DEAD WARHOL: Andy Warhol’s Posthumous Reputation – Part II

NEW PALTZ, NY — (New Paltz, NY)-The Art History Association at SUNY New Paltz and The Writing Program at The New School in New York City will present a two-part symposium titled Dead Warhol: Andy Warhol’s Posthumous Reputation. Part One will occur on Thursday, November 4 at the New School. Part Two will occur the following week on Thursday, November 11 at SUNY New Paltz.

Since Andy Warhol’s death in 1987, a vast new body of writing has emerged, presenting him by turns as a popular culture hero or a capitalist who corrupted the true value of art, as a devout Catholic or as a demonic entrepreneur, as a literate artist or an idiot savant.

A prolific photographer, painter, filmmaker, author, and businessman, Warhol’s classification in the early 1990s as a “queer artist” began to rival a “Disney-fied” reputation that dismissed menacing works in favor of those that were lighter and uncontroversial. Today, the accessibility of the Warhol archives and the current restoration of his underground films, which the artist himself had put out of circulation, are providing opportunity for new and sometimes contradictory interpretations of Warhol and his work.

Each participant in this symposium will speak about aspects of Warhol’s posthumous reputation from the perspective of her or his unique connection with the artist’s work. The presentations will be followed by a discussion with the audience.

Part II: Thursday. November 11 SUNY New Paltz Lecture Center 112, 7pm Free of charge

Deborah Kass is a painter who has done take-offs of Warhol paintings, for example replacing the Elvis in Warhol’s composition with a picture of Barbra Streisand as Yentl. A collection of essays about her work, entitled Deborah Kass: The Warhol Project and edited by Kass, Michael Plante, and Maurice Berger, has just been published (Newcomb Art Gallery, 1999).

Neil Printz Aside from the forthcoming volumes of the catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s paintings, Printz has been a contributor to the catalogues of major exhibitions of Warhol’s work; these include Andy Warhol: Death and Disasters (De Menil Museum, 1988) and Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (Museum of Modern Art, 1989).

Gerard Malanga This poet and photographer was a key associate of Warhol in the 1960s, assisting him with his paintings and filmmaking, and on occasion collaborating with him, for example on the book Screen Tests: A Diary (1967). A book of Malanga’s photographs, entitled Resistance to Memory, has recently been published (Arena Editions, 1998). Among his other publications is a history of the rock group the Velvet Underground, which he co-authored and which has recently been reprinted (1996).

Wayne Koestenbaum – is an author whose books include (among others) the highly acclaimed The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (Poseidon Press, 1993) and Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), as well as collections of poems, the most recent being The Milk of Inquiry: Poems (Persea Books, 1999). He is currently writing a biography of Andy Warhol for Penguin Books.

Reva Wolf is an Associate Professor of Art History at SUNY New Paltz. She was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton from 1995-96. Wolf is the author of Goya and the Satirical Print in England and on the Continent, 1730-1850 (Godine, 1991) and Andy Warhol, Poetry and Gossip in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 1997). Her most recent publication is an essay about sex, food, and photography in the exhibition catalogue that accompanies Andy Warhol Photography, on view at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany, and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (1999).

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