Andy Warhol
Mao
silkscreen
1972
Purchase
What it means to be queer has become a frequent discussion not only among my students but also among my peers who had long ago embraced LGBT identities. Reclaiming the term “queer” from the realm of pejoratives, which had once signified the right to and pride in living lives unfettered from heteronormativity, suddenly held new possibilities, particularly in the context of a tide driving LGBT people into normalcy. While no one regretted the demise of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell or the Defense of Marriage Act, the prospect of a new normativity raised issues about the desirability of that status.
In a Spring 2013 course I taught at Parsons called “Homonormativity and the American Ideal,” art historian and artist Catherine Lord visited my class, to speak about “To Whom It May Concern…”a site-specific installation she had created at the One Archives in Los Angeles. That project focused on dedication pages in the books the archive had collected. She talked about the color of the pages, the typeface, the bleeding print, the telegraphing of indecipherable massages that conveyed biography, politics, intentions, passions, fears, and other qualities. She talked about the power and “queerness” of those pieces of paper. Often those pages were not only different in design and content from the rest of the book, they possessed an autonomy that often inflected readings of the texts that followed. It was about that time that I began thinking about grounding future queer as a project would de-stabilize the ways in which we see our environment, and foreground approaches that demand, in some cases, attention to the details of the worlds they critique and the visions they present; in others an openness to the spirits they embody.
The works on view in grounding future queer represent a mining of The New School Art Collection for works by artists whose work and lived experience present options to heterosexual norms. From more than a two thousand works in The New School Art Collection, spanning a period of 85 years, these works were made by an international group of practitioners between the period 1929 to 2012 who have experienced changing political circumstances and cultural responses to issues pertaining to sexuality and gender.
The works run the gamut from the 1929 allegorical work of Russian émigré Pavel Tchelitchew to the 2012 work of Aziz & Cucher responding to the complexities of their responses to turmoil in the Middle East, from the minimalist image of a poem about a young man’s abuse by John Giorno to works by Frank Moore, David Wojnarowicz and Ross Bleckner that are direct responses to the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, from the work of Joan Snyder who calls out the names of Biblical women to a photograph by Catherine Opie recording performance artist Ron Athey creating scarification on the back of Divinity Fudge (a.k.a. Darryl Carlton.) Together, they lay bare the contradictions and ambiguities of defining queer experience while simultaneously peeling away the assumptions that underlie our world.
Tony Whitfield, Curator of grounding future queer
This blog has been created to provide an ongoing context for discussion of the individual works in grounding future queer as well as other related works in The New School Art Collection. Please contribute any thoughts you have about the ways in which these works inform our understanding of queer culture as well as any information you might have about these works.
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Playful and irreverent, this work is one in a series of portraits of Mao Andy Warhol executed in1972-1973 on the heels of Richard Nixon’s historic visit to the the People’s republic of China, marking the beginning of normalization between the two super-powers. In this image global recognized image of an iconic totalitarian figure and metamorphoses into light-heartedness, individuality, and subversive relations with power. The color palette here is rich: rouge red smeared from hairline to neck, pink beige background giving a soft tone, a light orange coloring the shirt, and lips left intact, the only remnants hinting at the original “untainted” photograph. Doodles of ink are left astray to the right, along with various smudges across the image. Might this be an act of queering Mao?
ReplyDeleteProduced while Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was in full swing, this image flies in the face of Mao’s dictates that devalued of difference. The ideology of Marxism-Leninism as represented by the CCP at the time held homosexuality in contempt, viewing it as a product of decadent capitalism. Frowned on since the 1912 nationalist revolution during which homosexuality was seen as part of the decadent imperial lifestyle. Although not criminalized under communist rule after 1949, it became regarded as socially deviant. During the cultural revolution, however, gay activity was cause for execution.
Making Mao flamboyant by colorizing and doodling over his austereness, this image demystifies the posed machine of power, both mocking and redefining the sanctified and revered. Was this image meant to be seen through a lens of queer politics? Probably not. If so, it would have been one anomalous among Warhol’s works as a direct comment on the mechanism of gay oppression. It is important to note that there are many versions of this image as there are of most Warhol portraits. In the work of Warhol, one to one equivalents denoting value are more likely to be tied to markets and fashion than to issues of life and death.
Colin Marston
When Andy Warhol talked about himself as an artist, he said, “ If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me and there I am. There is nothing behind it.” He was not only an artist he was also a businessman, who believed that good art is business; and that good business is art. Thus, he chose popular objects and people and transformed them into the materials of art and business. In my view, this portrait of Mao illustrates a serious problem in that approach. Taking advantage of the media attention on the image of Chairman Mao when President M=Nixon visited China, Warhol turned that image into hundreds of artworks. For the image of Mao in this exhibition, Warhol used yellow and red, the two colors that came to represent the Chinese Cultural Revolution. As someone who grew up in China, I understand the full breadth of Mao’s impact on China, from his role in resurrecting China after the eight-pronged attacks during World War II to the mistakes of the Great Leap and The Cultural Revolution to the development of a complex nation since 1972 leading to the China we know now. Most of this is not known in the West and that lack of understanding is what I recognize in Warhol’s portrait of Mao. The superficiality of this work is disturbing and reflective of a lack of ability such work possesses to convey the truth of its subject or the intentions of its maker. Consequently, this work can be easily misunderstood as an inarticulate criticism of an important part of Chinese history.
ReplyDeleteShuyang Peng (edited by Tony Whitfield)
This image of Mao should be viewed with Warhol’s portrait of Richard Nixon. Painted that year. Using similar palettes and strategy for the application of heated and lurid color schemes on both Nixon and Mao, Warhol levels the cultural playing field for these key figures, at the time engaged in a process of rapprochement. One critical difference, however, existed in the way in which Warhol dealt with Nixon. Across the bottom of the Nixon image, Warhol steps out of character and emblazons a clear political message,“Vote McGovern” supporting Nixon’s opponent in that year’s presidential elections. Writing about Warhol’ s approach to the role of political commentator that was afforded the artist through his commissioned or self initiated portraits activities, Susan Mansfield about the 2013 exhibition in Scottish Parilament,
ReplyDeleteAndy Warhol, Pop, Power and Politics, “…by painting a political figure, all of a sudden Warhol elevated Mao to the celebrity realm…perhaps the equanimity with which he treated his subjects…may have been the most radical thing of all: a dead celebrity, a propaganda image of a dictator, a car crash or a can of soup, all were commodities, images—and an image, Warhol knew, had tremendous power,**”
Tony Whitfield
From a 1967 interview, quoted in Kynaston McShine, Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 457.
**http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/arts/visual-arts/scottish-parliament-stages-andy-warhol-exhibition-1-3094049