It’s hardly surprising that many of the works in Walker Art Center’s newest show, Andy Warhol/ Supernova: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962-1964, are the artist’s best-known. His repeating runs of Elvises, Lizzes, Marilyns, and Jackies, along with paintings of car crashes and electric chairs, show the extent to which a fascination with tragedy and death is hard-wired into the human psyche. What you see is what you get. These works are not “interactive”; you don’t have a “dialogue” with them. As with the original Byzantine icons, they exist to exert their power over the viewer, to be meditated upon.
Theater of the World, probably the most popular piece in the Walker’s other new show, House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective, is mesmerizing in a totally different way. It’s a model coliseum of sorts, built as a wooden oval about eight feet long. It’s covered with mesh screen and ringed with open compartments occupied by a variety of insects and amphibians: scorpions, centipedes, beetles, spiders, roaches, lizards. There are also scads of tiny crickets, which skitter around the center floor. Left to their own devices, the creatures put on a Darwinist horror show that leaves half-eaten bug carcasses all over the place. The brightly lit, open expanse of the coliseum reminds me of scenes from the end of the first Gulf War: barren, blasted, desert landscapes studded with burned-out tanks and the charred bodies of retreating soldiers.
Back at the Supernova exhibit, the images seem timeless, or, rather, stuck in time. Elvis draws his gun, Marilyn smiles seductively, Jackie grieves. They have become a common part of America’s art vocabulary through the years, as we’ve cycled through countless stars, deaths, and disasters since Marilyn’s suicide, since the crash that led to 129 Die in Jet in 1962, since the food poisoning incident that led to 1963’s Tunafish Disaster. That familiarity, and our comfort in the familiar, however horrifying or sad, is precisely why Andy Warhol/Supernova could be seen as an over-easy, populist show.
On the other hand, House of Oracles is full of works that “attempt to embrace a speculative intellectual adventure,” as curator Philippe Vergne puts it in “Why Am I Afraid of Huang Yong Ping?” his essay for the exhibition catalog. They are deliberately obscure, given a pungent and mysterious aura by an artist heretofore virtually unknown in the U.S. Moreover, there are not one but three entrances to this retrospective, which is rigorously organized to avoid chronology—this is fine, because in Huang’s oeuvre, tracing stylistic developments would be largely irrelevant.
Depending on which entrance you choose, the first work you may encounter is Palanquin, in which snakeskins are wrapped around the poles of a litter, with no rider or bearers. The lightness and simple lines of this object, which hovers in midair, contrast with the massiveness of 11 June 2002—The Nightmare of George V, which involves a life-sized elephant with a snarling tiger on its back, attacking an empty basket of the sort the king used on hunting expeditions. In Eight-Legged Hat, four birds hold aloft with their beaks a pith helmet, on which a global map has been drawn; and Passage involves a pair of roll-down security gates hanging over empty lion cages scattered with dung and bones. In the next gallery, four huge rice bowls are filled with packaged foods—mayonnaise, crackers, and the like—that expired in July 1997, the month that Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule.
All of these works address colonialism, and with all of them, except for the rice bowls, what is absent seems to be as significant as what is present. “I understand only half of it,” said curator Philippe Vergne of Huang’s art, while guiding a tour of journalists—and he spent years organizing this exhibit. Certainly, he was being modest, but nor was he entirely joking; the pieces in this show are visually simple, but conceptually so complex as to practically constitute their own world, one that bridges—or digests—East and West and is not defined, but rather brought into existence by the artist.
Perhaps the most up-front pieces in House of Oracles are two “long drawings,” gorgeous watercolors of Huang’s own artwork. One of them, Long Drawing for Walker Art Center, is situated at an entrance and acts as an exhibition preview; Huang has referenced all the pieces in his retrospective and organized them in a linear arrangement, as a sort of artistic odyssey. This display of his “greatest hits” follows (probably not unwittingly) in the steps of Marcel Duchamp, who made a series of portable museums, La Boîte-en-Valise, that were stocked with miniature reproductions of his works. Another piece by Huang, The Wise Man Learns From the Spider How to Spin a Web, references his relationship to Duchamp, who opened a vast new world to the young artist in China in the eighties, when books on Western artists were rare. But eventually his admiration for the legend turned to annoyance regarding his ubiquity. In one of his essays, Huang wrote, “Is it possible for us not to mention Duchamp anymore, to let him really die? This is possible but is also not possible. At least, the reason for me writing this essay is to stop myself mentioning him again in the future.”
Huang’s other long drawing documents The Bat Project, an epic work inspired by the collision of a U.S. surveillance plane and a Chinese military plane in 2001, and the diplomatic negotiations that ensued. Due to censorship, this piece has morphed several times; the culmination, Bat Project IV, is here at the Walker. Frankly, this type of work, which involves countless letters, incidents, modifications, actions, and counter-actions, all documented with memos, models, photos, and film, can be excruciatingly boring, and make one yearn for the directness of Warhol’s paintings next door.
Or maybe that’s taking the easy way out. Toward the end of “Why Am I Afraid of Huang Yong Ping?” Vergne places Huang within “an aesthetic revolution that argues that much of contemporary art has been infantilized by the legacy of Pop Art and other forms of postmodern appropriation and their kiss-of-death relationship to the world of media, popular culture, and consumption.” The curator goes on to ask, “Is the radical criticality of early Pop”—e.g. Warhol’s paintings of stars, deaths, and disasters—“still effective or relevant?”
Absolutely, Douglas Fogle would say, at least in Warhol’s case. Fogle is Vergne’s colleague at the Walker and the curator of Andy Warhol/Supernova —a show whose press release boldly stated that “these masterpieces are as radical and relevant today as they were in 1964.” That’s hard to buy, because it’s difficult not to take Warhol’s paintings for granted, though this exhibition is meant to give them fresh consideration. Certainly Warhol is right up there with Duchamp, as far as radical innovators go, although he lived to see his innovations grow stale. Indeed, he himself diluted the power of his early works by later churning out portraits of business moguls and socialites. Now, of course, almost anyone can “commission” a silkscreen artwork from imitators. Says one website offering such services: “Pop Art Universe embraces the whimsical and fun style inspired by Andy Warhol. Enjoy!”
Fun? Whimsical? Enjoy? Whatever. Warhol was a consummate ironist, and many of his utterances, while sometimes whimsically put, were, as we know, quite prophetic—even, one could say, oracular. Fogle selected a particularly eerie musing from Warhol to open his catalog essay: “… I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen in life that’s unreal … when things really do happen to you, it’s like watching television—you don’t feel anything.” Further in that essay, “Spectators at Our Own Deaths,” Fogle links Warhol’s work to the tradition of history painting, specifically noting Géricault—the same artist, interestingly, that curator Vergne mentioned with respect to Huang’s work when leading the tour of House of Oracles.
Certainly, both Warhol and Huang have responded to events of their time—but not, as Géricault did in his masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa, with the intent of expressing popular outrage. They’re not trying to change anything, but merely bearing witness. Their individual responses to the subject matter at hand simply don’t matter; both artists turn themselves off, in a sense, in making their art. Numerous pieces in House of Oracles are created using elements of chance, such as Four Paintings Created According to Random Instructions (which were determined by spinning a wheel). In one of his essays, Huang wrote that “the desire for individuality and for attracting attention has become the most serious disease of avant-garde artists.” His way with words, in fact, recalls Warhol. For instance, Huang believes that “pursuing innovation is meaningless, and pursuing noninnovation is also meaningless, because ‘pursuing’ is the source of meaninglessness.” You can imagine Warhol vaguely agreeing, nodding and going “mm-hmm … ”
Despite Warhol’s carefully cultivated non-persona, he was obsessed with celebrity and status, not least his own. Fogle quotes Thierry du Duve: “To desire fame—not the glory of the hero but the glamour of the star—with the intensity and awareness Warhol did, is to desire to be nothing, nothing of the human, the interior, the profound.” Indeed, Warhol liked to think of the artist as a machine, and commercial silkscreening became his preferred technique; he churned out hundreds of variations on relatively few themes. Perhaps Huang had Warhol in mind when he observed that “an obvious Western habit is that if you have an idea, you are expected to carry it through consistently: you will do it once, ten times, a hundred times; you will do it for a year, then for ten years; you are expected to insist on doing it obstinately.”
Huang’s distance from his work is tied to various Eastern philosophies. It points to a sense that the individual is ultimately powerless, and chance, all-powerful; as well as a belief that self-expression—even talking, discussion—is futile. With The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes, Huang transformed two art books into so much pulp. He said, “Being put into the washing machine for two minutes can better enhance the fusion of ‘Eastern and Western paintings’ than debating for a hundred years”—another idea that Warhol probably would have found quite sensible.
But what of this fresh consideration of Warhol’s paintings in Supernova? Fogle draws several conclusions in the final paragraphs of his essay, observing that “… there is to my mind something extraordinarily human and sympathetic about Warhol’s images of stars, deaths, and disasters” and identifying “something hopeful about his framing of the perverse concatenation of celebrity and disaster in American culture.” But his penultimate thought hardly sounds hopeful or sympathetic: “Warhol’s Disasters … provide a sobering historical counterpoint and critical antidote to our voracious consumption of the uninterrupted flow of information, giving us pause before we televisually eat our own dead.”
These artworks are supposed to provide a shot in the arm—to what end is unclear—before we return to the routine materialistic orgy of our lives. But as the publicity materials for Huang’s retrospective state, “when one enters a house of oracles, one does not exit without being profoundly changed by the experience.” Grand claims, both, especially as testaments to the power of art, and the power of our ignorance.
Ultimately, if viewing Supernova is akin to, say, digging with relish into a jumbo bag of Cheetos, then House of Oracles is like confronting a plate of Golden Phoenix Claws, a dim sum delicacy of fried chicken feet in black bean sauce. That’s not meant to disparage the Warhol show, or to warn people away from the Huang retrospective. To the contrary, considering these exhibitions together raises a host of intriguing questions—not just about how these artists compare to or contrast with one another, but about what draws us to art in the first place, and what we expect to get from it.