3D Warhol by Morgan Evans Thomas

Author:Morgan Evans, Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B. Tauris

Fig. 4.2.Originally published in Interview magazine, April 1979. Courtesy of BMP Media Holdings, LLC.

The invasion of the gallery by a disco, of course, represents a direct challenge to its agenda (plates 4.3 and 4). In her work on wallpaper and contemporary art, Elisa Auther has described the dual affront that the symbolism of Shadows presented, both as ‘decoration’, that scourge of high art, and as an implicit ‘queering’ of the gallery space through the association with disco.18 In addition to Shadows’ formal and thematic ties to the art ‘across the street’, some of which had an overt feminist agenda, we might add that the set of associations between the decorative arts and femininity, and disco and homosexuality, which are condensed in Shadows, would have only been put in greater relief in contrast with the Minimal art that was native to the Heiner Friedrich Gallery. This could be seen as reflective of the white, straight, rock and roll crowd—a ‘heavy metal’ crowd—which was opposed to disco, and whose music superseded it in the mainstream.

Again, as I considered in my discussion of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, Minimalism’s iconography has been subject to critique, most notably in Anna C. Chave’s analysis of Minimal art’s ‘rhetoric of power’.19 However, again, what I want to suggest does not so much revolve around the alternative iconography that disco offers but its alternative model of aesthetic reception. I want to read Shadows as undoing the co-constitution of value in the relationship between the institution and its participant that was typical of Minimalism. In order to do so, Warhol’s strategy here, as it was in the case of Personality of the Artist and Silver Clouds, was one of aesthetic recoding, rather than disavowal. Despite not being at floor level as intended, Shadows suggested an integration with the gallery’s architectural structure of floor and wall, and also set up a relationship to an ‘object’ within this space, intimated by the shadow image.20 And like its Minimal counterpart, Shadows still suggested that relations between the object, the space and the person were on one even plane. But in doing so, the work ultimately reversed how these relationships establish the status and importance of the object by instead making its arena, the gallery floor, a dancefloor: a collective space that had had radical social implications during the years of disco. I want to read this new order as a reversal of the constitution of value at the Heiner Friedrich Gallery, whereby the outside space of the disco displaces Minimalism’s object presence, demoting it to the image of its shadow in the paintings. In his description of the aesthetic relationships constitutive of disco, Tim Lawrence describes a situation that we might read as the exact opposite of that described of Minimal art:

as the guests acclimatize to their new surroundings bodies begin to sway, arms start to stretch, legs limber up, and feet unconsciously flicker. Note by note, beat by beat, the music becomes more intense and rhythmic until everyone and everything is drawn into a dizzying display of movement.

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