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5/11/2014

Andy Warhol / Gretchen Bender / The Serving Library

Tate Liverpool, Liverpool

Transmitting Andy Warhol

It was Warhol’s democratic belief that ‘art should be for everyone’.
Transmitting Andy Warhol explores how the artist embraced the mass mediums of his time - publishing, film, music, and broadcast to transmit his ideas and imagery to as many people as possible. In doing so, Warhol radically re-defined access to culture and art, challenging traditional notions of high and low culture, private and mass experience.

In his desire to make art public, Warhol’s practice spanned the worlds of art, media, music, fashion and celebrity. Exhibition highlights include the Marilyn Diptych 1962, Dance Diagram 1962 and Do-it-Yourself 1962 paintings. These will be shown alongside Warhol’s television commercials, fashion illustrations for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, concert posters, his TV show and a dazzling display of his trailblazing celebrity magazine Interview. The exhibition will also include the much loved works Three Brillo Soap Pad Boxes 1964/68 and Campbell’s Soup I 1968.

The exhibition includes a spectacular presentation of the travelling multi-media spectacle The Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI), Warhol’s famed ‘total art’ environment. Used as a framework for a series of performances by the Velvet Underground and Nico, EPI will bring the atmosphere of 1960s New York to the Liverpool Waterfront.

Transmitting Andy Warhol is exhibited alongside Gretchen Bender and the The Serving Library to form Tate Liverpool’s autumn/winter season - Making Things Public. Across the gallery, you are invited to explore how artists from different generations have responded to and experimented with the pervasive influence of mass and broadcast media.

Whether you’re visiting Liverpool to do your Christmas shopping, take in the Liverpool Christmas lights or enjoy Liverpool’s Christmas markets, Tate Liverpool is the perfect addition to your trip. We have a wide selection of unique, art inspired Christmas gifts in the Tate Liverpool shop and a delicious selection of comforting treats in the Tate Liverpool Café; perfect for a winter’s day. Be sure to try one of our fabulous Marilyn cupcakes, also available gluten free.

Includes works from The ARTIST ROOMS collection.

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Gretchen Bender

Discover the work of American multimedia artist Gretchen Bender (1951–2004). Gretchen Bender presents the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work in the UK to date and showcases a selection of her immersive pioneering multimedia installations.

Unseen for 20 years, a major highlight of the exhibition is a reconstruction of Bender’s seminal video performance Total Recall (1987). A monumental 24-monitor multi-projection screen installation, Total Recall explores the accelerated image-flow of television and exemplifies Bender’s concept of ‘electronic theatre’, in which she aimed to infiltrate the corporate domain of mass media representation by overloading the viewer with information.

Combining stacked monitors and an aggressive barrage of edited footage of Cold War-era military hardware, animated corporate logos, Hollywood film iconography and commercials for consumer recording devices, the work provides a mesmerising critique of the violence and commoditisation of images in society.

Associated with the ‘Pictures Generation’ of artists, who were concerned with appropriating mass media imagery and its clichés for critical ends, she also made commercial work, including music videos, often with American painter and sculptor Robert Longo, for bands including New Order, Megadeth, R.E.M. and Babes in Toyland. In response to an increase of political and corporate ideologies being embedded into mass media, Bender developed a critically acclaimed body of work across a range of media, becoming renowned for her large-scale video theatre installations and tin sign screen prints.

Within a culture saturated by corporate self-representation, it is, Bender argued, images themselves that prevent us from perceiving the realities of the world. Through its critical focus on an accelerated mass media and its relationship to corporate ideology and perception, many of the ideas found in Bender’s work remain relevant in our current age of digital economy, where accelerated access to imagery and ideas are commonplace.

Both prescient and pioneering, Bender anticipated our current state of image saturation, saying in 1987:
I think of the media as a cannibalistic river. A flow or current that absorbs everything.

Bender’s work in photography, film and installation addresses this relentless stream of information and images which emanates from sources including movies, television, and advertising.

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The Serving Library

How do we access, share and preserve information in the modern age? As we increasingly depend on technology, specifically the World Wide Web, and shy away from traditional sources of information, what is to become of the library?

The Serving Library provides an answer to what the library of the future could look like. Using three forms of publication – magazine (Bulletins of the Serving Library, formally Dot Dot Dot), exhibition and public talks programme – to educate, share and discuss information and ideas, The Serving Library offers a new structure for the traditional public library.

At its heart The Serving Library is a publishing institution based around two physical collections - of objects (artworks, artefacts and other materials) and books. These collections, assembled over the past fourteen years, form the basis of each publication which follows a three step process. Artworks are used to illustrate essays in the magazine which is published both on and offline. These works then leave the page for the gallery walls of various art galleries and museums before being used as the foundation for a series of public discussions. Each publication is then archived on The Serving Library website. This system, experimenting with new ways of organising and publishing information, embodies the evolving role of the traditional institution.

This final online strand of the project has been compared to an ‘engine room’, where the traditional act of borrowing occurs on the internet, where the Bulletins of The Serving Library are freely available to download as PDFs. The Serving Library thus becomes a globally accessible modernised borrowing system.

The display at Tate Liverpool is the next iteration of The Serving Library. Featuring nearly 100 objects from their collection, the display will include airbrush paintings by UK-based artist Chris Evans, a stencil print of Muriel Cooper’s pioneering 1977 Polaroid self-portrait and popular culture paraphernalia such as an upside down photograph of Harry Beck’s 1931 London Underground map sketch. Visitors will also be able to interact with the website in-gallery, encouraging interactions with the collection and the unusual links between seemingly disparate items.

The Serving Library will be ‘resident’ within architectural intervention La colline de l’art designed by Claude Parent and built in the Wolfson Gallery.

A series of talks on the subject of transmitting art and culture will inform the next Bulletins of The Serving Library, making The Serving Library a living document, evolving around that which populates it.

Communications Manager:
Alison Cornmell Call + 44 (0)151 702 7444 Email alison.cornmell@tate.org.uk
Communications Assistant:
Laura Deveney Call +44 (0)151 7027445 Email laura.deveney@tate.org.uk

Press preview 6 November 2014, 10.00–17.15 and 18.45–21.30

Tate Liverpool
Albert Dock - Liverpool Waterfront
daily 10.00–17.50 (exhibitions last admission 17.00)
Free entry

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