Certain people just survive in terms of their importance. Andy Warhol represents the era of the 60s and 70s because of the iconography of his images and because of his links to rock and roll and celebrity in New York. That won’t go away. He did create what are essentially very simple images. You might think ‘Oh I could do that’, but you didn’t and you weren’t there. That’s what is central to the importance of Andy Warhol – that he will always represent that time and that place.
It felt special because we wouldn’t normally get to see these works. Curated exhibitions of works in the public domain would normally have some kind of angle or theme that would link the pieces like a particular period of an artist’s career. What’s different about this exhibition is that a collector’s personal preferences are represented.
Warhol thought that film was becoming the ultimate art form. He did a number of films, which, as with a lot of his work, were ahead of their time. His approach to filmmaking was artistic and almost DIY. In his Screen Tests series, he seemed to enjoy playing mind games with people as he would leave the camera rolling and just leave the room. I would have liked to spend more time watching them to really let them seep in.
He would deliberately use quite poor quality photographs at the start of the process particularly in his serialisations such as The American Man (Portrait Of Watson Powell). Each image is slightly different because of the screen printing process and you see this when they are all lined up.
Repetition of images is part of parcel of the Warhol approach, so the Halls have had to get little subsets of those larger pieces. There were 32 in the original works to represent Powell’s 32 years of service to the company he worked for. The Halls have eight in their collection so it’s enough to show the effect. You get a feel for it but not the overall thing so it leaves you wanting more.
I wonder how he would feel about his pieces being scattered all over the world. His ambition was for them to be displayed together. It was interesting to learn that he was thinking on that scale.
I like that this exhibition was in Oxford. To not have to go into London to see these kinds of exhibitions is quite nice, I must admit, for people like me in the provinces.
As told to Nicola Slawson
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