Watch Andy Warhol's films and videos and it's easy to imagine the late pop artist feeling right at home in the current age of reality TV and Web video.
This was a man who made an hourlong film of people's random activities at his New York art studio, shot "screen tests" of subjects instructed to simply gaze into his camera for a few minutes without moving or even blinking and videotaped his own mother sleeping.
"He somehow did foretell our complete obsession with putting ourselves in the limelight, reflecting ourselves back to the world in a kind of instantaneous way, all the things that the Internet, YouTube and 'American Idol' have made possible," said Sherri Geldin, director of the Wexner Center for the Arts.
Warhol's movies and video share the stage with his more familiar Campbell's soup can paintings and colorful celebrity prints in "Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms," an exhibition running through Feb. 15 at the Wexner, on the grounds of Ohio State University.
Columbus is the only U.S. destination for the multimedia show, which debuted in Amsterdam, Netherlands, last year. Because film and video can be duplicated and because Warhol was so prolific in painting and other media, the show also open sTuesday at the Hayward Gallery in London.
Warhol, who was 58 when he died in 1987 following complications from gall bladder surgery, assigned equal importance to each of the different art forms in which he worked, Geldin said.
"All of this counted; all of it mattered. And if all of it didn't matter, then none of it mattered," said Geldin, who also chairs the New York-based Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
At the Wexner, visitors are greeted in the first room by a series of huge screens showing the screen tests, 4-minute black-and-white face-shots of actor Dennis Hopper, socialite Edie Sedgwick and dozens of other visitors to Warhol's art studio, the Factory, in the mid 1960s. Other faces look on from a nearby wall in the gallery, including rocker Mick Jagger's, in a series of 10 prints, and Warhol's, in a simply drawn self-portrait repeated in a pattern on wallpaper.
The show's curator, Eva Meyer-Hermann, said she wanted to make Warhol's work in moving images more accessible and show how it relates to his other art.
"These films, they were shown accompanying big (Warhol) shows, but they were hardly seen. So, they're much more written about than seen," Meyer-Hermann said in an interview from her office in Cologne, Germany.
Two other rooms feature screens opposite seating in abstract, undulating shapes. Visitors are invited to hang out watching some 20 Warhol movies such as "Horse," a Western parody with gay overtones, "Couch," chronicling the goings-on on the Factory furniture, and "Empire," an 8-hour film consisting of a steady shot of the top of the Empire State Building. The films are played on a loop and each screen has a countdown clock to the next start time, for those who want to watch -- or at least attempt to watch -- from the beginning to the end.
Throughout the exhibition are numerous smaller, individual monitors equipped with headphones for taking in Warhol works on videotape, including "Factory Diary: Julia Warhola in Bed," starring the artist's mother, and 42 half-hour television programs made for MTV and other outlets.
Meyer-Hermann said the movies and videos are important to understanding Warhol.
"I was struck by the fact of how close I felt to the artist while seeing (the films)," she said. "You look with the artist's eyes through his camera's eye."
For more information:
* Wexner Center for the Arts: wexarts.org/
* Hayward Gallery: haywardgallery.org.uk/
