"Warhol: Dead at 21".

"WARHOL: DEAD AT 21"

World of Wonder Storefront Gallery, Los Angeles CA January 11 * February 22, 2008

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Warhol died on February 22, 1987 from possible negligence following routine gallbladder surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Now, some 21 years later, WOW curators Steven Corfe, James St. James, and Thairin Smothers have organized a show to celebrate Warhol's legendary influence and persona, effectively replacing Warhol's lifetime fear of doctors and hospitals with modern-day obsessive reiteration. Tarted up to look somewhat like the rest of the sex and paraphernalia shops that litter Hollywood Boulevard, the opening "Night of a Thousand Warhols" even extended to offering platinum wigs at the door, which wisely most attendees refused to wear.

Playing up Andy's bedpan humor, which is often overlooked in the rush to legitimize his work, Allen Hatch's Warhol's Gallbladder Operation Performed By Rembrandt's Circle (2000)--a wicked parody of the canonic The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632)--here documents or "screens" the operation that supposedly did Warhol in, complete with a bloody Campbell's Soup can. Read in today's context, just as the hospital staff was overloading Andy with the fluids that eventually brought on his fatal heart attack, the artist and his endless progeny continue to clog the art system in an endless Oedipal cycle. Similarly, given that all these portraits speak of death (that of the unique image), Jason Mecier's Andy Warhol (2007)--a collage of everyday objects delineating Warhol's face against a background of Campbell Soup cans--can easily be read as a perverse, if oxymoronic, Catholic altarpiece. Much of the work in "Warhol: Dead at 21" abides by the same themes of devotion, death, and disaster. Yet ironically, hardly any of it is mass-reproduced via Warholian silk-screens or "stock photography," drawing instead on the artist's other main preoccupations of simulation, burlesque, and cloaking devices.

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Two photographic prints, by artist duo Andrew Schneider and Mathu Andersen, fully resonate with what was taking place in the simulacral Factory on that and all subsequent nights. Titled Zachary/Candy and, apropos Christopher Makos's spiky-haired Warhol portrait of 1986, Andrew/Warhol (both 2008), indeed anyone can be Warhol, which presumably the artist wouldn't mind, and in fact urged everyone to try on for size during his own lifetime. Furthermore, both prints re-perform how Warhol and his 1960s entourage lived their lives as artworks, turning the complexity of human existence into a cool aesthetic turn--even unto death, as is demonstrated by Peter Hujar's hauntingly similar photograph, Candy Darling On Her Deathbed (1974).

One of the last works that Warhol made was a computer-generated self-portrait, so one wonders what he would have done with the technology available today. In view of such a prospect, WOW treats us to a Warholian fast-forward, and in so doing points both to Andy's profound anticipation of the power of digital cameras and the internet to expand the images of self forever outward, and the curse that entails for whoever treads this course. Throughout the run of the show, scheduled daytime events could be viewed online at www.wowtv.tv, and there was also access to "Warhol TV" on http://warhol-tv.wowtv. tv, a project Warhol himself started near the end of his life. A heart-clogging excess of Warholia ensued, turning everything into a potential copy of itself. At the same time as showing just how pivotal Warholism remains for the current era, "Warhol: Dead at 21" also had the misfortune of forecasting its demise.