Art review: Warhol. Mechanical Art

“In the future, I think everyone should be world-famous for 15 minutes,” Andy Warhol once said, famously and cryptically. His own 15 minutes will never be up, as the current exhibition at CaixaForum amply demonstrates; Warhol is as relevant today as he was when he died in 1988.

‘Warhol. Mechanical Art’ shows how the New York artist tweaked the traditional notion of the unique, handmade work of art into a question of relative value. The first few galleries treat us to some of Warhol’s greatest hits, mostly on loan from the Warhol Museum in his native Pittsburgh. We see his series of Campbell’s soup cans, and multiple portraits of Liz, Jackie, Marilyn and Elvis in Day-Glo colours: graphic images squished repeatedly through silk-screen frames. These images were as mind-boggling as they were original in the Sixties and, as familiar as they have become in the past 50 years, remain so today.

It’s fun, and instructive, to watch young Warhol evolve from a commercial artist cranking out ads and window dressing for Tiffany’s. The leap from his carefully inked words and images on posters and greetings cards to his early paintings (such as the 1962 black-and-white painting Nose Job) is not huge, but you can see his rapid development to fine artist by the end of the Fifties.

The scope of his influence on pop culture was enormous, from the psychedelic palette of the Sixties to his creation of the magazine INTERVIEW, which still exists today. As a filmmaker, he was also a trailblazer. In a darkened gallery his Screen Tests short silent movie series shows celebrities (Susan Sontag and Salvador Dalí, among others) silently staring at Warhol’s camera. To see his mentor Marcel Duchamp, the inventor of the ready-made art object that was in many ways Warhol’s inspiration, feels especially right. The exhibition ends with his famously enigmatic black-and-white film Sleep (1963), a five-hour movie that is a close-up of a guy, well, sleeping. 

My favourite moment comes in a small-screen video that visitors can watch while seated on a stool with headphones: “Fashion”. Debbie Harry and Friends. Here, Warhol was invited to do a performance piece before the cameras with Debbie Harry of Blondie, and the artist sits down for the first time at a computer screen to create a digital portrait of the singer. It’s pretty good, and one can only wonder where he would have gone with digital imagery, as his contemporary David Hockney has on his iPad in recent years, had Warhol lived a few years longer.

The curators could have chosen to leave out a re-creation of a curiously tame disco experience: Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 2014 (originally created in 1966). With its muffled music soundtrack and black-and-white videos, it pales in contrast to Warhol’s technicolour palette, and it fails to generate the appropriate buzz, feeling more like a head-scratching distraction from the rest of the dynamic exhibition than a contribution towards understanding the artist and his work. The baffling English text by the curator that is supplied on the newsprint handout at the entrance (poorly translated, it seems) is also off-putting. Warhol, who famously used a few simple words to explain his own creations, would have laughed at the convoluted curator speak that attempts to introduce his work to museum visitors. Skip the explanation and form your own opinions from Warhol’s rich visuals.

At the end of the exhibition, visitors, children and adults alike are invited to create their own rubber-stamp prints on pieces of coloured paper in a small gallery, and then scan them onto a screen to make them into unique, or not so unique, works of art à la Andy Warhol.