Andy's candy

Interview, April, 1996

Music:

Here are a few of the recent happenings in music that herald the renaissance of Warhol's influence on pop music, as well as his proteges, the Velvet Underground.

- The Dandy Warhols are one current band that pays direct tribute to Warhol's spirit. The band's 1995 release, The Dandys Rule OK, includes songs called "Lou Weed" and "it's a Fast-Driving Rave-Up With the Dandy Warhols Sixteen Minutes." They are currently in the studio recording a new album, due out this summer.

- Velvet Underground Boxed Set: Peel Slowly and See, is a compilation of the music of this legendary band. This five-CD box set was released in August of '95, and is a measure of the surge in popularity of these recent inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Books:

Here are some of the many new books that set out to celebrate, psychologize, and memorialize Warhol and his world.

- Unseen Warhol, by John O'Connor and Benjamin Liu (RizzoIi, September), contains interviews with celebrities and Warhol friends, as well as never-before-seen works from their personal collections.

- Flowers, Flowers, Flowers and Yum, Yum, Yum (Bulfinch Press, May/June) are the two newest editions in a series that matches a selection of Warhol's epigrammatic sayings with illustrations from the archives of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

- The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965-67 (Thunder's Mouth Press, February), Lynne Tillman's recently published work, weaves together the words of Factory fixtures such as John Cale and Paul Morrissey, and is an eloquent backdrop to Stephen Shore's black-and-white portraits of Warhol and his entourage.

- Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Duke University Press, April), edited by Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and Jose Esteban Munoz, is a collection of essays written from a variety of academic perspectives, which sets out to explore Warhol's homosexuality and the role it played in his art.

Exhibitions:

Here's a selection of current and upcoming exhibitions paying tribute to Warhol's work, as well as to the work of those whose lives overlapped with his:

- Andy Warhol 1956-1986: Mirror of His Time" (Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, April 17 through June 23, then travels to Fukoka and Kobe, Japan). This exhibition, curated by Mark Francis of Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum, features nearly two hundred paintings, sculptures, and drawings by the artist, including sketches from his 1956 visit to Japan.

- "Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945" (the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, through July 28; the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, September 21 through January 5, 1997). A multimedia exhibition, this show screens Warhol's epic silent film Empire (1964) alongside a selection of his paintings, silkscreens, and sixteen-millimeter screen tests.

- "Works by Warhol From the Cochran Collection" (the Montgomery [Alabama] Museum of Fine Arts, July 6 through August 25), is an exhibition of twenty-two Warhol silkscreen prints dating from 1974 through 1987.

- "Brigid Berlin" (Stubbs Books & Prints, New York City, through April 22). The first solo exhibition of artwork by Warhol Superstar Brigid Berlin in over two decades.

- Rounding out the year, the Joan Miro Foundation in Barcelona will mount a survey of Warhol's work beginning in mid-September. Also in the fall, the first show of the artist's 1984 "Rorschach" paintings will be on display at the Gagosian Gallery on Wooster Street in New York City.

Web Sites:

Warhol would have applauded the instant "superstardom" that web sites provide by allowing users a chance at (at least) fifteen minutes of fame. Here are just a few of the hundreds of web sites that feature Warhol and his work.

- ArtsLink @ Time Warner Electronic Publishing (URL: http://pathfinder.com/twep/artslink/artists/makos), is a site featuring never-before-seen photographs of Andy Warhol with audio voice-over captioning, all by photographer and Factory regular Christopher Makos.

- The Andy Warhol Museum (URL: http://www.warhol.org/warhol)

Offering a guided tour of the museum (including maps, directions, and fees), this site is "essential to understanding the most influential American artist of the second half of the twentieth century."