MeTube: Warhol’s Zero Minutes of Fame at Pittsburgh’s Airport

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Thomas Sokolowski, director of the Andy Warhol Museum, fronts a band of Elvises.

What did I do on my summer work-cation (which limited my posting last week)?

I'll have more on that later, but for now, I'll revisit my last stop---the Pittsburgh Airport, where I had much too much time (thanks to weather delays at my destination, Newark) to explore the diverse array of shops and fast-food establishments (which had all closed by the time I finally made it out of there).

But wait a minute! The airport also contains an outpost of the Andy Warhol Museum, located right near the entrance to the D Concourse, where the gate for my (non-)departing flight was situated. The museum's director, Tom Sokolowski, had previously escorted our press group through a tour of his Downtown Pittsburgh institution. The most important temporary display, which Sokolowski left us with too little time to explore on our own, analyzed a match made in heaven (much more so than Picasso/Degas)---a show entitled Twisted Pair: Marcel Duchamp/Andy Warhol, curated by Matt Wrbican, the museum's archivist.

Included were a canny juxtaposition of a Duchamp bottle rack with a Warhol array of dusty Coke bottles arranged in a sectioned crate, as well as a 1963 snapshot by actor Dennis Hopper (currently the subject of LA MOCA's critically slammed retrospective) showing Warhol, the actor/writer Taylor Mead (longtime member of Andy's circle), and Hopper's then wife, Brooke Hayward, who were all on hand for the opening of Duchamp's retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum.

Our tour also included a sneak peek at an about-to-open installation that is a strong contender for Most X-Rated Show in the museum's history (as confirmed to me by Sokolowski)---"Sex Parts." (I cannot find anything to share with you about this display on the museum's website.) It includes not only Warhol's relatively unshocking paintings of genitalia but also his unsparingly explicit, small black-and-white snapshots of men in his studio, caught in acts of oral and anal sex. (Move over, Mapplethorpe!)

None of that, mercifully, was displayed at the airport. During my video report (at the bottom of this post) on that hiding-in-plain-sight installation, you'll hear me refer to boxes of Warhol ephemera in which some of the items arrayed at the airport were discovered. During our visit to the museum, Tom had taken us into the inner sanctum of the Warhol Archives, where the artist's 610 "Time Capsules" of unsorted stuff are being opened, carton by carton, to be carefully examined and catalogued:

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Warhol's "Time Capsules"

The museum has thus far opened about half the boxes and hopes to have the job done in three more years. Among the fabulous finds: a slice of pizza, hundreds of bottle of liquor, table settings purloined from the Concorde, a petrified foot from the 2nd century A.D., $17,000 in cash, and, let us not forget, the widely reported autographed poster of the nude Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

While we were down there, one of the cataloguers had just come upon another of many postcards that had been sent to Andy by the poet Allen Ginsberg:

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White-gloved researcher reads Ginsberg's postcard. Tom Sokolowski listens at right.

The photos below were part of the contents of a box being examined during our visit. At the center, right, is a shot of Andy with the young Luciano Pavarotti:

WarhPhotos.jpg

But what Sokolowski really wanted to do was attach a name to the face of the man who appears in two of these photos:

WarhWho.jpg

If you can identify the fellow on the left (who is also at the left of the photo above the color photo), click CultureGrrl's "Contact Me" link (located below the Twitter logo in my center column) and we'll help to solve this mystery. He looks vaguely familiar to me, but I just can't place him.

But now let's leave the Downtown Pittsburgh Warhol Museum and explore its much busier, noisier outpost. At the very end of this CultureGrrl Video, you'll see a poignant demonstration of how a purposeful, hurried mother can squelch a child's natural curiosity about art:
July 29, 2010 12:01 AM | |

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LEE ROSENBAUM I'm a veteran cultural journalist with many pieces in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and major art magazines. I have been a cultural contributor on New York Public Radio (WNYC and WQXR) and have provided arts commentary on NPR and public radio stations in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. I am a HuffPost Arts writer. I've been profiled on the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer's Art Beat and in the Chicago Reader. I've appeared as an art-market commentator on BBC-TV and have published numerous Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. I am author of The Complete Guide to Collecting Art (Knopf) and have lectured on cultural property issues at the New Acropolis Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, on deaccessioning at at Investigative Reporters and Editors 2011 Annual Meeting, Columbia Law School, the University of Iowa and a conference of the Museum Association of New York, on museum governance and cultural property issues at Seton Hall University, on arts blogging at American University and on Smithsonian exhibition controversies at Rutgers University.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by CultureGrrl published on July 29, 2010 12:01 AM.

Deaccession Confusion: Mixed Messages from AAMD was the previous entry in this blog.

"Portrait of Wally’s" Unveiling: Tearful, Joyful Reunion of Lea Bondi’s Descendants is the next entry in this blog.

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