 1973, the same year Woronov and Gershuny divorced, she found her way to Broadway, when, while understudying for Julie Newmar in a production of the David Rabe play Boom Boom Room, she was given the role outright when Newmar was fired during pre-production. Woronov would go on to win a Theater World Award for her portrayal.
Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, Woronov continued to rack up film and television appearances, amassing a resume of roles in major favorites among aficionados of cult cinema. Three of her most celebrated roles came in films directed by her frequent co-star Paul Bartel: 1975’s Roger Corman-produced sci-fi bloodbath Death Race 2000; 1982’s cannibal comedy Eating Raoul, which Bartel also wrote in addition to co-starring; and 1989’s Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills. Other credits include her memorable turn as the loathsome Principal Togar in the Ramones-showcasing Rock ‘N Roll High School (released in 1979, the same year Woronov moved from New York to Los Angeles); 1984’s sci-fi comedy horror flick Night of the Comet; and guest roles on a spate of television series, everything from Charlie’s Angels and Logan’s Run to Mr. Belvedere and Family Matters. One of her most memorable appearances came through her connections to the L.A. punk scene, as she played the hateful, Pepsi-withholding mother of the narrator of Suicidal Tendencies’ hardcore classic “Institutionalized” (the father in the video is portrayed by David Lynch regular and Eraserhead star Jack Nance).
Woronov continues to enjoy occasional acting gigs; one of her most recent credits was in the bizarre Netflix short Frankenstein’s Monster’s Monster, Frankenstein (2019), starring Stranger Things’ David Harbour. In 1995, she published Swimming Underground, her memoir of the Factory years, which is regarded by critics and Warholian scholars as one of the finest volumes penned by a Warhol insider. She has also, like Warhol before her, become a prolific and accomplished painter, with the excoriating Francis Bacon cited as one of her signal influences. In 2022, the Palm Springs Cultural Center presented The Story of the Red Shoe, a retrospective exhibition of her painting work. The name Mary Might may not have withstood the test of time, but the might of Mary Woronov burns brightly still.