Art News recommended by Yong Chen : Book shelf: When the best way to live on the edge: picture of artists who lived in a brave new world - and created - Daringness Remembered - Andy Warhol

When the best way to live on the edge: picture of artists who lived in a brave new world - and created - Daringness Remembered - Andy Warhol - Book Review
Interview, Oct, 2003 by Patrick Giles

Starting in the 1970s, the young photographer Christopher Makos accompanied Andy Warhol in his travels, documenting his doings at the same time. Makos's WarholMemoir (Charta, just out in Europe and scheduled to appear in the States early next year) is a souvenir of this unusual but fortuitous alliance and the intrepid era to which they contributed. Warhol's visionary art and public ubiquity were essential to the birth of the belief in celebrity as an end in itself. He seemed to be everywhere, practically turning hanging out into an art form. Seen posing at Studio 54--a place he helped popularize simply by frequenting it--with the famous on either side (and the sexual revolution in full swing around him), Warhol and company turn into icons of a freer, more daring time before our eyes.

But then, Warhol was always drawn to knowing (and portraying in his art) people who reveled in pushing their talents and hopes to limits unimaginable just a few years before. Above, we see Warhol on the set of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film Querelle (1982), which starred Brad Davis, an actor at least as beautiful and talented as (but also bolder than) many others in Hollywood. Fassbinder's film of Jean Genet's underground novel was a risky venture in 1982 (it still would be today), and Warhol was siding with that risk by posing with its creators (later designing a poster for the film).

Today we can look at these pictures from another time and be amazed at how vital these people still appear, how full of the excitement and risk and daring of those days their expressions and fashions continue to give back to us. And then we remember, too, to experience what they created, and to find their works charged with that identical incandescence that can come only from living life as a great experiment.

Patrick Giles is Interview's associate editor.

Bibliography for "When the best way to live on the edge: picture of artists who lived in a brave new world - and created - Daringness Remembered - Andy Warhol - Book Review"
Patrick Giles "When the best way to live on the edge: picture of artists who lived in a brave new world - and created - Daringness Remembered - Andy Warhol - Book Review". Interview. Oct 2003.

Top of Page