Monday, June 28, 2010

Andy Warhol the Catholic

So I recently finished a fantastic book by Eleanor Heartney called Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art. In it, she talks about some of the most controversial contemporary artists being either Catholics themselves or at least highly influenced by Catholicism. It's a fascinating read, and Heartney's style is very conversational and accessible.

One of the things I learned from the book is that Andy Warhol was a practicing Catholic. Heartney makes the argument that indeed not only was he Catholic, but his faith predominated his work if you look at it closely. He was obsessed with death, according to Heartney, as evidenced by his Death and Disaster paintings, and his "transormation of ordinatry objects with icons with multiple resonances."

Most of all, Heartney writes that Warhol's Catholic tendicies are seen in his exploration of the conflict between the Church's official teachings and Cathoicism's subliminal messages

Case in point- see the dyptich Last Supper/Be Somebody with a Body for a clear image of what she's talking about.

Heartney notes that Warhol, though he went to church several times a week, never went to confession or took communion. As a gay man, Warhol was both censured in his church, but was also provided a whole host (no pun intended) of images depicting homoerotic and male desire. The Catholic Church, she writes, while it officialy abhors homosexuality, contains in its history of art and literature a series of conflicts "that emerge in an outlaw sensibility and sensuality". Thus, in the Dyptich linked to above, Warhol sexualizes the Christ figure.

The chapter made me want to reexamine the Warhol pieces I'm familiar with, and look at some new ones. It definitely got me thinking about his art in a new way.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

The Keys Experiment

Well, I performed The Keys Experiment at the Red Eye last weekend. I think it went pretty well. It ended up being a lot simpler than I intended, but I think it did resonate with people, from the feedback that I got. For the transitions between the characters, I found that if I took a pause and moved into the next person, I didn't need anything too clever to make the audience understand it was the next scene. We ended up not using any blackouts at all.

One thing that quite a few people said to me is that they were very drawn to the scenes that weren't just monologues. Barbra called them the "treated" scenes. For instance, when I eat my hands, or in my "assembly line" scene where I show time lapsing by repeating actions that the volunteers went through, warping the movements as the voiceover got continually more abstract.

When I do the piece at the Soap Factory next month, I'm hoping to add another movement sequence- this time focusing on what happens to the body in a state of starvation. I'll have to do some exploring about what that means. I also want to add another Keys monologue, speaking with wife toward the end of the experiment, and I want to do the scene which i didn't have time to do for the Redeye between one of the CO's and his girlfriend (played by a puppet). So that is quite a bit of work in less than two months but I'm pretty excited about it. I think three new scenes is a reasonable goal. I'd also like to add video, but that would be icing on the cake at this point- and i'm not positive it would work.