Anaesthetized Pop (Warhol) / Revitalized Pop (Zurkow)
Has the significance of Andy Warhol evolved in the ensuing decades since his death in 1987?
One certainty is that the works appear as soulless and uncritical today as when they were produced.
Another certainty is that Warhol has increasingly praised by critics and coveted by collectors.
Jed Perl, the art critic at The New Republic (November 15, 2012) provided examples of Warhol's crescendoing acclaim, raising disquieting evidence of Pop's enduring appeal.
Warhol / Zurkow
“Beginning in September 2009, “Andy Warhol: The Last Decade” toured the country for fifteen months, with stops at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. “Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures” opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in December 2010. “Warhol: Headlines” premiered at the National Gallery in Washington in September 2011, traveled to Germany and Italy, and has come back across the Atlantic for a final stop at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. This past summer “The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol” was featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. There is also an endless stream of gallery exhibitions, some of them quite massive, especially “Cast a Cold Eye: The Late Work of Andy Warhol,” mounted at the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st Street in New York in the fall of 2006. And then there are the books. According to my bathroom scale, Andy Warhol “Giant” Size, published by Phaidon in 2006, weighs thirteen pounds.”
The blockbuster of all these Warhol extravaganzas is currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.
A survey of reviews of this exhibition are remarkably devoid of nostalgia, romanticism, disgust, boredom, and even amusement. The give the impression that we remain enthralled despite the passage of so many decades. The following comment by art historian Robert Rosenblum was written 25 years ago, but it is distressingly appropriate today,“…we may all owe a debt to Warhol … for reflecting exactly that state of moral and emotional anaesthesia which, like it or not, probably tells us more truth about the realities of the modern world than do the rhetorical passions of Guernica.” (the Museum of Modern Art Warhol exhibition catalog).
Marina Zurkow, provides a stunning counterpoint to Warhol’s detachment, despite the fact that she also gathers themes and images from popular culture. Her work arouses pathos and concern, the exact opposite of Warhol’s cultural anesthesia. Viewers come to care about gun abuse, territorial violence, global warming, toxic waste, animal victims, human indiscretions, etc.
Zurkow demonstrates that climbing on to the Pop bandwagon need not entail buying into Pop culture’s credos. She is one of many environmentally-minded artists who are critiquing the many assumptions Warhol took for granted. In this manner she is investing Pop imagery with timely content that reintroduces it into an avant-garde domain – an avant-garde motivated by lofty environmental considerations.