It was suggested more than once during this adventure in Warhol-world that Andy Warhol himself was the artist’s greatest achievement. It’s a neat sentiment if not an original one, and while it may well be true, it didn’t bode well for a documentary in search of the “real” Andy Warhol.
Feelings. Whoa whoa whoa feeeelings. Just like that Morris Albert hit of the Seventies for star-crossed lovers everywhere, I lost count of the number of times I heard that word in this Alan Yentob meets Jeff Koons love-in. Or, more precisely, “feeling” singular, since Koons, one of the most bankable artists in the world, was talking about the “feeeeling” aroused when you looked at one of his art works.
Her name sounds like a brand of cigarettes, and an aura of corporate anonymity seems remarkably apt for this American artist who specialises in replicating other people’s work and sampling clips from online video libraries.
The first room of Andy Warhol: The Portfolios at Dulwich Picture Gallery made me regret coming. The second room made me never want to leave. The first has 10 of the Flowers and 10 of the Campbell's Soup Cans, four weedy sunsets and one Marilyn in pink, purple and brown - hardly any nourishment, certainly nothing fresh. I'm a Warhol fan - 10 glowing Marilyns in a darkened room at the National Portrait Gallery is the closest I've come to a religious experience - but is there anything new to say about these overly familiar works?
How long will it take for the penny to finally drop and to know we’ve been had all along? Months? Years? Ten years? Twenty? Will it really take that long before we come to our senses, and to wonder at our own gullibility? I’m talking not of Damien Hirst, who some now imagine has been conning us all for years, but of the execrable Lady Gaga. Yes, Gaga must be “exposed”! For is pap in pop really any lesser crime than art pap? You might think it is, even though, through the Nineties, both Britpop and Britart bobbed along on the crest of a Cool Britannia wave. They woz soulmates.
Who needs to hear or see anything more of the creepily manipulative world of Andy Warhol’s Factory? We’ve seen the films (well, bits of them); we bought the album (the one with the banana on the front); we’ve bought and dispensed with the images (in cheap repro form) several times over. We’ve seen those grainily evocative images of the Velvet Underground, Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga and co looking glassily back at us so many times we almost feel we were there ourselves.
Who or what is Jean-Marc Bustamante? This, surely, is the question we are supposed to ask of this artist of the affectless, who has skated in his three-decade-long career across the genres – first photography, then Minimalist sculpture, then a merger of the two, and for the last few years these shockingly vivid “paintings” (I use the scare quotes intentionally) on Plexiglass.
A well-groomed, middle-aged woman walks into view and lights a cigarette. She stands, she smokes, the camera gives us a steady close-up of her face. As she appears to reminisce, her face subtly registers a range of emotions. Is she agitated, sad, irritated? She takes long drags of her cigarette. The film ends and she walks out of view. A second film begins. Same woman, same duration. A cigarette is smoked, the camera lingers on her face. She’s lost in recollection, but wait, there are subtle changes. A different backdrop.
What a troubled life Alice Neel led. The death of her first child, a daughter, who died of diphtheria in 1928 just before her first birthday; another daughter lost to her estranged husband’s family in Cuba two years later (as an adult and a mother herself, the daughter, Isabetta, committed suicide); life as a single mother raising two later sons on welfare in the slum district of New York's Spanish Harlem; and a neglected but always diligent artist for much of the rest of it, only achieving fame and acclaim towards the end.