Andy Warhol

A brief but enjoyable visit to the exhibition of Warhol pieces from the Hall collection at the Ashmolean. Brevity of attention seems appropriate to work that is about - to the extent that it is 'about' anything -  a world of flashy celeb sensation, ephemeral fame, the replacement of the gaze with the glance. From my own porous memory, a few days later, what clings? Early silkscreen flowers which convey, beneath the deadpan cool of the Warhol image, an actual sense of beauty and excitement in making; a minute or two watching the various films on simultaneous display in Room 2, and being held by the scratches in the film and wavering light in Empire (1964); a huge screen print portrait of Joseph Beuys - another master of the self-image, and solemn prophetic critic of Western materialism - gazing gloomily across at the array of portraits of the once famous on the opposite wall; aleatoric creations in oxidized urine and a Rorsach image, made in some kind of nervous satirical dialogue with the Abstract Expressionism which represented a completely opposite aesthetic. Where Pollock & co. proclaimed the heroic and isolated soul of the artist taking form in unconsciously guided  paint, Warhol's works give us the deliberately vacuous maker, absorbed into the shallow anonymity of a superficial world of easy fun and brash sensation.

One might, on an astringent day, feel moved to criticise a lack of individual draughtsmanship, a reliance on facile technique, but that seems to be the point: the easily captured and reproducible image is the image of a world based on commerce and populist rhetoric, visual and verbal. Warhol could draw quite well - and did, in his fledgling days as an illustrator - but preferred to make drawn portraits by tracing photos with a thick carpenter's pencil, denying the possibilities of nuance and subtlety. In the last room, copies of kitsch religious imagery, ads and slogans (Heaven and Hell are Just one Breath Away) add up to a kind of commentary on last things, following Warhol's near-death experience when he was shot in 1968. Warhol heralded the infinite inanities of social media, self-branding, and fashion - our versions of the icons which fascinated him in the churches of his youth. The show is disconcertingly honest in holding up a mirror to our nature, turning pop images into a new iconography. It's all fun to look at, and very cool - but also one senses that coolness and facility leaves out almost everything that gives the human story any interest and dignity. It's beguilingly difficult to tell whether Warhol is providing some kind of critique of modernity or simply embodying its vulgarity. He was obsessed with money, fame and attention. Perhaps in a clever ironic way, perhaps not.  But he was certainly a voyeur (in a very literal sense, as one panel reminds us) and a valuable recorder of his age. The record that he leaves here is like a room where a party has taken place, bearing the acrid after-party taste of futility. The melancholy of the glossy polaroid snap.