Warhol in Prince George

I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic. ~ Andy Warhol

can you believe that we currently have actual Andy Warhols in the Prince George (Two Rivers) Art Gallery?
Jackie II (1966), Lincoln Center (1967), Liz (1967) and Mao (1972) are here.

Don't you just want to pull on your go-go boots, stuff your hat over your eyes, your hands in your threadbare pockets and head down there through Prince George's slushy winter-slogging streets?

Mao is particularly impressive as is Liz, especially her bright blue eye shadow vibrant against a red backdrop. There is even a (real) Campbell soup display at the art gallery which will eventually transform into a food hamper donation. . . funny how everyone's food hamper donations these days tend to be Campbells anyway, no questions asked. That was easy.

The art display entitled "Pops Display" was prefaced by an opening held last Thursday evening complete with delicious hors d'oeuvres (even jelly beans but there were certainly more elegant fingerfoods on hand too), wine and bright fruit punches.
Meow Music provided music a la 1960s. Truly, a complete fusion of arts in its various sensory delights. The art gallery describes pop art a "a fun and kitschy movement" and so too was this fine opening event complete with all sorts of folks dressed in 1960s garb (note to self: some fine 1960s woolen mini-dresses may be found in the Prince George Vallu-Village).

The description of the art show explains, "An explosion of popular imagery and everyday signs and symbols into the world of fine art began to occur in the late 1950s and early 1960s." The art is further described as graphically tidy and accoustically simple.

I did not happen to be around in the late 1950s nor early 1960s so this movement seems really very historic to me, but what I am intrigued by is that these commercial things that nowadays we have come to accept as mundane routine reality surrounding us wherever we go, were during that era coming to be viewed as interesting sources of art. Advertising was then really starting to come into its own and take off. The western world was really starting to become the saturated materialistic place it has now come to be.

Here is another interesting Warhol quote which perhaps explains why he found it so interesting to focus on the artistic merits as such regular things as Campbell's soup tins & Coca Cola:

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Warhol and other pop artists moved away from hand-drawn images, preferring instead a kind of print making/ silkscreening approach to depicting popular consumer products, ads and celebrities. Reflective of this basic pop art experience, the Two Rivers' Gallery show includes an interactive "make art make sense" activity. Visitors to the museum may have a quadruple image of themselves made on the computer then use the materials provided to colour and create a Pop-inspred self portrait.

All totalled, this Two Rivers display (on tour from the Vancouver Art Gallery under a provincial touring program) is tons of fun, and as Warhol put it,

"Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again."


Whatever that means. . .