With the amount of Andy Warhol exhibitions constantly being held around the world, it is easy to think that you have seen all there is of the best-known Pop Artist.After all, if you’ve seen one soup-can screen print you have seen them all, right? Well no, there are always new Warhol facets to discover, as proved by the 15 works in “Exposed: Songs for Unseen Warhol Films,” a performance just staged at the Barbican.The videos were shown with accompanying soundtrack from some of American independent music’s leading lights.After all, this is one of the most prolific artists of all time. Helped by a team of assistants (and usually industrially-sized quantities of amphetamines), they made work after work. His catalog raisonné currently runs to five volumes, with a sixth currently being prepared, and that still leaves a decade of work uncatalogued. His “Time Capsules” series alone has 612 editions, featuring 300,000 of the artist’s possessions that took 20 years for curators to fully sort through.Put simply, there is a lot of rarely seen, or indeed unseen, work out there. That said, it is easy to get Warhol fatigue. Repetition is key to the artist’s work, but the results can be, well, repetitive.Hence a new approach. The 15 shorts were previously unseen in Europe, although they had been viewed at the event’s premiere in Pittsburgh, home of the Andy Warhol Museum, in 2014.They get a live soundtrack courtesy of a cavalcade of American musicians that reads like a particularly cool night at Warhol’s Silver Factory. Performers include Martin Rev, one half of influential cult band Suicide; Television’s Tom Verlaine, one of the founders of post-punk; Eleanor Friedberger, of solo and the Fiery Furnaces fame; and Dean Wareham, who created the show. Sadly, Bradford Cox, of Atlas Sound and Deerhunter, was unavailable to attend because of a family bereavement.With each musician, we see a new Warhol, as creatives in their own right accentuate the parts of his film work that chimes with them. Some take inspiration from the images themselves, like Verlaine, whose intimate guitar playing soundtracks three early, domestic films, two of which feature the artist’s then-boyfriend, John Giorno.Others focused on the lives of the celebrities featured in the works, such as Friedberger, whose trio of songs are directly about the films’ subjects; artist Marisol, musician Donovan and archetypal Warhol Superstar.Some just did their own thing only loosely inspired by the action behind them, as with Martin Rev’s exhilarating noise set (at this point in his career, Rev’s world must just sound like the bombardment of noise he makes on stage.)Rev’s set was the nearest the evening came to what a Warhol gig must have been like, with the strange and exciting noise combined with projected film reminiscent of the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” (EPI) happenings orchestrated by Warhol to showcase his pet project, The Velvet Underground. Though instead of being attended by a wild crowd of 1960s outsiders and freaks, “Exposed” had to make do with a polite seated crowd of respectable middle class Londoners, none of whom bat an eye at a film that must have been shocking of its day of drag queen Mario Montez and his boyfriend alternately sharing a hamburger and sloppily kissing.What shines most of all, as that lurid example shows, are the films themselves. In a near pristine quality, astounding for works not seen for 50 years, the pieces show the sheer variety of Warhol’s interests, a range that gets forgotten in the pop history (pardon the pun) of Warhol, of soup cans, Marilyns, “Chelsea Girls,” and Empire. Though some of those Warhol film staples, the “Screen Tests,” are here (including one featuring Marcel Duchamp); so too is a stop-motion video, a backdrop made for an EPI show, and even what looks like a conventional home movie featuring Giorno washing dishes naked. As such, the show feels like a rare thing: a totally new insight into perhaps the world’s most over-exposed artist.“Exposed: Songs for Unseen Warhol Films” was performed on May 16.
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