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This is the fourth and final post in a series of podcasts produced about The Warhol’s exhibition Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei.

These podcasts were produced by The Andy Warhol Museum in collaboration with the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh to coincide with Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, a major international exhibition featuring two significant artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Interviews with professors, researchers, artists, and museum staff were conducted by high school students at the Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts School (CAPA) to help provide historical and cultural context for the exhibition. CAPA students Will Dowd and Anthony Quesen both edited and produced the final podcasts.

In this podcast Jessica Beck, associate curator of art at The Andy Warhol Museum, gives an overview of the major themes in the exhibition and how she paired both artist’s work to elicit provocative conversation in the galleries.

Audio transcript

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Host: Hello, and welcome to Capitalism/Communism: A Way of Life, the podcast that brings you inside information on the Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei exhibition.

Announcer: These podcasts were produced by The Andy Warhol Museum in collaboration with the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh, to coincide with the Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, a major international exhibition featuring two significant artists from the 20th and 21st centuries. Interviews with professors, researchers, artists and museum staff were conducted by high school students at the Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts School to help provide historical and cultural context for the exhibition.

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Host: In this podcast Jessica Beck, associate curator or art at The Andy Warhol Museum, gives an overview of the major themes in the exhibition and how she paired both artists’ work to elicit provocative conversation in the galleries.

Can you give us an overview of your curatorial role in this exhibition?

Jessica Beck: The exhibition is organized thematically to draw connections and parallels between both artists. They actually have nearly three decades between them, so we wanted to reveal how their trajectories and work was shaped throughout their careers, so for instance the top floor of the museum the visitor will find early drawings from Warhol’s first trip around the world which he took in 1956 with Charles Lisanby, a friend and then also someone that Warhol pined after. On this trip which he funded completely independently at this point in career, he was hugely successful as a commercial illustrator, so he funded this trip through Asia and Europe. They went to Honolulu, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bali, Singapore, Calcutta, and then eventually Rome, so you’ll see early sketches from sketchbooks of this trip that Warhol took through parts of Asia, and then you’ll also see compared to that Ai Weiwei’s early student drawings that he completed first in Beijing, so they’re somewhat more traditional, kind of unexpected when you think of Ai Weiwei now, working in a much more political fashion.

So the exhibition runs throughout all floors of the museum, and those comparisons, the side by side comparisons or you can say interventions, happen throughout all seven floors. So as the visitor goes through, they’ll start with these early drawings, then they’ll see comparisons of capitalism and communism. Both Warhol and Weiwei experienced different bursts of capitalism—for Warhol it was in early 1950s in New York and Weiwei eventually the move from the Cultural Revolution in Beijing to a more consumerist feel in society.

Each floor has these different themes, the themes go throughout such as surveillance in the state, social disease, political beauty, and then there’s a really great comparison of the engagement with the readymade, or Marcel Duchamp’s overarching long shadow and tradition in art making. Both Warhol and Weiwei did a lot with the readymade and sort of followed in Marcel Duchamp’s footsteps. That’s one of, I think, the stronger comparisons between the two. Both Warhol and Weiwei sort of dealt with issues of government or societal oppression, just in different ways. Obviously Ai Weiwei is much more political because he endured a lot more than Warhol did, but Warhol also dealt with oppression in a different way through his sexuality growing up in Pittsburgh in the ‘40s and then moving up to New York in the early ‘50s and dealing all the time in America when homosexuality was not only looked down upon and not accepted in society but actually illegal in different states.

I think one of the reasons why both Ai Weiwei and Andy Warhol remain relevant is because of their different dynamic uses of different methods and mediums. So Andy Warhol has used many different kinds of mediums—he’s worked in painting and silk screening and photography and film, and also used books and magazines as part of his practice, and Ai Weiwei equally has used those mediums, but he’s also used sculpture and he’s sort of broken down the walls of the museum or the gallery, gone outside of that. He’s used social media as part of his practice as well—Instagram, through that platform he has attracted the attention of hundreds of thousands of followers, and he’s been able to delve more into political activism. For instance he’s now much more engaged with the refugee crisis and has used his social media platform to bring awareness to that issue, and he’s actually working on a new film with the refugee crisis in Lesbos where he set up a studio. So I think that’s one of the main connecting points between them is that they’ve both been very dynamic with their medium, and they’ve done work that has gone beyond the normal conventions of art making.

One of the fascinating things between the two of them is that they were both in New York at the same time. So Ai Weiwei had moved from Beijing as a young student, a young art student. He already sort of connected himself in China with different art movements, but then moved to New York to broaden his work and his practice, and he studied at the Preston School of Design for a few years, took some classes there, and he used photography a lot during this period to explore the streets of New York, to explore social movements that were happening in the streets, particularly the AIDS crisis was gaining a lot of attention at this moment in New York. Warhol by the 1980s was already a household name in not just the art world but also in certain celebrity circles, so he was using photography at this moment very strongly as well, but he was tracking more social events that he was going to, his own travel, celebrity spotting and sightings, but he used his photography in an interesting way where he thought more about the medium of photography itself and created this whole body of sort of modernist black and white prints, where they were street images but they were more formal, not necessarily focused on people or parades or activists, presentations—kind of what Ai Weiwei was doing. So there is a difference between their practice at that moment, but it’s interesting that they’re both in New York in an important time.

One of the best takeaways from this exhibition is that each artist produced, and still is producing in terms of Ai Weiwei who is still living with us and alive… [chuckles] produce an enormous body of work. And that body of work continues to remain relevant in contemporary art circles but also in society. So Ai Weiwei is clearly involved in activist movements and Warhol we don’t think of him as so engaged, but he actually was very much engaged with identity politics, self-expression, sexuality, all of these issues which still remain very contemporary and are fiercely debated even today in our current society. So one of the beautiful things is this comparison reveals that each artist was—had a sort of insatiable appetite for documenting their worlds, their lives, and then transforming that into amazing, compelling, thought-provoking, challenging art. And with Warhol, who was so great with color and different sort of formal techniques, you’re able to see that Ai Weiwei is equally engaged in form and medium and beauty in a way that Warhol was as well. So there’s a lot of elements of dark and light in this exhibition, and I think that that’s what’s so beautiful is you get to see the dark side of Warhol and Ai Weiwei, you see that light and that beauty as well.

Host: This scene concludes Capitalism/Communism: A Way of Life. Thank you for tuning in. Bye-bye.

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