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In memory of Andy Warhol (an experience of his work, anyway)

From: rutgers!uwvax!astroatc!gtaylor (Mais, ou sont les neiges d'antan?)
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 87 14:20:32 CST
Subject: In memory of Andy Warhol (an experience of his work, anyway)
Newsgroups: mod.music.gaffa
Organization: Haute Vulgarisation, Madison WI

>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)