Warhol had a subject so vast that art space is incidental to it. His “Empire” is a masterpiece because it drew a hard line between past and future roles of art, and because this conceptual service is attended—when you witness, if not actively watch, the film—by steady sensations of self-evidence, beauty, and fathomless humor. Modern art had busied itself with adapting traditional creative mediums to unprecedented conditions. Like the minimalists, but with a vision hospitable to all manner of meaning, Warhol collapsed the contemplation of art into the self-conscious experience of existing, moment to moment, in a world where Rembrandts, say, and skyscrapers are just different objects of interest and distraction. What Warhol accomplished remains radical in ways that nothing in “Out of Time” transcends. He inaugurated the apparently incurable syndrome of the “contemporary” as one damned or blessed thing after another.

The best later works in the show completely assimilate Warhol’s lessons to independent ends. These may be modest in character, like Cady Noland’s “The American Trip” (1988), a sculptural installation that somehow evokes a dire moral emergency with steel pipe, American and pirate flags, a blind person’s cane, an oven rack, and metal and leather whatnots. What this has to do with time is unclear, but it feels indelibly timely.

Warhol is subject of upcoming Ken Burns directed PBS American Masters 2 parter.
- johnschw (guest) 9-06-2006 5:09 am [add a comment]