Various Artists – [Box Set]

Fifteen Minutes: An Homage To Andy Warhol

‘Fifteen Minutes (Campbell’s Soup mix)’

Probably the most famous bit of philosophy that Andy Warhol ever uttered – ignoring the indelible mark he made on the realms of music and theater and art – was that, “In the future, everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” Since the artist first made that proclamation in 1968, the phrase has been used to justify innumerable entertainment industry phenomena and other such passing fads. Since that time, while trends in pop culture have changed both dramatically and repeatedly, Warhol’s phrase has endured; with only the units of measurement having changed. Those “fifteen minutes” became as many seconds and nanoseconds with the birth of the internet, and with the birth and subsequent explosion of online social media, has been rethought to become a matter of “everyone will be famous to fifteen people.”

Times, social mores, values and entertainment – as well as the public’s consumption of it – have changed. The public’s perception of the world has been torn down and rebuilt/reinvented/redefined at least a dozen times over since Warhol bravely contained the public’s general attention span to a numeric value, but that “fifteen minute” assertion has been one which has ensured that Andy Warhol remains an icon even now, twenty-four years after his passing in 1987. His artwork, images, ideas, disciplines and proclivities (as well as his opinions and views, by extension) are now displayed as exhibits which tour through children’s museums and are taught to both high school and university students alike; in effect, Andy Warhol ended up proving his own assertion wrong as his work continues to be discovered by new minds daily. The work and the man remain inspiring and provocative too, as Fifteen Minutes: An Homage To Andy Warhol illustrates. Assembling a multi-discipline collection of work by eighteen artists, this 3CD/4LP box set is completely unique in that it attempts to offer complete experience of Warhol as well as his effect on pop culture and the arts, by showcasing the reach of his influence more than the work of the artist himself. In keeping with that spirit, each artist who contributed to the audio portion of this set (much of which is spoken word and ignores conventional song structures) also created a print of original artwork for inclusion with this (very) limited edition set; in effect, what buyers get is an experience quite unlike any other.

The uniqueness of Fifteen Minutes is apparent right away as one scans the list of contributors included in the set. Rather than going the obvious route and tapping a big, star-studded cast of names that are regularly associated with Warhol and his Factory, there is clearly some desire to present something else – something genuine – here. On Fifteen Minutes, the usual suspects that one would expect to see attached to an ‘Andy Warhol music collection’ like Lou Reed, John Cale, Jayne County, Mo Tucker, David Bowie and Devo have been overlooked wholesale in favor of including Warhol’s peers and contemporaries in the art community like John Giorno, Path Soong, Jeff Gordon, Ivan Karp and Yura Adams, with the only “full-time musicians” included being Patti Smith and Bob Dylan (of which only Dylan really contributes a conventional song). With that in mind, Fifteen Minutes would look like a dicey proposition to anyone right off the bat; a viewpoint that would only get more justifiable when they see the jaw-dropping price tag attached to the set. The deluxe edition is limited to eighty-five copies at $20,000 each, the slightly-less-limited edition retails for $600 – the extra $19,400 gets buyers the same music on the same formats, but gets autographed prints of the artwork, instead of replicas. Even so, it’s hard not to be drawn in by the decadence and artifice as one trips through the music and flips through the art. In listening to the albums it’s possible to pick out real grains of the influence that Warhol has had on both the arts and these contributors. Here, it’s possible to find the blatant commercialism and vacuousness that Warhol was often accused of in the Sixties and Seventies in “Titles,” where Pat Soong simply name-checks the work in Warhol’s sketchbook. There is a confrontational stance employed by Ivan Karp in “The First Time” reminiscent of the one Warhol had to have taken as he challenged artistic conventions with his Pop Art construct. There is a stark attractiveness to Patti Smith’s “Edie” that perfectly sums up the subject of her spoken word piece, Edie Sedgwick, but there are sparks of Andy in it too somehow. There is a direct and bold edge in Smith’s sibilance – in all of the dialogue that the contributors share here, in fact – that owes a debt to Andy Warhol’s persona and public image. It doesn’t sound at all supernatural really, but each of these tracks does echo Warhol, somehow.

Of course, any discussion about Andy Warhol wouldn’t be complete without giving an impression of the self-indulgent side to Warhol’s character. This opulent side is the one which yielded motion picture works like Sleep (which starred John Giorno – who contributes one of the most solid tracks here, “Thanks For Nothing,” ironically) and is represented on Fifteen Minutes by the forty-minute discussion between Vincent Fremont and Brigid Berlin which takes up all of Disc Two. There’s no doubt that there’s no script for Fifteen Minutes’ second disc as the conversation on it veers in every imaginable direction – from talk of Warhol’s Factory to the internet to Max’s Kansas City to Berlin walking seven blocks topless through New York to the excitement which surrounded the art world and Warhol in the Sixties and Seventies – with the natural flow and build of any conversation over coffee. In that sort of organic delivery, listeners will begin to flash on the films that Warhol made between 1963 and 1968 because it, like them is a true slice of life, in all its rambling, inchoate glory. It’s true that Disc Two is not the easiest thing to hear if you paid for it – just as it wasn’t at all thrilling to watch a man sleep on film for hours, or eat, or watch the New York cityscape as Warhol filmed it – but it is an interesting commentary on the nature of musical performance on records because Disc Two is perfectly naked reality.

It might sound confusing to read it, but “Naked Reality” is exactly what Fifteen Minutes shoots for in its presentation. This set is supposed to be a tribute/homage to Andy Warhol and it does work – but perhaps not in the ways that listeners have grown accustomed to accepting and consuming box sets. Fifteen Minutes presents the impact that the artist made on the art community as a whole – in visual arts, music, theater and film – and showcases Andy Warhol as a source of intangible inspiration, not as a cutout to be propped up in the corner and stared at. After absorbing all the work included in Fifteen Minutes, it’s hard not to believe that the set is a perfect success; this is the kind of presentation that would certainly have made Andy Warhol proud.

Connie Beckley

Silk Scream Liz

Brigid Berlin and Vincent Fremont

Untitled with a “tit print” by Berlin

Christopher Makos

Andy Warhol and John Lennon

Brigid Berlin (Warhol superstar, diarist, and confidant) reminisces with Vincent Fremont (Warhol’s right-hand man and executor of his estate) about strolling topless down New York’s Second Avenue to get Warhol a cheeseburger
and a chocolate milkshake.

She walked into Bickford’s, placed the order, and walked back—and guess what? No one paid any attention. That’s when she started to make her “tit prints.” Patti Smith recites a 1971 poem she dedicated to Edie Sedgwick. Bob
Dylan sings “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” Lawrence Weiner performs his 1991 sound piece Vienna. And that’s just for starters. It’s all part of a series of recordings-cum-images that add up to an exhibition titled “15 Minutes: Homage to Andy Warhol,” curated and produced by artists Jeff Gordon and Path Soong.

Eighteen people associated with or influenced by Warhol— from lighting designer Billy Name to dealer Ivan Karp to artist/ writer/shopper Ultra Violet—respond to Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” dictum through word, music, and art. The works are assembled into a box set, published by Sony. It contains four vinyl records, three CDs, and 16 12-by-12-inch silk screens designed by the participants and printed by Warhol’s master silkscreener, Alex Heinrici.

(A deluxe version costs $20,000 and comes in an edition of 85 signed by the artists; a standard set with unsigned offset lithographs is $600.)

For his part, Christopher Makos contributes a photograph of Warhol kissing John Lennon. He took it while working at Warhol’s Interview magazine. “I always tried to do things related to holidays,” he says, “because Andy always did. This was for the Valentine’s Day issue.”

Patti Smith’s feelings toward Warhol are more ambivalent. She explains today, “I wasn’t entrenched in that scene. A lot had to do with hierarchy, with gossip, with people falling out with one another.” Her piece for the project, she says, “was writing about a girl”—Sedgwick—“who was part of that scene. I wanted to include the poem so she’d be remembered as someone who was magical—a diamond, a sparkling little thing.”

Gordon himself riffs on Warhol with his Brillo box– inspired screenprint, uh yes . . uh no and a related recording of an interview he did with Warhol, in which he erased the questions and just left the “yes” and “no” answers. “Whenever we’d get together,” Gordon remembers, “Andy would talk about how he loved recordings of people’s voices. His favorite was Jacqueline Kennedy’s because it was like a whispering breath.” The show is at the Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center in East Hampton, New York, through October 29, at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh from October 1 through January 8, and at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, from October 5 through November 20.

Next year it will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Beijing. In the end, Gordon observes, “Andy was like a throwback to the Medicis. He took in all these people when there was no other place for them to go. He was a real patron.”

Carter Ratcliff

Glitch Cit

Jeff Gordon

uh yes…uh no

John Giorno

THANX 4NOTHING

John Giorno

THANX 4NOTHING,2009

Andy Warhol’s favoritevoice was JackieO’s. Why? “It didn’tmater what she said;she spoke in a whisper,”explained Jeff Gordon,former co-owner of theGreene Street Recording Studio, sometimeheadquarters of the hip-hop music industryin the 1980’s. With a personal affection for Warhol—he knew the artist—and the soundof his era in mind, Mr. Gordon has amassedan exhibition/installation of visual and audioart: “15 Minutes: Homage to Andy Warhol.”The unusual exhibit, opening at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center Aug. 4 andrunning through October, will feature theworks of 17 artists who either knew the pop-art master or were inspired by him.“It’s a look-and-listen trip,” said co-curatorMr. Gordon, that’s illustrating “the parallelsbetween visual art and sound.” Warhol, henoted, wrote on the topic and was “obsessedwith recording people himself. He’d walkaround with a tape recorder.”For the Warhol project, Mr. Gordon and co-curator and painter Path Soong approachedmainly artists who had a relationship and ahistory with Warhol. One work in the show, forexample, is a silkscreen of a 1966 photograph of Warhol and Bob Dylan taken by Nat Finkelstein,a regular at the artist’s legendary productionspace, the Factory. In typical Warhol fashion,there is a story behind the image that hasbecome part of contemporary art lore:“Dylan did not want to do a screen test whenhe came to the Factory. He was not happy,” saidMr. Gordon. “You can see it in his expressionin Nat’s photograph. He told Andy he couldpay him for the screen test with the ‘DoubleElvis’ print which Andy was showing him.”The deal cut, Dylan “strapped it to the car anddrove away.” Does the musician still have it?No comment, but Mr. Dylan did contribute tothe exhibition a track of his song “When I Paint

Jackson Pollock walking in a feld with Lee Krasner

My Masterpiece,” plus a silkscreen of the “Self Portrait” he painted and used as the cover for his1971 album of the same nameOther featured artists and/or Warhol Factorystalwarts include Billy Name, Brigid Berlin,pioneer dealer Ivan Karp (one of the manydealers to claim he discovered Warhol, butone with a good case) and Warhol Foundationhoncho Vincent Fremont; Mr. Gordon and Ms.Soong even tracked down Ultra Violet (Warholgave the actress her name), who starred in early Warhol films and was an extra in Midnight Cowboy

.Each of these artists contributed bothan audio and a visual work to the show.Photographer Christopher Makos gave Warholhis first camera; his image featured in the showis a picture he took of Warhol kissing JohnLennon in 1978. Poet and musician Patti Smith’scontributions include a poem about Warhol’smuse Edie Sedgwick. Mr. Gordon’s own audiocontribution is a 15-minute recording of aninterview Warhol gave where he responded inhis notorious monosyllabic style. “I edited outthe questions so all you hear are 15 minutes of yesses and noes,” said Mr. Gordon.

Pollock-Krasner House director HelenHarrison considers the historic space an idealsetting for the show. “Pollock is to abstractexpressionism as Warhol is to pop art,” said Ms.Harrison. “These two artists, both from workingclass roots, took New York by storm.”In terms of exhibit set-up, “there will be alarge circular dining table with headphoneswhere visitors can listen to individual mp3players,” said Ms. Harrison. And “if I seesomeone at the table glazing over, I’ll know it’s Jeff’s piece [the 15 minutes of yesses and noes]—it’s hypnotic.”In 1995, co-curators Mr. Gordon and Ms.Soong collaborated on the production of Two Dialogues, a CD that featured the only knownrecorded interview with Jackson Pollock,together with a later extensive conversationwith his wife, a noted painter herself, LeeKrasner.

All sales royalties from that projectwent to benefit the Pollock-Krasner House andStudy Center. This show has a similar, if farmore elaborate and pricier, souvenir: “The 15MINUTES Box,” produced in a limited editionof 85, will include 16 signed and numberedsilkscreen prints by the artists and musiciansfeatured in the show, three CDs with all 17 of theartist recordings, four vinyl records of the samerecordings and liner notes, for a cool $20,000apiece. The so-called Regular Box (1,964 of themwill be offered) has unsigned prints instead, for afew hundred dollars. Twenty-five percent of boxsales will go toward the Pollock-Krasner House. What would Warhol say if he knew aboutall the fuss? “He’d probably say, “Gee,” said Ms.Harrison.

Andy Warhol was obsessed with fame. You might say that it was his only consistent medium, and that everything else he did — painting, film, sculpture, publishing — was just a vehicle for examining its properties and effects. Now the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center has taken his most famous utterance, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” and used it as a springboard to create an exhibition.

Sony Legacy Recordings

“Uh Yes Uh No,” by Jeff Gordon.

Sony Legacy Recordings

“Andy, Bobby and Elvis,” by Nat Finkelstein.

Sony Legacy Recordings

“Shadow (Merce Cunningham III),” by Path Soong.

Sony Legacy Recordings

A silk-screen by John Giorno.

The 17 artists in “15 Minutes: Homage to Andy Warhol” possess — or suffer from, depending on your perspective — varying degrees of fame themselves. The artists — including one collaboration — each contributed two works to the show, which is sponsored by Sony: an audio piece that can be listened to on headphones, and a 12-inch-square silk-screen image.

Fame and quality are not always commensurate; some of the most interesting works are by people you may never have heard of.

But first, people you have heard of.

Bob Dylan met Warhol at his studio, the Factory, sat for a 16-millimeter “Screen Test” and received as payment a silk-screen painting of Elvis Presley, which, according to the wall text, he attached to the top of his station wagon and carried away.

Although Mr. Dylan is known for his music, he is also a painter. (A show of his currently at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan is stirring controversy: observers have noted similarities between Mr. Dylan’s works and photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson and others, despite the gallery’s claims that the paintings originated in his travels through Asia.)

At the Pollock-Krasner House, a silk-screen reproduction of a self-portrait by Mr. Dylan in the naïf expressionist vein is paired with a song called “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” which sounds appropriately late-Dylanesque.

Patti Smith, the punk poet and musician, offers a spoken-word piece rather than a song. “Edie” is the title of both a poem, recited with a kind of laconic jazz delivery by Ms. Smith, and a silk-screen of the poem printed over a hazy image of Edie Sedgwick.

The poem reflects on Ms. Smith’s experience as a teenager of seeing Ms. Sedgwick, a Warhol “Superstar” — one of the actors he used in his experimental films — in Vogue. The most jarring thing about the contribution, perhaps, is trying to imagine Ms. Smith, a downtown ’70s legend, reading Vogue.

John Giorno was also a Warhol film subject, but not really a Superstar because he forged a career as a poet in his own right. (Being a satellite to Warhol seems to have been central to Superstar status.) However, Mr. Giorno did star, in a manner of speaking, in Warhol’s first film, “Sleep,” from 1963, in which he performed the activity described in the title.
His contribution to the current exhibition pairs a silk-screen of the words “Thanx 4 Nothing” with a poem, “Thanks for Nothing,” which he began on his 70th birthday, in 2006. The poem refers to some of the figures Mr. Giorno knew in his earlier days, including those whose lives ended tragically.

One of the most engaging audio recordings, particularly for consumers of Warholiana, is a candid, nearly hourlong conversation between Vincent Fremont, one of Warhol’s business managers, and Brigid Berlin, a plus-size, outré Superstar and character actress who remained friends with Warhol until his death in 1987.

Mr. Fremont, who made a documentary about Ms. Berlin in 2000, plays the straight man, while she spits out one outrageous statement after another.

Ms. Berlin describes getting a face-lift so she could get a prescription for Vicodin; telling Warhol she wanted a vacuum cleaner for Christmas — or “anything but a painting”; and walking down the street topless to get Warhol a milkshake and a cheeseburger. The silk-screen created by the pair includes a sketch of Mr. Fremont and an imprint of Ms. Berlin’s breast.

But Mr. Fremont, who is a sales agent for paintings, drawings and sculpture for the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, perhaps best sums up his relationship to Warhol in the recording: “I’m still working for Andy.”

Another good contribution is by a contemporary painter who never met Warhol, Path Soong, one of the show’s organizers. Ms. Soong’s silk-screen, “Shadow (Merce Cunningham III),” shows the artist holding a chair behind her back in imitation of a silk-screen of Merce Cunningham by Warhol. But the recording is even more effective. Who would think that reciting the titles of Warhol’s paintings could be poetry? And yet, Ms. Soong turns such a list into a poignant exercise reflecting on history, memory and death: “Self-Portrait … Skulls … Special Edition Mohammed Ali … Birmingham Race Riot … Marilyn Monroe … Flower … Keys … S & H Green Stamps … Banana … Cow … Cow … Cow.”

The obvious question is what Warhol — or a show fashioned by his associates, admirers and contemporaries — is doing in Jackson Pollock’s living room in the first place.

The Pollock-Krasner House has mounted many exhibitions indirectly related (or unrelated) to the painters who once lived in the modest farmhouse, Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner. But this one seems particularly incongruous.

The show’s organizers, Ms. Soong and her husband, Jeff Gordon, tried to make some connections, noting in a gallery handout that both Pollock and Warhol “came from working-class backgrounds, grew up outside mainstream art centers, and emerged seemingly from nowhere to take the New York art world by storm.” The handout also pointed out that both spent time on the East End of Long Island: Pollock in Springs, a hamlet in the Town of East Hampton; Warhol in Montauk.

For those with even a vague knowledge of midcentury American art history, however, this narrative rings untrue. Pollock was a hard-drinking heterosexual whose brooding persona and physical painting style served as a template for macho strains of Abstract Expressionism. Warhol was gay and was a fashion illustrator whose later work was couched in subversive camp sensibilities. (A famous anecdote recounts Warhol asking his friend the documentarian Emile de Antonio why the artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who were also gay, didn’t like him. The answer: “You’re too swish, and that upsets them.”)

Nonetheless, “15 Minutes: Homage to Andy Warhol” is a neat, curious little show — even if it feels a bit perverse, installed inside this shrine to Pollock.

“15 Minutes: Homage to Andy Warhol,” Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, 830 Springs-Fireplace Road, East Hampton, through Oct. 29. (631) 324-4929 or pkhouse.org.

The New York Times

An Exhibition in Sight and Sound

August 4–October 29, 2011

Organized and produced by Jeff Gordon and Path Soong, the exhibition features silkscreen prints and original recordings, ranging from spoken word to music and sound, created by some of the most prominent artists, writers and performers who knew, worked with, or were associated with Andy Warhol.  Included are Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Ivan Karp, Billy Name, Ultra Violet, Lawrence Weiner, Carter Ratcliff, John Giorno, Vincent Freemont, Alexander Heinrici, Brigid Berlin, Christopher Makos, Yura Adams, Nat Finkelstein, Connie Beckley, Susan Breen, Path Soong, and Jeff Gordon.

Each artist has created a 12 x 12 inch visual image and an audio work related to Warhol and his circle. Patti Smith’s poem, “Edie,” muses on the life and death of Warhol Superstar Edie Sedgwick. Nat Finkelstein’s screen printed photograph shows Warhol and Dylan in the Factory with one of Warhol’s Elvis paintings in the background. In his song, “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” Dylan critiques the Warholian notion of fame and success. Gordon’s screen print modifies one of Warhol’s Brillo Box sculptures as a visual analogy to his sound piece, which loops excerpts from a Warhol interview and lasts for the proverbial 15 minutes.

Jeff Gordon, who knew and liked Warhol, has been producing original sound recordings and prints by visual artists and poets for twenty-five years. Path Soong is a well known and respected abstract painter. In 1995, they collaborated on the production of “Two Dialogues,” a CD that featured the only known recorded interview with Jackson Pollock, together with a later extensive conversation with Lee Krasner. All sales royalties went to benefit the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. In 2005 Gordon and Soong created “31 Stones,” a site-specific installation of visual and audio art, at the Pollock-Krasner House.

The 15 MINUTES Box, sponsored by Sony and released through Sony’s Legacy Recordings, is available for sale in both Deluxe Edition and Regular Edition versions. The Deluxe box, an edition of 85, contains 16 signed and numbered silkscreen prints, three CDs, four vinyl records, and notes. The Regular box, an edition of 1,964, contains offset prints, the CDs, vinyl records, and notes.

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