What feels fresh is the sense of spontaneity and the documentary proximity to
the artist’s life. So, we find images of flea markets that Warhol loved to
scour, as well as a gay-pride march, which has an obviously political
tingle. In fact, the more you look, the more you realise that Warhol wasn’t
shy on commenting, often quite explicitly, on the shortcomings of America.
There is a shot of a black man in shorts sleeping face down on a public
bench. Is he a down-and-out? There are pictures of bin bags, manhole covers
leading to sewers and a gleaming chrome toilet in a show-home bathroom:
reminders of the waste generated by the capitalist good life.
‘People in the Street’ by Andy Warhol (The Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts; Courtesy FAIF Collection/Gallery focus21)
In several less interesting photographs, Warhol is fascinated by little more
than the pleasing geometric patterns inherent within the architecture, say,
of skyscrapers. The images worth looking at are the ones with more bite,
where Warhol used his camera like a blowpipe, propelling poisonous darts
towards targets such as sexual inequality, poverty, or the excesses of
fashionable society. Perhaps he wasn’t such a cold, neutral machine after
all. In fact, the more I think about it, the more his stitched photographs –
which have an obviously handmade, tactile, human quality – remind me of
Richard Avedon’s famous photograph of Warhol’s scarred and sutured body,
taken in 1969 in the wake of surgery following the artist’s near-fatal
shooting in the Factory. It turns out that Warhol, that supposedly
dispassionate, mechanical enigma, had a heart.
Upstairs, the Photographers’ Gallery is showing work by two other
countercultural American figures: the heroin-addicted Beat novelist
William S Burroughs, who wrote Naked Lunch (1959), and the film
director David Lynch. The more than 100 photographs by Burroughs are
doggedly un-artistic: just as he rejected literary convention in his
writing, so in his photographs he avoided any overt sense of pictorial
ordering. Instead, we find impressions and fragments of his bohemian life in
London, Tangier and elsewhere, jumbled up together in a kind of freeform
miscellany.
‘Jack Kerouac, Tangier, 1957′, a photograph by William S Burroughs
(Estate of William S Burroughs)
The effect is reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s busy screen-prints, but minus the
elegance. There are several sequences in which a particular object or scene
has been photographed repeatedly, almost obsessively, providing a
multi-perspective take on reality – a little like the pictures an
investigator would shoot in a crime scene. Inspired by Surrealist collage,
Burroughs’s fractured vision offers a reordering of the world,
uncompromising, and with few concessions to aesthetic niceties.
If anything, Lynch goes too far the other way, in a moody and mysterious
series of more than 80
black-and-white images taken between 1980 and 2000 known as The Factory
Photographs. In these pictures, shot in Germany, England, Poland and
New York, Lynch concentrates on derelict, empty factory buildings. There are
lots of ominous views of dank brickwork, rusty pipes and gutters, mephitic
puddles, broken windowpanes and chains, and doorways so dilapidated and
seemingly foul-smelling that a location manager could suggest them for a
scene requiring the gateway to hell.
David Lynch, Untitled (Lodz), 2000, from his ‘Factory Photographs’ series
(Collection of David Lynch)
The precedent for the series is the influential work of the brilliant German
artists Bernd
and Hilla Becher, who are best known for their “typologies†of industrial
structures, but Lynch infuses his source with an unashamedly neo-gothic
atmosphere, an effect in part achieved by the accompanying soundtrack, which
he also designed, involving the sort of brooding bass with which fans of his
films will be familiar. You wouldn’t want to find yourself wandering around
one of these gutted factories late at night: menace and murder, you sense,
must be just around the corner. Unless, of course, like me, you find
yourself resistant to melodrama – in which case, a trip around Lynch’s
overly artfully composed factories will feel more like visiting a haunted
house in a funfair: spooky, but not properly scary.
Andy Warhol: Photographs 1976-1987; Taking Shots: The Photography of
William S Burroughs; David Lynch: The Factory Photographs. Until March 30; thephotographersgallery.org.uk
Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, David Lynch, Photographers" Gallery, review
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