Books
Photography: A World to Warhol
Christopher Makos, foreword by Ai Weiwei
Andy Warhol in China: The Photographs of Christopher Makos (Timezone 8, 2008)
In 1982, before it was hip, fashionable, or barely possible, Andy Warhol tripped off to China with young photographer Christopher Makos, who documented the fabulous but anonymous Andy in Mao land. Now Timezone 8 Books, based in Beijing but available at Amazon.com, has published—just in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics—a look back at Andy in silky black-and-white, on hiatus from The Factory, The Chelsea Girls and his post-Valerie Solanas woes.
The pictures show Warhol as both a fish out of water and a prophet and harbinger of things to come. Even back then, he was quipping that though McDonalds had not yet arrived, it would: “Oh but they will!”, and of course it did. The photos have tremendous relevance as archival documents and the quotes are, well, priceless. The Warhol of China, artist Ai Weiwei, wrote the foreword to the book, and Andy’s voice still haunts through pithy quotes, including his perception of the Great Wall: “It doesn’t look like a wall, it looks like a rollercoaster without the roller”, his thoughts on Chinese culture (“I like this better than our culture. It’s simpler. I love all the blue clothes. Everyone wearing blue. I like to wear the same thing every day. If I were a dress designer I’d design one dress over and over”), and his reaction to the large portrait of Mao hanging over Tiananmen Square: “Gee, it’s big. Yeah, I painted Mao about four hundred times. I used to see how many I could do in a day. I love his book. I read it all the time. I like the simple thoughts.”
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Andy Warhol, Sleep (1963)
By Blake GopnikSEPT 2017 | Critics Page
From the beginning, some observers—even some Warhol fans; even (sometimes) Warhol himself—have claimed that his durational movies were conceptual works whose essence lay in their premises, not in the experience of seeing them.
Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World
By Banyi HuangNOV 2017 | ArtSeen
Looping endlessly on twelve television monitors, close-up shots of hands frenetically scratch different parts of the body. Zhang Peili’s iconic piece, Uncertain Pleasure II (1996), ironically anticipates today’s highly mediated experience of viewing, as well as the challenges of giving a coherent framework to the chaotic history of contemporary Chinese art.
Peggy Phelan and Richard Meyer’s Contact Warhol: Photography Without End
By Karen ChernickDEC 18-JAN 19 | Art Books
If Andy Warhol had an Instagram account, its feed would probably look like the 3,600 gridded contact sheets he produced during the last decade of his life.
Warhol Women
By Robert C. MorganMAY 2019 | ArtSeen
Not since an exhibition of Warhol’s screenprints some years ago have I elected to write about the work of this monumental art world figure. Despite the controversy at that time, focusing on the history of Jews in the twentieth century, these prints seemed to hold resonances, both aesthetic and political, yet dissimilar to those embedded in Warhol Women.
