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COLUMBUS, OHIO - Watch Andy Warhol's films and videos, and it's easy to imagine the late pop artist feeling right at home in the current age of reality TV and web video.
This was a man who made an hour-long film of people's random activities on the couch at his New York art studio, shot "screen tests" of subjects instructed to simply gaze into his camera for a few minutes without moving or even blinking, and videotaped his own mother sleeping.
"He somehow did foretell our complete obsession with putting ourselves in the limelight, reflecting ourselves back to the world in a kind of instantaneous way, all of the things that the internet, YouTube and American Idol have made possible," says Sherri Geldin, director of the Wexner Centre for the Arts in Columbus.
Warhol's movies and videos share the stage with his more familiar Campbell's soup-can paintings and colourful celebrity prints in Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms, an exhibition running until February 15 at the Wexner, at Ohio State University.
Columbus is the only United States destination for the multimedia show, which had its debut in Amsterdam last year. Because film and video can be duplicated and because Warhol was so prolific in painting and other media, the exhibition also opens on October 7 at the Hayward Gallery in London.
Warhol, who was 58 when he died in 1987 after complications from gall bladder surgery, assigned equal importance to each of the different art forms he worked in, Geldin says.
"All of this counted; all of it mattered. And if all of it didn't matter, then none of it mattered."
At the Wexner, visitors are greeted in the first room by a series of huge screens showing the screen tests, four-minute black-and-white face shots of actor Dennis Hopper, socialite Edie Sedgwick and dozens of other visitors to Warhol's art studio, the Factory, in the mid-1960s. Other faces look on from a nearby wall in the gallery, including rocker Mick Jagger's, on a series of 10 prints, and Warhol's, in a simply drawn self-portrait repeated in a pattern on wallpaper.
The show's curator, Eva Meyer-Hermann, says she wanted to make Warhol's work in moving images more accessible and show how it relates to his other art.
"These films, they were shown accompanying big Warhol shows, but they were hardly seen."
Two other rooms feature screens on the walls and hanging from the ceiling.
Visitors are invited to plop down on floor cushions that snake around the floor to watch some 20 Warhol movies including Horse, a Western parody with gay overtones, Couch, chronicling the goings-on on the Factory furniture, and Empire, an eight-hour film consisting of a steady shot of the top of the Empire State Building.
"My eyes hurt," says Cathleen Williams, 49, of Columbus, after two hours in the dimly lit galleries. Still, she is eager to recommend the show to others.
- AP
