When Andy Warhol first installed his Shadows paintings at Heiner Friedrich Gallery in 1979, he distinguished them from art by calling them disco décor. Back in his studio several months later, Warhol had second thoughts, and used the canvases as backdrops for an Interview magazine fashion shoot.
The hundred-and-two large-scale silkscreens have had a shadowy existence ever since. Acquired by Friedrich's Lone Star Foundation – later renamed the Dia – the series took up too much wall space even for the sprawling Dia:Beacon. (From 2003 until 2011, the Dia:Beacon showed a selection.) Only in 2012, at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, were the hundred-and-two Shadows seen together for the first time. Now the complete installation – all four-hundred-and-fifty linear feet of it – is on view at MOCA.
Installation view of Andy Warhol: Shadows, September 20, 2014 – February 2, 2015 at MOCA Grand... [+]
Yet even in full light, the paintings have retained a penumbra of uncertainty. Art historians continue to debate the photographic source of the shadows: whether they're shady corners of Warhol's Factory or dim silhouettes of male genitalia. Moreover, people have remained uncertain about how the paintings should be taken. At MOCA, many visitors use them as artsy backgrounds for selfies. In a Los Angeles Times review, Christopher Knight is less sanguine, calling the Shadows "vapid and pretentious", and supporting his view with Warhol's own opinion.
Knight acknowledges that Warhol may have been ironic when he dubbed the paintings disco décor, yet he fails to appreciate the depth of Warhol's irony, mistaking it for glibness. The Shadows belong – as Knight rightly acknowledges – to the zero-sum game initiated by John Cage's silent musical composition, 4'33", and Robert Rauschenberg's White Paintings, blank surfaces for ambient shadows. But far from "a dreary, monotonous epitaph", the Shadows are a bridge from the midcentury avant-garde to our own era of perpetual overstimulation, in which the negative spaces provided by the White Paintings and 4'33" have become increasingly inaccessible. The Shadows are simulacra for nothingness, and the notion that these ersatz shadows should decorate a dance club or support a photo shoot only accentuates their ingenious fraudulence.
So if you visit MOCA, be sure to take a selfie. In your smartphone-addled distraction, you'll find yourself facing Warhol's subversive irony.
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