BRILLO BOX HEADSLAP >>>

Viewing and reviewing the Andy Warhol exhibition at Tacoma Art Museum brought back memories of fun times and heated arguments in college art departments in the '60s and '70s. The consensus opinion was that Warhol was not really so much an artist as he was a great practical joker putting everybody on and making lots of money at the expense of a gullible art-buying public. Most of us in the art schools thought that was super cool.

I, for one, thought he was the greatest artist since Picasso. Not that I particularly liked his art; it was his whole being that I liked - his public persona, his ideas. I saw him as not so much a painter or silk screen artist or sculptor or filmmaker but as a brilliant, tongue-in-cheek performance artist. His art was not what he made but what he was. This was the apotheosis of what Marcel Duchamp had begun by purchasing a urinal and entering it in an art exhibition.

I liked Warhol but did not fully appreciate his contribution to modern art history until I read the critic Arthur Danto's analysis of Warhol's Brillo boxes. Sorry, folks, his analysis was too complex to explain in the limited space of this column, but I can kind of hit the highlights. It has to do with calling into the question the relationship between art and life, reality and illusion. For centuries, beginning with the Italian Renaissance and up through the Pre-Raphaelites and on up to the photo-realists of the late 20^th century, artists had attempted to create illusions of reality. With the invention of collage by Picasso and Braque, artists began to bring real life into their art rather than create illusions. Duchamp erased the boundaries between artist-made and manufactured items, Alan Kaprow's happenings of the 1960s blurred boundaries between art and life, and when Jackson Pollock was criticized for not painting from nature he said, "I AM nature." All of this culminated when Andy Warhol painstakingly and with great artistic skill duplicated banal commercial machine-made objects - the Brillo boxes - and said he wanted to be a machine.

The Brillo boxes ushered in the very-hard-to-explain post-modernism and forever changed the face of modern art. That's the short version of Warhol's accomplishment. It took me years to recognize and understand it to whatever small degree. It took me even longer to grow to like the very subtle and sometimes shocking artistic quality of his drawings and silkscreens. I still see the red-and-white silkscreens of soup cans as more conceptual than visual. But I have come to love his color choices and the shimmering off-register of many of his flowers and celebrity portraits and many of his other pieces. I've come to appreciate him as a conceptualist and an artist, and I think Tacoma is lucky to have this special exhibition of his work, some of which was done specifically for Tacoma. How cool is that?

The exhibition is organized by Tacoma Art Museum, with the acknowledgement of the generosity of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.