Who would’ve thought a borderline sociopath and devoutly homosexual voyeur like Andy Warhol would wind up siring so many children? Even though his work doesn’t feature, Warhol’s DNA is all over this exhibition of art made from the 1970s up to today, and it’s a potent stream of influence that takes you from New York to Moscow to Beijing.
Here’s an image of a Campbell’s soup can reimagined as a charred poster by the Russian duo Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid in 1973. Here’s another soup can picture, this time rendered as a dead-eyed pop art facsimile by 1980s US appropriation artist Mike Bidlo. And here’s Warhol’s famous image of Elvis shooting from the hip, given an early computer-art makeover by Belarus artist George Pusenkoff in his 1996 painting ‘Double Elvis (After Warhol)’, and morphed with Sid Vicious in YBA Gavin Turk’s semi-self-portrait ‘Ghost Pop’ (2012). Marilyn Monroe crops up, too, as a grinning foil to glum chops Stalin in New York-based Russian artist Leonid Sokov’s ‘Two Profiles’ (1989), and as a clever composite of Chairman Mao postcards in British artist David Mach’s ‘M&M’ (2014).
The show sets out to tell us why pop art, that most disposable of twentieth-century art movements, has had such an enduring global influence,taken up by artists from fundamentally different cultures and backgrounds. But it doesn’t, at least not in any straightforward way. However through the sheer amount of stuff on display, it does reveal just how easily the subjects of mass consumerism and advertising – logos, movie stars –can be co-opted by pop to say pretty much whatever you want them to. For every message and standpoint you’ll find the opposite. One minute you’re looking at Wang Guangyi’s ‘Great Criticism’ paintings (1992), in which Chinese workers appear to wage war on the logos of Western brands. Next, you’re enjoying the gaudy realism of Fang Lijun’s canvas ‘2011-2012’, which seems at first glance to celebrate the spoils of the free market. Andy’s fright wig would bristle with approval at the ambiguity of it all.
Drawn from various collections (though, curiously, not Charles Saatchi’s own) the show is exhaustive and exhausting, and genuinely thrilling in parts, with its smattering of contemporary masterpieces including Cindy Sherman’s sex-doll photo series and Andres Serrano’s ‘Immersions (Piss Christ)’ (1987). It starts sedately enough with mostly monochrome furniture sculptures by Rachel Whiteread, Clay Ketter and Robert Gober. But it quickly descends into glorious chaos with works such as Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s ‘Unfinished Installation’ (1995) of half-opened boxes, and Tom Sachs’s cobbled together ‘Nutsy’s McDonald’s’ (2001) fast-food stand. As you walk into one room on the first floor, it takes a moment to realise you’re in the gallery shop and not another faux-consumer environment.
Warhol, of course, loved to shop, his unprejudiced hoarding of treasure and tat was closely aligned with his compulsion to observe, catalogue and control. Meanwhile ‘post-pop art’ works best when accentuating the gulf between desirability and attainability: the stuff we buy in substitution, perhaps, for the things we really need. There’s a terrible void at the heart of Jeff Koons’s basketballs floating in their glass tank; saccharine blankness in Gary Hume’s gloss paintings of hospital doors; and hollow laughter in Alexey Kallima’s conflation of beauty-product ads and Chechnyan war imagery.
Proving that Marcel Duchamp really did do everything first, the show makes a final splash with an enclave of urinals – given a Suprematist makeover in Alexander Kosolapov’s ‘Russian Revolutionary Porcelain’ (1989-90), rendered in primary-colour acrylic foam by Sergey Shekhovtsov in ‘Duchamp’s Urinal’ and gleaming bronze by Sherrie Levine in ‘Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp)’ (1991). Each of these delve back beyond Warhol and into art’s pre-pop history. Because, while Warhol may have spawned hundreds of imitators, Marcel Duchamp really is the daddy of them all.
Martin Coomer