Whom Andy Warhol shot

Thursday morning, I escaped that awful bitter cold and rain-specked, tree-whipping wind by walking into the lobby of the Nasher Museum of Art, happily ensconced in its warmth and marble whiteness, and found the exhibition I had come to see: “Big Shots: Andy Warhol Polaroids,” which began its three-month run that day. But instead I hit a snag—the security guard informed me that I would have to wait until 11 a.m. 

To pass the time, I wandered into the permanent exhibition, and found the requisite pieces of Greek and Roman antiquities, and with them the statues of Jesus Christ, his apostles and various saints—the facades of old stone taken from churches in Europe. They were nice but I didn’t think much more about them until my lunch at the Nasher Cafe, where I had a meticulously crafted sandwich and two glasses of a good Pinot Noir. So, it was after I finished with the Warhol exhibit and after an hour of poring over those instantly developed images, the images of multitudes—some world-famous (Mick Jagger, Jack Nicklaus) and others who were merely celebrities in the Warholian sense, in which their fame lasted for no longer than the 15 proverbial minutes, essentially the time it took for them to sit in the photo booth—that I thought to revisit those statues in the permanent exhibition. I came to find that they were basically the same form of art: it was idol-worship, the transformation of a cult of celebrity into a tangible medium, the perfect embodiment of one’s relationship to the concept of fame. Both the ancient art and its modern counterpart were produced in a format that complements the subject matter perfectly. 

Of course, the comparison of Warhol’s small cheap photographs to ancient masterworks is completely merited. The exhibition is fascinating; it effortlessly sells Warhol’s genius. Many of the Polaroids are on display to the public for the first time, a fact confounding to me, as they are as much genuine examples of art as they are indispensable historical documents. They serve the dual purpose of both illuminating the inquisitive patron as to how exactly the silkscreens are conceived and assembled, and chronicling the lives of the people who mattered to Warhol, because to him these people were America. But in their Polaroids, the faces that once inhabited the photo booths look lifeless, their skin softened by the distortion that this specific Polaroid model gave to them (Warhol used the Big Shot, a version of Polaroid camera that the company discontinued because of its oddity, for this specific reason: He liked how the camera made the subjects look). Add that to the sense of doom that inhabits the frame—the reality of death that took so many of these junky-artists, junky-actors or just plain junkies—and there is a piercing feeling that accompanies these instant photos, replications of their human counterparts that were snapped, expelled from the camera, and developed in a matter of minutes, only to be fated to out-live the people in them.  In his picture, Truman Capote—who died in 1984 from liver failure, the result of debilitating alcoholism and a fatal cocktail of too many drugs—has pasty skin, a bloated face and glassed-over eyes that don’t quite seem real. 

Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat—who died in 1988 at the age of 27 after a night of too much heroin and too much cocaine—is sporting wild dreadlocks and a tie. Beside him there are Polaroid pictures of his sister, mother and father, all of whom survived him.

But the most tragic of all the pieces in the exhibitions happens not to be a Polaroid. It’s one of Warhol’s famous screen tests, the series of four-minute, slow-motion, black-and-white silent films that Andy made of famous people who stopped by The Factory. 

This particular screen test is of Edie Sedgwick. I sat in the dark theatre at the center of the exhibit, alone and a bit buzzed from the wine, and Edie’s face emerged from the flickering whiteness: her lips parted not a millimeter, her eyes gushing—a nearly still image that, if it weren’t for the gentle sway of her golden earrings, could pass for a Polaroid. Then her eyes begin to widen, as if in fear, her pupils darting toward something off-screen, perhaps to Andy himself, and over the next few minutes I was subjected to the full scope of human emotion, each hitting home the tragedy of yet another too-young death of an astoundingly beautiful person—she died at 28, the victim of a night that involved a handful of barbiturates washed down with alcohol.  And those four minutes were a rebirth only Andy could have orchestrated: a combination of still images that can bring back a person who succumbed to the very version of fame that Warhol’s art captures. 

Nathan Freeman is a Trinity senior. His column normally runs every Friday.