The search for Andy Warhol's voice
Wainwright, Jean (2011) The search for Andy Warhol's voice. [Curation, Exhibition/show, Installation, Sound art]
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The Search for Andy Warhol's Voice was a curated sound installation, which occupied an entire floor of the De La Warr Pavilion as part of the 2011–12 exhibition Warhol is Here. The installation incorporated photographs and archival ephemera, but centred on a collection of tape-recorded interviews, taken over the course of my fifteen-year journey to find Warhol's voice as recalled by those who were close to him. Did he hold conversations, did he chat away or was he as silent and monosyllabic as has been suggested by the extensive Warhol literature?
I both conceived and curated this project, which was created in site-specific form first for the De La Warr Pavilion and then for The Graves Gallery, Sheffield in 2012. Each version had new recordings especially made for the project and played on old cassette players alongside earlier recordings. The project emerged from my PhD, awarded 2007, using my primary research and unique access to the extensive audio archive of Warhol recordings.
These recordings contain the stories of Warhol's collaborators, the stars of his films, and his family. His brothers John and Paul Warhola talk about growing up with Warhol; other participants include David Bailey, Steven Bluttal, Brigid Berlin, John Giorno, Gerard Malanga, Billy Name, and Nat Finkelstein. Some of the interviewees had not spoken publicly before and several are now dead, making their contributions especially valuable. The primary Warhol tapes are embargoed, unavailable to scholars, so this exhibition provides a unique insight into the way Warhol talked to those around him, giving a sense of the man, his working methods, and his relationships with family and lovers. No other exhibition of this kind has been produced on Warhol.
The De La Warr exhibition also incorporated a surround-sound performance piece War(Holy), conceived by myself and co-produced with Rhys Davies.
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