Advocate on Warhol Retrospective
More on the Warhol Retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Last weekend Daze linked to a New York Times review which criticized the show for downplaying Warhol's gay sensibility and homoerotic art works. Three weeks earlier, Robert Summers made similar criticisms in The Advocate. "But even though I welcome a Warhol retrospective, I must say that both the selection of the artworks (and the calculated omissions) and the scripting of Warhol as an asexual (read: heterosexual) art historical figure disappoint me." Summers may have a valid point about the selection of artworks, but he loses me here:
The retrospective fails to contextualize any of the artwork on display. Quite noticeable is the absence of any explanatory wall text that would aid the general viewer in understanding both the context and significance of the works. It would have been instructive for the exhibition to have explained that many of Warhol's early drawings, especially his homoerotic nude drawings of boys, were first exhibited at the Bodley Gallery in 1956 but were dismissed as "smut" by critics and that they were dropped by the Tanager Gallery because of their blatant homoeroticism — indeed, the reception of these images was Warhol’s first experience of art world homophobia.
Ugh, count me with the curators on this one. The modern museum trend of placing long, didactic, jargony explanatory text alongside the artworks annoys the hell out of me. Put the commentary in the exhibition catalog and let the artworks stand by themselves.
