“Looking into Andy Warhol’s Photographic Practice”

Highlighting the Fisher’s recent acquisition of a bevy of prints and Polaroids by Andy Warhol from the Warhol Foundation, this small, tight show presents thematic clusters of those works. The Polaroids constitute a (partial) archive of Warhol’s silk-screen practices, since the likenesses that the artist snapped often formed the touchstone for his subsequent portraits. His black-and-white snapshots, by contrast, served no purpose other than to record his daily interactions and curiosities: a fashion show, an errant pig, a raft floating in a pool. Those who pore over these images for studied, formal nuances or narrative dramas will be disappointed. But it is precisely in their breezy lack of affect that the photographs capture something fundamental about Warhol’s deadpan enterprise––particularly his desire to act as a kind of recording machine, an image factory, and an impassive mirror for matte banality and flashy glitz alike. In their small, clipped dimensions and offhand format, these photographs seem almost like the visual counterparts to his famously quotable sound bites.

In that vein, curator Ariadni Liokatis and art historian Richard Meyer have exchanged pedantic wall texts for a medley of passages and quotes by Warhol. Letting his humor and monotone anecdotes permeate the exhibition further draws out the images’ diaristic qualities while refusing to gloss their import with an overwrought or heavy-handed exegesis. “Muscles are great. Everybody should have at least one they can show off,” Warhol comments in America (1985)––a line that finds its due echo in the artist’s penchant for recording said muscles, whether at a boxing match or in more intimate circumstances. But just as often, it is the disjunction between Warhol’s reflections and his imagery that truly compels. Along with the varied circumstances of his activities, encounters, and interests, Warhol’s wry and dry personality––most often ingenuous, but occasionally acerbic––comes alive in these works more subtly than through the usual outsize glam of his Pop icons. “My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person,” goes one of his most cited quips. Even when he turns his lens outward, though, the individual who comes into focus is himself.