Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum outside New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
“I started repeating the same image because I like the way the repetition changed the same image,” Andy Warhol once told Gerard Malanga in an interview they conducted for “The Print Collector’s Newsletter” in 1971. Warhor’s answer is trademark vapid and repetitive, but it’s funny that the interview is being conducted by Malanga, whose hands made many of Warhol’s most famous silk screens. There’s no way the two of them had never had a conversation about the topic before. But that was the Factory for you: if something was worth doing once, it was worth doing a thousand times, for hours on end.
Repetition is the subject of a new show in Warhol’s home state at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Begin Again: Repetition in Contemporary Art” features loaned and collection works by the likes of Anri Sala, Lorna Simpson, Bruce Nauman, Melik Ohanian, Marepe, Sherrie Levine, Trisha Brown, On Kawara, Francis Alÿs and Gabriel Orozco.
Your analyst might have a simple explanation as to why everyone seems to make the same mistakes over and over again, but all these artists have each found a wider and unique depth in their mimetic studies. On Kawara’s painting practice involved a joyous exploration of colors and fonts as he painted the date each painting was made. His Guggenheim retrospective, when so many of these dates could be seen simultaneously, felt like a confirmation of time’s subjectivity. The paintings in Philadelphia are from 2001, a particularly good vintage for him, if not a great one for planet Earth.
SEE ALSO: Gillian Varney On the Lumen Prize and Its Relevance After Thirteen Years
Atomists: Blindside Run (1996) is a prime example from Gabriel Orozco’s “Atomists” series in which he seeks to cancel, augment or, yes, repeat the movement in a sports photograph through strategic use of geometric shapes. These are integrated so skillfully that you’re forced to question what really draws you to the screen. There’s a similar point to be made in Fiona Banner’s Break Point (1998), in which the artist describes a car chase from the movie Point Break (1991) in increasingly small red letters as if it’s being described by an excited child. It must be an effective piece, because it makes me want to go watch Point Break, and I only want to do that a few times a year.
Francis Alÿs Fairy Tales, Stockholm (1998) recreates an earlier performance in which the artist walked the streets with a string so as not to get lost, depicting it in a forest with oil paint and doubled. What’s consistent in the works presented in this show is the way that repetition seems to romanticize everything. The recently deceased Bill Viola demonstrates this in Silent Mountain (2001), a video piece that has two actors displaying extreme anguish in beautiful slow motion. Repetition reveals just how much of our lives is always a performance, which allows us to go deeper into the parts that aren’t.
“Begin Again: Repetition in Contemporary Art” is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through December 30.
